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[3DS] Fate Liner Kalied Prism Illya

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    [3DS] Fate Liner Kalied Prism Illya

    A new thread, a new game adapted from an anime. This time it's the spin-off of Type Moon's hyper-acclaimed Fate/Stay Night, Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya, published by Kadokawa Games. This 3DS was meant to come out one year before, when the first animated series was airing, but was held back by the publisher on quality concerns; I think that the actual bug hunting/polishing didn't last for more than a month or two, and the rest of the delay was to publish the game with along with the second season of the anime.

    I'm not the biggest Fate/Stay Night Fan (or Type Moon fan, for what matters), but since the game is about magical girls beating the crap out of each other, I thought it could be like the Nanoha games, nothing special, but well made and with strong ties to the source material. Unfortunately, Illya falls short of my hopes; in fact, it falls short of the recent anime adaptation I played, and in a kinda spectacular way the even BandaiNamco would be ashamed of.

    The game features a story mode, the takes places between the two anime series. Your objective is to collect all seven class cards within a limited number of days or face the bad ending. These cards are randomly placed around the city, in which you can move by selecting one of the...ehm...seven locations; and when a card is "detected" somewhere, the location shows a question mark. Not much of a hunt. Visiting a location without a question mark triggers a small dialogue between two or more characters, that usually include a choice, with the "wrong" option usually leading to a battle; battles won or certain locations net you spell cards, that can be used in battles as special attacks; defeated class cards also join your card deck for you to use.

    Battles are on the /very) short side, limited to 60 seconds, set in a small arena, where characters square off trying to defeat each other. Controls are more than crowded: analog stick moves, L and R chose cards, Y attacks, X uses the card, B jumps, A dashes, the D-Pad is used to rotate the camera (left and right), lock/unlock a target (up) or change targets (down). The first problem in battles is to locate your opponent, you can't just press up hoping that this will point you torward something, you have to rotate the camera, and you have to stop moving to do so. The AI know where you are, and this usually result is some free hits for the computer, and a frantic search for the target for you: after the target is in sigth, you use your most powerful card to knock him/her down, rush toward it and mash the attack button, hoping that his/her health will be depleted before the timer runs out. The timer is actually your worst enemy, the minute you have to end the fight is barely enough and doesn't even let you experiment with the cards you've collected.
    There seems to be a good number of cards, more than 100, and after completing the story mode for the first time i was left wondering how you can get those: Illya's story lasted 40 minutes. When the credits rolled, I was left staring at the 3DS for quite some time, my mind blank. There is a battle mode (VS the AI or local players) but that doesn't give you cards.
    Maybe reloading the last save? Nope.
    Ah-ha, you can also tackle the story with other three characters. But the gallery tells me that I've unlocked all class cards and all environments, so my guess is that the remaining three characters will have to go through the same thing as Illya with little or no variation. I don't think that dialogue choices influence the outcome of the story, as the only objective is to collect the cards within the time limit.

    While the previous point only make the game appear dull as your usual anime tie-in, the technical side really kills it. Graphics, from the interface to the battles are very poor, battles do not have a 3D effect and sprites during dialogues appear blurrier with 3D off, certain background showing two wonderful black bars on the left and right sides with 3D on. Arenas just end with a greyish invisible wall, and most of them are just flat environments; when they aren't, you'd wish they were as you have to choose between moving or maneuvering the camera. And most of their obstacles are just go-through objects.
    The interface is as barebone as it can get, and not well though: cards must be equipped via a specific menu, but said menu is not available in story mode, you have to save, exit story mode, get to the card menu, assign cards, reload story mode. But you can access the gallery directly from story mode!
    Someone got priorities backward.
    Voices are from the cast of the series, but one character (Ruby) doesn't sound much like she did in the anime, and just like there, she constantly talks, even when loading or saving. It carries across the point that she's obnoxious, but that's a bit too much. As the finishing touch, loading and saving times are excruciatingly long. The longest, by far, I've experienced on a 3DS, and made worse by the interface.

    Are there any saving graces in Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya? Not that I can see, but succeeds in the very difficult job of making BandaiNamco anime adaptations look competent.

    #2
    You have a brilliantly entertaining knack of demolishing these 3DS niche titles, briareos-kerensky, I must admit. I almost think you enjoy it.

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      #3
      Game completed with all story modes cleared with the good ending. Not that's particularly hard, or long, but at least I've played throughout it and made sure that's an incredibly shallow game, that makes me think rather fondly of other anime tie-ins.

      I was wrong on a couple of things, like the card assignment menu not available directly in story mode (it's the first option in the menu, and for some reason always ignored it) and battles have a 3D effect, although it's incredibly subtle.
      Each character's story takes less an hour to complete without skipping dialogues, around 20 minutes if you skip. All characters have to collect the same cards, in their own order, but the AI is so basic that the only thing changing between class cards is how they look; if you're lucky you'll see a card's special attack, but this has only happened once during the time I spent with the game, even wwhile going through Luvia's story in hard mode.
      Endings are just one static image with few variations, and the story doesn't expand anything in this series or the whole Fate universe, it's just a dry rethread of the events happened in the first anime season, although it takes place after that.

      I've also come up with a video, if you have to look at moving pictures.

      Last edited by briareos_kerensky; 14-08-2014, 09:34.

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