Fairy Tail: Dungeons Review – Magic With Cards

I am an advocate for more Fairy Tail video games. Sure, we have the Koei Tecmo game developed by Gust but I feel like we can explore more of the world of Fairy Tail. I was ecstatic to hear that Kodansha was working on bringing more games about Fairy Tail from indie creators. One of those games is Fairy Tail: Dungeons.

Game Name: Fairy Tail: Dungeons
Platform(s): PC (Reviewed)
Developer(s): ginolabo
Publisher(s): Kodansha Creators’ Lab
Release Date: August 26th, 2024
Price: $13.99

Fairy Tail: Dungeons begins as Natsu meets up with a talking cat named Tabi. Tabi is searching for a person named Arthur, who has ventured into a mysterious dungeon. As soon as Natsu attempts to enter the dungeon, he loses his ability to use fire magic. After meeting Cana, Natsu learns that she can create cards that house magic. Now, Natsu needs to delve deeper into the dungeon to find Arthur. You will use cards to harness his magic and acquire more cards as you explore each area of the dungeon.

The Good

Each floor is divided into different rooms, including enemy rooms, encounter rooms, treasure rooms, and shops. A Nether Lantern decreases every turn you spend in the dungeon. Each turn allows you to explore a single nearby room. When you finish exploring a room, the lantern’s number decreases. Once the lantern’s number reaches zero, you must fight the boss of the floor.

In Fairy Tail: Dungeons, it’s important to build a deck that suits your playstyle. Each character has unique passive abilities and starting decks tailored to their magic style. Natsu uses fire magic with high attack power, while Gray uses Ice Make magic to create shields and cannons. After exploring each area of the floor, you can acquire cards to add to your deck.

At the end of a dungeon section, you will need to reach the same location with a different character or set of characters. Once you get these characters to the end, you will face a tough boss fight to unseal another section of the dungeon.

I enjoy creating decks tailored for challenging fights to use in a party of characters. You can customize these decks and keep them in Tomes of Remembrance for tougher areas. When I realized this, I had to restructure my Natsu deck to better suit a party setting. You might need to repeat the first section of the dungeon a few times with the same characters to develop the deck you want.

I spent most of my time with Fairy Tail: Dungeons on the Steam Deck. You spend only a small amount of time doing sections of the dungeon in each interval. Perfect for a handheld capacity. It was a flawless 60 fps at 720p. The pixel graphics show up clean on the Steam Deck’s screen. There is a wide variety of animations in the game and it shows just how much love the developers had for the game to have so many anime-accurate attacks and combinations.

Fairy Tail: Dungeons has Lucy in all her outfits when she uses her spirit keys. They even let Aquarius join the ranks with the explanation that the magic cards are made from the memories of the characters. We even get a ton of variety of the armors for Erza. Ginolabo went all out on making sure the characters had their move sets and outfits associated with them.

The Bad

Fairy Tail: Dungeons excels in implementing a party of characters and unique decks for each one, but it can become a bit overwhelming. To unlock the next areas of the dungeon, you need to progress with multiple characters. If you focus on only one character, you might find it frustrating to have to go back and adjust the deck of another character just to advance.

The customization of skills is a valuable feature, but it can be annoying not being able to preview what you are unlocking, making it difficult to determine the best way to build your character. Once you unseal a skill in your skill book, you can see the next three skills in the book. In other games with similar systems, you usually get at least a hint of the skill progression route. This game, however, does not provide that level of guidance.

The Verdict

Fairy Tail: Dungeons is a fun and balanced deck builder that embraces the theme of “friendship is power” by featuring a multiple-character party system, which is quite unique for a roguelike deckbuilder. The animations and attention to detail for the characters will delight Fairy Tail fans. This game comes highly recommended if you enjoy either the Fairy Tail universe or deckbuilding roguelikes.

Fairy Tail: Dungeons releases on August 26th, 2024 on PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: Fairy Tail: Dungeons was provided to us by Kodansha Creators’ Lab for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.

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