It's a matter of what the writer can handle well. There are some very good books with high-powered magic that plays a significant role in battles, and lots of good ones where magic is minimal or secretive in the world, or absent altogether.
Shooting sparks? Sounds like Rowling may have run out of ideas on alternatives to spells Well, in my novel's case, my characters are fighting ghosts and demons from the Underworld, so thankfully snipers would not have worked on them I do have an all-magic fight that I'd just written - PM me if you're interested in reading it.
@MilesTro that sounds somewhat trans-sexual: I am a woman if I feel like one, whether or not I have any biological, psychological, cultural or any other female atribute. I always wondered how do you genre-bend magic realism? "A Hundred Years of Solitude", for example, or Baricco's "Silk", or "Foucault's Pendulum", or any freakin' Borges story: fantasy or what? Where is magic in "Garden of Forking Paths"?
Disney Tron was considered fantasy although it looks like a Sci-Fi cyberpunk genre, unless somebody made a mistake on it.
Are you sure . . . once you open that door, it's not you who closes it . . . LOL. I could send it to you if you want but if you plagiarize it I may just have to hire a blind troll with a large gun to shoot you.
How about a fantasy novel set in the spirit world, or afterlife? Wow! No magic, as such, but plenty of scope for weirdness. The spirit world/astral plane is thought-responsive. This could be interesting.
You do not need magic to make fantasy interesting. You could just stick to the usual swordplay, war strategies, or even machinery. Magic does not make a fantasy. It is the plot and character interactions, like any other story.
