Among the submissions of FB6 that caught my attention, there was that nice looking fantasy visual novel. It seemed to have more gameplay than a traditional visual novel and I love visual novels with more gameplay than just choices.
While I was downloading the game, I took a little nap. When I woke up, I was surprised to find myself in a throne room with a queen, a seer, a mage and a bodyguard. I was expecting to be playing a fantasy werewolves game, but the seer says I am a kind of legendary hero or something. Wait, me a hero? That's nonsense! I'm just a regular luck fairy, I'm good at anything other than pranking innocent people! The queen seems to agree with me, but for some reason she decides to put me in prison. How fairyphobic from her! With her bodyguard holding my whole body inside his fist, I have no way to fly to escape.
After a forced nap, I wake up in a prison cell with the mage from the throne room, who tries to convince me I am really the hero they are looking for. I don’t try to contradict him too much, since I don’t want him to close the door after me if I don’t go along with him. He asks me if he must call me ‘My lord’, ‘My lady’ or ‘Whatever’. I don’t even answer, he realises quickly there aren't many non-female fairies with “Fortuna” as a surname. Then he asks for a name for his party of colour-swapped DnD characters. I gave him the word that passed through my mind, so our group will be called “The cabal”.
We leave the prison room and we come across a guard patrol. Hopefully, we are four plus a fairy versus three, so it should be easy. However, the mage insists that we fight three vs three for ‘balance reasons’ I guess. After being explained the combat rules of this world, I finally got why the seer had so much hope in me: those battles are exclusively resolved by rolling dice and seeing who has the bigger number. It is my chance, as if there is one thing I can do -besides pranking people- it is to get good dice rolls. There is a little subtlety in the fact that it is an auto-battler where you pick up units that exploit the weaknesses of the enemy team by selecting the right counters, giving you a flat -3 to +3 bonus to your die total, meaning I need to do some basic maths when selecting who will fight.
After this first battle, I realise something horrific: my good luck powers don’t work in this world, my dice aren’t any better than the enemy team. My allies still are impressed by my supposed “skills” so I play around with them. Since I can not get good dice results with my natural obscenely high luck stat, I decide to do what every sensible person would do: cheating. Every two turns or so I add an extra die to the mix, and if an enemy catches me, I pretend it is a “leadership extra roll”. Hopefully it will be enough to keep every battle under control without my allies noticing I have no value as lucky charm…
This prison is actually quite big, and there are a lot of guards out there. Too many guards, actually. Fighting them becomes quickly repetitive, as there isn’t any input from my part beside selecting the good units at the start and pressing the dialogues boxes. I would heavily suggest cutting the number of encounters in the prison by half or even two thirds while increasing the relation/gold rewards to compensate. There are also quite a bunch of nice mini-dialogue scenes and something a bit of gold and oh! Nevermind, just more guards encounters. I unlock later the ability to reroll in case we lost a round, but I don't feel like calculating with proper maths if it is really worth it to use this ability over the cheaper leadership die, so I didn't use it.
What should happen eventually does happen, I meet a regular enemy group who after a couple of lucky rolls defeats my team despite my team having a +1 advantage and an extra half-die. I was about to use my “protagonist’s plot armour” skill to reload a save before realising than losing a fight has no impact in this world, so I invent a “heroic aura” excuse to explain why we are still standing and say to my team that this defeat was absolutely 100% intended and was actually a test of their faith in me.
A few moments later we come to an impasse with an event that isn’t about finding gold or defeating guards, with the mage proposing to look at some prison cells. I say no just to mess up with him, but to my surprise he says it is wise on my part and that we should continue. We finally reach the exit, which is guarded by an elite soldier that was teased a bit earlier (he is also definitely going to join my team later, as shown on the itch page). His team is quite unbalanced, but he has a flat +8 bonus and an ability who allows him to deal damage to our team based ~60% of those his team suffered (unless his team is dealt 1 damage, in which case his skill will still activate and inflict no damage). Needless to say that I narrowly lost, and for some reason the dungeon master teleported me close to the impasse from earlier. Since there should be some logic behind that apparent madness, I go back to the cell and find a Water knight whose element is conveniently the weakness of the elite soldier. I go back to the boss, lost another encounter against a team of priests of the double six, and then defeat the boss who thought giving himself a +6 bonus would allow him to beat my team.
One recruitment later, we are outside the prison. One night later, we are about to traverse a forest full of brigands, and we find out there are quite a lot of brigands encircling us. I could have tried to fly away, but those kinds of brigands usually have proficiency with bows, so I prefer the diplomatic approach. They don’t seem to like the queen either, it seems. We are forced to go to their village where we will hopefully find an arrangement before they hand us over to the queen. It seems like the gameplay is now to organise my days to reach that goal. Now time to gossip (I’m very good at that!), shop (hum, where can I see my inventory or how much gold I currently have?), bet on fight (someone said unregulated gambling? I’m really made for this world) and flirt with my al… wait, it is that late already? I need to go to the fairy office tomorrow!
I hope you had as much fun reading as I had while writing this. I will definitely play more of this when I have the occasion (I have other games from the jam I want to give a try in the meantime). I need to see if the combat gameplay improves/complexifies itself later into the game.
In addition to what I already said about the number of encounters and the lack of UI inventory at the village, I also need to point out that the game seemed to run pretty slowly during battle. Characters’ idle animation seemed to have only a couple of fps and there was a big delay before getting the option to roll the dice. I played on a random 2019 laptop, for info.
What can I also say? The live2d models and simple backgrounds are serviceable and fit the game pretty well. Music is pretty nice, too bad new players will mostly experience the dungeon and combat music. The fire emblem voice acting is also a nice touch.
In conclusion, I give this game the note of “the moment you hear “triple bonus” but it is just a triple of 1”/10.