Your play options are Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, the Naked Emperor or the infamous Jack. From the game itself, the story line is not entirely clear, but it seems to involve four disgruntled fairy tale characters deciding to build up their reputations by running around and killing people.

Much was made about the premise of Fairytale Fights when the game was being promoted. Myself, I think it's inexcusable that the game somehow got through QA with nobody saying, 'Hey, maybe this would be more fun if we just let them mash a face button to attack? I mean we've got four and we're only really using one to jump and one for talking.' If that sort of thing didn't bother you five years ago, you may be OK with playing Fairytale Fights now. It results in a sort of curving, crab-clawed grip reminiscent of the contortions the original Xbox controller required. I cannot adequately express how hard it is to play Fairytale Fights for any extended period of time while holding your fingers in the position the controls require. Movement is the left analog stick, perhaps the only sane decision the game made about controls. So if you get in the habit of trying to buff up your attacks … well, get ready to fling your weapon away near-constantly. Ridiculously, you use RB to pick up the game's weapons (much like River City Ransom), and tapping it while you have a weapon in hand will lead to tossing the weapon away. You're supposed to be able to buff your attacks by tapping RB with correct timing, but the analog-wiggling is so imprecise that this rarely works. This can even happen when surrounded by enemies if you flick the stick in the wrong direction. You can block attacks with LT, but half the time, you won't know you're suddenly open to being attacked due to somehow facing in a direction that makes you attack air. The direction in which you wiggle the stick supposedly determines which direction you attack in, but in practice, you will flail the analog roughly in the direction you need and hope for the best. The problem lies completely in which parts of the 360 controller were mapped to various functions.įor reasons unknown, Playlogic decided that they wanted you to attack by wiggling the right analog stick. Regardless, Fairytale Fights is loose and floaty in a way that's totally undesirable in a fighter that's supposedly about building up big chain combos, raising your meter, and then unleashing super moves. I'm not sure what Fairytale Fights' excuse for its lousy controls, as the game clearly had a good production budget and was even promoted aggressively. Vampire Rain and Bullet Witch were early, Japanese-developed games that clearly ran out of money before they were finished. When it comes to game controls, Fairytale Fights manages to be worse than either. Bear in mind that I've covered the console since launch and played virtually every stinker shoveled down the 360 pipe, from Vampire Rain to Bullet Witch. It may win the gold medal for possibly the worst controls I've ever encountered in any Xbox 360 title. Specifically, River City Ransom had great controls and Fairytale Fights really doesn't. The only thing separating it from the likes of, say, River City Ransom is the play control. I bring this up because Fairytale Fights plays a lot like a simple 8-bit beat-'em-up.

Sure, a reviewer might discuss new features or graphical tricks in a starry-eyed tone, but what clearly makes or breaks the game's score is what they called 'play control' back then. You'll notice that for any action game, the quality of the controls will receive more focus than almost anything else in the review. If you ever have the chance to read such a thing, do so. Have you ever read a review of an 8-bit video game? I'm not talking about one of those revisionist reviews written 20 years after the fact, either, but a game review written back in the '80s, when simple 8-bit titles were new.

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