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Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force PC Port Impressions

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Published: February 22, 2017 1:00 PM

I've played a lot of Fairy Fencer F over the years; I played through it on PlayStation 3 for my first review on TechRaptor, and I recently played through the recent PlayStation 4 enhanced re-release Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force for review last year as well. Naturally, I felt looking at Idea Factory International's PC release of Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force was something I should take a shot at.

First things first; the options menu. Most of the options FFF: ADF's (as it will be abbreviated, from here on out) PC version sports were also present on the console release. Varying audio levels, some controls configuration, and the ability to choose between Japanese and English voices were all present in one way or another on the western PlayStation 4 release of the title I played through last year. What's new here isn't much; you can choose between English, Japanese, and Chinese text - and you can use either of the game's dubs to go along with them. You can choose to play the game windowed, borderless windowed, or true fullscreen. You can decide to turn Shadows and/or Outlines on and off. You can change the resolution. Pretty standard PC options for the most part.

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Needless to say, FFF: , ADF's graphics options leave quite a bit to be desired. So what about default controls, and performance?

To be blunt, FFF: ADF's keyboard and mouse support isn't the best I've seen. To put matters a bit less lightly, I would honestly rather play the original Dark Souls PC port with a keyboard than FFF: ADF. Mouse controls allow for movement, but there's no good way to use it to move the camera instead. Although you can remap most inputs, there are some notable absences - for example, as far as I could tell there's no way to remap the dash. Controller support is perfectly fine and even allows you to use the mouse for the menus when you're using a gamepad as your "main" input.

Performance is a bit harder to quantify. I tested the game on two separate configurations - my desktop, with an i5 3570k (OC'd to 4.2GHz) and an R9 290, running Windows 7 - and my laptop, with an i7 6700HQ and a GTX 950m, running Windows 10. The game ran well enough on both systems, but I did consistently run into some issues on both platforms. On my desktop, videos simply would not play. On my laptop, hovering over areas on the world map would have almost a second long freeze before every began to work again. I managed to fix the latter issue (mostly) by transferring my game data to my laptop's SSD. One issue I had on both configurations was some weird texture glitch on the world map, revolving around the map's water sources. It's hard to catch a screenshot of the issue, though, so you'll have to take my word for it.

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To that end - I wouldn't call FFF: ADF's PC port "good", but it's certainly not the worst port I've ever seen either. It runs well, even on my laptop which is weaker than a PS4 in many ways. Still, even with the various upgrades, this is a PS3 game underneath. The game is still great, and if you don't have a PS4 this is certainly a viable way to play it - even if it has a few bugs as of the writing of this article. I wish the port could've been better, but I think it's still worth checking out if your computer both meets the game's recommended specs, and you have a controller with which you can play the game on your PC.

Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force was played on Steam with a copy provided by the publisher.

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James Galizio TechRaptor
| Former Staff Writer

Former Staff Writer for TechRaptor, technology and games in particular have been my passion my whole life, and to contribute to the industry has been my… More about James