The anime series in manga of Fairy Tail has never had much luck in the world of video games: after a couple of attempts, only in recent months are we truly discovering the video game world of Hiro Mashima’s fantasy adventure, thanks to the announcement of titles such as Fairy Tail 2 and to launch experiments such as Fairy Tail Dungeons.
Contrary to what appears from other sagas taken from anime and manga, however, Fairy Tail he doesn’t choose at this juncture the “easy road” of arena fighting games, but instead takes a decidedly more “old school”: we are in fact faced with a dungeon crawler with combat from Turn-based RPG.
Full of iconic situations and truly interesting characters, the series ended in 2017 It was successful in Japan as well as abroad: for this very reason, it is obligatory for every lover of the series and for fans of dungeon crawlers to ask themselves what work has been done with Fairy Tail Dungeonswhich we are going to review in its Steam version.
Old protagonists, new encounters
Trapped in a mysterious underground labyrinth, the adventure will begin in Natsu’s shoesthe protagonist of the original work, flanked from the inseparable cat Happy and from a new one mysterious feline figure: Labi. Our goal will be to get out of this dangerous dungeon… without losing our feathers! And believe us, it is anything but easy…
The large dungeon is in fact divided into a series of stages within which we move for a limited number of turns: during this part of the game we can encounter unexpected events, find treasures, or enemies. Once we have exhausted the turns available to us, Labi’s precious lantern will stop lighting our way and the boss of the labyrinth will appear before usto be defeated to advance to the next area.
You can easily guess, given the nature of the game, that the plot plays a rather marginal role: we witness short dialogues between one level and another and, after the first game over, we will also unlock other original playable characters. We can say with certainty that the essence of the title is not found in the narration, even if this is not very invasive and particularly pleasant and capable of keeping us company for about 5 hours.
Every plan could be the last
Let’s start talking more specifically about what the gameplay of Fairy Tail Dungeons consists of: once we enter the labyrinth we will have the opportunity to take a series of steps before theinevitable going out of the lantern. In the boxes we land on we may find ourselves facing enemies to attack, “suspicious” situations where we can understand whether it is better to run away or take advantage of the reward that seems to be around the corner, encounters with other characters from the franchise, or treasures to collect.
A fundamental resource for our protagonist is represented by the cards: these special objects allow the controlled character (and be careful, they are different for each character) to perform different attacks. On the battlefield, in fact, we will be able to perform the attacks available among the cards we have drawn: in a hand of 4 cards there can be hidden powerful attacks, defense strategiesOf enhancement of ours ability or of treatment.
THE fights work like some Turn-based card-based RPG which will tell us what moves we will be able to make: all we can do is hope for good luck (or fish out, at the cost of a little bit of our life bar) and make the right choices, given that the moves at our disposal will have a cost and will be limited by a sort of “energy bar”.
The journey to the boss of the labyrinth, a particularly difficult opponent to defeat (or a group of opponents, even there the hand of Lady Luck is there), will require attention and a willingness to take risks: filling our very small inventory with the right tools (we can only carry 3 consumable objects), obtaining the right cards to enrich our deck and, above all, lose a few health points along the way, they are not so much strategies to implement to make the path easier, but rather moreians to survive.
We do not hide from you that, from the very first steps, Fairy Tail Dungeons takes off the cloak of appearances and reveals a not exactly low level of difficulty. Thanks to the rather short duration of the title, you can well understand how the difficulty factor serves to compensate for the relatively low number of stagessince it will be enough for one turn to go a little less well than we had planned to find ourselves in front of the very strong boss at a clear disadvantage, and maybe with only half of the life bar available!
A difficulty, that of this title, that we find difficult to always define as fair, but which has the merit of making the adventure more stimulating and to encourage us to venture into the extra stories, which increase the length of our adventure by another 3 hours or so.
Pixel-art it is!
The art style of Fairy Tail Dungeons is simple yet iconic: with graphics in pixel art detailed the right and a choice of colors That alternate with correctness the gloomy and the livelywe are faced with a title that is very pleasant to look at and that will delight lovers of the “retro” style without however keeping away players who embrace modernity more, thanks to a fluidity of movements on the screen and a completely up-to-date use of the menus.
Even with regards to the style of the soundtrack, we are travelling on considerable levels: overwhelming but never inadequate to the “old style” context imposed by the pixels, We were really satisfied with the listening experience.
The title, in its Steam version, can be played comfortably using only the mouse or of the keyboard: the gameplay is not particularly frenetic and this allows the player to think about the next move and, above all, prevents the creation of frame rate drops and issues related to input lag. We played the title on a laptop with an Intel Core i7 without any abrupt interruptions to the gaming experience.
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