Neopets: The Darkest Faerie for PlayStation 2 Reviews by Gamers

Neopets tries to create a fantastic world in which players can become involved and interested. Mystical creatures, aspiring heroes, dark powers and medieval townships are all mainstays of the action adventure genre, and so make appearances here. Unfortunately, even though the basic ingredients for an escapade worthy of remembrance have been provided, the essentials are all bland and the storyline that ties the unmemorable gameplay together is hardly entertaining.

The Neopets brand certainly makes for a worthwhile videogame. The opportunity to create an unnatural animal and quest about a fantastic world is appealing. Darkest Faerie sadly reserves its source material to fill in the setting, populating a gameworld with recognizable characters but not allowing the player to ever partake in the most genuinely appealing aspects of virtual pet or person creation and management. Instead we become stereotypical hero archetypes with limited specialties and predictable backgrounds.

The focus on set protagonists implies there would be a story worth getting into, but the choppy and generally poor computer generated cutscenes only serve to deliver a conventional good versus evil cartoon.

The actual gameplay, too, is hardly engaging. Most of Neopets involves tedious backtracking and tracking over the backtracking. There's a constant and ever escalating emphasis placed on fetching random items to initiate random actions. The eventual conclusion of all this seeking is the distribution of even more random fetch quests. Go grab this and report to Bob, says Jack. Thanks for reporting to me, now go back and report to Bob to get your next fetch quest. And the hero's tale continues.

There's something endearing about being a young peasant aspiring to become a somebody, and even something interesting about just wandering about the plainly decorated but clean and crisp world of Neopia, but even when glory is achieved and nothing can be said for it other than "now I have to seek out and fetch more important things," there's really a problem. It's in the design that Neopets truly falters.

The fetching wouldn't have been so irksome if the underlying mechanics behind platforming and combat at any range had been more engaging. Unfortunately, for as bland and uninteresting as the premises continually are, the action can be just as unexciting.

The simplistic strings of shooting and clubbing never really work well outside of the most primitive levels, and are often marred by poor camera work and a tendency to lean more toward scripted animation routines than the necessity to block at specific moments. There's also a real problem with exploitative maneuvers that will allow even the clumsiest of players to jump-slash their way to victory. At least there's a cool item and mote collection and application system that lets players gather a lot of unique elements to alter the effects of different items and combine them to open chests, solve minor puzzles, and even battle tougher foes with specific weaknesses.

Neopets also features a large gameworld. We appreciate it if only because it's there and populated with a number of texts, secrets, characters, and references to its source material. There's also a very sweet, cute feel to the game that's charming in inexplicable ways. Children at least will love the clean, vibrant art style and distinguishable characters. The combination of bright palettes, vast draw distances, and distinctly designed locales helps create a more interesting setting, at least.

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