The Classic PC Gaming Era (1977-1989) - The Faery Tale Adventure: Book I
An obscure but worthwhile overhead action RPG that feels like a precursor to Ultima VII and a combination of The Elder Scrolls games and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
RELEASE DATE: 1987
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Microillusions
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Fairly playable
BEST VERSIONS: Amiga
In the 1980s, the CRPG genre developed a reputation for providing games that were enormous in scope but far behind the curve in terms of graphics, sound and interface design. One area where CRPGs were particularly weak was in storytelling, and most games adopted a theme park style of design where players explored large open worlds until they either took on a quest to find, fetch or kill something or they ventured into a dungeon that had some item to uncover or monster to slay. While many CRPGs had huge maps and a variety of environments, the places you’d go and things you’d do didn’t feel very memorable most of the time, and many games re-used artwork not only within each game, but throughout their series. It was also very hard for someone who wasn’t a fan to distinguish various CRPG games from one another; so many resembled Wizardry and Ultima that they all started to look alike after awhile. (A similar pattern occurred in the decades that followed with first person RPGs, JRPGs, Action RPGs and Japanese Tactical Strategy RPGs; the role-playing genre tends to lend itself to repetition!)
One of the chief reasons for all of the sameness among 1980s CRPGs was the constraints of the 8-bit computers of the day; the Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 400/800 and earlier IBM compatible systems had a small amount of available RAM and tended to use low-density disks that might only have a few hundred kilobytes to work with. In the UK, the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro and Amstrad CPC were even more confined in their capabilities. But as the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Apple Macintosh and higher-end IBM compatible MS-DOS machines began to see wider adoption, the opportunities to create games with better graphics, sound and interfaces allowed for some fresh CRPG designs. One of the games that took advantage of this shift was FTL Games’s 1987 hit Dungeon Master, which revolutionized the dungeon crawler RPG. But another was a lesser-known game called The Faery Tale Adventure: Book I, a 1987 game by David Joiner and Microillusions that looks an awful lot like what many CRPGs would evolve into once the first half of Ultima VII rolled around 5 years later.
The Faery Tale Adventure presents an enormous scrolling graphical world that the manual says is 144 screens tall by 100 screens wide – amazingly vast for the era, particularly given the game’s high level of graphical fidelity and large, detailed sprites. The game features a day and night cycle and also requires you to do things like rest and eat, adding some small steps towards the immersion later CRPGs would strive for.
You begin as the eldest of three brothers and start off in a town that you should definitely explore from top to bottom if you plan to survive. But if you feel like venturing off, you can walk as far as you like – just be prepared to attract the attention of enemies who will follow you relentlessly around the world, unthreatened by the meager dirk your character starts off with. Combat is probably the least fun aspect of the game because it involves pressing an attack key and an 8-way direction towards an enemy and letting the game resolve the hits in real time. But unlike many CRPGs of the day, there are no random encounters where you’re stopped in your tracks and forced to fight - enemies exist within the world, and you can avoid them or trap them if you pay attention to what’s going on around you. The game’s music even changes when enemies are nearby to help you to be alert to the potential for danger.
If you die – and I did, almost immediately, my first time playing – a fairy will revive you until you run out of luck points, and then you move on to a second and third brother, each of whom has slightly different capabilities. The game’s five stats are quite different from other RPGs, eschewing conventional ideas like constitution or dexterity in exchange for bravery, luck, kindness, vitality and wealth. The eldest brother, Julian, has the highest bravery and is the best fighter, while the middle brother is luckier (allowing him to escape death more often) and the youngest is kinder (and thus more charismatic). All stats can be boosted through your actions. For example, while it’s easy to die in the early stages of the game when your bravery is low, as you kill more enemies and improve your bravery score, your character can reach a point where he is nigh-unstoppable by most enemies.
As a result, Faery Tale Adventure is that wonderful sort of CRPG where the fun is not in combat or questing but rather in exploration. Wandering around and searching for things becomes addictive, particularly once you’re powerful enough to withstand tough foes. There are castles to explore, islands to visit and dungeons to delve into. Because the world is so huge, however, it takes a long time to go anywhere, and it soon becomes extremely important to learn how to utilize teleportation circles that are activated by blue stones. For whatever reason, the design team decided to make these counter-intuitive; there are 11 circles, but where they take you depends upon the direction you were facing when you activated the stone, which means you can only access eight destinations. This means that you not only have to create or reference a matrix outlining all of the possible destinations for each circle, but also occasionally need to visit two or three circles to get where you want to go. It’s needlessly complicated, but easily dealt with once you understand the mechanics.
Items play a big role in the game, and much like The Legend of Zelda games, there are a limited number which enable you to gain new abilities and progress to different areas. One of the most intriguing is the turtle, which can not only help you sail over oceans, but also lava. You can also obtain a magic lasso that will eventually allow you to fly around on a golden swan, which greatly improves your speed traversing the landscape when magic circles aren’t nearby. You can also build up a small arsenal, and while the weapon you’ll use most often in the game is the sword, a bow and arrow and a wand you’ll find later on both come in handy for ranged attacks.
If Faery Tale Adventure does have a failing, it’s in the story, which is pretty standard fantasy stuff that even morphs into a “save the princess and you can marry her” affair pretty quickly. The princess has been captured by an evil necromancer whom you’ll eventually battle on the surreal Astral Plane, and while the battle is cool, there’s very little character development leading up to the final moments to make any of it feel epic. One game Faery Tale Adventure reminded me a lot of was The Elder Scrolls: Arena, as it too is a game where you spend a lot of time exploring but where the main quest itself feels fairly underdeveloped and unimportant.
But another game Faery Tale Adventure resembles in some ways (and significantly predates) is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past because it has some similar sensibilities in terms of its design and approach. In both games, the focus is more on adventuring than role-playing, and the giant world and dungeons require taking some time to find the right items and utilize the appropriate travel mechanics if you have any hope of finishing the story. While Zelda: A Link to the Past is far more refined and has better combat and a stronger story, Faery Tale Adventure is sort of like its Bizarro world counterpart; the two games feel very different, but they have many points of similarity due to their attempt to smooth out the rough edges of their genre and create an accessible adventure RPG experience.
I’m not sure why The Faery Tale Adventure fell off the radar of CRPG fans and is virtually unknown today; it was well-reviewed upon release by multiple critics and was even listed at number 63 in Computer Gaming World’s list of “150 Best Games of All Time” in 1996. Though the Amiga version is the definitive release with the best graphics and sound, it also came out (less impressively) for the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS. Electronic Arts even published a 1991 Sega Genesis port which is fairly faithful to the Amiga experience.
If you decide to play it today, I’d recommend consulting issue #44 of Computer Gaming World (which had a lengthy – and very helpful! – guide to the game in its glowing review) and the detailed maps at the Hall of Light website. There’s also a good walkthrough on The Computer Show website. The Faery Tale Adventure also has a copy protection that’s easily completed with the game’s manual – just look at the text around the map.
You may have noticed as well that the game’s title includes Book I. MicroIllusions planned a sequel, but it never happened, and the company went out of business within just a few years of its founding. In the mid-1990s, a team called The Dreamer’s Guild acquired the rights to create a sequel called Halls of the Dead: Faery Tale Adventure II that offered an ambitious follow-up adventure. It looked promising at the time, but sadly, the developer suffered financial difficulties and the game was released in 1997 in an unfinished state. So much content was cut out, in fact, that the main quest can’t be completed. As a result, it can only be recommended as a curiosity.
As Our Series Continues…
In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about 3D games, arcade action games, wargames, grand strategy games, RPGs, sports games, gameroom games, puzzle games and so much more.
And while you’ll definitely see some titles from prominent North American publishers like Sierra On-Line, Infocom, Activision, Electronic Arts, Brøderbund, SSI, MicroProse, Lucasfilm Games, Epyx and Sir-Tech in the mix, you’ll also see references to games from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Spain and Japan.
This series will continue to cover games written by unique personalities like Chris Crawford, Roberta Williams and Danielle Bunten Berry, by great writers like Steve Meretzky, Michael Bywater, Robert Pinsky and Brian Moriarty, and based on the work of famous authors like Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, William Gibson and Douglas Adams.
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