Ani's DB Analysis Blogs: Curien's Masterpiece, The Magician Type-0

Just a few notes before we start…

Hello everyone and welcome to another one of these, keeping up with the on-rails shooter craze, now we have what's probably one of the most famous games during the golden age of arcades and one of SEGA’s most recognizable old-school franchises. For this analysis I’ve stuck mostly with the canon timeline of the series (Long story short it starts at THotD1 and ends in THotD3) but for the sake of completion I also took THotD:Nightmare (the mobile game) into consideration and the Pinball game, Im ignoring the movie tho cus its shit...With nothing else to add, let's get going!

Background

Our story starts, like a lot of tragic stories do, with a humble doctor by the name of Roy Curien who had a son named Daniel, all was well and good, both of them lived in the former’s mansion when one day little Daniel was diagnosed with an strange and incurable disease (how original), distraught, Curien desperately sought to find a cure for his kids illness… His experiments caught the attention of a rich man named Goldman, who gave him the funds and team needed to keep performing these experiments under the mantle of the DBR Corporation.

Soon the good doctor would build a lab under his mansion (this is starting to sound oddly familiar...) and would start the development of the project called BioReactor…(wait a fu-)...this project had the purpose to create a machine that could directly alter the DNA of a subject to their leisure, but there was a little problem… For some reason the experiments could not be done on live people and this they had to resort to testing on corpses, the tests were a resounding success, and soon the DBR corporation was creating a bunch of zombies and other bioweapons, and to make matters even more amazing, they started to clone the shit out of them! Surely nothing would ever go wrong with this.


Slowly, but surely, the lust for power and the on-going experiments would corrupt his very being, he became mad and his workers saw this and tried to bail out. But Curien was mad, not stupid… soon he would make his army of the undead capture the poor scientists and test on them, soon, two particular agents of an assosiation called A.M.S would be sent to investigate...


However… as all of this took place, Curien was behind the shadows planning something… creating something, a bioweapon that would stand above the rest. So using all of the smarts he could muster he developed a singular monster that would do his bidding, a creature of such power that, if unleashed, would destroy anything that got in their way. Soon Curien had it, the Type-0...The Magician… The most powerful of his creations. Thing is however, that upon being freed The Magician refused to obey its master and promptly killed him and proceeded to do battle with the previously mentioned agents of the A.M.S.

But this would be far from the last time the Magician would come back, time after time he would be resurrected, faster, stronger and smarter, waging war against humanity, seeking to plunge the world into chaos, with an unimaginable design to kill everything...

Equipment

Equipment

Armor

Although the Magician is already pretty durable on its own, it has a layer of protective armor around its body to protect the more fleshy parts, it proves especially useful against different types of firearms. 

Duplicates

Seen in the “bad” end of House of the Dead 4:Special. The magician is able to activate them using Pandora’s Box, we never see these copies in action, however we can assume they would work and be as powerful as the main one.

Pandora’s Box

A device created by Goldman (to protrect DA LRAIF CRYCLE) as a way to maintain humanity in line, this thing appears on the events of The House of the Dead 4. Inside of it resides the final boss of that particular game, The World…(that specific box was kamikazed by an AMS agent tho.) BUT, apparently there is more than one Pandora Box out there, and the Magician seems to have acquired one somehow. It is unclear how much the power the box by itself provides, as the Magician has not shown the full potential of it, at best we can speculate that it should have the same power output as The World...However, the most it managed to do when in its possession was awaken the previously mentioned duplicates.

Abilities

Pyrokinesis

 

One of the Magician’s most commonly used and famous abilities. Due to the heavy experimentation it went through, the Magician somehow developed the ability to create and manipulate fire at will. It most common uses are for creating fireballs and shooting them at the opposition (these being strong enough to one-shot a regular person), it can fire individual fireballs or several at the same time and even make them rain from above. The Magician can even conjure up pillars of flame that fly through the ground or engulf its claws on fire to strike enemies from up close. Although it usually shoots these fireballs from his hands, it can create them and shoot them at will from any place. 

Levitation.

 

Another one of its most famous abilities, The Magician has the ability to make itself levitate and serve as makeshift flight. The Magician is wicked fast, being able to zoom around its opponents in seconds while dodging a barrage of gunfire…Its tremendous speed is usually shown as leaving a trail of afterimages behind (usually shown by a blue blur) but it can even crank up his speed to go even faster (shown by a red blur this time). 

Energy Manipulation

 

In case the fire doesn’t cut it, The Magician seems to have limited energy manipulation, as it’s capable of creating a purple energy shield around itself that protects it from gunfire and that serves to ram into opponents. In addition, it seems to be able to summon giant beams of energy that fall from the sky.

Misc. Abilities

Aside from these abilities, the Magician seems to have some strange abilities that don’t seem to fit anywhere else, for starters, it's shown to be fairly smart for a monster, as it's capable of communicating in english. It can create small, purple clouds that can cause confusion to a target. And it seems to have some limited form of telekinesis, as it can lift objects without touching them (like the Pandora Box) and destroy things without the need to physically interact with them (like his stasis pod).

Feats

Strength

• One-shots Curien upon being released.
• Destroys a huge steel wall.
• Causes a massive explosion in the Goldman’s headquarters.
• Destroys the containment pod it was held in.

Speed

• Is constantly dodging gun fire from stuff like handguns and submachine guns. 
• Moves so fast it leaves afterimages.
• His fireballs are fairly quick, covering the distance between it and Curien in just a few seconds.
• Flies from the top of the Goldman building to ground level in a few seconds.

Durability

• It's constantly getting shot and can still keep going.
• Either it be a normal handgun
• Or a machine gun.
• Survived being near the previously mentioned explosion.
• Gets blasted by a grenade.

Scaling

Various bosses across the HotD series: The magician is usually depicted and shown to be one of Curien’s most powerful creations, even when resurrected time and time again, and usually serves as a final or second to final boss in its major game appearances. So it's fair to say that The Magician should be capable of performing feats that other bosses have performed across the series (or at least... I'll be focusing on the games he makes an appearance in). 

Note: "For the sake of argument and compeltion, and assuming The Magician with the Pandora Box should have a similar power output to the World, so I will be mentioning feats from other final bosses across the franchise as well...I personaly believe the scaling can get weird, but I feel like its worth mentioning at the very least."

The House of the Dead 1 Bosses (I'm including feats from HotD:Scarlet Dawn here, as they are the same bosses, just revived from the first, so it should still apply):

• Chariot: 
• breaking through a glass rooftop.
• Golf-clubbing a poor woman across a room.
• In Scarlet Dawn it is seen destroying brick walls with ease.
• Throws a man so hard it breaks a large panel.
• Destroys a pillar.
• Tanks an RPG round.
• Hanged Man: 
• lifting people and throwing them.
• Lifting and throwing a helicopter in HotD:Scarlet dawn.

The House of the Dead 2 Bosses:

• Judgement:
•  yeeting some cars.
• Hierophant:
• destroying part of a bridge.
• Doing the exact same thing, but on an even larger bridge.
• Strength:
• punching itself through a stone wall...More than once.
• The Emperor:
• getting struck by what seems like a bolt of lightning.

The House of the Dead 4:

• Justice:
• Destroys part of a building floor.
• Casually makes a hole through a stone wall.
• The World: 
• Can create a giant axe made of ice.
• Can create an ice dragon that is as tall as a building. 
• The only way the World was destroyed was with James having to Kamikaze himself to destroy the monster... such explotion was so strong it melted all the ice arround them, made a small crater in the plaza they were in and created a massive explotion.

 

Weaknesses

 

Despite being one of the most recognizable and famous enemies in the whole francize, The Magician is far from invincible, for starters, even tho in several entries its weakness is labeled as “Unknown” it was shown in the events of ThotD2 that the weak point are actually the unprotected areas of its body, so a clever enough opponent could take advantage of that. His fire based attacks have been dissipated by gunfire before and despite his amazing speed and power enough damage will still be enough to put him down. And finally, as of the events of THotD4 we still don’t know his fate (pretty sad yes) so for all we know... it ded.