Among Makai Kingdom: Reclaimed and Rebound's wide array of gameplay features, few are as frequently misunderstood as Make A Wish. Sooner or later, every player will need to figure it out for themselves, but the nuances involved will go over many heads since the game isn't as forthcoming with details as many other strategy RPGs would be.
Thankfully, piecing together Make A Wish is hardly a huge ordeal. You just need to fully grasp the basics, and then you can stop wasting time tinkering with the menus desperate for Lord Zetta to heed your pleas or be bewildered as to why one of your best units just croaked on you. (That one's particularly unpleasant — though hardly as definitive as it appears.)
What Is Make A Wish In Makai Kingdom?
Nippon Ichi's RPGs tend to forego conventional settings in favor of more memorably absurd ones. Makai Kingdom's a grand example; throughout the game, the protagonist is bound to a book due in part to his own hubris, and the player controls his many minions. Lord Zetta's goal is to regain his body, and like any self-respecting cosmic overlord, he'll treat humans and monsters as his pawns in a bid to do so.
That's a passable enough summary of the story setup, but what does it have to do with making wishes? You, as the player, can have whichever unit you've deemed the leader (by default, this is the character you create in an early tutorial) approach Lord Zetta at his so-called "castle," Makai Kingdom's main hub. As these are his aforementioned minions, Zetta has a real stake in helping all these wishes come true, because every wish effectively empowers him in some way.
But Lord Zetta isn't quite what he used to be, which is the gameplay impetus to complicate the Make A Wish command so that there's an incentive to fiddle with it and work hard toward success. Each wish demands a sacrifice, often in the form of that ever-elusive supernatural currency called mana.
Making A Wish To Challenge Powerful Foes
Technically speaking, the bulk of all Make A Wish options pit your army against an optional (and highly dangerous) set of adversaries. Make A Wish is not only critical to unlocking a few alternate endings, but it's also the greatest wellspring of unique characters. During your first playthrough, you won't have access to any of them, but from your second onward, that will change — but only if you make the requisite wishes at specific points in the plot.
Beginning with your second playthrough, or "cycle" as the fandom tends to say, keep a close eye on the Make A Wish menu for the arrival of these temporary tough-as-nails contenders. The first of these will come with the wish entitled "Fight the Ally of Justice." (Do note, if you're playing a different version of Makai Kingdom, you may encounter a slight variation on that phrase.) This will pit your team against Flonne's, and you'll need your leader to be at least level 70 and in possession of 3,000 or more mana for Zetta to grant you this special battle.
From there, five further characters can be challenged during the second cycle: Etna, Castile, Laharl, Robosuit, and finally Lord Zetta himself. Each costs an increasingly high pool of mana as well as a leader who is that much stronger. Defeating one of these limited-time enemies brings them into your party, so yes, you can indeed enjoy the rest of your time with Makai Kingdom toting around a version of Zetta who has his body back. Neat.
Making Wishes for Facilities, Dungeons, and Transmigration
While the preceding section covered one-time ordeals, the rest of this guide tackles things you'll likely be doing a great many times.
Wishing for Facilities
We have complete coverage of facility creation here, so check that out for all the sweet details. The gist is that a non-leader character can be sacrificed to construct a new building so long as they've got the mana to do so (and in some cases, they're also the mandatory class). Again, you're sacrificing the character. You'll watch them die and everything. Don't worry, it's cartoonish. But still. Ouch.
Here's the twist. When you're creating new characters, you'll have the sacrificed one(s) available as presets. Choose them, and they'll clearly be reincarnations of your ill-fated structure-summoning companions, straight down to acquired class skills and the like.
So yes, it's not all bad.
Wishing for Free Dungeons
Free Dungeons are the bread-and-butter of Makai Kingdom's supplemental content. They're your go-to for grinding, your best bet for treasure-hunting (outside of Happy Dungeons, but those are one-time gigs), and all-around good times. They can vary tremendously in size and strength, factors that will tie into the relative power of the unit whose mana is siphoned in their creation.
If you're not making at least a handful of Free Dungeons, you're missing out on a lot of what Makai Kingdom has to offer.
Wishing to Transmigrate
Advanced play, like the Event Dungeons that can be visited once you've made a wish to fight a unique character, eventually reaches a degree of difficulty in which the stat gains you'll receive for restarting your characters at level 1, or as the term transmigration suggests, giving them new bodies and lives, will save you a tremendous headache. The most powerful optional boss possesses a Defense stat in excess of 320,000. Leveling your units without utilizing transmigration several times will natively inhibit their full growth potential.
Transmigration is, most importantly of all, a tool for providing your characters with new classes. Thhe classes can either be direct evolutions of what they've already gotten good at or something else entirely, though we recommend the tried-and-true RPG formula of picking people out early on to fulfill various roles and letting those dictae what each of them is destined to become. (A Warrior will gain the most from transmigrating into a Swordmaster, for example.)