Fairytale

Fairytale is an early FDS strategy game.  It was published by Soft Pro International in 1989.  Unfortunately, the early nature of the game makes it feel very clunky to play.

The cover of the game is incredibly cute.

I suppose the simplest way to describe how the game is awkward is to describe how the game plays.  It starts with a “you’re reading a book” concept – complete with a “this is written on notebook paper” concept on system messages.  When the game starts, you’re on a world map.  You select a character with the A button, and then promptly get a set of options.  One is to divide the group (represented by a red line under various characters.)  Another is to see their stats.  And another is to move with a number showing where you go.  All movement is dealt relational to the map (so up goes up the map, left goes left on the map, and so on.)  You can accidently hit A and ‘not move’ for one of the movement phases.

The red dots represent the pigs, and the blue dots are the heroes.

After a round, you hit start to start the enemy phase.  When you hit A over a red dot, a battle starts.  The battle screen has three options:  movement, stats, attack.  Pick movement and you get a clock pattern and your number of moves.  Here movement is in relation to your character.  Left and right rotates their orientation, back backs up (at the cost of 2 movement points,) and A “stays” for that turn.  Attack gives you a cursor to move (in accordance to their vision range) to attack.

Battling in Fairytale.

Problems with this system is that the enemies move during the heroes turn.  So if you attack north, and the pig goes west, you can’t hit it.  If you flee and aren’t aimed where the pig will be, you can’t attack the next round.  If you try to hit A to go forward in battle, you end up skipping a movement round.  It ends up feeling like you’re frantically shooting at emptiness while you wait for enemies to walk into it.  It’s also fairly difficult, probably partially due to discomfort with the system.  Since your heroes have 5 HP, and the pigs have 4 – 5 HP, it’s still pretty risky for the start of the game.

Here, the boys have moved, and the girl is preparing to throw a bomb targetted at the X.