S-Rank Blog Post #6: Fairytale Fights
By Phr4nk0 1 Comments
So it hasn't been very long since my last post, due to me not writing it for a week or so, but here we are again! The spotlight is thrown onto Fairytale Fights this time, and it isn't worthy of the attention. This game has been long due to be finished by me but the super repetitive and shallow nature of the gameplay has kept me from jumping back in. After slogging away at it for a long time I ran out of steam and put it away, out of mind, playing and finishing all of the games I've blogged about and more before managing to stomach some more.
One of the main reasons for this is the non-stackable difficulty achievements. Not only for single player, but multiplayer aswell. All up you need to play the game on easy, medium and hard in singleplayer, then easy, medium and hard co-operatively. Now I should include the fact that I got bored of the game before even hitting the halfway mark in my first playthrough. This is another game that I wish I hadn't purchased, another impulse buy I regret. My mate and I ran into each other in the shops, both having nothing to do and both were just there to waste some time during a boring weekend we decided to get a cheap, simple and short game we could take home and blast through in an afternoon together. Fairytale Fights was cheap and definately simple, but short it was not.
So we get home, crack it open and whack it in. Jump on and first impressions are good enough, drop-in/drop-out co-op made it easy to get going. You have a little hub town that changes as you progress (the heads of each different enemies you slay get mounted on the walls, you can spend money to upgrade a statue of yourself eventually blinging it out in all gold), the game has a weird sense of humour, super violent mixed with cute, cartoony, slightly off-tilt characters and obscene amounts of blood pooling on the floor which you can slide around on by running through it. All of this sounds well and good, but after a few hours of it, it became old and it was up to the gameplay to sustain our intrest.
This is where the problems come in. This is basically a hack & slash mixed with a platformer... but worse. In most hack & slashes there is some degree of strategy. Light and heavy attacks, blocking, maybe a grapple or something. Here there's nothing. Also the way the game works is it maps the attacks to the right stick, up swings the weapon up, down goes down, left... well you get the idea. Now this could have been cool if some enemies were vulnerable to horizontal slashes, some verticle, some only from the right. It would have helped mix it up, but no. You play this game by wiggling the right stick like a retard. I ended up doing the fighting through the last few run throughs of the game without even looking.
I said there was no strategy to all this before, I lied... sort of. You can do a heavy swing by charging up a swing one way before swinging back the opposite way. This seemed like a decent move for about the first level, where you only get 3 or 4 enemies thrown at you at a time. Then it starts getting harder, and near the end of the game your facing groups of 20 all attacking you at the same time, there is no time to charge up anymore. Plus charging up slows you down to "look super cool, slicing all these fools all matrix like and shit" except while you're cutting in slow motion an enemy will hit you normal speed in the back cancelling your charge and leaving you back at square one. Also a charged move might be worth around 3 times the damage a regular attack does, but by wailing on the right stick you can easily get 5 or more normal attacks out in the same time. So the strategy is that it's more strategic to not use strategy.
There is also a block, but the enemies have no noticable tells or anything to warn you of an incoming attack. So basically you're left to guess when to use it, or waste your time holding block while you could be attacking. The best defence is a good offence as they say. That mixed with the fact that you have unlimited lives, with the penalty for death being you drop your weapon and some money. However if you hammer the A button you can spawn fast enough to collect it all again.
So in the end Fairytale Fights is a game where you walk through a bunch of levels wiggling the right stick, where they drop a new enemy and weapon on you every 10 minutes will be enough to keep you interested. These enemies and weapons all bring nothing new to the table, being basically new skins for the same damage sponge enemies and sharp or blunt weapon types. There are some guns, but they only carry 10 shots each, and potions, none of which are of any real use. After the "fun" of sliding through countless blood pools and watching Fairytale characters tear each other to shreds wears off you're left wiggling the stick through super long levels (each one taking 30 mins or so) for a total playthrough time of about 10 hours.
Now do that another 5 times due to the afforementioned non-stackable difficulty achievements. Then the glitchy A+ achievement (Who Wants My Autograph) which wants you to complete each chapter from start to end with an A+ rating, which I had to attempt twice to get and the achievement for opening every treasure chest (Treasure Hunter) which is also tempermental. Including the few proper co-op sessions I played this game I think I've played through this piece of crap atleast 9 times.
Plus the secret achievement (Got My Wish) which I'm sure glitched on me. To obtain Got My Wish you need to put money in wishing wells (which you use to get special weapons) you find through-out your adventure and randomly the achievement will pop. I had played through 6 or 7 times, putting all my money into every wishing well I could find and nothing had popped. That sucks because another achievement (King Bling) requires you to fully upgrade your statue, requiring a total of around 5 million coins. So because I had been wasting all my money in those wells I had only reached about the half way mark before my console decided to freeze.
It must have frozen while saving, and corrupted my save data because everything had wiped. I was just about to kill someone, but every cloud has a silver lining and this one is no different. Within 30 minutes of regaining self control and putting my gat back in the closet, Got My Wish popped up. I was in shock and remember just sitting there for a minute before saying "You're shitting me." Once that popped I knew it was time to finish this game off because the one achievement that was out of my hands I had now obtained. I hunkered down and busted out the last two play-throughs I needed. All that was left now was King Bling.
Luckily due to getting Got My Wish straight away and in two playthroughs with out having to waste money in those wells I reached 2.5 million again. All that was left is to grind out another 2.5 mill to finally put a bow in this piece of crap. I looked up the best way to get money online and luckily it turns out the level I enjoyed the most was the one you grind. You can get 400 000 in a 20 minute run through a level. So gritting my teeth with the ending in sight I grinded my favourite level slowly turning it into my least favourite. But I got that achievement, and by god I'm glad it's all done now!
So now free for my next completion, I'm thinking of starting Alan Wake or Bioshock 2. I've got a few long ass grinds that need to be started on and a bunch of other games that I need to get back to to 100%. We'll see what happens... oh I nearly forgot! This marks my 100th 100% completed game (including arcade games). So party on Xbox and you're all invited! Haha I'll see ya next time.