Fragile Dreams had a lot of good ideas and obviously wanted to tell an interesting story about human nature. Like many RPGs and point-and-click adventures, a story-driven game only has to be competent at its game mechanics in order to succeed; not even stellar, just acceptable and the story should presumably take care of the rest. Fragile Dreams is hard to classify, but it best falls into the survival horror genre similar to most Resident Evil games (though by far not as gory and violent). While it has a lot of admirable goals, the actual game mechanics are so bad that it’s hard to justify picking this title up at full price.
The premise and presentation are great; you play an early to mid teens boy named Seto, who is one of the few remaining humans alive after an apocalypse event wiped out most of modern society. With most buildings and modern conveniences having fallen into decay, Seto is armed with little more than a flashlight and improvised weapons as he searches for survivors and fights against a mix of enemies such as wild dogs as well as ghosts. Seto spends the majority of the game alone, instead coming across ’Memory Items’ he can inspect that share the stories of the recently deceased. Some people are going to find this plot very interesting, as it basically presents several ’slices of life’ from a variety of people. While it did little for me (I prefer a few very developed characters over dozens of ones with only small details to them), I can’t call the plot bad and it’s definitely going to entertain a certain crowd. It’s just too bad the plot is all that’s going to appeal to most players.
A great plot cannot carry a game if the actual game play is terrible, and this is what goes wrong with Fragile Dreams. It starts off annoying, becomes tolerable, then nose-dives into being rage inducing. Seto is easy to control once you get used to it; the Wiimote is how you look around, turn, interact with objects, and attack, while the Nunchuk’s analog stick controls movement and crouching. The controls are basic despite their odd layout, so it won’t take long to get used to them. Even whacking a flock of angry birds is just a matter of facing them and tapping the A button a few times, and if you do it with decent timing Seto will execute a nice combo to scatter most or all of them. This isn’t the problem; this is what the game does right, and had it stuck to this it would have been merely competent, but that is sufficient in a plot-driven title like this.
Since the basic controls are fine, the problem lies in the details. The first of these is that at first you’ll be constantly interrupted by cutscenes. You may watch a scene, resume control of Seto, take two steps and be put into another cutscene, then briefly resume control and have yet another cutscene happen right away! That’s annoying, though thankfully the game lets up on this after the first hour or two. If it was just the first hour being bad, you could forgive it since tons of great games do that. But cutscenes are soon replaced by other annoyances, the chief among them that Seto has limited inventory space that must be shared between healing items, weapons, and the optional Memory Items that drive much of the game’s emotional plot. It’s true that you get that space back after inspecting a Memory Item, but you can only do that at save points and thus will have to spend some time backtracking to pick up things you had to leave behind earlier.
The trouble doesn’t end there. Even after you come to terms with the inventory, the game has several sequences that are more irritating than challenging. Extended chase sequences with a survivor who would rather antagonize Seto are just one example, ending in a lengthy hunt for all the clues you need to find the person, and being sent through certain areas more than once with needless backtracking. Even this isn’t the worst part; that might well be the segment where you have to walk on a very thin platform for several minutes, and falling off causes you to lose a huge chunk of health. The designers are apparently fans of the 8-bit Ninja Gaiden games, because that segment has lots of birds trying to knock you off! But even once you get past this, your problems aren’t over.
Even after you deal with flawed game design over and over to get past all those problems, Fragile Dreams will keep kicking you in the stomach. Your reward for thoroughly exploring a multi-floor building and beating its boss will be to be sent back through several sections of the game on a fetch quest, and while some shortcuts can be used it’s still ridiculous. The only real saving grace to all this is that Seto’s weapons are pretty powerful, and partaking in even half of the fights you encounter is enough to keep him ready to handle bosses. Yet this is one good game mechanic joined by several bad ones, and that’s not enough to make Fragile Dreams fun.
To be fair, it does several things right that aren’t directly related to game play. The graphics are very well designed and easily some of the most atmospheric on the Wii. The sound design is even better, with a minimalist soundtrack that only plays when it’s very appropriate for the mood at hand and excellent use of ambient sound. Even the Wiimote’s speaker is used well, primarily playing noises such as crickets chirping, enemies growling to give you a little warning they’re nearby, and faint, garbled voices of survivors give you some clues on where to go. The voices being garbled isn’t specifically a problem; the speaker is low quality but in most cases the survivor’s voice is justifiably affected for some reason or another and their garbled (but still understandable) speech thus makes sense. Better still, the game’s dialog can be heard in either English or the original Japanese. If you have even a limited understanding of Japanese then I recommend playing it in that language (nearly everything is subtitled, so don’t worry); you’ll catch a few minor but interesting plot tidbits that don’t render well into spoken English. All the excellent visual and audio design in the world can’t save Fragile Dreams from one other flaw: It’s short. The game retails at roughly $50, yet you can beat it within about ten hours; give or take a few depending on how quickly you catch on to certain details and know where to go. This would be fine if those ten hours were amazing and fun, but they’re not. Thus Fragile Dreams represents bad value for money if purchased at retail.
Ultimately, Fragile Dreams doesn’t deliver on what should have been a great game. While not difficult, the uninspired game mechanics, significant backtracking, initial cutscene barrage, and long ’balance walk’ section just drain all the fun out of it. Most players can safely skip this, and the only group I would recommend it to for rental (not purchase, it’s too expensive for what you get) are those who are very curious as to what a ’game as art’ title might look like. That crowd alone will find some interesting things to take away from a rental of Fragile Dreams, but everyone else should just completely avoid this.
