Fragile Dreams Farewell Ruins of the Moon
07 Apr 2010 Leave a Comment
in Video Game Reviews, Video Game Reviews April 2010 Tags: DS, fantasy, final, game, mggsound, music, nintendo, review, RPG, video game, video game music archive, wii
“Fragile isn’t so much a game as it is an experience in humanity. Treat it as such, and your heart could be touched in incredible ways.”
With each new generation of consoles that comes out, gaming takes another step to push its limits. The action becomes more over-the-top, the graphical detail takes another step towards photorealism, the gameplay evolves and steps up. But there’s also a small number of games which push the envelope in another direction: to tell a story like never before. That’s the kind of game Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is – it is a story first and a game second.
Since you probably don’t want to hear a rant on the status of video game storytelling/games as art, or a debate on whether this results in a good game, it’s very important to make an important distinction right in the beginning of this review:
As a game, Fragile is only so-so. As an experience, it’s incredible.
So thus follows the resulting implication, which is arguably more important than any score for determining if you’re going to like this game: To get the most out of this game, go into it fully intending to get engrossed. Play late at night, when nobody is awake to bother you or make snarky comments. And let yourself get drawn in. If you’re willing to do that, you will find Fragile to be an incredible experience. But, if you’re not the kind who ever feels anything for games; who doesn’t care for story or atmosphere… well, first off, you’ll be really missing out, but second, you can set the game aside and perhaps come back to it one day when you do care.
Created by Namco-Bandai (Tales Of), with Tri-Crescendo playing a major role (Tri-Ace’s music department, from games like Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, or Baten Kaitos), Fragile saw a long wait between Japanese release and even a North Americain announcement, long sitting on game sites lists of “Great games that the Wii will be getting… that we’ll never see”. It came as a surprise when XSeed Games, a still rather up-and-coming localisation company, announced they would be bringing it over.
All most western gamers knew of the game – if they had heard of it at all – was that it was an atmospheric, quiet, and beautiful title, about a dead world and a boy looking for survivors. And that was about it. Very few people knew more, or had actually played the game. As it turns out, this is more or less correct. But now that the game’s out over here, we can take a great deal more look at things. So, let’s start with the single major problem area of the game…
Fragile Dreams is best described as an Atmospheric Adventure… maybe. In truth, the game really does merge elements of the Horror, Action, Adventure, and RPG genres, but none of these are very strong. While the game is incredibly atmospheric, it settles for being eerie, sad, lonely, and rarely disqueiting, as opposed to being Silent Hill-esque horrific. You do get into fights, but combat is very basic and is more about slow movements and watching your foes for openings. You’ll be exploring a lot, but there’s almost no real puzzles to solve or high-level interaction you’d expect from an adventure game. There are levels, but you’re hardly going to notice. In the end, the game settles for arguably carving its way outside of typical genres which the gameplay would decide, and focuses on telling a story and portraying a world – for all the good and bad this decision means.
To be honest, despite how excellent every other aspect of Fragile is, the game’s chief issue is it’s gameplay, which is a pretty significant issue. Let me stress first off that what the game actually does is actually done really well on a technical level – you won’t be encountering glitches, freezes, sprite clipping, and all that stuff. That’s the good.
Here’s the last part of the good. You control Seto, a youth who explores the ruined world with a flashlight in one hand and a weapon in the other. The Wiimote’s pointer is used to determine where Seto is looking and pointing his flashlight. As such, you have to point towards the edges of the screen to get Seto to actually turn, which takes a bit of getting used to, but it does feel fine by the end – and if moving with a combination of Nunchuck joystick and Wiimote pointing sounds odd, you can point the Wiimote away from the screen and navigate traditionally with just the joystick. To look around in more detail, you hold the B button, and can use the A button to examine things. Because important objects are always marked with a couple small fireflies dancing overtop, missing something important is not something you end up having to worry about, though you may still miss things in small nooks or crannies.
What is nice is the little touches done to exploration. When you look at a sign in Japanese, most of them will cause an english subtitle to show up. Your Wiimote’s speaker is used a lot in this game too, and very well – when pointing your flashlight at where enemies will appear, for instance, you can often hear a sound effect signalling what kind of enemy it is. Or, for most of the game, lifting the Wiimote up to your ear will cause any partner with you to speak, adding a bit of personality or a bit of guidance. It adds that extra little bit of atmosphere.
So while the exploration is fine, combat isn’t. When Seto enters combat, being rather inexperienced, he’s unwieldy and slow. There are four weapon types he can use – quick slashing weapons, long pole weapons, heavy blunt weapons, and ranged weapons. This is pretty much the whole of the variety right there; you have four different ways to attack and that’s it, and because switching items requires you to pause the game (More on this later), switching isn’t something you’ll want to do. While the enemies are half-decent in that by the end of the game you really do need to be paying attention and attacking them only at the right time, combat feels notably too slow. It’s hampered a bit by the fact that there’s only about 10 or so different enemy types throughout the whole game (Though they get recycled with slightly different looks and higher attack power and HP later), and the boss fights – when they occur – are generally either disappointingly easy, or destroy you because you got trapped between three enemies, couldn’t run out, and they beat you down mercilessly. In the end, even if it’s reasonable that Seto can’t fight all that well, the game still fails to make it all that interesting.
Speaking of disappointingly easy, gamers who absolutely must feel a level of challenge in order to be involved in a game should probably think twice; while it doesn’t necessarily bring down the game, the whole game in general was clearly not made with the intention to be challenging. If ever it is challenging, the game has so many save points – there’s one or two instances where you can see a save point from the save point you’re currently at – that you’ll rarely lose much progress. This could be seen as good, as the game’s objective is to focus on its story and let people experience that, but all the same it feels a bit disappointing.
The final aspect of gameplay that deserves mention is the inventory. Seto can only hold so much at a time. Using a traditional grid-based inventory, he has to carry his flashlight with him at all times, plus at least one weapon. Anything above that – keys, healing items, extra weaponry – takes up his limited space – and at the start of the game, these spaces get taken up very fast. If you want to pick up other stuff, you have to rearrange or discard other items. This becomes a little irritating. Fortunately, at any of the plentiful save points, you can access your Briefcase and move items in and out (Why can’t he do this elsewhere?), and you can hold as much as you want in there. You just have to make sure to drag out anything you want, or put back anything you’re done using.
The complication comes from “Mystery Items”, which are items that Seto won’t be able to identify until he sits down and looks at them thuroughly. These go from gems dropped by enemies (which instantly turn into money for you to spend at the game’s freaky, randomly-appearing Merchant, who makes the Resident Evil 4 merchant look like the average joe), to useful items, to the beautiful memory items. But you’ll never know what they are until you bring them back to the firelight, and oftentimes there’s really just too many between you and the next save point, forcing occasional extraneous backtracking.
Speaking of backtracking, the final complaint is that the game starts to drag a bit in design after the first half. After being forced to backtrack through previous areas a couple times, be ready to spend most of the second half of the game in rather monotonous, huge stone tunnels. It’s really disappointing, actually.
Now that we’ve covered the bad, here’s the good – Fragile is an absolutely gorgeously created world.
Graphically, while there are instances wherein you can really feel the fact that you’re playing a Wii title (Such as the old ’2d lines of grass’ trick), there are other moments which will simultaneously drop your jaw, whether because of beautiful scenery or artistically stylish cutscenes. Because the game is so small, a lot of the game’s environments are very carefully detailed, and extremely believable. For instance, an old fairgrounds’ structures are rusting and falling apart, the grass is growing wildly and untended, and vines are now creeping up the old fences around it. Little details are paid attention to, to create an inhabited world that simply has not been.
This is helped by the game’s music – or, rather, the lack thereof. It sounds odd that an empty backdrop with nothing but Seto’s footsteps would be fitting, but it is. It just adds to the feeling of being alone. When the music does play is usually during cutscenes or important encounters, and there, it’s always fitting for the scene; from carefully played melancholy upon a piano’s keys, to childish bells and energetic violins capturing a moment of happiness. The music is simple, soft, and oftentimes minimalistic, but never once does it ever take away from the game, and it adds its own depth to the scenes.
One minor area of possible contention is the voice acting. While it isn’t terrible, it also isn’t that great in english – admittedly, a large chunk of the issue, however, comes from the fact that it uses relatively well-known english gaming actors, such as Johnny Yong Basch playing Seto. In a game like this, recognising these voices can draw you out of the world at hand, and that’s extremely undesirable. It’s suggested to play with Japanese voices on, if you find it possible – the voices are very well done and full of emotion in both languages.
==The Excellent – Everything Else==
Fragile Dreams is a story that takes place in a world that has begun to decay after humanity’s death. The civilized world is slowly falling apart without its maintenance. Seto, following the death of his caretaker, seeks to find someone else in this empty world so he’s not alone – and loneliness is the feeling that the world will evoke to you in this game. Though you may be walking the city streets at one point, it may as well be a ghost town, and the game makes it completely believable.
Of course, Seto isn’t alone. He soon encounters a single human – a silver-haired girl, who quickly flees from him. Now certain that there is a chance not to be alone, Seto chases after her, desperate to have someone to cling to, so he isn’t left to wander the world alone until his death. Along the way, Seto meets a sparse cast of others – a robotic backpack, an energetic thief and a flirtatious ghost are just a couple of the others.
Amazingly though, as odd of a cast lineup as that sounds, these characters are incredibly moving. Even as they toe the line between simple human and something unlikely, they’re written in such a way that you can really believe them. Each represents a different existence, but all of them are facing the same problem Seto is – loneliness in an empty world. They each deal with it in their own ways, with their own insights about their lives, and their own thoughts about how valuable their bonds with Seto become.
As these characters approach their ultimate fate, good or bad, their meetings with Seto are incredibly moving and could even bring you to tears. Each leads you on, piece by piece, to understanding what brought about the end of humanity, and taking the final steps to prevent what little survivors may remain out there from falling prey to the same mistake that brought about humanity’s end once more. While the game goes a little more dramatic near the end, it never aims to be overly so, and remains melancholic the whole time. Even when you’re facing your final hurdle, the music playing is not a massive orchestral mix of dangerous energy, but rather soft, regretful, and sad. To some, the cast may seem all squishy and unexciting, but they are believably human, and that’s the most important aspect of the world.
To flesh out the world farther, Seto can find Memory Items – mundane items into which the thoughts and memories of people have been attached, as humans from all walks of life faced the end of their own lives. These range from single moments in time, to multi-part stories, each telling of the sadness of those who felt unfulfilled, of those who thought philosophically, of those who desperately clung onto hope. They are the true reward for exploration, and even the most innocent of stories can give you pause for thought as you picture in your mind the lives that these came from, however little we’re getting to see of them.
If I haven’t made it clear yet: Fragile is a depressing game, but it is a very human depression. The game does an excellent job of portraying the sadness of humanity, both before and after its near-extinction. But it should be said that if you’re not willing to let a game make you sad, you won’t be as affected. Regardless of that, though, there’s a feeling that these are real people behind these thoughts, that these are real stories that could have happened. They’re not outlandish or heroic… they’re ultimately human, and in many ways, that’s why so much of this game is powerful. Even when the game toes the line into shades of science fiction and the occult, it’s all done in such a way that it still feels like this could all be real.
In the end, Fragile puts together almost every piece necessary to create a perfect experience. It’s hampered down a bit by its unoriginal, simple gameplay, unfortunately – but that’s the only thing really holding it back. That, and the fact that the game will only take about 10-15 hours to complete. All the same, those are going to be 10-15 of the most moving, touching hours you’ll have ever experienced in a game.
Fragile isn’t so much a game as it is an experience in humanity. Treat it as such, and your heart could be touched in incredible ways.
Triforce-News Final Score 89.5%
