Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force is a good game, but your enjoyment of it will depend on how much you like its mostly comedic story, its replayability options, and the standard Hyperdimension Neptunia formula.
The game is very similar to the PS3 Neptunia games, but with a different world and different characters. The main town, overworld, shops, and NPCs are 2D menu-based. The 3dFairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force is a good game, but your enjoyment of it will depend on how much you like its mostly comedic story, its replayability options, and the standard Hyperdimension Neptunia formula.
The game is very similar to the PS3 Neptunia games, but with a different world and different characters. The main town, overworld, shops, and NPCs are 2D menu-based. The 3d dungeons are very basic and low quality. Character models and animations are below-average.
Combat and other mechanics are okay. Like in Neptunia, combat is turn-based, where you can move around freely on your turn (within your movement area) until you perform an action, such as attacking or casting a spell. Stronger actions require you to wait longer for that character's next turn. It's not a bad turn-based combat system, but if you've gotten tired of it through the Neptunia games, you won't find much new here.
The character stat and equipment options feel limited; there's usually only one or two best options to choose from. That goes for weapon attacks, spells, equipment, stat upgrades, and fairies (to some extent). For each fairy, you can also assign a permanent bonus, but choosing a bad bonus won't hurt you that much.
An interesting map mechanic is that you can put fairies in the ground on the overworld map, which gives you various stat changes in dungeons, such as +10% physical attack with -10% magic attack. These stat bonuses are useful (especially for grinding with + experience bonuses), but aren't necessary and you'd be okay if you ignored them.
Strategic play has its limitations and leveling up through grinding is necessary in some cases, especially on Hard mode. I don't like grinding, but I found that the amount needed for this game isn't that time-consuming and should be tolerable for most people who don't like grinds.
As someone who likes well-told stories, the best parts of the game to me are the comedic characters and certain unique aspects of the main plot. The majority of the main plot is generic and cliche, but the comedy helped keep me going.
The main plot revolves around a young guy in a fantasy world pulling a sword out of a stone (with an attached cute female fairy) Excalibur-style and embarking on a journey to revive the long-ago-sealed goddess. While doing this, you're working against the bad guys, who want to revive the vile god. The amount of comedy takes a sharp downturn after the opening, where things progressively get more serious (and less interesting).
Along the way, you meet and party with a large variety of characters. They're all relatively well-written (given the comedic setting) and there's plenty of visual-novel-style scenes you can view that expands them. There's not a lot of depth to most of them, since the majority of your interactions with them involve cracking jokes. But the jokes were good enough to make me laugh nearly every time I returned to town to talk to them.
There's a slight dating-sim element to the game: Your ending will vary slightly based on which girl you talked to most often. It's not obvious when/how this happens, so a guide is required to get the girl you want. But either way, the ending doesn't change much, so it's not a big deal.
The unique aspect of game I liked is that depending on your actions during the first half of the game, the second half of the game is completely different. There's three major paths to take, which result in different main endings. How to pick between the endings isn't obvious, so you'll also need a guide for this.
Experiencing the wildly-different paths, with different character actions, places to visit, and plot points is great and hasn't been done at this extent in many games. Comparing your first path with the others helps to elevate the experience. I'd say that you haven't fully experienced this game until you've went through at least two paths. Although the third and hardest path is rushed, with several new characters that aren't really explored and don't seem to fit well within the world.
So the game is probably worth your time if you're looking for something like Neptunia, but without the console war references, and with an original, and mostly-comedic story.… Expand
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