Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon Review

Every now and then a game comes along that attempts to do something completely different than what has been done before. More often than not, these games end up missing the mark and get relegated to the bargain bins relatively quickly. But sometimes, the developers are truly able to create something new and unique. Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon dares to take the original path by offering up a game that attempts to get an emotional reaction out of the player by offering a story based quest, filled with atmosphere and enough narrative to fill an average novel. The question is, does Fragile Dreams succeed at creating a worthwhile game or should it be thrown into the bargain bin and forgotten?

 

Farewell Generic Story

 

Fragile Dreams takes place in a modern version of Japan several years after most humans have died. The main character is a young teenager named Seto who lives in a tower with his adoptive grandfather. The story opens up with Seto

The plot is advanced through the use of in-engine cutscenes, as well as through finding artifacts hidden throughout the game world that have past thoughts attached to them. You gain access to the thoughts by picking them up and then sitting down by a fire to listen to them. The thoughts are usually special memories of dead people that are attached to objects. What

Unique Look

 

Further adding to the atmosphere of the game are the graphics. Fragile Dreams has two very distinct graphical styles that somehow work extremely well when combined together. The characters themselves have a cellshaded cartoon appearance. All of the main characters are highly detailed, vibrant, and have a friendly, childish style to them. However, the game world itself has a very realistic look. Imagine Link from the Wind Waker being plopped into Fallout 3 and you can start to see what Fragile Dreams looks like. Impressively the Wii manages to pull these two distinct styles off and offers up a truly artistic and good looking game. Each area is highly detailed and shows signs of nature reclaiming civilization. Some of the textures in the game do look substandard, but the overall look and feel of the game more than makes up for the few things that are off.

Ruinous Gameplay

 

Where Fragile Dreams starts to falter is in the gameplay department. For some reason the developers decided to make Fragile Dreams an action game. Since most of the game world is devoid of any type of living creature, our hero is left to fight ghosts. These ghost aren

Throughout the game you will find new weapons and have the chance to buy them as well. For some reason the developers decided that it would be a good idea to make the weapons break after a certain amount of usage. The problem with this approach is that there is no indication of when a weapon will break and there is no way to repair a broken or near broken weapon. You simply have to throw out a broken one and hope you have a replacement in your inventory. With limited bag space it becomes tough to choose which weapons to bring along with you.

Saving Light

 

Even though the combat controls and gameplay aren