Review cover Fairy Bloom Freesia (Steam) (Computer)
User Review

Product Information:

  • Release Date (NA): October 17, 2015
  • Release Date (EU): October 17, 2012
  • Release Date (JP): October 17, 2012
  • Publisher: Nyu Media
  • Developer: Edelweiss
  • Genres: Beat'em Up - Action RPG

Game Features:

Single player
Local Multiplayer
Online Multiplayer
Co-operative
The number of Japanese games on Steam have significantly increased as of late, and one that caught my eye was Fairy Bloom Fresia. Is this eye-catching game worth your hard working time and money?
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Story

The game talks about a fairy girl named Freesia, whose job is to protect the forest and the main tree named Jomon from the Golems, but soon humans enter it with ill intentions. While they don't look hostile, the "enemy" cast consists of a Prince named Listine, a gentleman with interest for cute girls, and of a woman named Shynie, who's always accompanying the Prince wherever he goes. She's loyal and supportive, but a bit of a tempered person. By the request of the King, they come to the Forest in search of the spirit stone. Even though the humans knew that taking the spirit stone will kill the Forest and the Jomon tree, they still forcefully tried to get it for their own selfish reasons. Freselia, as the guardian of the forest, keeps fighting back protecting the land against the Golems and the humans at the same time.

The main issue the story has is that it's really predictable. Cliché story with cliché actions and no plot twists or anything that would make it engaging. Even in the 2 hour long story they couldn't explain who and what the Golems enemies are or what happened to Freesia after the final battle making it a cliffhanger in the end. There are a lot of loop holes and the 2 hours of the story mode are pretty short.

Gameplay

Story might not be the place where the game shines but the gameplay hits it right. The game is a Fast-Paced Action RPG game similar to Tales games. You will be slicing and dicing through monsters on a fixed battlefield for 5 Days (5 rounds) after which the location changes to other seasoned places. They made the combo system simple by only using 2 kinds of attacks, Simple and Special attacks. Surprisingly, fighting the monsters feels really satisfying. One of the things that really made the gameplay fun is the Ricochet system. When monsters are kicked, they will ricochet off each other and take damage. With faster skills the ricochet will be wider and more frantic, which will make the enemies fly all over the screen, making it even more fun. Killing enemies rewards you with EXP and Mana. EXP, like in all other RPG games, by getting enough of it, increases the LV and the base stats of the character. On the other hand, Mana is used to aquire new skills.

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Simple skills are the base attacks that you will be using during the game.

Special skills are special attacks that are executed using the Special Attack button plus one of the directions on the dpad. They do require MP to be used, but the MP refills pretty fast in the game, so it doesn't slow down the gameplay. 4 of them are equipable, and there are over 20 of them to get, which is enough to make your own optimal character.

Supportive skills are skills that have passive effect on the character. You can equip 2 of them and there's a huge variety of them. HP Boost, STR Boost and HP Drain being one of them. I haven't really bothered to unlock other supportive skills than those 3, because there wasn't any threat in the game that would benefit from the other supportive skills making all other skills useless.

Other than attacking, you're able to defend against enemy attacks and dodge them. Defending too much will result on a guard break, making you vulnerable to attacks and doing dashes will make your character invincible during the action. You might die sometimes during the game, but by dying the game doesn't penalize you in any way other than losing the Mana and EXP that you obtained during that round.

Art Style/Graphics

The dialogue of the characters are displayed in a visual type direction which sometimes blends with the battlefield with 3D models. I myself didn't enjoy much of the 2D Art Style and the creepy reaction of the Prince didn't really make it better. While Fresellia's 3D model looks nice, the 2 Human enemies look decent at best, and the Golems monsters enemy design is one of the worst enemy designs that I've seen. Not only that, the term has no connections with big stone monsters but the slime monsters are copy pasted in all of the stages just slightly altered with color or shape. Sometimes there are in-game dialogue sequences with the 3D models but they are pretty rare.
The battlefield revolves in a 2.5D environment with most of the background objects being in 2D which reminded me a bit of Rune Factory Frontier.
60 FPS benefited the fast paced gameplay and because of it, the animations look fluid. There's no need for a high end PC to run it and most of dual core PCs and older graphics card will run the game fine.
For a PC game it doesn't look that great, but it’s a-ok for most of it.

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Final thoughts

The most that I could criticize is the story and the length of the game. With a lot of loop holes and hitting only 2 hours it doesn't have much of content and the post-game content is just an infinite wave mode. The good thing about the game is its fast-paced gameplay with its ricochet system, which really makes the game shine. The quality of the music is a mixed bag, some of the music reminds me of Kirby and Disgaea, but most of them are just fine.

Verdict

What I Liked ...
  • Fast Paced Gameplay
  • Addictive combat system
What I Didn't Like ...
  • Not enough content
  • Barebones story
  • Boring enemy design
9
Gameplay
Fun fast paced action game with RPG elements. Unlocking new skills and finding the optimal attacks makes the game fun and addictive.
6
Presentation
Looks and sounds fine. The protagonist might be cute but everyone else is just ok.
5
Lasting Appeal
Campaign only takes 2 hours and after that you unlock a harder story mode and an infinite wave mode. The problem with the infinite wave mode is the number of unlocked skills. You can pretty fast obtain all of them and make your own optimal character, that might sound good but after you unlock everything and while you play more and more of the game you will find it even more and more repetitive. There's not much variety in the infinite wave mode to make it fun like the campaign.
6.5
out of 10

Overall

Fairly well executed game. Story might be barebones, but the gameplay is at its finest. Sound, graphics and content could be a bit better but there's always a place for a sequel.
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Review cover
Product Information:
  • Release Date (NA): October 17, 2015
  • Release Date (EU): October 17, 2012
  • Release Date (JP): October 17, 2012
  • Publisher: Nyu Media
  • Developer: Edelweiss
  • Genres: Beat'em Up - Action RPG
Game Features:
Single player
Local Multiplayer
Online Multiplayer
Co-operative

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