Update: Still working on the 8th level, which is going very slowly, although I'm continuing to make the minimal amount of progress. My previous comments apply to an even greater degree now. Playing this game is a miserable experience. You're given pieces in bizarre, wide-open setups, and pitted against a highly tactical machine that can brutalize you in those setups. You just end up feeling like an idiot, and the usual principles -- control of the center, trying to create threats, etc. -- you find yourself discouraged from using, since any move you make other than interlocking every piece and praying will result in an instant loss from a combination. (Any other approach loses more slowly, but you at least get the chance of the computer unsatisfyingly dropping pieces at random so you can get past the challenge.) I'm also not sure whether there's a bug; one of the challenges demands I figure out what it claims is a five move forced checkmate, but it actually seems to be four, since it fails me every time I get the mate in five moves. It's just an exhausting, unpleasant time for a beginner. I very much doubt I've improved even a smidgeon from the low level I was when I started.
Will keep at it. Do not recommend, though.
EDIT: Down to the final challenge, which I can't beat despite a 6 point advantage and lots of tries. It's draining; even when you finally get a good position after twenty or thirty tries, the strain is enough that you blunder and lose. Not only do I strongly dislike this game, but it's literally made me less enthusiastic about chess in general. From time to time, I encounter games or drills or challenges that make me wonder whether I made a terrible mistake committing to chess improvement. This game is definitely one of those things that make me question whether chess improvement is a route I want to take. I just want it to be over.
EDIT 2: It's finally, finally over. I beat the dark wizard "Sargon" (a cute addition; all of the villains have names like Grob the Barbarian and Black-Mar the dragon, but the charm of this game has worn off after the nth repetition of the exercises). I got a little congratulatory note for my efforts about how I won the game. No fanfare, unlike most fantasy games.
Final verdict?
You should play this if you're already pretty good -- a 1300 on Chess.com speed-ran it -- so that you can appreciate the charm of this game. It's absolutely a little gem of early 2000's fantasy RPG flavor in chess form. But as a beginner, especially a beginner who starts out pretty bad like I am (I'm 750 or so on Chess.com), absolutely not. By the end, I strongly disliked this game, and I'm really glad it's over.
Since this is a beginner forum, and this old (and nostalgic) game was advertised for beginners, I thought I would throw my two cents in about it.
I'm a beginner, and I bought Majestic Chess to improve my play. I'd heard that the game had lots of tutorials for new players, wrapped up in a quest theme, and saw it recommended by several older scholastic chess sources as a good way for beginners to improve.
IMO, it is not.
Don't get me wrong: there are great components to Majestic Chess. The RPG aspects are fun. The game designers clearly spent a lot of time creating the right flavor for the game. You spend your time adventuring across a fantasy world where your opponents play chess against you, encountering all sorts of creatures and gathering loot (that you spend on chess pieces) along the way. And that part was great!
In the beginning, and right up until about the 6th or early 7th level of the game, this setup was very motivating. I'd done a bunch of exercises on other platforms before (including Chess.com), so the exercises in Majestic Chess were do-able. Even then, though, I remember thinking that some of the exercises would've been pretty hard -- bordering on unfair -- if this was my first chess learning software. Some of the exercises were downright frustrating.
But then, I hit the later worlds, and things started to get ridiculous. "Reverse Chess," where the pieces are lined up the wrong way round on the board, took ages to figure out, and seemingly taught me nothing about how to play conventional chess. The challenges got more bizarre and gimmicky from there, like starting out with your queens in the other guy's starting lineup. One puzzle, Lord Condor's Watchtower, was a knight domination one. I had to look up the answer online. I pity the people who played this before it was easy to find stuff online. (More on that later.)
The chess engine started to get harder, too, but not in the same way that modern engines do. Modern engines play a little more like humans, and even when I get thrashed by a modern AI, like the Chess.com Coach or Dr. Wolf on the higher settings, it feels like a fun challenge where I learned something. This thing, by contrast, played highly tactical, weird-looking, inhuman chess. Every time it moved a knight or bishop, you started feeling demoralized, since it was going to take something and put you into a triple fork two turns down the road. It checked the king at every opportunity, seemingly just to annoy you, and would sometimes go for three move repetition in even positions. When it blundered, it did so in bizarre ways that gave you zero satisfaction when you "won." You felt like you were getting your victories awarded at random.
All that said, I'm going to finish this game. I'm not going to quit. Even though it's frustrating enough that I can no longer play it in large doses anymore, I'm committed this point, since I'm on the last of the eight levels. But alongside people online remembering this game nostalgically, it's interesting that a lot of them remember that they got stuck at a certain level as kids, and never got any further. One poor guy got stuck on the aforementioned Lord Condor's Watchtower for six years. Before the internet could tell him how to get past it.
So, in short, I didn't find this a good game for beginners. Which is a shame, since it's designed to teach chess to beginners. And I doubt advanced players could get much out of it, either, since almost all of the actual lessons -- the ones that resemble normal chess -- are very basic. The only use this thing seems to have for modern players is as a speedrun for bragging rights; a couple people posted their speedruns of this thing on Youtube, and they're fun to watch.
But for beginners, no. It's not even a "just get good, noob" kind of problem, since the entire point of this game is supposed to help you get good at chess in the first place. A beginner playing this just doesn't get enough exercises or lessons to sink their teeth into and learn the game. The exercises can get the player to a certain (low) level of chess understanding, and then some over the top puzzle or opponent or exercise stymies them.
Which is disappointing, since the atmosphere, music, and general epic feel of this game are AWESOME. If somebody created something like this with a more gradual and reasonable curriculum, like "Chess Steps," it would have been incredible. But as it is, it's just frustrating.