Would I play Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon if it was the last game on earth?

Well, considering it’s a game with post-apocalyptic elements and that, for it to be the last game on earth I would likely be in some sort of post-apocalyptic situation myself, playing it would probably be disturbing or, at best, redundant. So that was a stupid question, but it still holds more weight than “Would I play Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon if it was one among a number of games I currently own in my daily, mostly comfortable life?”

Fragile Dreams places you in the looks-like-a-dress-but-he-makes-it-work of Seto, a boy seeking survivors in a vacant and decaying modern world after the only person he’s ever known passes away. He quickly finds a mysterious, silver-haired girl who promptly runs away (smooth, junior), with the main crux of story involving tracking her down while meeting some other characters along the way. The Wii remote serves largely as a flashlight, lighting up the dark corners of the world and turning Seto to face where you want him to go.

Whatever happened to the world has populated it with dangerous creatures and spirits that must be fought off with whatever weaponry is scrounged up in Seto’s explorations, including sticks, brooms, bows and mallets. There are four different classes of weapon that at first seem rather simple — all requiring just a press of the A button to use — but eventually you may discover certain weapons are better suited for certain enemies and environments. For example, heavier weapons are good for stunning slower enemies, staff-like weapons can be swung around to hit through swarms of enemies and lighter weapons are better for landing quick hits against the ghostly lower halves of children who try to run up and kick you in the butt. I’m not making that up.

Ghost dogs often inhabit the wild worlds of Post-Apocalyptia

The battle system isn’t perfect — the look-around IR controls can cause disorientation sometimes in the middle of a skirmish and what looks like a sure hit occasionally doesn’t register — but for the most part it functions well. It’s like what might have been expected from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories if it included combat.

Unfortunately, some other choices in the game system can turn the fun survival into the tedious chore it really is. The game employs an inventory system similar to Resident Evil 4, allowing only a certain amount of space for all your on-hand weapons, recovery items and assorted trinkets, all of which comes in various sizes and shapes to challenge your organization skills. Personally, I don’t mind this sort of game mechanic at all — I was the Martha Stewart of Leon S. Kennedy’s attache case — but it turns to annoyance when you throw in “Mystery Items.”

Mystery Items are littered about the environment and regularly dropped by enemies. They can be weapons, shiny stuff to sell to the traveling merchant who wears panda kneepads and a giant chicken head (again, not making that up) or “memory items” that have little stories with them but otherwise don’t serve any use in play. The only way to find out is to stop at one of the many bonfire savepoints throughout the world, but every Mystery Item you run across, if you have room in your inventory, will be picked up and until you find out what it is, you can’t throw it away. Beginning to see the problem, here?

But it gets worse. Now, it’s often not difficult at all to reach a bonfire to unload your junk. You also have a “briefcase” in which you can place extra items you don’t want on-hand with you at that time to grab later and you even restore all your health. All well and good, except the side effect of visiting a bonfire is that almost every time it will cause the enemies in that area to respawn. So you go out, whack some dudes, get stuffed up with Mystery Items, backtrack to a bonfire to unload them and then — that’s right! — run through all those same enemies again to get on with your game.

Oh, did I mention your weapons will sometimes spontaneously break, too, making you run to the nearest bonfire to swap out? Yep. Another decent mechanic in itself, and one that makes sense given the environment, is made obnoxious by bonfire respawning.

I know the world is destroyed but does it have to look so... empty?

Such misgivings are forgivable if the journey and story are engaging — and, at least initially, they are. The anime-influenced ruins and world can be beautiful in an eerie, empty sense. The Japanese text of signs and messages left by people before you is often translated when you shine the flashlight on it, contributing to the exploratory element quite nicely. There are also a few “interchapter” cutscenes that are artistically stunning.

But about halfway through, it just seems to run out of steam. The ironically-silent and overgrown locales of a train station, amusement park and hotel give way to dull, underground corridors and labs in what is now a survival-horror cliché. Even the messages you find start to turn generic and the motivation of exploring is lost to a desire just to get through enemies and reach the next area.

The story itself also feels weak. One would expect the mysteries of what happened to the world and the characters Seto meets to gradually intensify and unfold as the game progresses, but that doesn’t happen as much as the developers seem to just pick a point near the end to lay it all out for you. The “memory items” tell stories, yes, but they feel disjointed. Some can be related to the discoveries you find at the end, but many seem nothing more than little stage monologues in an emo style I can only describe as “anime typical.” One guy’s lamentation to his lazily-named video game character is mentionable, for instance, but in the end serves nothing more than filler in lieu of embellishing the main story.

You know what? He does kind of make that not-a-dress work

Even the actions of Seto and other characters sometimes feel forced to the will of the developers and murders common sense. In one scene, Seto believes he is trapped in a room, providing plenty of time to drop some story explanation — only for a cat to conveniently walk by afterward to reveal a gaping escape hole 10 feet from where Seto had been sitting the whole time. There’s also a cutscene where Seto is talking to someone about how desperately he wants someone to talk to. Let me repeat that with emphasis: he is TALKING to SOMEONE about how desperately he wants SOMEONE to TALK to.

What I’m really trying to say is…
Nothing about Fragile Dreams is “broken,” exactly. A player should expect to make it through the game without any dealbreaking technical issues. The experience laid out for players, however, ultimately left me disappointed. It is clear the elements were in place to create a consistently compelling story and world; creative flairs are obvious and worth sampling to see seeds of what can be accomplished in this vein of gaming. Ultimately, though, some unfortunate choices in design force the player out of a fascinatingly lonely, open world and down rigid, grinding paths familiar in so many other games.

Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon was developed by Tri-Crescendo and published in North America by Xseed Games. It is now available for the Nintendo Wii for $49.99 USD. Game rented through GameFly and completed in 11.5 hours. Bonfires extinguished: none; but Smokey the Bear isn’t around anymore, is he.