Fairytale Fights (PS3)
Many years ago, I played the game Fairytale Fights on a friend’s Xbox 360 but didn’t quite catch the name of it as I played. Attempts to find it again later were fruitless as the details I remembered tended to flag unrelated results on Google, especially since Alice McGee has a series of corrupted fairy tale games similar in concept that kept presenting themselves as the incorrect answer to my search. I realize now that I could have just asked my friend what the game was at some point, but the idea to ask her didn’t come until Fairytale Fights already found its way back to me. The strangest thing about this hunt for this forgotten game though is that it was never a fondness for the title that inspired the search, and I certainly wouldn’t have been too beat up about it if it had taken me longer to find it.
The most memorable aspect of the game is certainly its concept though. In a land where classic fairy tales coexist, four famous characters are denied their proper fame by the interference of the far less famous Little Tailor. Little Red Riding Hood finds the wolf dealt with before it ever ate her grandmother, Snow White is woken up without true love’s first kiss, Jack’s spoils from his beanstalk climbing adventure are upstaged, and the Emperor from The Emperor’s New Clothes is denied the moral to his story by everyone freaking out immediately on seeing him bare naked. In this land of fairy tales though, to not have fame comes with the risk of disappearance, so the four set off to try and find a new claim to fame, a task that apparently involves spending half the game trying to get back the porridge back for the bears from the Goldilocks story. They do eventually pursue another goal of trying to rescue princesses, their adventures throughout the game told with almost no words but a lot of bloodshed in the ultimate inverse of the typical trimming down and softening of the older and darker fairy tales.
Some of the locations you visit on your journey find their roots in fairy tales as well, the witch from Hansel and Gretel building a candy castle and the giants from Jack’s story having their large house serve up some interesting level set pieces, but at the same time the game spends a lot of time with the heroes fighting lumberjacks and tends to wear out areas by making them too long, the overall experience covering very few distinctly different environments. A spark of inspiration briefly strikes when the player has to dodge princess-hungry suitors in a race and a twisting palace maze requires some puzzle solving, but most of the time areas are pretty much just designed only to house the game’s bloody yet unfortunately bland battles.
Fairytale Fights is definitely a hack-and-slash action game through and through, almost the entire experience focusing on the straightforward bloody slaying of any enemy who gets in your chosen character’s paths. Unfortunately, despite having four playable characters with very different origins, there’s no real difference between them. It’s easy to accept them as the character skins they are, but this is also a missed opportunity in a game that desperately needs something to give its fighting an interesting edge. In Fairytale Fights, attacks are controlled with one control stick while the other handles movement, but the only real thought involved in executing an attack will be the direction you do it in. Once you know where an enemy is standing, it’s just a matter of hammering your control stick in that direction to hit them until they die. Maybe if you’re surrounded you’ll have to guard, but this approach works on most every enemy, even ones the game tries to make different. If a foe is fighting from long range, its much easier to bum-rush their position before they can hit you, and if you die, the only major penalty is losing some of the coins you collected in the stage, coins which are only used for the purpose of building a statue in the game’s hub world.
Fairytale Fights does want to trick you into thinking the battles have variety though, with the game packing in well over 100 different weapon types to find in the environment. Some are expected types like swords and hammers, but there are plenty of wackier items to bash baddies with, with things like gnomes, swordfish, lollipops, ice cream cones, and stuffed animals serving as legitimately useful weapon options. Each one has a star rating to tell you its strength when you pick it up, and they come in sharp, blunt, or special varieties, this mostly determining whether an enemy killed with it will be cut apart and spray fountains of blood, be knocked away while having their bones broken, or suffer some unusual effect. The sharp and blunt weapons are the go-to since they are reliable for battle, and since you can carry two and swap between them, it’s easy to compensate for the fact you lose a weapon on death by immediately coming back to life with the other weapon ready to go. The special weapons, unfortunately, aren’t too useful. Bows and guns give you projectiles to fire at foes from afar, but the control stick aiming is sloppy and the shots fired are slow to seemingly balance their range advantage… only for them to have limited ammo so it’s almost always smarter to just charge in and fight foes with your close-range options. There are potions to throw and wands with limited charges as well, but again, their unwieldy nature and limited ammo means its much better to just hold onto two highly rated blunt or sharp weapons and hope you can grab them again after dying, death not punished enough to encourage any level of caution.
Once you’ve resigned yourself to a few hours of fighting enemies who don’t put up a good fight with weapons that almost all feel the same to use, there’s very little the game can do to renew your interest in its design. You can build up a special move, but all it does is briefly freeze time as you get a close-up of the kills you’re committing while in super mode. You’re clearly meant to revel in the bloody carnage, but its so mindless and tedious that it ends up feeling more like blood for blood’s sake rather than as a reward for your excellent fighting skills. The boss fights do change things up slightly, in that you can’t just hammer them with your equipped weapon endlessly. Boss fights almost always take on the form of dodging their attacks and then striking during their brief vulnerable moment, but even if you do this well, so many of these battles take an incredibly long time to complete, this chance to reinvigorate a rote combat system instead being more drawn out than regular fights. The normal baddies may be handled in the same way by the player, but they do come in different forms and are combined in different ways throughout the levels, the likes of gingerbread men, fairy godmothers, and royal knights allowing for something new to slash apart as you push on through the game. Besides rats and gnomes who steal your nearly worthless coins and the projectile fighters though, enemy types are much like weapon types, in that they’re barely felt variety despite the visual changes.
Fairytale Fights is a game that seems to hope you play it cooperatively, as the waves of enemy and long boss fights are much easier handled with friends along for the ride, but you’re of course left with the same boring battle system no matter how many players are trudging their way through the game. There is a competitive multiplayer mode as well, players dropped in an arena where they attempt to kill each other with weapons that spawn in, but these battles are slow and dull as well more due to the pace of weapon distribution and limited arena design that doesn’t encourage risk-taking. Fighting with your fists is slow, and whoever gets a weapon first will have a range and strength advantage that can be hard for the other player to overcome. Like most things in the game, action has been focused on to the detriment of any real thought to how its executed, and since that action is unwieldy and shallow, the multiplayer fights lack energy and have no engaging element to draw players in with.
THE VERDICT: Besides the brief thrill at seeing fairy tale characters getting sliced into bloody chunks, Fairytale Fights does not have much to offer. Its combat relies on a system that makes most every weapon feel the same despite the efforts in visual variety, with the only ones that break away from it too limited to justify using. Enemies are mostly fodder despite their different appearances as well, but the easily won fights are more tolerable than the drawn out conflicts with boring bosses. Very briefly a new hazard or a level concept might pull you out of the mindless repetition, but sadly, this is a hack and slash whose concept can’t salvage it from a brainless battle system that grows stale before the first stage is complete.
And so, I give Fairytale Fights for PlayStation 3…
A TERRIBLE rating. Hack and slash games can be enjoyable if they’re given direction or proper variety in enemy design and skill use, but Fairytale Fights only really has its concept of extreme cartoon violence to build off of. Levels are mostly a series of moving from one enemy filled spot to another, picking up weapons in the hope they’ll have one more star than the previous one because a pitchfork can turn out to be stronger than a chainsaw in combat. The weapons that do change up your attacking method are often poorly placed, potions popping out of a treasure chest that you would have to waste a holding slot on to carry the single use item into a horde of enemies up ahead if you want to taste a weak version of variety which has little payoff. You might be able to lose yourself in the constant swinging of blade or bludgeon, but Fairytale Fights has very few moments that break from that formula, almost all of the conflict blending together into one haze of blood and control stick mashing.
Fairytale Fights is just a mix of concepts with very weak follow-ups. The violence utilizes a dynamic slicing system where characters lose the limbs that match up with your slashes, but the play to make that happen hardly makes the concept satisfying to see, especially when its happening over and over in dull fights. The fairy tale elements mean we fight characters like the Pied Piper as a boss, but then we spend a lot of time with lumberjacks as well and then face off with the same giant beaver boss twice. It’s a collection of ideas rather than executions, meaning there’s very little to enjoy outside of surface level features and mindless carnage.