Fairy Tail 2 Review
From Another Time
Enjoying a popular film or TV show often means there is a large possibility that a video game adaptation of it exists, and in the RPG genre is home to many of these licensed adaptations. The latest of these is Fairy Tail 2 from developer Gust, a direct sequel to the 2020 release Fairy Tail. Fairy Tail 2 adapts the Alvarez Empire Arc from the original series, as well as including a game-original story known as The Key to the Unknown, essentially serving as an adaptation of the ending of the original Fairy Tail manga.
Getting the adaptation of the source material right is often one of the first things people will care about, and Fairy Tail 2 is no exception. Its main area of success is in the audio department. The Japanese voice cast does an excellent job and brings these characters to life just as well here as they do in the anime, and the music similarly does an excellent job evoking the feeling of the anime’s soundtrack without outright copying it. Unfortunately, the adaptation of the narrative is lacking in key areas. Several incredibly important moments happen offscreen, including events that directly lead into the finale. Worse still is that many characters from the original manga are missing from the game, relegated to simply being text boxes and perhaps having an image associated with them. Thankfully, the game comes with a live-glossary of sorts that allows the player to get more context if they aren’t familiar with a specific reference or character, but this does not remedy the fact that the adaptation feels incomplete on the whole.
Fairy Tail 2 also suffers from feeling underbaked in several aspects. While visually the game is solid, with bright colors and an art style that befits Fairy Tail as a franchise, the cracks begin to show in the animation department. Aside from a few prerendered cutscenes, most events are incredibly stilted, with characters simply standing around talking to each other. In some cases the game makes clever use of the camera to communicate certain actions like a punch or a character falling, but too often do these tricks accidentally betray how limited the scope of these cutscenes are, leading to an even more bare-bones feeling adaptation.
Stunning static visuals do not automatically translate to incredible animations.
Aside from being an adaptation, Fairy Tail 2 also allows the opportunity to play as a large selection of the cast in the context of a traditional RPG. Mainstays like Natsu, Lucy, Gray, and Erza are present, but also included are the likes of Laxus and Juvia, characters that are definitely important but not so important that their inclusion is a given, making it a pleasant surprise when these characters appear.
The game’s map is quite large, though traversing it isn’t anything interesting, simply running from place to place. Campfires act as fast travel points and also refill every character’s health for free. Aside from enemies to encounter, the map is also peppered with treasure chests and other collectibles. While the player can find many of these without map markers, a good number are in obscure enough places that markers can be helpful. Area bosses are marked on the map, enabling players to seek them out and collect rewards.
Combat sees a drastic shift from the first game’s turn-based system into a semi-real-time structure that combines ideas from the Active Time systems of Final Fantasy and the combo resources of certain Tales combat systems with varying degrees of success. Battles happen in real time, with the player’s character able to attack on a cooldown. Once this cooldown is up, the player can use basic attacks to build up SP, which can then be consumed to use a skill. Skills deplete both an enemy’s health and break gauge. Enemies with a fully depleted break gauge receive guaranteed critical hit damage, making these moments the most effective for doing damage.
Skills are the primary method of dealing damage.
As the player uses skills, they will raise their Fairy Rank, which maxes out at 5. A higher Fairy Rank has a few effects, chief among them being a higher max SP. This becomes especially important because, as the game makes clear in the early hours, using the same skill multiple times in the same action raises that skill’s effectiveness. This makes higher Fairy Ranks essential for maximizing a given character’s effectiveness, especially in the late game as SP costs begin to balloon and enemies require much more damage to deplete their break gauges. The bones of this combat system are solid, and when it comes together it has a fun flow. Characters are different enough from one another that it is enjoyable to switch from one to another, and it can be incredibly fun to watch a strategy come together and melt an enemy’s health bar. Unfortunately, the combat system suffers greatly from an oversaturation of systems, attacks that grind the pace of combat to a halt, and technical issues.
Feature bloat is a problem in many RPGs, with Fairy Tail 2 being the most recent victim. Aside from the core mechanics, characters also have access to an Awakening, which, when activated, raises the character’s stats, refills their health, and significantly shortens their attack cooldown. Aside from this are the Link and Unison Attacks, team-up attacks that activate when a segment of a boss’s break gauge is depleted. Link Attacks see a party member use one of their skills on the enemy and confer character specific benefits, such as extra SP or burning the enemy. Unison Attacks see the player character and the party member team up to deal massive damage.
More still are attacks that feature non-party members. Support characters are essentially extra party members that will activate attacks based on certain conditions met by the player. Extreme Magic Attacks are a separate system that feature special attacks that the player can activate independent of any cooldowns. If the player has a high enough Fairy Rank, they can activate an attack featuring a non-party member. All of these systems are fine on their own, in many instances granting characters that wouldn’t have screentime otherwise a chance to shine. Unfortunately, most of them feel at best underbaked. Extreme Magic is perhaps the biggest victim of this feature bloat. The further into the game the player progresses, the earlier tiers of Extreme Magic become less and less relevant. The higher tiers also consist of some very powerful options that render other attacks in the same tier or lower useless.
Combat can feel like a constant series of interruptions rather than a satisfying loop.
Combat pacing is something that Fairy Tail 2 misses the mark on rather spectacularly. Skill animations cannot be skipped, and the emphasis on spamming the same skill over and over means that players will spend a lot of time watching the same animations. These animations are shortened when used in succession, but many of these shorter versions are only slightly shorter, which is especially a problem when the best attacks are the ones with long animations. While this is an issue on its own, it is exacerbated by the abundance of Link Attacks. Link attacks not only activate when a break gauge segment is depleted, but also when an enemy’s special attack is interrupted, and they are unskippable. Thankfully most other attacks allow the player to skip the animation if they so choose, but the pacing of combat is so often brought to a screeching halt by the very animations that are supposed to be one of the main draws of the game.
This is not the end of Fairy Tail 2’s problems though. Link Attacks and other abilities that pause the action appear to occasionally cause the game to crash outright. During the playthrough for this review, it got to the point where the PC version would regularly crash within an hour of restarting, a this problem is only slightly alleviated by Fairy Tail 2‘s liberal application of it’s autosave feature. If the game crashed during a story battle, at least at no point was there a huge amount to repeat, but the frequent crashing is certainly trying on one’s patience and desire to return.
Fairy Tail 2 has a core problem that it fails to solve. Its identity as an adaptation pits it up against both the original manga and the anime, which concluded far before this game’s release, putting the onus on the game to do something to provide an extra spark. While the gameplay systems are solid, they aren’t enough of a positive to overcome that fans would likely receive a more complete narrative elsewhere. Add to that the game’s technical issues, and Fairy Tail 2 ends up being hard to recommend.
Disclosure: This review is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.
Great voice acting and music
Beautiful visual style
Combat pacing is incredibly slow
Game crashes frequently
Narrative feels incomplete
Too many underdeveloped features
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