The Shrekoning: Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown (Game Boy Color)

While Shrek on Xbox is perhaps the best known game based on Dreamworks’s grimy yet lovable ogre, it was not the first game based on the animated film franchise. That honor belongs to a Game Boy Color game known as Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown, a game released around a week after the film’s theatrical debut. Oddly enough, TDK decided that the first game based on a fantasy comedy film should be a fighting game, an odd tonal choice but one made more unfortunate by the fact the Game Boy Color only has two possible buttons to use for attacks. Perhaps the concept just seemed easy to put together, but unfortunately the quality of the end product does not seem to have been an important consideration as Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown is not only an extremely basic one-on-one fighting game, but one with no multiplayer and barely any attack options.

Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown must be played alone, meaning any effort spent learning the game’s 9 playable characters can only go towards beating the game’s single tournament mode where you will face computer controlled opponents. Strangely, the game’s roster of fairy tale adjacent characters from the film only gives you 6 characters to start with, the other 3 unlockable despite the game featuring no way to save your progress. Instead, you are given passwords after each victory and if you want to be able to use those characters for a tournament run, you need to either do a quick play through to unlock them by beating them during the tournament or keep a password on hand for after you’ve done so before. Battles are just single round affairs though and a loss just has you retry the fight so it’s not too big an ask, but it’s an odd little choice especially considering how easy it is to unlock those characters.

Attacks in Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown are often fairly basic and you’re not really given much room for strategy. Every character has a punch and kick attack, although depending on their body type this might be executed with varying speed or in a different manner, and a few characters are lucky enough to get a crouching or jumping attack. Usually though a fighter’s basics involves you picking between 2 to 3 attacks that aren’t that interesting. Guarding is handled in a strange manner as the moment you press backwards it immediately activates but if you hold it you just start backpedaling, and guarding doesn’t always seem to negate damage perhaps because of animation errors or extra affordances given to particular opponents. It is hard to parse the specific strengths and weaknesses of an attack, the Practice mode only having a character stand around to take your hits rather than fighting back. However, most characters can achieve some degree of solid success if you just hammer the punch and kick while you’re directly in front of the opponent, usually picking whichever one is faster since it’s not like you need to worry about where you’re hitting them and weak defensive options means the best reply to incoming attacks is usually to run off or try to fire back if your attack has greater damage output over time.

All characters do have special moves they can utilize though, and to the game’s credit it does try to make these incredibly simple to execute. Usually a special attack is some combination of pressing down, either forward or back, and either A or B, there being some variation if you press some inputs at the same time or occasionally a character’s ability asks you to press forward and back without any down inputs. This means special moves can be attempted pretty often even if the game seems sometimes snippy about accepting them, but the characters all have 2 or 3 special attacks performed this way. Often one of them is a stronger close range strike whose usefulness is debatable when its slower than rapid punches and not as easily repeated while most characters also pack some sort of projectile ability. Surprisingly enough there are limits put in place where an opponent who is too far away so they can’t repeatedly fire projectiles, meaning you can potentially guard one and try to fire back before they get another out. However the frequent presence of projectiles in the roster moveset does mean the AI heavily favors their use, often running off to start firing them repeatedly until you attempt to break the stalemate somehow.

Projectile spamming is such a frequent feature of the fighting that one battle in the tournament is based purely on its use, the Ginger Bread Man character firing projectiles over and over again and running off when you approach. Your window for actually smacking him is short and his rapid fire projectiles are good at interrupting your attempts at firing back, and while it is cute he’s living up to the nursery rhyme that inspired him, catching the Ginger Bread Man is a repetitive fight idea. Other characters who like to rely on projectiles often hop out of reach and will literally never move in to strike you if you don’t start moving towards them, but level layouts work against you. The 2D arenas in Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown have instant death drops if you miss your jumps across the platforms, and since the computer players almost never fall down them unless you learn how to exploit their AI they appear to be present mostly for making navigating these simple battles unnecessarily more dangerous for the human player. Opponents will hop up onto an elevated platform and just keep firing projectiles that have no hope of hitting you from so high, but to continue the fight you need to get up there and risk being damaged or even knocked into a pit for attempting to actually engage your enemy.

Since this is a single-player focused fighting game though, when you begin to consider the playable characters it’s less about game balance and more about game difficulty. While you change the overall settings to Easy, Normal, or Hard, the tournament can be significantly easier or rougher based on who you pick to fight through it with. Ginger Bread Man’s running tactics may be annoying when you fight him, but if you play as him you learn his kick is incredibly strong and swift and trivializes most battles. Princess Fiona’s kick is also so good you can mindlessly hammer the button and quickly end many battles unless the computer player gets a chance to run away. On the other hand someone like Shrek or the Big Bad Wolf have slower strikes but without the power increase to make that okay, playing as them requiring more work and luck since strategy in this fighting game mostly boils down to hammering an attack button and running when things get too dicey to keep doing so. Some characters like Dragon though get a projectile so strong you don’t even need to approach if you pick her, and the executioner Thelonius’s stunning strike that slows down battles when fighting him becomes a good tool for speeding through them when you’re the one dishing it out. If the computer player does decide to keep their distance and your character has a decent projectile though, sometimes winning just comes down to firing that repeatedly while not being hurt by their attempts to execute the same tactic. Rarely does it feel like you’re thinking much about how to fight your opponent, you just pick a simple attack to try repeatedly and swap out the one of choice based on if your opponent’s bland strategy has shifted.

The tournament has you fight through every character on the roster unless you pick Shrek or Fiona, the couple not fighting each other but instead having a repeat fight with a copy of themself perhaps to avoid unfortunate implications. As you progress through this tournament though, you will unlock power-ups that do add to your attack arsenal a touch, these having slightly longer button sequences required to activate but usable once per battle after you’ve been knocked below half health. Invincibility gives you a few seconds where you won’t take damage, the Speed power-up lets you move around more quickly, and Ogre Power gives your attacks a strength boost, and these would have potential for introducing a little strategy or at least making certain fights end faster if not for the fact the opponent has all these power-ups as well. More importantly, the computer players don’t need to unlock them, so before you even get super speed you will have the Ginger Bread Man using it to be an even more slippery foe to hit, and you can usually expect the opponent to activate invincibility if you were doing a decent job whittling them down so that you need to retreat and wait before trying again. Ogre Power is another tool they use as you exchange close range punches and kicks, the lack of any flinching or stuns for most moves meaning unless you watch your health bar you might not realize their power boost suddenly means they’re winning the exchange. Since fights swing from your character having almost no trouble handling things without a power-up to a character who could use the boost but the opponent will just flee if they see you activate one, it only adds a nuisance to the bouts since the enemy gets more mileage out of them and the response from either side is almost always going to be a period of avoidance rather than some actual action.

More as an amusing note than something that changes the gameplay experience though is the graphical direction for the game. While in the fights characters have simple sprites, the faces featured in the fight cards feature some unusual choices, Shrek looking morbidly serious and Lord Farquaad looking less like a pompous royal and more like he’s mid-sneeze. Dragon’s appearance in battle is rather amusing, the enormous reptile shrunk down to be of a similar size to the cast and given proportions that make her look like a chubby bootleg dinosaur toy. You can see some decent pixel art in the stage introduction pictures and in the character select, and the backgrounds look fairly nice even if stage variety only comes back to bite you when it means some stages feature death drops. Little cute animation touches like the Big Bad Wolf lifting his dress to run only go so far though, especially when some attacks look rough like Farquaad’s strange bite attack that almost doesn’t look like he’s trying to hit you. Some characters like Pinocchio also seem to have extra reach on their attacks but determining if it matches the move’s appearance is hard as well, so sadly the silly and decent visual elements are balanced out by actual problems the graphics cause.

THE VERDICT: Shallow move sets, poorly implemented power-ups, and no multiplayer means all of Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown is fighting the AI in a tournament structure that is almost the same across the entire cast. The structure for the battles is already poor, but the fights don’t encourage any kind of interesting strategy from the player since many can come down to projectile trading or jut running up into the enemy’s face and hammering the attack button. Characters like Fiona and Ginger Bread Man barely have to do anything but repeat the same attack to reliably win while Pinocchio will struggle against all the annoyances the AI enemies provide, your opponents getting more out of projectiles and power-ups than you but also responding to many battle situations rather unintelligently. There’s little room to squeeze out a fight that actually felt like it had substance or strategy played a real role in its outcome, making this not only a mindless button masher but one that still feels hollow even if you normally are fine with such a game approach.

And so, I give Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown for Game Boy Color…

An ATROCIOUS rating. The simplistic fighting system in Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown has almost no depth, and when it does try to introduce it, it fails spectacularly. Power-ups don’t add neat options to whip out in a pinch, they just means the repetitive button mashing takes a break as one side gets an advantage the other would have to be stupid to stick around and try to overcome. Arenas having holes to drop in would be an interesting extra wrinkle to the fight if they weren’t put there just to serve as player traps, the computer players only ever using the varied level geometry as a way of finding a perch to launch projectiles from until you put yourself at risk to reach them. It’s hard to really try and justify making a bad character like Big Bad Wolf work when even in the base roster you have Fiona who can rapidly kick her way through the tournament, and it’s hard to justify doing anything besides fireballs as a character like Dragon because some attacks are so effective there’s little need to do anything else. If you specifically deny yourself these moves you just face computer players without such compunctions and with so few attacks to even pick from you aren’t exactly given room to develop a new strategy to win. If multiplayer was present at least you could maybe try to even the playing field to avoid the many imbalances in the design, but then you’d still have moves that are primarily about repeatedly smacking the foe instead of planning your approach, varying your moves to break through guards, or changing your attacks to gain different advantages or keep your opponent guessing. Against an AI set in some unwavering ways and without much you can do yourself, this fighting game doesn’t provide any battles worth experiencing, its most distinct fight being the frustrating one where the opponent just keeps running away the whole battle.

Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown is definitely an awful start to the world of Shrek tie-in games and unfortunately an omen of how things would be handled under TDK. This then-young publishing group would go on to seemingly toss the many licenses they scooped up to all sorts of low-end developers with seemingly little quality control, and while TDK did stumble into some decent games like Wendy: Every Witch Way, the young Shrek brand definitely suffers from this slapdash approach to game creation. Licensed games already had their bad reputation back in 2001 so maybe TDK felt this game didn’t need to be good and it would ride brand recognition to a decent return, but it is still baffling that the first Shrek game is a 2D fighter on a system awful for a usually technical genre. When a character is good they’re too good, when a character is bad they’re too bad, and with barely any thought required since even the bad characters need to earn their wins through cheap and bland strategies, Shrek: Fairy Tale Freakdown is a surprisingly abysmal way for this Dreamworks property to enter the video game space both conceptually and in execution.