To its credit, Faery is a very pretty game, boasting cel-shaded graphics and a colour palette that shows it off nicely. It’s good then, that the game allows you to customise your character’s appearance and French developer Focus Home Interactive ought to be commended for including such a detailed character creator. Like in a lot of role-playing games nowadays, your gender makes no difference to the core storyline, but opens up a couple of romance options later on. In order to get that far though, you’ll have to sit through a lot of text-based conversation, during which you determine your responses with a Mass Effect-style dialogue wheel. There are even options at certain times to be an absolute angel or a total jerk to your companions, which doesn’t serve to have a greater purpose (except for the romance, of course). Chances are though, you’ll be pressing B to scroll as quickly as possible through the dialogue because a lot of it is rather inane and littered with grammatical errors. On the flip side, important details such as locations of certain items are said only once, which can lead to a lot of aimless wandering if you’re not careful.
No, we're not going to make that joke. Shut up.
Faery is divided up into four distinct worlds, each with their own inhabitants and characteristics. Yggdrasil, for example, is a forest centre with tiny villagers living in the branches of a tree, while The Flying Dutchman is a haunted ship featuring ghost pirates and a rather frightening banshee. Exploration is generally not a problem, as the worlds are mostly open air and perfect for flying recklessly around, but this becomes a problem for small, confined areas such as the lower levels of the Flying Dutchman. Quest-wise, there are different objectives for each world, as well as different side-quests that the numerous inhabitants give you. Most of the time though, the main objective of the world is to ‘purge [location] from [ailment]’ which is really much easier than the game makes it out to be. There are two reasons for this: firstly, that the locations in question are quite small, linear and uninspired; and two, that enemy encounters are very easy due to the simplicity of the combat system. If you’ve played any simple Japanese RPG, you’ve played Faery.
There aren’t any factors that add spice to the turn-based gameplay, except for perhaps the use of action points. Action points, as the name implies, refers to how many actions you can take per turn. Basic physical and magic attacks take one turn, but more powerful actions (such as healing) take more. In order to use these though, you have to wait a certain number of rounds (also determined by the number of action points required by the action in question). It’s a very basic variance on convention and it doesn’t really add much strategy to battles, because chances are once you wait to be able to use these actions your enemies will be on very low health anyway, due to the fact that your normal attacks are actually quite strong. As you can imagine, this means that battles are always heavily skewed in your favour, and makes levelling your character a breeze.
Levelling is by far the most interesting thing about Faery. You see, with every level you gain you receive a skill point, which, naturally, can be put into learning and raising your skills. But unlike the vast majority of such games, adopting particular skills and traits will change the way your character looks, from the type of wings they sport to the colour of the aura surrounding them, to the tattoos on various parts of their bodies. If there’s any complaint to be made about it, it’s that the game doesn’t make it immediately obvious that once you pick a particular element to specialise in, you’re stuck with it. It would have made a bit more sense to be able to purchase other elements and their more powerful counterparts, but to have to choose which skills to go into battle with depending on the enemies you are facing. We suppose that’s what your companions are for though.
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me!
Faery is also home to some rather annoying glitches, none of which really break the game, but serve to highlight the game's lack of polish. Firstly, we ran into several points in the game where an NPC’s load data title would be displayed, rather than the NPC’s name itself. There were also some bizarre instances where combatants would miss their turns for no reason whatsoever.
Admittedly, Faery has a lot to live up to, what with the popularity of Xbox Live Arcade skyrocketing due to those titles with excellent reputations. But if Focus Home Interactive thought that they could turn out something of that calibre with something so utterly bland and generic, they were wrong. Still, at least Faery is a fine piece of eye candy, but looks aren’t everything, are they?
Loading...
