Fearless Fantasy – A journey into enjoyable oddity
Fearless Fantasy is quite possibly the most bizarre RPG I have ever had the pleasure of playing. The design is fantastic, the game play original, and the dialogue is as cheesy as a Hickory Farms gift pack. I am endlessly pleased that tinyBuild picked up this amazing indie title and helped get it out into the world for everyone to enjoy. This is definitely not a title intended for people seeking a serious game with a deep plot. Players aren’t going to sink a lot of time into it trying to find hidden secrets or weapons. Instead, this is an amazing game for anyone seeking something different, amusing, and casual.
Some sort of horrible flying nesting doll.
Fearless Fantasy was the first I had heard of developer Enter Skies, but they have an earlier game called Memohuntress. That game is more of a hidden object hunt with an exceptionally sad story behind it, but a lot of similarity can be seen in the artistic direction. It is, however, a free to play flash game and I really just wanted to put the link in this article. Of course, Fearless Fantasy relies more on a character aesthetic that makes me think someone had an LSD induced nightmare after watching Yellow Submarine. To say that the things I encountered in Fearless Fantasy are weird would be doing a disservice to them and simultaneously raising the bar far too high for those things I already considered to be weird. A ravenous shrubbery with a yellow rubber duck strapped to what I can only loosely describe as its face is one of the least odd things that I encountered in the game.
Voice acting is a huge draw in Fearless Fantasy. The talent that this indie company managed to get on the project was top notch. King Xola is played by Adam Harrington (Bigby Wolf, Wolf Among Us) in a performance that I found to be reminiscent of Mark Hamill’s Joker. Leon Tyler is voiced in meltingly cheesy goodness by Joshua Tomar (Announcer, Skull Girls) who seems to channel every cocksure anime hero at once. Essentially, you couldn’t ask for a more cliche plot in which a bunch of voice actors could wild overacting to their heart’s content. It really drives the comedy up to 11 and keeps it there for the duration of the ride.
If you can draw freehand straight lines and perfect circles in MS Paint using a mouse, then Fearless Fantasy‘s combat mechanics will be no obstacle for you at all. For the rest of us, half of the fun and challenge in the game is attempting to zoom a mouse cursor through a series of cues in order to execute attacks and blocks. The more accurately swiped an arrow is, the more effective the action will be. I do fine with basic attacks that require a straight line, but can be prone to using some choice vocabulary with certain special attacks that require far more intricate mouse movement. The patterns look so simple, but there’s only a limited amount of time to follow them and drawing a circle with a mouse turned out to be trickier than I would have initially imagined. Thankfully, the battle system is turn based and will wait on my turn until I select an action. That gave me time to make zen preparations before my next bit of mouse-based kung fu. I’m very curious to see how this mechanic plays out on mobile devices when it makes the transition later this year.
Since this is an RPG, it is worth noting that I did find all of the normal comforts I associate with the genre. There were plenty of weapons and accessories with which to increase the power of my characters. (As a side note, the more powerful a weapon, the more complex the attack gestures become.) There was also a baffling array of items to be used during combat which included hamburgers and cheese pizza. And, of course, an xp based level progression that allows for stat customization and ability power ups. In fact, the stat customization will allow you to redistribute allocated points as much as you want between battles. That aspect is really telling in terms of how much the developers just wanted players to have fun with the game.
Overall, I highly recommend Fearless Fantasy to anyone looking for a lighthearted break from a normally time-intensive genre. There will be time enough later to dump dozens of hours into the next AAA title, but isn’t it nice to have fun fighting hideous creatures hiding inside of giant cupcakes once in a while? Fearless Fantasy is comprised of thirteen levels which can be played independently at any of three difficulty settings. The game uses an autosave feature that makes it very easy to play in short blocks of time. At this time, the game is only available on Steam, but the developers are working on bringing it to mobile devices later this year. The humor is a little odd, but who doesn’t want to taunt enemies using the horse dance from Gangnam Style? Nobody. There is nobody that doesn’t want that.
Official wallpaper of the freaking bizarre.
