Fairy Knights Review

There are a surprising number of games out there that combine puzzle and RPG elements, especially on mobile. And yet, for a genre that has been pulled off successfully many times before, Fairy Knights manages to botch both its RPG systems and the core puzzle gameplay.

As is the case with many other Eastern RPGs, the main character is a young boy who must head out into the world to follow his destiny. In this particular instance, the protagonist Kai’s destiny is to seal away monsters that are posing a threat to humanity. Instead of rising to the occasion however, Kai instead mopes around and unwillingly starts on his journey to the nearby capital. Tagging along for the journey are his weird cat monster Digi and the dubious priest Elisa, who joins Kai initially for the sake of completing her own goals.

Fairy Knights has a bland premise, but it could have at least been built up into something more compelling. Instead, the story only gets worse as you progress further. Kai’s attitude is incredibly annoying early on, and even when he’s more invested in his quest, he never becomes a character that I actually cared about. Elisa isn’t much better, being unlikeable most of the time due to her selfish tendencies. The writing in general is just poor, attempting to use comedy to mask the lack of an interesting plot, with little success. These flaws are only exacerbated by the game’s poor localisation that is full of mistakes and awkward sentences.

Some of this could have been overlooked if the gameplay was actually fun — it isn’t. In fact, I’d go as far to say that the gameplay is even worse than the story. For starters, the RPG elements are either poorly implemented or just uninteresting. Levels increase your stats and nothing more. Basic and magic attacks can also be leveled up individually on each character, but they max out so quickly that it feels unnecessary. Also unnecessary is the equipment upgrade system, that requires you to combine multiple of the same item to increase its level. All this system does is make upgrading take way too long, as you need to buy and combine more and more items at higher levels. As if the game’s equipment system wasn’t already bad enough, there’s also equipment durability loss for some reason.

As for the main gameplay, there’s next to no variety in what you’ll be doing during Fairy Knights’ 15-hour story. You pick an area from the map, move forward, and get jumped by monsters every few steps. Exploration is non-existent — aside from a couple of locations, all you do is walk in a straight line — and you’ll be seeing the same bland backgrounds constantly. Movement could have been automated and there would have been no difference to the overall experience.

The biggest failing in this game though is the combat. Every time it’s your turn to attack a grid of tiles appears, with the center tiles being rotatable. Connecting two side tiles together with one unbroken line, or making a connected line out of the centre ones, lets you attack. The power of basic attacks is determined by the length of the line you create, so in theory you always want to spend time arranging tiles for the most damage.

This system has a couple of key flaws, the first of which being that once you make a connection, you will attack straight away. This means that if you accidentally make a small line while rotating a tile, that’s your turn wasted. It wouldn’t be as big of an issue if it wasn’t for the other annoyance, which stems from Fairy Knights’ mobile origins — you can only rotate tiles clockwise. Because of this, trying to make longer connections is incredibly clunky, as you move other tiles just to stop your turn from ending prematurely. It made sense for the lack of anti-clockwise rotation on mobile, but with the buttons available on Switch this should not have been an issue in this version.

Even taking into account these flaws, combat is not exactly challenging. Sure, you’ll die every now and then (especially on bosses) but a small amount of grinding, or a bit of luck, will see you through the entire game. Combat is the same monotonous “puzzles” over and over again, the only difference later on being that tiles will occasionally have elemental gems attached to them. These will cause you to do different attacks, though most of them are just single target or AOE attacks and do little to make fights more complex.