FAIRY TAIL

FAIRY TAIL was supposed to launch in March 2020. Koei Tecmo pushed it back to a simultaneous worldwide release on 30 July, and four years of reviews since suggest the extra months went into the parts that show up in a trailer rather than the parts that show up in a 90-hour playthrough. Developed by Gust — the studio behind the Atelier series — it adapts the manga's Tenrou Island and Grand Magic Games arcs into a turn-based RPG where you swap Fairy Tail's guild members in and out of battle mid-fight to chain their magic attacks together. That combat idea works. Almost nothing built around it does.

The combat is the one thing nearly everyone agrees on

Across both the positive and negative sample, the fighting system is the least contested part of the game. You build a squad from a genuinely wide roster of guild members — Natsu, Erza, Gray, Lucy and dozens more, each with a distinct magic type — and swap the active fighter mid-combo to chain attacks and cover elemental weaknesses. Several reviewers who otherwise refuse to recommend the game single out the combat as the one part that delivered exactly what they wanted: an interactive excuse to throw around the magic they've watched for a decade. The catch, repeated almost as often, is that the loop doesn't evolve much. It's genuinely satisfying for the first stretch of the campaign and noticeably flatter by the midgame, and the game is short and easy enough — by multiple accounts, beatable within a few days even on the hardest starting difficulty — that the shallowness rarely gets the chance to become a serious problem before the credits roll.

A story told mostly by a portrait standing next to a text box

The bigger, more consistent complaint is what happened to the story on the way from manga panel to game screen. FAIRY TAIL skips large stretches of the source material outright, and several major fights that anime and manga readers would consider essential — one reviewer specifically calls out Jura's absence from a confrontation fans expected to see — either don't happen or happen off-panel. Where a scene does survive, it's frequently presented as a static character portrait talking over a chatbox rather than an animated cutscene, which more than one reviewer describes as actively undercutting the emotional weight of exactly the moments the game exists to dramatize. This isn't a one-off complaint from a single disappointed fan; it's a specific, repeated pattern across reviews written months and years apart, which is the kind of consistency that separates a real production shortfall from ordinary "the adaptation wasn't perfect" grumbling.

The budget constraints show up elsewhere too. Towns are populated by a small number of NPC models reused over and over — one completionist reviewer describes seeing the same background character seven times in a single screen — and the environments themselves are small enough that a couple of reviewers compare the whole production to something closer to a visual novel with light 3D sandbox elements bolted on than a full JRPG.

Steam's own global achievement data backs up the "short and undemanding" read from the reviews rather than contradicting it: the easiest unlocks sit at roughly 60–65% of the playerbase, and even the hardest ones — presumably tied to full completion — still clear 8–16%, a gentler falloff than you'd expect from a JRPG with a genuine end-game grind. That's consistent with a game most players finish rather than abandon, which tracks with reviewers calling it "easy to complete" rather than demanding.

The day-one patch that became its own controversy

Separately from the story-compression complaints, a day-one patch that trimmed content players had already seen in pre-release footage generated its own dedicated wave of negative reviews in the first week after launch — reviewers who say they were fine with the game's other shortcomings but felt specifically misled by content being pulled after they'd already paid for it. It's a narrower complaint than the broader adaptation issues, but it's corroborated by enough independent accounts from the same launch week to treat as a real, documented event rather than an isolated grievance.

This puts FAIRY TAIL in an odd position relative to other licensed anime RPGs of its era: it's neither an ambitious full retelling in the mold of the bigger Naruto or Dragon Ball adaptations, nor a cheap, honestly-scoped side story. It's a full-price release that plays like a mid-budget game asked to cover a much bigger story than its production could support, and the corners it cuts to do that are the same corners fans notice first.

Sixty-two pieces of paid DLC is not a typo

The single most-repeated word across this review corpus, positive and negative alike, is "DLC." FAIRY TAIL's Steam page lists 62 separate paid downloadable items on top of a base price above NZ$76 — a Season Pass, individual costume sets, and packs that unlock additional playable characters. Reviewers who genuinely enjoyed their time with the base game still bring this up unprompted, several comparing it unfavorably to Koei Tecmo's own Dead or Alive monetization playbook, and more than one treats the character-unlock DLC specifically as content that should plausibly have shipped in the base roster rather than being sold separately. When a game's fans and its critics agree on one specific complaint this strongly, it's worth taking at face value: this is the part of the game most likely to sour anyone regardless of how they feel about the combat or the story.

Final verdict

FAIRY TAIL gets the one thing a licensed anime RPG absolutely has to get right — the combat is fun, the roster is wide, and there's real nostalgia in seeing these characters and their magic rendered in a game you control. It settles at 5 rather than higher because nearly everything surrounding that combat was visibly built on a tight budget: a heavily compressed story that skips fights fans specifically wanted, cutscenes reduced to portraits and text boxes, recycled town NPCs, a day-one content-removal controversy, and — above everything else — a 62-item DLC catalogue that both fans and critics single out as the worst part of owning the game. If you've read the manga or watched the anime and want a nostalgic, undemanding combat experience, this can be worth a deep-sale purchase. At full price, with the DLC included, it's very hard to recommend even to the fans it was made for.