Galapagos RPG's first game, Fairy Fencer F, will be released in North America next month, making this the perfec--
*skip*
The basic flow of the Fairy Fencer F consists of using a menu to choose people to speak with in your party, then using a similar menu to talk to people in town -- especially the girl who points out new locations -- before going out to the world map to select and play that new level. The levels themselves are a series of indoor or outdoor pathways, leading through green fields, ice caves, warehouses, lava caves, and the like. Enemies are visible while walking through the levels, and battles are initiated whenever the player makes contact with them. At the end of most levels there is a boss that must be defeated before going back to the menu that lets you talk to your party and so on.
I'm close to the end of my fourth(!) playthrough of the Japanese version of Fairy Fencer F, a fact I am confident would not be true if it weren't possible to skip almost everything mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Dialogue with the party? Initiate it and skip it. Talking to people in town? Get them started and then skip it. The enemies in each level? Run past them (i.e., skip it). Boss fights? Still necessary, but it's possible to skip all the attack animations and even the victory screen at the end. By skipping as much as possible, a group of tasks that could take 20-30 minutes to complete will end up taking more like two. By extension, a complete playthrough that might take 40 hours will take more like four.
This will no doubt sound familiar to anyone who has zipped through the Hyperdimension Neptunia games. Both series are fundamentally identical, right down to the button layout and the suspicion that the game exists primarily as a hangout spot for anime tropes. That said, FFF does have a much more traditional JRPG setting and plot compared to the games industry world of Neptunia, so there are at least narrative differences between them.
And yet despite my advocacy for ignoring the story entirely, I didn't skip anything the first time through, and found some parts to be fun or interesting. The main character is so lazy, for example, that he resists being rescued from prison early in the game, preferring to stay in a cell just laying around waiting for his three meals a day. I'll admit to having a similarly short-sighted fantasy during the laziness of my youth, so I found him to be endearing, even if somewhat tiresome.
I also enjoyed the idea of collecting Fairies and Furies, basically a system of matching up an accessory to a set of modifiers that apply to an individual character when equipped, or to a level when stuck in the ground. A character might get, say, a bonus to fire damage when equipping one of these, or the entire party would get 30% more experience while doing 10% less damage if applied to a level instead. For me, the fun was spending the time to balance the buffs I wanted for any particular character against the gains/losses I wanted to get out of each stage.
After the first time through, however, I've been skipping through the game as fast as possible, grinding levels, collecting Fairies, and all around turning small numbers into bigger numbers. I may complain sometimes about the way games like this pander to otaku sensibilities when it comes to characters and characterization, but I can't escape the allure of the simple, often mindless otaku task of leveling up over and over again.
This is the reason I keep coming back to FFF: the game has been designed to accommodate excessive leveling without requiring an excessive amount of time to do so. Galapagos RPG knows that attack animations just get in the way of dealing damage as fast as possible. They know there's no need to fight low level enemies, especially on subsequent playthroughs when the party starts at the level they ended the game with. They know that the story stops mattering when shifting into the postgame grind. Monster variety and nifty animations and dialogue all have their place, but so does stripping a game down to a few profitable runs that can be completed as fast as possible.
In that respect, at least, Fairy Fencer F is no doubt one the greatest JRPGs of all time. Certainly worth a look at some point after it comes out in North America on September 16.
*skip*
The basic flow of the Fairy Fencer F consists of using a menu to choose people to speak with in your party, then using a similar menu to talk to people in town -- especially the girl who points out new locations -- before going out to the world map to select and play that new level. The levels themselves are a series of indoor or outdoor pathways, leading through green fields, ice caves, warehouses, lava caves, and the like. Enemies are visible while walking through the levels, and battles are initiated whenever the player makes contact with them. At the end of most levels there is a boss that must be defeated before going back to the menu that lets you talk to your party and so on.
I'm close to the end of my fourth(!) playthrough of the Japanese version of Fairy Fencer F, a fact I am confident would not be true if it weren't possible to skip almost everything mentioned in the previous paragraph.
 |
| Loosely translated : "Shut up and everything will be fine" |
Dialogue with the party? Initiate it and skip it. Talking to people in town? Get them started and then skip it. The enemies in each level? Run past them (i.e., skip it). Boss fights? Still necessary, but it's possible to skip all the attack animations and even the victory screen at the end. By skipping as much as possible, a group of tasks that could take 20-30 minutes to complete will end up taking more like two. By extension, a complete playthrough that might take 40 hours will take more like four.
This will no doubt sound familiar to anyone who has zipped through the Hyperdimension Neptunia games. Both series are fundamentally identical, right down to the button layout and the suspicion that the game exists primarily as a hangout spot for anime tropes. That said, FFF does have a much more traditional JRPG setting and plot compared to the games industry world of Neptunia, so there are at least narrative differences between them.
And yet despite my advocacy for ignoring the story entirely, I didn't skip anything the first time through, and found some parts to be fun or interesting. The main character is so lazy, for example, that he resists being rescued from prison early in the game, preferring to stay in a cell just laying around waiting for his three meals a day. I'll admit to having a similarly short-sighted fantasy during the laziness of my youth, so I found him to be endearing, even if somewhat tiresome.
 |
| Just a sampling of the people I will never speak to again |
I also enjoyed the idea of collecting Fairies and Furies, basically a system of matching up an accessory to a set of modifiers that apply to an individual character when equipped, or to a level when stuck in the ground. A character might get, say, a bonus to fire damage when equipping one of these, or the entire party would get 30% more experience while doing 10% less damage if applied to a level instead. For me, the fun was spending the time to balance the buffs I wanted for any particular character against the gains/losses I wanted to get out of each stage.
After the first time through, however, I've been skipping through the game as fast as possible, grinding levels, collecting Fairies, and all around turning small numbers into bigger numbers. I may complain sometimes about the way games like this pander to otaku sensibilities when it comes to characters and characterization, but I can't escape the allure of the simple, often mindless otaku task of leveling up over and over again.
This is the reason I keep coming back to FFF: the game has been designed to accommodate excessive leveling without requiring an excessive amount of time to do so. Galapagos RPG knows that attack animations just get in the way of dealing damage as fast as possible. They know there's no need to fight low level enemies, especially on subsequent playthroughs when the party starts at the level they ended the game with. They know that the story stops mattering when shifting into the postgame grind. Monster variety and nifty animations and dialogue all have their place, but so does stripping a game down to a few profitable runs that can be completed as fast as possible.
In that respect, at least, Fairy Fencer F is no doubt one the greatest JRPGs of all time. Certainly worth a look at some point after it comes out in North America on September 16.
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