What a slog that was. I started playing Fairy Fencer F Advent Dark Force in December, after getting it for cheap in a Black Friday Sale last November. Initially I liked it. It was goofy and kind of crude but it made me laugh. Fifty-ish hours later, my feelings have changed considerably.
When I say I finished the game, I mean I got to the ending credits and saw one of several endings. Essentially I got to the ending of Fairy Fencer F, the original game. Advent Dark Force adds more endings, I guess. I am NOT going to play through this game again to get another ending, and I’m not going to chase trophies.
The problem with FFF, for me, is that it’s just kind of shallow for an RPG. There’s no real exploration or crafting and there’s not even much character development. You just teleport into dungeons and grind your way through mobs, and the turn-based combat gets dull fast. As you fight you get Weapon Points that you can use to unlock different skills and such, but honestly I mostly spend 50 hours hitting the X button over and over again.
Characters have a couple of gear slots, so there’s a little bit of loot collecting, but nothing very satisfying.
I also found it irksome that the monsters play by different rules than characters do. While characters all take a turn based on some kind of speed rating, monsters often attack several times in a row, which always felt really cheap.
Combat is slow paced, but holding R2 down speeds up the animations and stuff. I basically played the 2nd half of the game while holding down R2 and it still felt like a slog.
But what really ruined the game for me was that about half-way through, there’s like a time-jump and you go back to the start of the game and have to play through the same dungeons a second time. When this happens you lose all the characters you’ve added to your party and have to re-add them.
Anyway, not for me. I’m not sure why I got it stuck in my craw that I was determined to finish the game, but I did. So every Monday since the start of the year I’d play a little bit. And I did it. I guess that’s something. But man, it was NOT fun.
Skip this one.
