I wish I could tell you how “Fortune Summoners” lived up to Carp Fulgar’s first release, “Recettear.” I wish I could tell you this game wasn’t a waste of money and time.
It has all the elements there: nostalgia-friendly side scrolling action, adorable protagonist, quirky characters and a rabbit-like sidekick. Unfortunately, Carpe Fulgar’s latest translation of a Japanese-RPG is a flop.
The combat is clunky at best, with an overcomplicated system that makes fighting slimes a punishment rather than fun. If you are slightly off in your button sequence, your protagonist Arche flails about and gets hit a lot. It’s not just that you can’t button-mash your way to victory: it’s that fighting becomes a litany of over-up-attack, no, down-over-attack, how do I block again? Fights aren’t fun when you need near surgical precision to pull off the move.
You can’t save when you want. You have to be at an inn, or a traveling healer or a vital plot point in order to save, so if you suddenly realize you need to stop playing and get to class, you have to go find a save point or lose progress.
Travel between quest objectives is incredibly obnoxious, as there is no fast travel option. You have to travel over the river and through the hordes of slimes, snakes and angry bee things every time you need to go forth or come back home. One quest gets you to the door you need and then a character says, “Well, we need to go home now!” Back through the repopulated kill zones your adorable, grade school heroes go, and the next game-day they want to go back to that door.
One thing that really bothered me was jumping on platforms. You’re at a cliff, you need to get across the chasm. Look! A moving platform, ready to transport you. Jump on it, but oh dear, you’ve got a bit too much momentum, and you are sliding off. Then repeat a few times until you get the perfect launch trajectory for Arche to actually stay put on the damn thing. Sometimes I got it right quickly, but occasionally I found myself frustrated by repeated rounds of jump, fall, jump, fall.
The quest system was not so good. Instead of a journal or log, you receive messages that say things like, “So and so is sick, I should go check on her!” But then you need to talk to somebody to get the quest to find the cure for your friend’s sickness. Sadly, far too often there is nothing in the game directing you to the next quest point. You have to just talk to everyone and hope one of them triggers the next phase. There’s no list of objectives in your menu, or helpful dotted lines to follow.
Really, you don’t want to buy this game. It will make you sad and frustrated, and there are other, enjoyable new games you could spend hours of your time and money on.
