Fairy Fencer F is an older game from 2015. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review. It's an obsolete and superceded Playstation port, and not a good one. Which is a tautology, really, because all Playstation ports are terrible. I don't know why that is, but they're just awful. This is no exception, it's a clunky mess.

It's an attempt at making an RPG, and it's one of the less successful RPG franchises to come out of Japan. Some effort did go into some aspects of the port because you can at least change the resolution and controls, but it doesn't change the clunkiness of the core game... there's no way to fix that apart from to continue to discourage people from using consoles or making console games.

There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre cutscenes in this game. So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but watching extremely poorly made cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with Netflix for your time. We're here to play games, not watch hours of garbage intersituals.

The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.

Another defect in the game caused by the console-peasant-centric design is the intolerably bad camera controls. There's no effective mouselook, and control of the viewing angles is deliberately outside of reasonable control from the user.

This defect springs from the limitations of inferior console peasant children's toy gamepads, but on PC we don't have this limitation due to KB+M controls... however, the developer deliberately chose to arrogantly foist this handicap onto PC gamers. Out of spite, or laziness, it's unclear, regardless, once more console peasants and console devs have made gaming worse for everyone.

Because this is designed for consoles, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. Once more, console peasants have made gaming worse for everyone.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?

Fairy Fencer F has the comically over-optimistic price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. Given the defects and shortcomings, it's impossible to recommend this, as well as the way the developers have made this obsolete by releasing newer/updated versions (while somewhat questionably leaving this superseded version on Steam).

For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Dishonored 2", "Disco Elysium" or "Cities: Skylines". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.