For those of you that don’t know me, I’m the Horseless Headsman, but you can call me Horse. I used to write horror movie reviews for Horror Metal Sounds, but left to pursue personal ventures. I currently work as a product photographer. First and foremost, I am a game collector and a retro gamer. I’ve longed to discuss my love for games older than current gen (yes, that includes wii u, xbox 360, and ps3). I’ve tried my hand at it on instagram. However, I felt oppressively limited by the minuscule length of the caption I’m allotted. So, I’m giving this platform a chance to express my love for video games.
Today marks a special occasion, I beat a video game. In the past year, I’ve beaten five games in this order: Final Fantasy 8, Kingdom Hearts, Mass Effect, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, and last but not least Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon. That last title is a mouthful. Developed by Bandai Namco, published in the US by Xseed, and directed by Kentaro Kawashima Fragile Dreams is a JRPG post-apocalyptic survival horror game on the Nintendo Wii. The main story follows Seto. For quite sometime, he has been living with an old man. Upon the old man’s death, Seto sets forth into the world. Shortly, thereafter he meets a mysterious girl with silver hair. Startled by the sudden appearance of Seto, she flees and Seto starts his journey to find this girl.
Like almost all Wii games, this game relies heavily on motion controls. Seto moves with the Nunchuck; pressing up will move him forward in whatever direction he is currently facing, left and right will make him strafe, and back will, well, make him move backwards. Pressing B, will put Seto in a first person view. You can then look around using the Wiimote. You will only use this feature to pick up items you can’t walk over and to light campfires. His direction is controlled with Wiimote, his flashlight will follow the on-screen reticule. Pointing the reticule to either the left or right of the television screen will cause Seto to turn. This is the first major problem of the game. Maintaining control of Seto is the game’s biggest difficulty. You must constantly be weary of the cursor’s position the screen, if you begin to drift towards one side of the screen or the other, Seto with begin to turn. Turing brings up another issue, you must maintain your cursor onscreen at all times when performing a turn. If the cursor leaves the screen, then Seto will stop turning altogether. If an object is in the foreground, instead of the controls behaving like previously mentioned, accidentally pointing your cursor at this object will cause Seto to turn and face cursor and inverting the controls in the process. This happening in combat is extremely disorienting and often gives the enemies a free hit on Seto.
Speaking of combat, You have four types of weapons. Swords are used in strings of three hit combos; great for single combat. Rods must be charged and released to perform a 360 degree attack with a wide range; great for most of the game. Range weapons forgo your flashlight to shoot enemies at a safe distance. The problem is most enemies require a flashlight to even be seen; this is only good for boss battles. Another issue with these weapons is that Seto will not shoot where the pointer is located. He’ll only shoot in the direction he is facing based on the location of the pointer. For example, if an enemy is approaching Seto from the lower right hand side of the screen, pointing the cursor at the enemy and firing will cause Seto to fire his attack randomly into the darkness and not at the target because he is not facing it. The final type of weapons are hammers, they operate exactly like rods but have an inferior range and slower attack time. These are totally useless, by the time you get these weapons you will fight enemies who are invulnerable except for brief moments when they can be hurt. The short range and the awkward time it takes to attack will cause you to either miss the attack entirely or hit the enemy just when it leaves it’s vulnerable phase, triggering a counter attack.
Navigating in combat is just as frustrating as combat itself. Moving around enemies is incredibly difficult. This is because you can’t actually turn using the Nunchuck, you have to use the Wiimote. Often, you’ll find yourself making wide turns just to face your target while they gain ground on you; quick turning is impossible. Secondly strafing to keep your target in your sights is useless. When strafing your character moves at roughly ⅓ of their normal speed, and all enemies but the jellyfish guys can out maneuver this. I would have instead dedicated the Nunchuck to 360 degree movement, this would make Seto way more maneuverable. I would have removed the first person feature entirely, and replaced it with an aim mode. You would hold B that would cause Seto to enter a strafing state. This would have streamlined combat making it more enjoyable.
That all being said, combat was never difficult. In fact, it was quite easy regardless. Enemies never took too many hits to kill and have predictable patterns making them fairly easy to hit. The real challenge in terms of combat is boss battles. The difficulty, however, is artificial because a simple change to range weapons makes combat infinitely easier. This is because many boss have incredibly mobile attacks and Seto is the exact opposite. The final boss battle is the most guilty of this. Right before the battle, the game gives you a katana: the weapon the game suggests you use. This is wrong, you should be using the crossbow. The final boss is only vulnerable after he attacks, problem is all of his attack are range attacks. His main offensive technique is three homing energy balls. You can block these if you hit the energy balls with an attack. If you stand at a safe distance and block these with a melee attack and then follow up with another attack, you’ll find by the time you’ve closed the distance his vulnerability state will have worn off. Your only option is to close the distance while he’s preparing the attack guaranteeing that you’ll hit him when he’s vulnerable. This will also ensure that you will be hit by his attack. OR, by using the crossbow you can, at a safe distance, shoot all three balls in the air and follow up by shooting him. Since combat was so easy and the controls so annoying, the only actual gameplay in this video game was just lackluster and not fun or rewarding in any way. I would often times find myself trying to skip combat where I could.
The game had a few other annoying mechanics, the first is weapon durability. When first playing I thought, that maybe weapons would wear down after so many uses but that didn’t seem to be the case. They would break randomly. Sometimes the weapon would last for long periods of time, and sometimes a weapon would break the first time. Oddly, it would always break miraculously at the end of combat. It finally dawned on me, whenever you use a weapon in combat, at the end of battle there would be a fixed chance of it breaking. This was incredibly annoying as there is no strategy involved when it comes to trying to maintain your weapons. It’s pure chance, chance is the cheapest way of trying to balance difficulty. This was another reason to avoid combat: I didn’t want to break my weapons and spend an exuberant amount of money replacing them. The game wouldn’t have been any different if weapons didn’t break. That leads directly into my next point, the shop. The shopkeeper only appears when you rest at a campfire. However, this is not guaranteed. In fact, more times than not wouldn’t show up. Why would a random shop be of any use? He would never appear when I would need or want him to. He would only appear when I was already fully stocked and didn’t need supplies. Secondly, his inventory is also random. Late game, my primary weapon of choice was the spear. Sadly, in my last several encounters with him, he never carried the spear but the inferior pole.
With all those complaints aside, I still really liked this game. If this makes any sense, this should have been a game with no gameplay. At its heart, I can feel that this is supposed to be an atmospheric point-n-click adventure game. The game told a compelling coming of age story about a boy who is afraid of loneliness and seeks companionship from other humans. Over the course of the game, you also discover smaller self-contained stories told from the perspective of long dead humans who knew the world was coming to an end. These were the most interesting part of the game and I found myself exploring every nook and cranny trying to find every last one. Fragile Dreams is also fantastic at capturing what it feels like to be one of the last living people exploring old ruined structures. This is aided with a haunting soundtrack that makes you feel completely alone. A brilliant touch to the game was a green flashlight, it would reveal secret messages written by ghosts. Whenever I saw these I would stop and read them. Some were quite sad and others made me feel unsettled. When I first got this flashlight I decided to backtrack to areas the game wouldn’t take me back to and found that there were hidden messages even in these locations, locations you would have no reason to revisit unless you were looking for these messages. This shows a great deal competence when it comes to attention to detail. I’m impressed.
Let’s talk about the length of the game. It took me about fifteen hours to beat the game, that is not a complaint. I’ve grown to appreciate shorter games. The last game I beat before Fragile Dreams was Tokyo Mirage Sessions, that game took me over ninety hours to beat, not complete. To complete that game I need to start fresh on the insane difficulty and that’s easily another ninety hours of gameplay, I don’t have time for that. In contrast, short games are refreshing. Sometimes I only have about an hour play to play a game, I need to pick something that good for a short burst of play and this game is that game. Another strike against this game is, post game content. Sure you unlock some bonus content upon beating the game, but not new game plus or really anything offering replay value.
Overall I’m asking you to ignore everything I said about the gameplay and just play this game for the story and world building. I honestly feel like the creators were forced to put in combat as a form of gameplay because that’s what games were like in 2009. A game had to have gameplay, nowadays games can be a medium just for telling a story. The Telltale games are living proof of this and they are incredibly successful. If this game was made today I honestly feel like there would have been no pressure on the developers to have lackluster gameplay dampen and otherwise exquisite story. Now is the game worth $45 price tag that the commands? Probably not. I certainly wouldn’t pay that much for a book with an equally compelling story, especially considering there is no replay-ability. If you’re collecting for the Wii though, I’d go for it. It’s a fairly uncommon game, and now is the time to buy Wii titles, I only see the price of this game going up. I don’t think it will ever be re-released digitally either. This game is only going to get tougher to find. That’s my final verdict. If you’re a collector nab this, or if you really really really want to play this. Other than that I would recommend it get passed on. It hurts to say that because I did really like this game.