Earlier this month Sony announced a price change to PS Now. What was originally a highly expensive program with too many games to play, now it’s reasonably priced. But similar to Netflix there’s too much content and, for me, it’s very difficult to narrow down the large selection to just one game.

I was successful though. My selection was a JRPG called Fairy Fencer F Advent Dark Force (quite a mouthful). It’s a remake of the PS3 game called Fairy Fencer F. I chose this game because Yoshitaka Amano (of Final Fantasy and Vampire Hunter D fame) did some promo artwork and it looked cool. Plus, it’s included with PS Now.

Btw, spoilers, proceed with caution.

The story follows our lead character Fang, who pulls a sword from a stone and discovers a fairy named Eryn. She tells Fang the backstory, there are these two gods, The Goddess and The Vile God. The God and Goddess created these weapons called furies and if you collect enough then you can unseal one or the other.

The plot is simple, you collect these furies to unseal with Goddess (or the Vile God, if you’re into that). You accomplish this goal by visiting going to a dungeon, beating the boss, head back to town, watch a few cutscenes and repeat.

Gotta also mention there’s this evil corporation named the Dorfa Corporation and their goal is the same. So there are times when you have to fight a member of their group. Those battles are usually scripted/you can’t beat the boss, a cut scene ensues where your characters get more power, then you fight them again (where you can finally beat them).

It’s a generic JRPG with the plot, but the game shines with the mechanics and boss fights (they are fun). Once you unlock a fury, you gain its power to use in a dungeon. Some powers include double EXP, double WP (more on that later), more money, etc. But they can lead to some disadvantages like sealing your characters abilities during battles.

There’s a lot of grinding in this game and I tended to use the furies that gave me double XP and WP (which are skill points that increase your base stats).

There’s also Fairize, where your characters transform into powerful beings after you fill up this bar in battle. Each character has a different form and each of their powerful attacks deals massive damage to enemies but at the cost of HP. Bring those potions with you. It’s super satisfying whenever the boss is down to one bar of health (bosses later have multiple bars of health) and you unleash that fairize power and beat the boss. 

One of my complaints about the games difficulty. Now, it wasn’t that difficult, but higher level enemies would get about 4 turns for every player turn. So the later game goes from ‘more strategy’ to ‘just spam your magic attacks on them.’

Another complaint, and one that made me just skip ahead to the boss, is the quest to get that last fury. You get these side quests from Lola (the informant) and some of the side quests yielded a key item to get the powerful fury and one of the side quests glitched and I didn’t get the item. After I figured that out, I just stopped grinding and went straight to the final boss.

The characters were lovable, Fang was a dork, Tiara and Harley were my favorite characters. Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force is definitely a good entry point into JRPGS. And the final boss fight and ending was satisfying. I won’t stick around for the Vile God and Vile Goddess route though. 

I’m definitely going to keep the PS Now service, even if it takes me forever to find a game to play.

Thanks for reading!