90s Korean childhood games the West barely saw – Part 2: How to Be a Wizard

I’m doing a small series about 90s games that were pretty big in Korea but barely showed up on the Western radar. Part 1 was Farland Saga; for Part 2 I wanted to talk about a game a lot of Korean kids remember simply as “that magic game from a magazine CD”: Mahou Tsukai ni Naru Houhou – literally “How to Become a Wizard” – which we had as 마법사가 되는 방법.

It’s a late-90s RPG by TGL that originally came out on PC and later got console ports in Japan. In Korea we only ever saw the localized PC version, usually as one of the bonus games on those old PC game magazine CDs. You’d install it because it was there, expecting some random freebie, and then suddenly realize you’d sunk a ridiculous amount of time into it.

You play a wizard’s apprentice on a small island at the edge of the world, training under your mentor and trying to become a real mage. The magic system is what really sticks in my memory. You don’t just “unlock” spells from a menu. You run around the island gathering ingredients, experiment with recipes, and when you find one that works you turn it into magic scrolls. If I remember right, once you craft a spell as a scroll and actually use that scroll three times, your character finally “learns” the spell and can cast it freely afterwards. That slow process of going from “I have no idea what this does” to “this is now part of my permanent spell list” was incredibly exciting as a kid.

I played it a lot with my little sister. We’d sit in front of the PC, argue about which ingredients to try, and then scream when something actually worked. Back then we would dig through early Korean web pages and tiny fan sites for recipe hints, write them down on paper, and then go back into the game to test each one. Every time we managed to learn a new spell – craft three scrolls, use them three times, watch the spell finally show up in the list – it felt like we’d just discovered some huge secret. Even now, thinking about that “one more spell learned” feeling with my sister is enough to make me weirdly happy.

The story itself is small and cozy – more like a little wizard-school coming-of-age tale than an epic save-the-world plot – but together with the soft BGM and the slightly lonely island atmosphere, it had a mood that really lodged in your brain. It’s exactly the kind of slow, system-driven, ingredient-hoarding, experiment-heavy RPG that I think a niche modern audience would absolutely love.

As far as I know, there’s never been an official English release. Japan got the original PC and console versions, Korea got a fully localized PC release, and that was it. These days there’s no straightforward, modern way to play it unless you’re willing to mess with emulation and fan guides. Which is why I wanted to at least write this down: for most Western players this game barely even exists, but for some of us it was a big part of growing up with a beige PC and a stack of magazine CDs.