The Fairy Tail anime & manga has received a new video game adaptation that is designed for hardcore fans of the series, but offers little for anyone else, as it's an average JRPG that looks like the source material, yet lacks the things that made it interesting. Fairy Tail started out as a battle manga set in a fantasy world, where magic-users work together in guilds. The main character was a dragon slayer mage named Natsu, who was a member of a guild named Fairy Tail.
Consumers wouldn't actually know any of this playing the Fairy Tail video game, as it starts in the middle of a boss fight at the end of a story arc. The Fairy Tail video game starts halfway through the series, at a point where a time skip is about to begin. as the cast vanish from the world for seven years. This limits the audience of Fairy Tail straight away, as anyone not familiar with the anime or manga is going to be completely lost, especially as the game does little to fill newcomers in on the blanks. It would have made a lot more sense to release a game that starts at the beginning of the story and use the time skip as a framework for a sequel, but the decision was made to appeal more to established fans than newcomers. As such, the time skip is used as a framework for the cast needing to rebuild their Guild ranking from scratch, restore their headquarters, and train everyone for combat.
Fairy Tail is a JRPG where the player forms teams from members of the guild to take on quests. The battles are turn-based, with the enemies placed on a 3x3 grid at the start of each fight. The battles are the highlight of Fairy Tail, with the characters feeling unique and true to the source material. The spells used in battle each have different AoE and effects, some of which can move monsters around the field. The starting position of monsters on the battlefield changes each time, so the player needs to switch up their tactics and moves with each fight, in order to maximize damage, without spending too much MP.
There are also other options that players can use in battle, such as Chain attacks that deal a lot of damage, but quickly drain MP, or Awakened forms, which are transformations that boost a character's power. Fairy Tail does a good job of making the battles seem filled with action, even though it's a turn-based game based around planning the next move. The animations for the attacks can drag after a while, but the player can switch these off during their turn in order to speed things up.
The battle system in Fairy Tail is let down by bland quest designs, limited variations of foes, and monster & overworld designs that are so generic that it's hard to believe they are part of a Fairy Tail video game. The vast majority of the sidequests involve revisiting the same handful of areas and fighting the same monsters over and over again. The quality of the visuals is sub-par across the board, with the main character models looking as if they come from the PS3/Xbox 360 generation, while the animations for everyone are stilted and unnatural. The cities are full of copy-and-paste NPCs that recycle on every corner, while every dungeon and overworld map is instantly forgettable and looks as if it had zero care put into its design. Completing the quests does offer some tangible reward, as improving the Fairy Tail headquarters offers buffs and improves the selection of items in the shops, but even this feature is hamstrung by the boring nature of the quests that are tied to it. Fairy Tail isn't a bad game, but it does the bare minimum of what constitutes being a video game.
Fairy Tail is similar to One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows, in that they both capture the spirit of their source material, but fail in adapting them to the video game format in an interesting way. Seeing the cast fighting together again Fairy Tail will provide a thrill for fans of the original series, especially as it features scenes that weren't in the anime & manga, but it does its best to make the story hard to follow for newcomers. If the gameplay in Fairy Tail were more interesting, then it would be worth players bringing themselves up to speed, but what is present in the final product will only be of interest to the hardcore fans of the franchise.
Fairy Tail is available now for Nintendo Switch, PC, and PlayStation 4. Screen Rant was provided with a digital code for the PlayStation 4 version of the game for the purposes of this review.