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So I thought this might interest some of you:

Academagia: The Making of Mages is a text-based fantasy RPG by Black Chicken Studios
that is in its basic setting somewhat resembles Harry Potter. You create a character,
visit the Academagia to learn magic, go on adventures, make friends and enemies, train your familiar, etc...
The game spans the first year of your education at the Academagia, Year Two is set to be released late 2013.

Honestly, when I first heard of it, I feared it to be some cheap Harry Potter ripoff, filling the
niche of a proper Harry Potter RPG. Having played it, I know its not.
The world of Academagia is a well thought fantasy universe, that gets revealed to the player ingame,
through bits of lore that can be unlocked by, for example, taking the history class in the Academagia.

The games biggest weakness is probably the UI: It's been improved by countless Patches,
but its still very small and uses only 3/4 of the screen.
Another thing is the engine: Loading times a pretty long and sometimes abilities just ... disappear.

On the hand, you get a huge game in which you can do pretty much anything:
Completely disregard school to study law, control all your "friends", join secret organizations,
annoy fellow students until you have to dodge fireballs, meddle in fairy matters.
You can of course do none of these things and just concentrate on studying - but thats boring!

What the game really needs though, is a real tutorial: There are some videos on youtube,
but since they were uploaded, 15 free DLC's have been released. The learning curve is steep:
I had to play through it twice to figure what everything does and it is impossible to max every skill or
complete every adventure in one playthrough.

Narratively, Academagia reminds me a lot of first two Harry Potter books:
On the surface its all butterflies and rainbows, but there are darker aspects as well,
the possibility to mind-control everyone around you is one such example.

So yeah, give it a look. I think its possible to download a demo over at the official homepage
( http://www.academagia.com/ ), but I'm not sure about its DLC compability
(and you really shouldn't play it without those, because then the UI is pretty terrible).
Its well worth 25 $ in my opinion, though.
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I'm not sure, I just went ahead and bought it, but you need to download the DLC pack from the forum anyway, so they probably didn't upload it again for every DLC.

 

I play the full version. It's a pretty sweet game with a wonderful world to explore and lots of replayability, but I got bored about the 2nd time I played through because, well, the game is simply too long and I think it lacks a coherent storyline frankly. So yeah, a lot of troublesome details to keep track of etc. If you're really into magic and world-crafting and stuff you'll love it. Otherwise, stay away.

 

I think theyre gonna wait until Year Two is out and try to get them both on steam then.

You have a point there, but considering that its trying to give the player complete freedom, I think it manages admirably. For me the ingame text is only half the game, the rest is filled in by my imagination.
As for the details, well, to be honest, I personally don't use even half of the skills. They aren't really needed, but if someone ever wants to play this game as a gossiping zoologist, he can and thats fine.

 

Every time I see text-based fantasy RPGs I expect them to turn into CoC... and then get disappointed when they don't.

 

Well, we don't know this isn't like that.

Panther, how many goblins do we get to rape in this game?

 

Not as many as with Fenoxo, but stay awy from the Satyrn, they may be child-molesters.