FAIRY TAIL 2 on PS5
I will never understand why Gust and Koei Tecmo decided to take the direction that they did with FAIRY TAIL 2. It feels like these games are rushing toward something with how much story hasn’t been covered, and I can’t figure out why. Anyone looking to pick this up should know the game follows the finale of the original story.
Admittedly, I didn’t know that going into it, and while I have never watched the series or read the manga, I still got a solid grasp on everything. The thing is, the game doesn’t even tell you everything. There are many times there will be text, or a character will have a voice-over that details something that happened off-screen, which would make sense to invested fans and less so for newcomers. That’s certainly a fair choice, but that meant being taken out of the experience often just to catch up outside the game for someone hoping to see what the buzz is all about.
Speaking of which, for those unfamiliar with the Alvarez Arc of FAIRY TAIL, it all begins when a neighboring nation declares war on the continent that houses the Kingdom of Fiore. This is all orchestrated by the emperor Zeref to obtain the powerful secret the Fairy Tail guild is hiding. This leads to a full invasion, and the members must take on the overwhelmingly powerful elite team known as Spriggan 12.
Seeing as this game jumps directly to the end, the developers graciously added a function during dialogue to ‘Check Terminology.’ This means that if you hit down on the D-pad when there is a specially marked word on the screen, you can bring up a window that gives you more information. This was highly appreciated, especially when used with the World Encyclopedia. However, even with this, I still don’t think FAIRY TAIL 2 will entice anyone who doesn’t already have a strong familiarity with the source material.
The game is basically all fighting; there’s not much side content outside of combat and exploring. Thankfully, exploring actually serves a purpose. As you advance character skill trees, you must supplement skill points with special items found only in crystal formations. The downside is that characters need crystals of a matching element, and there’s no way to know what crystal type is which from the map. Traveling to hopefully find the one type you need just to be let down is a bit frustrating and a very high possibility that happened quite a number of times.
Fleshing out characters is an interesting mechanic, though. While I ignored it earlier in the game, I cared far more as the story started winding to a close. Each character has three skill trees for you to explore, or you can let the game automatically pick skills whenever they level up, which I took full advantage of for the characters I used the least. You can also use stat-enhancing Lacrima (up to a maximum of three per character) for buffs on characters who are weaker in specific aspects.
It all feeds into the combat in FAIRY TAIL 2, which is somewhere between turn-based and full-action combat. It operates like Final Fantasy‘s ATB mechanic, where you wait until a gauge tells you that you can attack. You then use your regular attacks to bank up SP (visualized by crystals), which is then spent on three (with another three in an additional skill set) equipped skills. I prefer more real-time combat in games, so I was cool with this evolution over the first game.
You fight with three characters and can swap between them whenever you want while fighting or even trade them out if you wish. The latter is nice because I often had the wrong party matchup for an enemy/boss, so getting the right trio together on the fly was helpful. I do have one hefty gripe with combat, though, and it’s entirely because of the attack animations.
On the whole, characters don’t have a vast number of skills. So, you usually sit with the same spread for quite a while. This means you’re seeing the same animations over and over and over and over. I was desperate by the end of the game for some sort of setting to let me speed these up. The game allows you to skip certain animations, but only infrequent ones.
The repetitive nature of the fighting was just so tiring, and because it is the bulk of FAIRY TAIL 2, it will start to grate. It is helped by the fact that you don’t have to do much grinding to be able to fight the frequent bosses, so there’s not a lot of extra battling to bog down progression. At the very least, bosses are cool for the most part, but what isn’t cool is the unnecessarily drawn-out nature of the fights.
You never fight any boss a single time. Instead, you fight them once just as an appetizer, and the second or subsequent times become the actual encounter. With every boss being an unapologetic damage sponge, these fights lasted so long that I constantly got bored of them. This affected my motivation to progress the story, as the glaring lack of side content meant there was no real break to the monotony.
If you’re a massive FAIRY TAIL fan and want to experience one of the most climactic arcs in the series, FAIRY TAIL 2 will be right up your alley. I just don’t feel like there is enough here for the average RPG fan, especially considering the bland overall combat experience and it being the grand finale of a long story. It’s not the type of game you can power through because it will wear you down, and I liked it more after taking breaks, and that’s not always the best experience you would want for an RPG.
FAIRY TAIL 2 launches on December 12 and is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, and the Nintendo Switch.
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