First and foremost I must admit that personally, I am not the biggest fan of turn-based combat in games. I feel that they can sometimes be aFirst and foremost I must admit that personally, I am not the biggest fan of turn-based combat in games. I feel that they can sometimes be a little slow with seemingly never-ending chat boxes which can’t be fast loaded. It’s one thing to have some interesting lore to keep you learning more about the characters and world around you but it grinds my gears when you’re forced to endure endless “trash talking” or block text loading incredibly slowly- sometimes letter by letter!
Thankfully, I found that this was not the case in Ara Fell with regards to the combat. At the very beginning of the game, you may choose the difficulty you would like to play on. If you are less keen on struggling through combat or if you would prefer for the combat encounters to speed up a little, then you are in luck! The easiest of settings enables you to focus more on the story and avoid getting sucked into fights altogether. This can be changed whenever you want more or less of a challenge or time is of the essence.
You start the game as Adrian accompanied by the eventual protagonist, Lita. They are searching for a magic ring on behalf of a mysterious being… Without giving away too much, from this little escapade, Lita unknowingly embarks upon a quest to save her home. To be fair to her, she is not given much choice in the matter. I don’t think the neighbours would have been very understanding if she had refused to save them all. As you journey through the game and meet new people, some of them will join your party, bringing new skills and strength required to defeat the enemies and complete the tasks ahead.
Ara Fell is a beautiful game with a well-rounded and thought out story featuring some interesting characters, side missions and mini-games/puzzles to keep you busy. There are plenty of things to do and soon you will be earning enough XP points to learn skills and level up your characters. Every level-up will award you with points which you can assign to either of the following: power/defence/agility/wisdom which will strengthen you against your foes. You can craft items so harvesting fish, coins, crystals and plants are an absolute must if you intend to survive. Enemies naturally, grow in strength the further you venture into the game and boss fights (if you do not have the easy difficulty enabled) are challenging yet satisfying to accomplish.
Whilst I have quite enjoyed playing Ara Fell, I will confess that I found it hard to get into. There is extraordinarily little guidance and if you are not a fan of exploration games then perhaps this is not the game for you. With many other games in the exploration genre you would be given rough locations of items or at the very least, a waypoint of sorts (even if you have to set it yourself) but this is not the case with Ara Fell. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what to do and where to go. I got lost more times than I care to admit as I was also trying to memorise the map during this ordeal because I was literally going round in circles (I am not known for my amazing sense of direction!). Thankfully, I persevered because after a few hours of gameplay I genuinely found myself enjoying the story and time ran away from me. Although at first, it can be quite daunting, you do have the ability to fast travel and fly (sort of) so it does make traversal much quicker.
With regards to performance, I found that Ara Fell gave me no real issue aside from a few short freezes early in the game. They did not last long and never resulted in a crash and happily, I have not noticed any issues whilst playing since. Seemingly, the developers are taking care of their game post-launch onto Xbox as there have been a few patches released so far which is always wonderful to see.
Overall, I have enjoyed my time with Ara Fell and I am glad to have played it but, in all honesty, I feel that there is something missing from the game to truly grip my attention and keep me wanting to go back to it and there is no real replay value unless you weren’t paying attention to the story the first time around! It has been out on PC for some time now so there is nothing ground-breaking about the game but for me, it is predictable and ultimately lacking the wow factor. Would I recommend the game to others to play? Yes, but only if you are a fan of the genre.… Expand
