Thank you Koei Tecmo Games for sending us this game to review!

Fairy Tail is at this point a long-running anime that has built itself a pretty dedicated fan base.  I started watching it when my daughters were much younger and their best friend started to watch it together.  While Fairy Tail certainly has women in some rather exposing outfits, it's mostly about fun, friends, and defeating evil.  

My wife and I watched several seasons early on, eventually watching through season five.  Then, I played the first FAIRY TAIL video game from Koei Tecmo, and reviewed that here.  This game, FAIRY TAIL 2, picks up where that game left off and continues through to the end of the main Fairy Tail series.  This covers the Alvarez arc, though it's worth noting that certain parts of the arc are missing or glossed over.  After beating the game, there are bonus chapters that let you know what happens in the time between completing that storyline, and the start of the next series, Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest.  These bonus chapters are exclusive to this game, and written by the creator of Fairy Tail.

The story starts with a cut scene that shows Makarov going to Alvarez to talk with the leadership there to try and negotiate peace, in hopes that emperor Spriggan will cease trying to invade Fiore, the land of Fairy Tail.  The attempt at negotiations fails and leads to a trap, and a rescue is launched.  Thankfully, Makarov is saved.  Most of this part of the anime arc is skipped, and simply summarized in just a few minutes at the beginning of the game.  After this it's clear Alvarez is going to invade, and so Fairy Tail and other friendly guilds will have to band together to protect their land from invasion.  The emperor Spriggan is shown to be Zeref, a powerful immortal mage that was first introduced in previous arcs.

It's not long before Magnolia, the city where Fairy Tail's guild hall is located, is almost entirely vacated for the safety of the citizens.  Only Fairy Tail is left behind, and you are all tasked with defending the city from invasion.  Like most RPGs, there are also quests to complete for anyone standing around that needs your help, and of course you fight enemies as you go.  As long as you fight most things as you explore, leveling up is surprisingly quick, and I personally found the game quite easy overall, especially on Balanced mode.  Since all enemies are visible on the game screen, skipping them is often possible if you are in a hurry or don't want to get any more powerful.

While playing the game, your party includes whichever Fairy Tail mages the story demands at that particular time.  The cast selection is pretty good, and maxes at around ten people unless you purchase more via DLC.  There is a somewhat open world design, where you can explore the map outside of just what the story requires, though there are boundaries in places and blockages that require skills that you earn later.  Being the type to explore more than what is required, I found myself quickly overleveled and was able to defeat lots of normal enemies in field combat; more on that in a moment.  

Unlike the first FAIRY TAIL where you traveled to different icons on a map and explored within, this one has a more open-world approach.  Here, when you leave Magnolia, you just walk out and explore the nearby forests, following paths around to wherever you like to go.  There is a well-designed map system, and there are several choke points that divide major map areas.  There are very few loading screens while playing, except between chapters and when you first start the game.  Backtracking is available though not required, and you can explore to find treasures, locations, and later on there is a quest to find every hidden Plue, and there are a lot, giving you incentive to visit every corner of the map.

As you might expect, a Fairy Tail game would not be complete without Natsu getting really fired up, and lots of battle to follow.  While the first game had a turn-based RPG approach with menus where you select actions, this one has you pressing face buttons that directly correspond with attacks in an almost real-time way.  When you run into an enemy, each visible creature on the map lines up in front of your party members, where you can select your opponent and go to town beating them up.  You use normal attacks by pressing 'X' on an Xbox controller.  Doing so charges up your SP meter, which you can spend to activate skills.  

Each skill requires a different amount of SP and performs a different action, with some being cheap and quick, while others hit very hard.  Some hit once or just a few times, while others hit many times.  Each type of skill attack has different benefits, since more powerful enemies have break and health bars.  Attacks that hit more times tend to do more break damage, giving those hits a big advantage in situations like that.  There are three skills that you can assign to the normal face buttons, and three more that you assign to those same buttons but with the RB button held.  In this way you have normal attacks along with six skills available.  Each character eventually learns more than six skills, so deciding what to keep available is part of the strategy involved in setting up the build for each of the Fairy Tail mages you control.

All characters in your party get experience at the same time, so as long as they are there they level pretty close to each other.  Mine were slightly out of sync, but not much, and it was easy to get them to the same level.  Each time you gain a level, called an Origin Rank, you gain Origin Points.  You can manually or automatically evolve your characters; since there are so many, I let the game auto-evolve everyone.  Once you hit max level (and I did because I explored so much) everything is unlocked, so it didn't ultimately matter what order I leveled things up in.  But if you want to grow your characters in a certain way, you certainly can direct it.  This is how you gain new skills and like most RPGs, levels directly correlate to your HP, damage, and more.

If Origin Rank approximates levels in most games, then Lacrima is the closest this game gets to equipment.  Each character can equip up to three Lacrima pieces, and each can bolster one or more stats significantly.  Later on you can also equip Ability Pieces into each Lacrima, making them even more powerful.  To summarize, you customize your characters primarily with equipping skills, Lacrima, and by which Magic Origin points you have allocated.  Every character's skills are unique to them, making team composition very important.  As an aside, only Wendy and Juvia can heal, so make sure at least one of them is always alive!  You can switch characters any time you aren't attacking in battle, making any skill just a moment away.

The game is fairly short if you don't explore everything.  But if you do aim for exploring every corner of the map like I did, then it's around thirty-five hours long, and likely quite a bit shorter if you do not.  I feel you will get the most value from this game if you are the type of gamer to explore every corner; if you are the type who goes straight from one main quest to the next, you might find the value much less for your money.

With that said, for fans of the series, there are a lot of scenes throughout, and throughout the map there are campfires.  At any campfire you can view Character Stories, which unlock as you meet certain requirements.  These are a highlight of the game if you love the characters in Fairy Tail. 

I feel compelled to point out that Gust still has their trademark 'Barrel' yell by investigating a few of the barrels located in Magnolia, a clear shoutout to Gust's Atelier series.  The combat seems to borrow many aspects from the Atelier Ryza series, with its focus on a faster-paced battle system.

The art style looks really nice, with a decent approximation of the anime-style art.  With settings on max, it looks quite good, but at a cost - the game demands surprisingly high system requirements.  My desktop, with a Ryzen 5950X and a RTX 3080, struggles to keep the game running at 4k resolution at 60 frames per second (fps).  My new gaming laptop did a bit better, with a 4090 mobile (close to a 4070 Ti desktop in performance, but with 16GB VRAM).  It does run pretty well on desktop Linux, but for some reason the cut scenes didn't play.  The game is Verified on Steam Deck, so there must be a setting I missed.  

The other thing, besides performance optimization, is that the game's audio would randomly stop playing back certain types of audio.  Usually combat or field voices would just stop playing after a while, and I would have to save and exit the game, and everything would come back after a restart.  This rarely happened during story sequences, but it would happen often while exploring the overworld.  I feel that there is plenty of room for optimization, especially on the PC version.  I still feel like the PC version is a great choice if you want a good looking game however, as you can play it at high resolutions and even set the frame rate to unlimited if you like.  Intel's XeSS is available for graphical upscaling if your hardware can't handle native resolutions, which I appreciate.  While using it I noticed that far away objects aren't quite as clear, but anything close up looks great.  Regardless, I hope they continue to improve optimization, as I feel there is more work to be done here.

The music is overall pretty fantastic.  Some songs return from the first FAIRY TAIL, and there are several new ones as well.  They fit in quite well with the Fairy Tail aesthetic.  The voice acting is sadly all in Japanese, though I honestly had no issue following along with the subtitles.  Like before, the voices are overall remarkably similar between the English and Japanese cast, which is a testament to how well those who dubbed the English anime adaptation did their jobs.

When it comes to appropriateness, there is no shortage of issues, just like the source material.  

To begin with, there is animated fantasy violence, which is common to games of this genre.  Enemies include humans, animal-like monsters, and darker mystical creatures as well.  Some enemies are dragons, demons, and various enemy mages including those who call themselves gods.  All characters are wizards and use magic; some throw fire or other powerful elemental attacks, while others summon creatures to do their bidding.  One character's skill is called 'Satan Soul' and she can transform into one of several demons.  Several characters refer to themselves as 'dragon slayers', 'god slayers', or 'demon slayers'.  It all seems pretty consistent with the kind of things you might find in the anime.  PG-13 level curse words are present, and include words like 'd*mn', 'h*ll', and '*ss'.  There are minor references to alcohol, but it's toned down dramatically compared to the previous game.

There are quite a few females meant to be attractive, and they quite often wear extremely exposing outfits.  This includes some of the main characters, who consistently wear very short shorts with exposed midriffs and significant cleavage.  Some characters, both friend and foe, wear extremely unrealistic outfits that would lead to nearly constant wardrobe malfunctions in real life.  Some of these women move in ways to draw attention to their cleavage as well.  There are also swimsuit outfits available, and a beach scene where you see everyone wearing their swimwear.  A couple of them also are either younger or 'less endowed', and discussions are made to that effect.

One of the male characters has a habit of stripping in front of everyone, and it's a long-running gag of the series.  He never takes off more than his shirt in this game.  There is one scene late in the game where an opponent magically causes a woman's clothing to disappear.  You don't see anything, but the scene plays out like it happened.  Given the circumstances, it's played both for laughs and as a foil to an enemy.

FAIRY TAIL 2 is a much shorter than the previous game, but is more fun for me because of the fast-paced combat.  There is a lot less value for your money, though.  It's certainly an enjoyable romp for fans of the franchise, and it certainly has its merits.  It gives a decent amount of time to character interactions, the stories are all interesting, and combat is fun and engaging.  There is still room for improvement, and performance and stability needs work.  Some parts of the story gloss over entire sections with just a few slides to summarize what just happened, especially early on, which is unfortunate.

Overall, I'm still really glad I got to play this game, even though I am not caught up on the anime.  I did catch up on the story via the first game, though.  Some players may want to catch up first, if you want to know what you missed.  Even without that, I was able to follow along pretty well.  If you are a fan of the show or manga, I think you'll enjoy this also, and I'm sure you have a pretty good idea of what kind of appropriateness issues to expect.  If you aren't a fan of Fairy Tail, I'd suggest watching the show or reading the manga first, both to familiarize yourself with them, and to give you a good idea on what to expect from this game when it comes to appropriateness.