No, that's not the name of the game pictured above. Instead, it's how far I leveled up in Fragile Dreams before I decided to shit-can it from my collection. Why? It's quite simple, actually: the combat really, really sucked. Like, really. "Oh, but if you can muster enough strength to power through the combat parts, the rest of the game is a lot better," some might say to me. Sorry, but I shouldn't have to muster the strength to get through a game. If I'm not convinced I should even be holding the controller, it's a safe bet I shouldn't be. It's a shame, though, because everything besides the gameplay was working for me. The atmosphere was foreboding and desolate; the score hit all the right notes; the story had a lot of potential; and yet I traded it in after only about two hours of game time. Sad day.
OK, so, the combat. Not one aspect of it did anything for me. I started off with a stick, and I hit some dogs over the head with it. Fair enough. But then I hit some floating jellyfish with it. Then I found a bamboo sword and hit some dogs and jellyfish with it. Then my bamboo sword broke, so I switched back to the stick. Then it broke, as well. As it turns out, a broken stick was the last weapon I was able to wield before I gave up, and that doesn't sit right with me. Oh, well, I guess, because maneuvering around borderline-retarded enemy A.I. that have the worst dodging abilities known to man or computer didn't really make me want to find a better weapon. Take the dogs, for example. When you hit them, they automatically jump backwards, no matter where they are. So my main plan of attack was to always angle my swing towards a wall or object in the environment, that way when they jumped back, they didn't actually move. Instead of the dog leaping out of harm's way, it just backwards-dry-humped the wall while I beat it in the face. Not how I would like to go out, but I'm not a post-apocalyptic canine that appears into, and disappears from existence whenever a human being walks past me.
The way weapons break in Fragile Dreams is just about the stupidest thing on the planet. Apparently, there's no formula to follow or weapon HP to keep track of. Shit just breaks sometimes. And I can say from experience that my only two weapons (which sucked anyways) both broke shortly after about an hour of playing. If the developers wanted to force people to use different weapons, hey, I'm all for it. But they can't make it happen by random chance. Theoretically, then, it could break after the first time I used it. There's no strategy or brainpower needed to play along with that scenario; it's called shitty design. And compounding the brain-dead weapon system is the fact that it can be overly-cumbersome to aim and successfully hit enemies sometimes. If I press down on the nunchuk, I would normally expect my character to turn towards the camera. Oh, no. Not in Fragile Dreams. It works similarly to Silent Hill: Origins, only less-so. I had to maneuver the flashlight with the Wii-mote in order to face the enemy I wanted to hit, and it got obnoxious pretty quickly when I was whiffing half of the time, only to get hit for 50 damage from a fucking jellyfish. Why are there floating jellyfish? I don't know. And I didn't mention this before, but why are there person-less pants with blue flames instead of upper torsos laughing at me? I don't know, but whatever.
The main point I want to drive home here is that the first few hours in a game are arguably the most important. And with a game like Fragile Dreams, I was looking forward more to the adventuring aspects than the combat. What I found, however, was that the world made me want to push forward, but the game itself kept holding me back. It's one reason I can't stand most JRPGs, but I thought this one could have been different. Sure, it could have been, but the gameplay is sadly but surely stuck in the same boring and tedious level-grind mentality that plagues pretty much all the games I hate. So, in the end, hate wins out again. This is one giant victory for hate.
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