Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force is an expanded port of the PS3 JRPG for the PS4. It boasts additional story content, extra playable characters, some quality of life changes in game mechanics and more dungeons. The game uses a modified battle system from the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, which is somewhat disappointing. It is turned based and during each turn, your character can move around the battlefield to position themselves. They can attack, use magic, or use an item. Attacks can be chained into multiple combos and if you attack an enemy from behind, you do additional damage. You're able to skip battle animations at the press of a button which is great because it can be boring fighting the weak enemies.
The twist here is that the characters can Fairize. This is just another fancy way of saying that the characters can transform with additional armor and boosted stats. This added firepower are lifesavers in certain moments, especially when optional bosses from the sidequests are a tad more powerful than what your characters can handle at the time (and several times stronger than story bosses at that point). There is an addictive mechanic in which you can use points earned from battles to power up specific stats or learn new abilities and magic for each character. This gives the player a degree of freedom in how to develop the characters.
Unfortunately, Fairy Fencer F feels like it was made on a very tight budget. The story is told via visual novel type cutscenes, which usually isn't too bad but the execution feels dull. You can't help but feel that in-game rendered cutscenes would suit the more action-oriented atmosphere of the story. The graphics are poor, barely being better than games from the Wii. When you start out, you are constantly interrupted by tutorials. The way tutorials are presented is inelegant as they are screens of text that just pop up.
Similar to Hyperdimension Neptunia, there is a lack of exploration. You use a point and click system to select the next destination on the world map. The towns are represented by menus. Deungeons are uninspired, look bland and are extremely small. Enemies roam on the battlefield and respawn as soon as they are offscreen, which is a huge pain when you just want to get to the destination after visiting the same dungeon for the 10th time. You now have the ability to dash but there is a slight cooldown, meaning that once enemies spot you, there is a 90% chance of them catching up and forcing you into battle.
The story follows Fang, who manages to pull out the sword (a type of possessed weapon called Furies) from the ground. The sword is possessed by the Fairy Eryn. Together, they are joined by Tiara, another Fencer, on their quest to free the goddess. To do this, they must gather other Furies. It sounds more exciting that it is and the story is definitely one of the weakest areas of the game. Merging the Fairies into gameplay, you can use them to alter the characteristics of a dungeon. You may boost the experience points gain at the cost of lower defense, or up the drop rate if you need certain materials to complete sidequests.
Sidequests are pretty stock standard. You're tasked with either killing a number of enemies or gather a number of drops. They're more of a chore than anything. The game is generally pretty easy on normal difficulty. However, it has a tendency to remove your party members before dungeons or before bosses. Considering that you can have up to six party members during battles, this does screw up your strategy. Plus, fighting solo or in pairs means your damage and healing output are severely crippled, dragging the battles out and forcing you to play more conservatively, which feels like the game is padding an already padded game. Towards the end of the game, the bosses will have difficulty spikes, which can be quite annoying especially when you were already steamrolling enemies in the same dungeon beforehand.
Speaking of padding, using a weak story excuse, the game forces you to repeat dungeons you have already cleared. The dungeons were already uninspired and bland; this makes the game a lot more repetitive and boring. You'll end up just trying to run past all the enemies (hoping that they don't notice you before if they do, they run faster than you and you're forced into a battle) or drop the difficulty down because there's no point anymore.
With the two new endings, it effectively means that after you speed through the first half to get to the point where you can trigger the different endings (takes only 30-40 minutes skipping all cutscenes so it isn't that painful), the second half's story is completely new. The amount of new story content is quite impressive, and thrown into the mix are some new dungeons too, including a big expansive one that makes you wish that the rest of the game's dungeons were like it. Unfortunately, you are still forced to trek through the old dungeons multiple times which dampens the enthusiasm somewhat.
The scenes in each of the three endings are vastly different, right down to the characters' personalities. It may confuse you for a second when characters don't act the way you'd expect, until you remember that it was in another route and not in the current one you are in. One of the two new endings throws in some new mythology and ends with a sequel hook... only that there is no sequel.
Overall, Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force has its good parts and its fair share of bad. The story, while quite bland, has the characters eventually grow on you. The battle system is simple but there's just something about overpowering your enemy by constantly bashing them that makes it addictive. If you are a fan of JRPGs and enjoyed the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, then this game is worth a play.
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