Return to PopoloCrois: A Story of Seasons Fairytail Review

**Becky** Fri Feb 19, 2016 5:36 pm

So you fancy a bit of tactical RPG action mixed with farming? Well you’ve come to the right place because that’s exactly what Return to PopoloCrois: A Story of Seasons Fairytail is. The game starts by telling a story in which prince Pietro and pals have previously saved the Popolocrois and even turned Dr Robotnik's long lost brother into a friend. Now it’s the prince's 13th bday. The way the game starts you'd think it's a strictly RPG affair, black beasts are invading the land and we have to put a stop to it otherwise they'll be no farming! Which is honestly why we all came here anyway right?

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It's not an RPG if you can't steal from peoples' treasure chests

The story actually had me gripped from near the start and even made me not care it started with a distinct lack of farming. Prince Pietro is teleported to another world and imprisoned, broken out by a wolf. The general gist is we save farms from darkness that stops crops growing, as obviously once again only kids can save the world. Also the only true way to take over the world is to stop farms from making produce. There is a lot more to the story than that, but spoilers.

The graphics are cutesy but nice and you can decide if you want the black outline typical of 3DS games on or off, a feature I appreciated but eventually decided black lines off. The Cel shaded graphics are a teeny bit jaggedy but look great on the 3DS a quaint but timeless effect.

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I want to sleep cuddled up to a cute wolf

Everything has a cute style to it in PopoloCrois even one of the early enemies is a pot of honey with legs, however by the end of the game the enemy design is repetitive with mostly a few designs being repeated over just with a minor change or a colour change.

You can choose between two Japanese voice acting sets, one cutesier than the other and English voice acting which is a nice touch for a 3DS game. I enjoy anime and chose the cutesy Japanese voices as it fits the graphical style and found the voice acting every bit as good as an anime it really helped immerse me in the world of PopoloCrois. However only the most important parts of the story are voice acted, other than that characters just say single words or sometimes the odd sentence, it felt rather disconnected.

The music is varied to say the least ranging from easy listening to orchestral to country to like a modern sounding 16bit eerie style. It felt like the composer couldn't decide how to have the music as it's all so radically different. However some of it is very good and I found myself bopping along.

In typical JRPG style the town has various people around to talk to but no interaction with the environment. Battles are random when in the field, but at least there's the option to change the frequency of battle which you can change whenever you want. Feeling lazy? Wack the encounter rate right down, want to grind your soul away turn up the encounter rate. It’s great.

Fights are a tactical RPG affair with characters moving on grid then attacking if in range, or you can use a skill or pair skill if you have the right character with you. There's no indication of either it’s you or the enemy next which makes being tactical and knowing when to heal very difficult and the movement system makes it difficult to get skills to hit the right place to hit multiple enemies, it was like having that one shopping trolley that just won’t go where you want it to, except that was every character when using skills.

Return to PopoloCrois: A Story of Seasons Fairytail Review Biv8772

I don't even know what you are, but now you will die

There are the good ole elements of fire, wind, earth and water as well as light and dark but I found they had very little impact on the gameplay almost to the point that I wondered why elements were even included.

As you journey around the land you get quests from people often just to kill a certain amount of a particular enemy but it still adds an extra something to do and you don't have to go massively out of your way so these aren't a pain in a bum to complete

Now for the reason we are all here, the farming. It’s simple, hoe the ground, plant seeds, water and the plant grows in real time whilst out adventuring. Of course there aren’t just crops you can also adopt three types of animals for your farm, chickens, cows and alpacas which are slowly unlocked as you play. There is no time of day or getting worn out from actions you do as much or little farming as you want. Make no mistake this is an RPG with a side portion of farming, however you can easily spend just as much time even more time farming than RPGing.

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I'm sorry, what was that Dr Robotnik?

The amount of farming increases a lot as you progress through the game and unlock more farms. You'll be travelling back and forth between battling in the field and you various farms watering your plants and animals and collecting, selling and even synthesising your produce to make more expensive and useful items and it's all optional for money making so you do as much or little farming as you like.

Also typical of Story of Seasons (Harvest Moon) games, you can befriend lady friends with little 13 year old Pietro. They have 5 levels of friendship and like all women, gifts are the only way to their heart, talking also helps a bit (we do like to gab). Though it does take a lot of pressies and money spent to win these gold diggers hearts, I'm a prince shouldn't that be enough? Perhaps I shouldn't have kept giving them eggs.

Thankfully to help with the farming and wooing of girls you unlock fast travelling so you can go cheat on all the different girls and tend to all your farms quickly and easily.

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I loved the style of the map

Return to PopoloCrois honestly took 5 hours to really get going, it was good from before that but it really got Hard to put down after then. PopoloCrois is one of the easiest games I've played for a long time but it is intentionally easy like Bloodborne is intentionally difficult. However one of the best things is that you can play it for 10 minutes and feel like you've made progress, not many RPGs offer that. If you're looking for an easy going RPG, a side portion of farming and some interesting characters (I love GamiGami) then PopoloCrois is the game for you.

8/10