It's Not Working! A Fairy Bloom Freesia Troubleshooting Guide

Based on the sheer number of threads on the forum about this game's issues (and the number of issues), I figure it's about time someone made this guide, even if everyone still goes to the forum anyway. So, without further ado, here's some known problems and solutions.

Foreword

Disclaimer: This does not necessarily represent a complete list of the issues with this game, or a guarantee that you will encounter any of them. Please post anything I missed in the comments and I'll try to add it in.

All credit for the fix-finding goes to the various discussion board members who had them; I have literally never had a problem with this game, apart from Esc hard-quitting (which is not a bug, just how the game is programmed).

This means I don't know how to fix your problems if they're not on this list - which is already a compilation of all the things I know how to fix. You're better off posting on the discussion board and hoping someone else discovers a solution.

I also haven't played the game in years; I'm keeping this guide updated as best I can (leave a comment if you find anything), but I've unsubscribed from the discussion board.

Problems with Known Solutions

If you have one of these problems and none of the suggested solutions fix it, let me know. I can't solve it, but I can move it down to problems without known solutions.

P: My achievements are disappearing! (From the ingame list.)
S: This can happen for a bunch of reasons, including if you accidentally pressed Esc and closed the game. It should re-award you any you've earned pretty quickly if you get back into the game.

P: The game won't run properly! It pops up a window asking if I want to update from version 111 to version 112 (with a bunch of Japanese stuff) but when I update, it still wants to update!
S: Don't update (click No every time it runs).
(Reason: Ver.112 is only for the Japanese version of the game and (according to the developer's Twitter) it just fixes a couple of text bugs with the demo, but the autoupdater code is still present in the English version.)
This bug is supposed to be fixed now - the broken auto-updater code has been removed.

P: Game crashes when I try to load my savegame!
S: Start a new game (your save file is most likely corrupted). I can provide save files, but after some contemplation decided not to link them right here so people who haven't played the game at all yet don't get tempted. A forum search will turn them up anyhow.

P: Game crashes when I beat Plum (may also happen with other bosses?)!
S: Disable Reverb in the options menu.

P: Ambient sound is incredibly loud!
S: Change from 5.1 to 4.1 or 4 surround sound. The game hates 5.1 for some reason.

P: The game won't run at all! Clicking Play does nothing, or pops up a window that rapidly disappears.
S: There seems to be a few different things that cause this one (links are to discussion board):

• Data Execution Prevention can cause this. Try disabling it - instructions here. This is probably a good thing to try first - it has the most "this fixed it!" responses out of all the suggested fixes.
  
• You might not have DirectX.
  
• The game does not like to run in fullscreen for some people. Try switching it to windowed mode before (or while, with alt+enter) running it and switching it into fullscreen in the ingame options afterwards.
• It could be a bugged update. Try disabling automatic updates and reinstalling.
  
• Or maybe the game EXE is just not happy; one person on the forums reported that getting another copy of the game and replacing the executable of the Steam version with the executable of the other version fixed it (which breaks Steam achievements for sure). Obviously this is not very practical for most.
  
• Try running the game executable directly and seeing if it gives you an error, instead of running it through Steam. (see also: missing DLLs)

P: I'm stuck on the main menu! It says to press the Accept button. What button is that?
S: The controls for this game are arrow keys and ZXCV, with Z being Accept and X being Cancel, so press Z. But I imagine you'd have checked the controls guide first anyway if you wanted to know that.

P: Menu selection constantly flies up/down, even if I don't press anything!
S: Try to get into the options menu to fix it - you'll need to disable "Use D-pad". And yes, this can happen even without a controller plugged in.
...Actually, you might want to check if you do have a controller plugged in and sitting on the floor first.

P: Characters don't show up! (Everything else does.)
S: Disable Stereoscopic 3D.

P: Game runs at a dizzying speed! (At >60 framerates.)
S: Disable VSync and the game will lock to 60; this is not a very elegant solution, but the game logic appears to be linked to the framerate...

P: All the text disappears when you switch the language to Japanese in the game settings.
S: Change your non-unicode system locale setting to Japanese via these steps[windows.microsoft.com] and restart your computer. (Thanks jay_rab!)
Note: This is required for many Japanese doujin games, not just this one, and won't break most English programs. It may change some system fonts and replace backslashes with yen symbols in some cases however. Some alternative methods of temporarily changing your system locale exist, but manually setting your system locale is by far the most reliable solution to this problem.

P: The game says it's missing DLLs ("3dxaudio1_7.dll is missing," and similar).
S: You may not have installed DirectX yet (which I strongly suspect is what gives the message reported here). It is generally good practice to try to obtain the packages that contain these DLLs from an official source like Microsoft's website (As of the time of this writing, the runtimes can be downloaded here[www.microsoft.com]), not by downloading the individual files from other websites.
Note: This will probably only happen on relatively newly built computers as older computers generally already have the DirectX runtimes - many other games also require them.

P: The game runs at a crawl (VSync on) or stutters badly (VSync off) despite good hardware.
S: Try putting Steam into offline mode, to disable steam cloud sync. (Steam->Go Offline). Source. Probably not the only possible cause, but worth a shot.

Problems Without Known Solutions

I don't know what the solutions are for these problems. They might be fixed; they might not. If you're not suffering from them, don't worry about them. Feel free to post more of them, but they're undoubtedly specific to your hardware, software or configuration (or just good old 'intermittent faults' triggered by some weird specific situation).
If you do know how to solve any of these, please let me know and I'll move it to the Known Solutions section.

From this guide's comments:

I had a weird one... I started the game fullscreen and once I got into the options menu, I tried to change the resolution to 1024x768 (which is what I have on this machine) - as soon as I went to confirm it the game crashed, with several scary-looking "fatal error" messages.

It works for me but its only at the main menu I cant play

From the forums:
Severe frame rate issues, sometimes. [Another thread suggested disabling V-sync for a similar issue. Might be worth a try.] Specific case resolved, sorta; moved to known solutions.
Achievement list has completely blank spots that aren't just unearned.
Some instances of people not being able to see backgrounds or characters, but not having a stereoscopic 3D option to disable
STATUS_BREAKPOINT crash during tutorial.

[Ironclaw]

Cool! Will add.

[jay_rab]

recently I was troubleshooting a framedrop issue for this, it turned out to be the steam cloud which caused the problem for them: http://steamcommunity.com/app/214590/discussions/0/208684375431203048/?tscn=1484360492

[Ironclaw]

Anime is Life: That's a new one for me, which given that I'm not connected with the developer means I don't know how to fix it. If it's still not working, I recommend that you post a thread on the discussion board with a bit more detail (does it show the main menu and crash? Does the play button not work? Does it crash while loading the first level? Does it show an error message?) and see if anyone else can help you.
If it's working now, I'd appreciate knowing what fixed it (or if it seemed to fix itself) to add to the guide.

[Duk]

It works for me but its only at the main menu I cant play

[Ironclaw]

Thanks jay_rab. I've added it to the guide. I've been trying to maintain this guide (and my forum presence) but my actual interest in Fairy Bloom Freesia is waning, and I've noticed you seem to be quite active lately. If you'd like to be added as a contributor, let me know, but I'm guessing you've got your own stuff going on.

[jay_rab]

If everything appears blank when you switch to japanese in the game settings, what you need to do is change your region settings to japanese via these steps: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/change-system-locale and restart the computer in order for the japanese text to display.

[Lilly]

I had a weird one... I started the game fullscreen and once I got into the options menu, I tried to change the resolution to 1024x768 (which is what I have on this machine) - as soon as I went to confirm it the game crashed, with several scary-looking "fatal error" messages.

[Ironclaw]

As mentioned under "game won't run at all!", people have found a few different things that helped them. Here is the most recent thread on the subject, where someone found that installing DirectX 9.0c fixed it for them.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/214590/discussions/0/616198900637672260/

But I'd say disabling DEP, as suggested in this slightly older thread, is probably more likely to work.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/214590/discussions/0/522728814601870657/#c37470848620934269

If you try both and it doesn't work, there's honestly not much more I can do, since I don't have this problem; I recommend posting in one of the threads.

I'll update the guide to be a bit more specific.

[Nice.nik555]

And if the game does not start? Press play and it does not turn on and says nothing.