My experience with the first Fairy Tail game by GUST Studios was mostly positive, but I did have some issues with the game and how it dealt with its storytelling. Seeing Fairy Tail 2 announced by GUST Studios excited me, as I was hopeful that the developer may have learned from its mistakes from the first game and incorporated those into the follow-up. I was delighted to get my hands on a preview build of the game and I was able to go through a rather meaty chunk of the game.
Joining Fairy Tail Once Again
The prologue of the game throws you right into the thick of the main plot of Fairy Tail 2. Zeref wants to attack the guild of Fairy Tail and Makarov meets up with him. He plans to find any way to convince Zeref to stop his plan of attack. Zeref’s answer is to bring out a member of the Spriggan 12 to attack Makarov. This is when you get a tutorial on how combat works.
Combat is very different this time around. It isn’t a pure turn-based system like the first game. It takes some inspiration from their combat engine in Atelier Ryza. You have an action bar that allows you to do a basic three-hit combo once filled. With each basic hit, you fill up your stamina points or SP. Skills require SP to activate. Each Fairy Tail character has a moveset that reflects on their character in the Anime. Gray has a lot of Ice Make moves, Natsu has his Fire Dragon Slayer abilities, and Lucy has her Celestial Keys. Each skill has an element, a power attribute, and a break attribute. Enemies have a break gauge, once it is broken you can use a combo Unison Raid skill. Once the skill is over, then they will be stunned and that lets you deal some serious damage. Part of me misses the full turn-based combat simply because of being able to watch more of the animations of the characters’ moves.
The animation and models in this game look fantastic! Some of the best animations are in the unison raid abilities. My favorite in particular was Gray’s and Juvia’s combination. The ice and water particles blend well. If the character you choose to do a unison raid doesn’t have an animation, it just turns into them blowing whatever element they control out of their mouth which was super funny to watch on Gray’s part. Seeing him and Laxus blow Ice and Lightning out of their mouths made me chuckle when I tried their Unison raid skill.
Once the prologue is over, you instantly get access to a big cast of Fairy Tail. You can change your battle party as well as the character you control in the field. You can switch characters in the field very quickly by just holding down a button and moving your cursor to the character’s face on the radial menu. It was nice not having to mess with the menu to switch to someone in a giant cast of characters. My favorite character is Gray so for most of my playthrough I used him in the field.
Growing Your Strength
You earn experience points by defeating enemies in Fairy Tail 2. Once you earn enough, your character gains a core level. With each core level, you gain an origin point. You can use origin points to level up that character’s magic origin. The magic origin is divided into skill, health, and body. Skill helps increase your attack power and has skills that do massive damage. Health gives more HP, and can also help give moves that utilize recovery skills. Body increases defense and moves that can buff allies. There is a large roster of characters so they let you select specific ones to apply an auto-evolve status to. This makes it so that once they level up, the game will automatically level up the magic origin with the least amount of requirements.
You find materials in the game field like elemental crystals that help with learning certain skills so be sure to keep your eye out for that. You can also find Lacrima in treasure chests or after defeating certain enemies. A character in your party can equip up to three Lacrima. There are basic stats improvements with Lacrima or even damage multipliers for certain elements. One I liked to put on my characters was the absorption Lacrima that adds lifesteal to all your attacks and lets you heal with giant damaging abilities. Marijane especially benefitted from the absorption Lacrima. She had low health but large attack stats with her dark elemental abilities.
Story Telling In Fairy Tail 2
I understand that the reasoning of how the original game of Fairy Tail was catered towards fans mainly and it made the narrative suffer. In most ways, this game is better with how it tells its story, although it still suffers from the choices of the first game. For one, the epilogue of the first game was Lucy and Natsu gathering all the characters back to rebuild the Fairy Tail guild. Fairy Tail 2 begins directly after the epilogue with all the characters gathered and pushes you into the main part of the story, defeating the Spriggan 12. I would have preferred a smaller burn to a better build-up to the mechanics and cast of Fairy Tail. They just throw characters into your party and hope you use the text menus to read up on the characters. One positive change is you can check up on the terminology of characters, and special terms during cutscenes or in dialogue cinematics. This helps expand the lore and the world behind Fairy Tail.
One amazing addition to the game comes in the form of Fairy Tail Diaries. When you come across a campfire you can access what is essentially the drama pieces from the Tales series, but for Fairy Tail. You unlock more of these Fairy Tail Diaries with each new character added to the party, when a character levels up, or when you reach a certain point in the story. It is awesome just getting cinematics of Fairy Tail guild members getting some slice-of-life moments and seeing them interact with each other.
Side quests in Fairy Tail 2 are pretty basic. You will see someone with an orange sign over their head, you talk to them and they will ask you for an item, or for you to defeat an enemy. Once you get the item or defeat the enemy you go back and turn it in. I only really did some of the side quests if I had the item on hand they wanted. There wasn’t much incentive for doing the side quests.
The Big Picture
Overall fans of Fairy Tail will love to see some of their favorite moments and moves recreated in the GUST studios engine. There might not be every moment in this arc animated the way you like, but there are much better chunks in this so far than the first four chapters of the first game. I enjoyed my time in Fairy Tail 2 and am looking forward to the next release. I would not recommend picking this up if you are new to the series or if you want to get into Fairy Tail. If you want to get into the series, pick up the manga or the anime. This is gonna be another game catered towards fans and it’s good to see it is doing well enough to fund a sequel. I am interested in seeing what the game-only story will be about too!
Fairy Tail 2 will be released on December 13th, 2024 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
