Fairune 2

Ah, the looking at a tower in the distance opening, how quaint.

A couple of years ago I played Fairune 1 for the 3DS and enjoyed it, as you can read here. So with the announcement of a sequel I couldn't wait to play it. And boy, it feels childlike fun to play this game. Same basic premise, the same princess is searching the lands for adventure, she stumbles upon this book, a codex that points her in searching for the lost fairies, three of them... in the colours red, green and blue... this is Hydlinde isn't it? You save the first fairy in this wooden area, travels up a tower to the next area, the snow area, save this fairy and take the tower once more to the third stage a water stage, save fairy and climb to the top and enter a portal to the Ashen world which is trying to conquer Fairune. Find the gate, destroy the final... and pretty much only boss in a shoot 'em up sequence and you win.

Trash blocks to save fairies!

Each area work pretty much the same. Find the three orbs to open the door to the locked away fairy. Find a hidden ring that grants you access to the whole area, beat enemies to level up and solve puzzles to reach new areas. The puzzles are very fun, mostly solve them by observing the environment to see a picture, or some small hints. The difficulty is more realising which solution goes o which puzzle. Collect stones to open a secret area to add text to a memory stone and so on. One puzzle I really liked was revealing sections of the map so they showcased numbers and put those numbers in as a code to get access to the whole map. Brilliant! Some problems though is that certain puzzles are hingeing on that you can't see a switch because it is hidden behind a pillar or tree. And speaking of trees, some are just illusions which you can walk past, but the only reason you can distinguish them is that they lack the brown foundation everyone else has. The same goes for hidden caves that are only shown as small cracks in the wall. Those can be a bit obnoxious.

The solution to one of the puzzles I missed and brute forced instead after backtracking from the third level to the first since I missed the key behind this solution to get a medallion to open the third level.

The final battle is a four-stage shoot 'em up as expected, but fairly easy I felt since I beat it the first time trying at it. This one is much larger than its predecessor and really fun and really recommended to waste up to 6 hours on a first playthrough. Also, really good music.