I strongly urge players that are new to the franchise to try out Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force. If you are a returning player to the franchise, then you may end up liking this game.

Refrain Chord is definitely a nice fan service game for people who enjoy the series as most of the characters (both good and evil) are playable because they aren't fated to die this time around. The story this time feels a bit out of place and assumes the player knows each character from the returning cast. An example of this is in the beginning of the game, where most of the main group of protagonists get swapped out by Dorfa executives and Sherman is just chilling with them. The game just assumes the player knows why Sherman is so susceptible to changing his moral compass so easily.

The combat has an-okay feel to it, but I have two gripes against it. First off, Glace is in every battle you do. Some battles force you to eliminate her; while some require you to keep her alive. Glace's presence in every battle is to introduce some sort of difficulty and prolong the battle by giving enemy forces one of the following effects: Increased Attk or Def or decrease wait time or heal %HP (I could be missing one more effect).The other gripe is that the battle animations are a bit lack luster when compared to the previous entry in the franchise.

I see a lot of people complaining that the game isn't english dubbed, but nobody really talks about the few points I have mentioned.

Overall the game is just that, a nice fan service-y game. If you enjoy the series, go ahead and pick it up. Please do not expect an amazing story like you do in Advent Dark Force, but if you miss the characters and want to see more bromance or a bit of sh*tposting then you'll like this game.


Edit: messed up spoiler formatting

First, let's start with a simple request to IF as a publisher/developer.
Please, fire your whole localization team and get one that wants to do a good job instead of inserting ♥♥♥♥ that will get old in the blink of an eye or directly ignores what the character is saying to insert their own story.

If you aren’t reading this during a sale, go no further, this is IF’s most expensive game they have published to date, but at the same time is the one that reuses most assets, animations, OST, etc.
Not worth neither for fans nor newcomers at a whopping 50€.

Wait, how can a game not be targeted to any audience at all?
Refrain Chord is a game sitting in a strange crossroad. It changes the genre of the game from turn based RPG to strategy RPG, so fans of that kind of gameplay are left behind.
The story is neither a full reboot, nor a sequel, but chooses to start at something like 20% of the original game story progression, leaving newcomers confused about who the characters are, their relations, etc, since we don’t even get introductions.
At the same time, it treats itself like some kind of alternative ending but skipping part of the journey and mixing the character growth from before and after the time leap, making the old fans feel confused about what exactly to expect from them.
So, after explaining this, I hope everyone gets why nobody is welcomed here, fans won’t get something substantial, and newcomers should be redirected to advent dark force instead.

The game is, if I’m not mistaken, 25 chapters long.
Wow, that’s a lot!
Well, not really, almost every chapter follows the same structure:
• Talk in the inn/fountain.
• Click on map (SRPG has no exploration), short chat.
• Battle.
• After battle conversation ending with “let’s continue talking in the city” (the next part of the conversation is always the opening of the next chapter so there’s not even a full convo as opening per chapter)
Some chapters have the rare trick battle->second conversation->real battle, but the gist is that.

Understood, but it’s the plot good?
Not really.

I have read some people arguing that Refrain Chord tries to mimic what Mary Skelter 2 was, a retelling of the story of the first game with a few changes so we get a big party for a sequel. Reminder that there’s no route on FF:ADF that has all the party members alive at the end.
But I don’t find that comparison doing justice to MS2.
Mary Skelter 2 starts at the same point MS:N does but with Otsuu and Little Mermaid accompanying Red Riding Hood, and from that point onwards everything changes. The story makes the characters a blank slate again and develops them and their personalities in different directions compared to the first instalment. The story, despite having the same premise, is used to expand the lore and key elements of the world, with special emphasis in Blood Skelter, something that there receives the treatment it deserves after being shrug off in the first one despite being the biggest fear and danger a Blood Maiden must confront.
Meanwhile, Refrain Chord tosses you in the middle of the first act of the story, but with characters having a weird mix in their personality between their developed selves from any of the routes the developers picked for them and the starting way the character was (which will be quickly overwritten).
The new characters and key points don’t help either in create an engaging story, since most of them will quickly set into the group and pushed to the sideline to introduce the next character and the “mysteries” (all more obvious than usual) collide with the driving force of the cast, still chasing after furies and never trying to learn more about their enemy true intentions.
The dark tone that combined with the jokes of the original is also mostly gone, here everything will get resolved quickly and with a happy ending.

After going through the story part, you must think, how can the new characters get sidelined so quickly if the previous main cast is already ensembled by the start of the game.
Well, we just speedrun the Heel-Face turn trope again and again and again.
This game won’t take it’s time to develop the enemies and how Fang feels about them, you will always have the same progression: Enemy appears as boss from the chapter->next chapter the enemy joins the party after a weak talk.
This is embarrassing because despite there being some examples that more or less makes sense (despite this supposedly being the starting Fang and not the one trying to amend all his needlessly killings after some reflection and getting the chance with the time leap) others are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ laughable, at the point of a psychopath attacking you and trying to murder you, and in less than 1 minute conversation (depending on the speed you are reading it) him already joining you and being a good ally for the rest of the game.
Others directly are different from their starting point just because they are, without further explanation nor development (worst offender Sherman, who just goes in one scene “this is what must be done, but I won’t do it because I have changed. When dude? When did you change? because you clearly hadn’t changed in the previous chapter).
But I guess is what we get when we need to rush character after character to increase the party and keep introducing new foes.

The relationships at the inn also return for this game, but despite them being a perfect way to develop the characters, they are just gags for the biggest part and pretext for subquest in the rest.

I’m reaching Steam’s word count for reviews (301 longer than it should first time trying to publish it) so I’ll make this section short.
TL;DR: unapologetic GRINDFEST, and yes, grindfest needs to be in capital letters.
Gameplay itself is as basic as it gets, is an SRPG but with the S watered down to the bare minimum requirement to still add it in the genre. Hyperdevotion Noire, being from the same publisher, has more complexity and better art direction, map verticality/strategy and art/models than this game.
I recommend playing on easy, I played in hard and the only thing I can say about it is that you need to be careful of chip damage doing bigger numbers, the rest has the exact same ratio of difficulty be it easy, normal or hard.
In every battle you will have a plethora or mobs that get copy pasted until madness and a copy of Glaze, because yeah, Glaze will be in every fight no matter what.
Battle are looooong, not because complex or needing you to think, but because they are slow, the “speed up” option is not toggleable and needs of your constant input and Glaze itself is resistant to almost any damage you make, the enemies are always disperse and you need to eliminate them, but stay closer to your allies to use the buffs.
Animations are either recycled from ADF or non-existent. Models are deformed versions, not being as good as they were there (10yo game btw) and being worse than going full Chibi.
OST is the same as ADF. Adding only the songs of the Muse’s abilities (they did really, really dirty Ishikawa Yui here).
Maps are just flat surfaces with minimal detail (yes, there are different heights, but no detail).
There’s only one quest per quest rank, the rest are done via inn interactions with characters and the new world shapping is a step back from the og one, this one being a tedious grind that gives you items, requires special energy to play it (2 units per battle, and at the time of writing this on chapter 18 after doing every subquest available I’m ~50% so the game expects me to make some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ free battles for this)

If you like Fairy Fencer and want to see the characters in a “new” adventure go ahead and get the game, just be prepared to be disappointed.
If you are new to the franchise or love it, go play Advent Dark Force.

Genuinely one of the worst SRPGs i've ever played. Could've genuinely been a Vita launch title (and that is NOT a compliment.)

If you have any lingering affection for Fairy Fencer and it's lovable cast like I do, please don't let them use that to sucker you out of money for one of the laziest and most boring sequels i've ever attempted to suffer through. You're not missing anything story-wise anyway since they just rebooted the timeline and characters AGAIN. So it's all effectively non-canon.

To quickly run through all the problems this game has though:

-Copy pasted enemies everywhere, you'll be seeing the same models over and over and OVER. especially Glace. Glace will be copy pasted into every single battle you do it feels like. And no, putting (shadow) next to the name and writing some one-off line about how she can make shadows of herself is not an excuse lol

-Basically 0 customization, most sub faries are useless, most gear you can buy in the shop will be worse than what party members started with several chapters ago.

-Difficulty curve is just a flat line. The game is never challenging, most enemies can barely scratch you while you just mow through them.

-The 3D models in battle, especially for the party members are just so ugly. I'm pretty sure the devs just aren't talented anything to pull this kinda thing off. All the way back in 2014 Hyperdevotion Noire looked BETTER on Vita, and thats because they didn't kid themselves by trying to do proper models, just some decently cute looking chibi ones instead.

-The singers aren't actually an interesting mechanic. As party members all they do is just sit there with a buffing aura around them when their songs are active. And when the songs aren't up, they're practically worthless (can't attack, very mediocre single-target buffs, no healing moves.)

-World shaping, the most unique mechanic in the original game has been replaced by the most pathetically boring mini-game I've ever seen. Stabbing swords into squares on the world map and getting items you'll basically never need, wooo, so exciting!

After 10 years from the release of Advent Dark Force, Fairy Fencer F is back... as a Tactics RPG?

It is hard to talk about the plot of this game without spoilers (You probably know why if you played the first game), but as far as it goes I think it does a good job of telling a new story within the same world and characters we know.

About that change of gameplay, as mentioned this time the game is a Tactics RPG where the position of your characters is key. I think that the game does a nice job on using the fairies as a way to personalize your characters, each fairy gets points from battle that you can spent on new Skills and better Stats like "+2 STR" or "+10HP", and with enough points you can even get skills that are independent of the fairy and you can freely equip to any character.

This game introduces a new type of character called "Muses" that instead of fighting they help their team with a song that emits an aura that improves the stats of the units inside. It is a fun mechanic and I really like how each aura is a different song and how when both teams have a Muse singing both songs get mixed, is a really nice detail. With that said, I think that the excuse that the game gives you of why every single fight has an enemy Muse is kinda dumb, like seriously do we really need some random monsters in a cave to have their own Muse helping them?

This is a decent follow up of Advent Dark Force, but it definitely feels like the budget of this game was A LOT smaller than the last game. By the way... I am surprised how little this game was advertised, like not even the official Idea Factory Twitter account promoted the game before release, I would not be surprised if 90% of people that played Advent Dark Force don't know that this game exists at all.

A new FF game which isnt a sequel but yet ANOTHER re-telling.

This games story takes place just before you meet Pippin and have started fighting Ethel for the first few times. This means if you never played the first game or Advent dark force then your going to be utterly lost on the story or its characters.

You'll then either read up a quick summary or go play ADF and realise that's the better game than what this one is.

FF Refrain chord also changes things with it now being tactical turn based over the traditional JRPG turn based system that the previous games had. As a result you quickly find out just how repetitive everything really is and how tactics mean nothing as you can just do the same thing for each battle.

Your character has about 8 songs in total. Glace has 2 (MIGHT be 3 actually) so get used to listening to the same sounding songs over and over again for the next 50-60 hours.

Theres no English dub either and whilst people are claiming it's because of X or Y reason....I'm fairly sure it's because of the Japanese singers in the game and the fact their a big part of it. IF probably felt it would seem strange having these 2 speaking English one moment, then singing Japanese the next.

FF Refrain Chord is an ok game but its definitely NOT the sequel we were all preying for and what's worse is the ending reveal which just makes you wonder why they didnt just give us a proper sequel to begin with.

Theres then the censorship issue which has happened alot with IF with its latest releases.
Mary skelter got censored upon release but then uncensored after the uproar. Sisters vs sisters came out alright but then got force censored a month later due to swearing.

This game has swearing but it's all in Japanese so I doubt it will suffer the same fate SvsS did. However you can tell the overall tone of the game has been lowered with certain aspects (Ethel shows you zero interest now) and some things like the relationships between other characters either is none existent or just flat when compared to how they were before.

A more detailed review can be seen here:

https://youtu.be/b2Y8xy6zr_0

So as of the time I'm writing this review, I think I've seen and played enough to be able to give an opinion on whether the game is good or not. Please remember this is MY opinion so don't get all pissy if you disagree. That said.. Yeah, I think the game is fun enough to get on sale. I don't think it's as good as the original or Dark Force, and I'll address those issues here:

Graphics: 8/10 -
Unless you're a graphics snob who thinks every "old" game needs to have updated graphics (it doesn't), the graphics for this one is fine. It uses the same style (or assets) from the original FF and FF: DF games so there's a lot of familiarity to the game in that sense. Of course that also means they don't have many new enemies, but considering you're in the same region and this takes place around the mid-point of Fairy Fencer's story, it's not really that big a problem. If you went to new areas and still saw the same thing, then that would be an issue.

Plot: 6/10 -
Personally I don't think it was needed (or wanted) to have this storyline with the Songstress over a continuation of Dark Force's, but there IS a connection to the previous Dark Force game, multiple call backs and it may reveal that it's more connected than I initially thought when I actually finish the game. It is enough of a Fairy Fencer type game for me, even if I would have preferred the original game play style over SRPG's style. It does feel a bit..budgeted in that sense.

Gameplay: 5/10
It's a SRPG, there's not really much that's new to the concept or mechanics to write home about. If you've played one SRPG you've pretty much played them all. The only thing new would be the addition of Fleur's song system, but the combat still feels weirdly..nerfed in the way that abilities and items are handled, but I could be biased for the original system.

Localization: 3/10 -
Here is one of the problems exists. While some people will ♥♥♥♥♥ about "NoEnGlIsHdUB" that isn't what the issue with the game actually is - the issue is in localizers not doing a proper job in translating and forcing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ memes and interpreting things incorrectly. Two such examples:
Fang comments on Eryn being a reliable partner.
Localizers: Fang - "You're a strong independent woman! You can carry all those things yourself!"
In fairness, I was amused a little because any line that trashes Eryn is a good one in my opinion.

Example #2:
Harley comments that in Fairizing, a fairy enters the fencer's heart. Naturally Fang and Eryn are opposed to this idea.
Tiara says in Japanese: You're just being shy
Localizers -Tiara- "Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?"
♥♥♥♥. You. Localizers. Not only is this not a funny line, not only is it NOT what was said, but it's SO FREAKING OUT OF CHARACTER. HOw hard can it be to just DO YOUR JOB RIGHT? This isn't even "I want a 1:1 translation. No, I want a CORRECT translation, and arguments of "oh its so hard to interpret Japanese for western audiences" made by people too lazy to read is 500% wrong.

I will say that the English voice cast was fine in the original games, and would be even better if they gave the lines the way they're supposed to be, but having the Japanese voice only doesn't detract from the game in any way shape or form. Except for the localization being ♥♥♥♥♥♥ or if you can't be bothered to read anyway. That aside, I did catch a small number of typos and grammar mistakes, (not that many so far though) so again.. do your damn jobs properly, people.

Characterization: 7/10-
The characterization is something I had a problem with as there is a CLEAR dissonance between the way the characters act in the main story, and the way they act in the private scenarios (which don't have nearly enough Tiara imho. I could have done with Less Eryn and Sherman. :p I.E. None). In the main story the writers decided to double down on Fang acting stupid to hide his real personality a good 95% of the game, resulting in almost the ENTIRE PARTY dogpiling and insulting him in the most toxic and disrespectful way possible. It gets incredibly grating and annoying. In the private scenarios, on the other hand, the characters interacting with Fang behave like their normal selves, without calling him an idiot all the time.

Romance: 9/10
Some people might have said "there's no romance!" in the game. They're wrong. Romance is STILL part of the game - there are multiple scenes in which the girls imply that they have feelings for Fang, or are envious of the others who have a closer relationship with him (specifically Tiara and Eryn who are the main ship anyway). They even have a private scene with Tiara and Fang in which they play the Tiara/Fang Love song. But apparently because its not progressed, or perhaps because it's subtle -- and it always has been, again because it takes place in the MIDDLE of the story not the end) people whine that there's no romance.

Maybe I got too detailed with it but I tried to keep spoilers out. There are supposed to be two routes, which I haven't finished yet, so hopefully they improve on the treatment of Fang. I don't have any hope for localization to get better..in any game...ever..though.

I have no idea what this game is about, but the white pokemon looks cute. ^_^

I Don't Recommend This Game
First 14 Minutes: https://youtu.be/mkl6gTbxa24

Pro
- Music

Con
- Controls

Can't say I'd recommend this to anyone that hasn't played FFF:ADF already.

This is neither a sequel nor a remake. The game is pretty clearly intended to be a supplement to FFF:ADF where it adds an additional storyline. You can think of it like a fandisc. This means that you are fully expected to have played FFF:ADF first before playing this. Do expect old CG to be reused, though there are new characters as well.

Now, if you like sRPGs, this does have some interesting mechanics compared to many sRPGs. I wouldn't say the mechanics are unique, but some are done in an interesting way. That said, not everyone will like the mechanics.

The music is nice, but might not be to everyone's taste. The dual song mechanic in battle is definitely a hit or miss. You have two songs playing by trading off lines in essence. This means that for some people, it doesn't sound right while for others, it could sound great. Definitely a hit or miss there.

The story is definitely a bit off, but no more than ADF already was. You have some rather extreme personalities that will flip very quickly. This is more understandable in the main game where you get to see more of the character and learn what their thought processes are. Even then, some of those swaps were a bit odd. Here, they don't give you all that background information, so again, you are expected to have played ADF first.

In summary, if you enjoyed ADF and sRPGs, then you can give this a try, but play at least one ending/route of ADF first to better understand the characters.


Edit: I noticed one review mentioned having to keep Glace alive. That isn't true from what I've played so far. The wording in the game is bad, but those fights, Glace does not matter for victory. Basically, the wording means kill all enemies, but you can ignore Glace. You can tell because Glace dying is not a defeat condition.

Basically, there are a lot of issues with the translation. For example, one quest says to use "Seal Magic" and "Seal Physical", but the skills are "Silence" and "Seal". This is a translation issue.

Edit: Another issue. If you have multiple audio devices, the game uses whatever is active when you run the game. That means to switch audio devices, you have to end the game and start it again.

Check out our Steam curator , YouTube channel and Twitter!

[Kawaii/Strategy] FFF series released in 2022. This time, tactical adventure RPG themed songs with several elements such as step difference. Usual cute anime 3D modelings, 2D stills.
[カワイイ] 同名ゲーム世界版。