FairyLand 2 Online (Part One)

The game that I'm going to introduce to you today is called FairyLand 2 Online. If I remember correctly, I only came to know the existence of this game due to a newsletter that I received from IAHGames, advertising about this new release of theirs. And since I was just about to finish up on Star Trek Online, I decided to give this game a check.

After a visit to their official website, it seems that FairyLand 2 is somewhat a 3D MMORPG based upon a fantasy world revolving around popular bedtime stories like "Jack and the Beanstalk", "Alice in Wonderland", "Pinocchio" and "Little Red Riding Hood", which...frankly speaking, ought to be fairy tales that we were often exposed to when we were young but grew up and left forgotten (not sure if that's still the case with youngins nowadays though). And perhaps partly due to nostalgia or maybe just homage to these fairy tales that had kept us entertained, I proceeded with downloading the 1 GB game client.

But skipping the character creation intro for the time being, let us just proceed with the general feel of the game and its content for now...

Upon loading into the game for the first time, you as the character somehow find yourself inside the storybook setting of "Little Red Riding Hood" and an animated scene kicks in where the Big Bad Wolf is just about to attack Little Red Riding Hood.

After saving her and completing a few other minor tasks (some of which are classics while others are just twists), you or rather Little Red Riding Hood finds that her grandmother is missing and sets off to find her together with you.

Using some magical crystal or spell, both of you get warped outside of the storybook and into a Fairytale Library which is "surprisingly" (or not) managed by "Hans Christian Andersen".

Anyway, shortly after your encounter, a yeti escapes from some storybook, gets turned evil by some sort of wicked witch, got defeated by you and then some sort of fairytale exodus happens.

Now with all the storybook plots wrecked and jumbled up, the task of setting things straight got pushed upon you and so the journey begins...with you trying to put things right and Little Red Riding Hood trying to find her grandmother.

Albeit a bit cliche, I still kind of feel that the storyline might not be too bad and ought to keep people interested in how it would develop.

Gameplay-wise, your whole endeavor practically revolves around this "fairytale library" situated within a mystical village called "Jean's Village" (not sure why its called that though and I vaguely remember some references calling it Rainbow Village instead).

Anyway, the village itself is more or less acting like some sort of hub where you would be doing all sorts of the mundane stuff known to playing an MMORPG, i.e. crafting, trading, repairing or upgrading stuff etc. The library, on the other hand, functions like a terminal or interchange with portals warping you into the various storybooks or fairy tales (with their accompanying difficulty in levels).

Pretty typical of an MMORPG's gameplay style I'ld say, but nonetheless still okay to me. However, what really puts me off about the game is its lack of a proper translation with regards to the information present within the game. And if I'm not wrong about it, its probably a game made in chinese or something (initially) that got translated into English to cater to English-based customers.

To help you understand what I meant, let us take a look at the two screenshots above. One shows a typical quest dialogue while the other shows one of my skill's information window.

For the quest dialogue, while it is still readable, it is clearly not presentable as the sentences seem broken and weird. Furthermore, I find it terribly wrong that we weren't given any way to check what the instructions were (in our quest logs) after leaving the quest giver (apart from running back to it). Which, in this particular case, was especially important since the sequence of inputs was vital.

As for the skill information window, the state it is in is even worse. For a skill's description, whose primary purpose is to inform the players about what the skill does and whether they should spend precious points into learning it, the ones found in this game totally fails in this aspect.

Players of FairyLand 2 Online are left on their own to guess what a particular skill does, how much and what sort of damage it causes, whether its AoE or single target and the stats that affect the skill (all based upon what little unreadable content is shown on the description). And what's more, since the same particular description is used for all levels of the same skill, its useless to even try and guess what upgrading the skill does.

Mind you that with just these two and its already portraying badly for the game so even if the plot is slightly interesting, most wouldn't even be bothered to try exploring too far in the game. Moreover, I kind of find that some of the features present within FairyLand 2 Online seems awfully similar to that found in another game that I've introduced earlier before, called Magic Campus if I'm not wrong. So overall, the game kind of feels like its made from an overused template that keeps popping up once in a while, over and over again...or at least that's how I felt when playing.

But for the sake of those who are planning to give this game a try nonetheless, I will be going over some of the basics of this game, quickly and over the next few articles, to help you get around the game at the very least.

Next: FairyLand 2 Online (Part Two)

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