FAIRY TAIL 2 Review (PlayStation 5)

by Jim Smale · December 12, 2024

FAIRY TAIL 2 Review, “FAIRY TAIL 2” is a new RPG based on the popular magical combat fantasy manga and anime series “FAIRY TAIL,” whose story is beloved by fans around the world, with the original manga selling more than 72 million copies worldwide. This sequel to the game “FAIRY TAIL,” released in July 2020, depicts the “Alvarez Empire Arc,” the climax of the original manga.

FAIRY TAIL 2 Review Pros:

Beautiful Anime graphics.
15.26GB download size.
Platinum trophy.
You get the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5 versions of the game.
Four game difficulties – Story, balanced, hard, and Ragnarok.
Camera settings – Invert axis and sensitivity sliders, zoom controls, and camera auto-correct.
Game settings – autosave, Map rotation, event dialog, event autoplay, and font color support.
Japanese voice with English subtitles.
Gorgeous cutscenes and character interactions.
Check the terminology button to learn more about the world and what’s going on.
You can skip and fast-forward interactions and cutscenes.
Turn-based combat in that every character has a bar that fills up and once full you can do an attack, think of it like a cool down meter.
Earn SP in combat and use it to perform special attacks and skills.
Attacks and skills will tell you if they are AOE (area of effect), targeting a single person, or just a general attack.
Action adventure gameplay.
Opening and ongoing tutorials and pop-ups as you play.
Seamless transitions between cutscenes and gameplay and vice versa.
Cool over-the-top attack animations.
A fantastic set of characters both good and bad.
You can block manually, you get a slight heads-up beforehand.
A database in the game includes every character’s back story and events from the previous game.
A full 3D game world with 360-degree camera control.
The map fills in with color and points of interest as you play and explore.
Main story and optional side quests, you have a management system to keep track of it all.
Save and load from the menu when you want.
When exploring the world you can instantly change to any party member character.
Loot chests are everywhere to be found, collect resources and materials from the game world and enemies.
Enemies have break gauges and breaking that (from attacks) enables link attacks from your team. Triggering this lets you pick who to link with and shows the benefit of doing so like for example a stronger attack or earning more health.
Fairy rank is what increases as you use skills, levelling this up increases your max SP and SP generation.
The full combo counter is complete with damage numbers popping off.
Conversations between characters in the world will pop up as small text conversations.
Guide marks show when you press a Hutton and act as a guide to the next or marked objective.
Open the world and explore and play how you want.
The combat is not as stiff as you would think and allows combos and special attacks.
You see enemies and creatures roaming the world.
Elements play a huge part with each character specialising in a particular element. This also means some elemental attacks do way more damage because of the enemy’s elemental state. This also works against you.
A bump can be done in the world to trigger a fight and start with an advantage but it is tricky to pull off so much that you will forget about it half the time.
When fighting, you have a team with you but only control your one character and the others auto attack.
The world changes as you play because you will unlock new characters and skills that can be used to break down and open up new areas.
Lacrima can be found and equipped to boost stats.
Each character can initially have 3 Lacrima equipped and they can sometimes have additional buffs attached to them.
Earn ether from combat etc and level up to get origin points and you can put it into one of three origin cores – Spirit, Skill, and Strength. Clicking it will then show the skill tree.
A handy auto-evolve option that can be toggled so you don’t have to deal with the leveling up.
Active pause is done in combat and here you can see your attacks and enemy info.
After learning four skills you then unlock an additional sheet of skills to choose in combat.
Campfires can be used in the world and here you can view character story cutscenes and heal up for free.
Fantastic locations.
Full photo mode support.
When all break gauges break you can do a special unison attack with others that triggers a cutscene intro.
I like how when you are in the character interactions you can move the camera around.
When you are leveled up and way too powerful for the smaller-level enemies you can instantly one-shot them, it’s part of the game.
Find crystals in the game world that drop ether to level up.
The game is very accessible and kind of chill put it on a lower difficulty and you can just fly around a cool game world and get a lot of fun out of it.
Vendors/merchants sell Lacrima and items,, and you use raw materials as currency.
I really like that they made low-level fights quicker, the combat is streamlined, and how you can set things to auto.
Support characters can be recruited and they do passive skills complete with cool downs.

FAIRY TAIL 2 Review Cons:

Slow opening with a lot of cutscenes and hand-holding tutorial sections.
You cannot remap the controls.
Not all cutscenes can be skipped.
Only certain boxes, barrels, etc can be broken.
Enemy encounters are noneventful in that you walk up to them regardless of their state and the fight just starts and it’s all very civil.
I do get the feeling that the game expects you to have played previous games and know a fair amount beforehand.
Character management is slow and kind of tedious.
The game manual is a website, which is not ideal if you are playing offline.
Had the game lock up and freeze for a short time.
Combat can be tough when it comes to blocking as it’s such a small notification/alert.
I found the character stories to be too much as you get a load of them at one time, it doesn’t add a lot to my experience.
Lacrima management is slow and clunky.
Early on I just didn’t like how repetitive the combat was and how so much of the world is locked out.
No matter who you roam the world you will always be the main character in battle.
It’s a shame that you cannot see enemy levels beforehand.

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