You know when you see something and just think, “That’s cute,” afterwards? The thing in question didn’t inspire deep thought, didn’t incite a strong emotional response, and probably didn’t leave a lasting impact. It was cute, though. Like walking outside into a cool breeze before heading to your next destination. Like a stranger giving you a brief smile, maybe a bonus nod, when you accidentally lock eyes on a sidewalk. That’s the feeling I have walking away from my time with Philna Fantasy. It’s a quaint, little action-RPG that doesn’t do anything particularly arresting, but it doesn’t have notable problems either.

A classic fantasy adventure, minus the space ship

Source: Another Indie

Philna Fantasy starts with a couple of blue collar space travelers chopping it up inside their ship about “The Game” while we see it from the outside. They accidentally release their cargo too early, shrug, and head back home. Gotta catch The Game. The cargo is you, an adventurer who needed to be dropped into an alien planet for the sake of bopping monsters and collecting color-coded equipment. Kind of like Predator, if instead of the monstrous Yautja we had an alien race of tabletop RPG dorks space-dropping in cosplay. Bizarre setup aside, you wind up in a settlement built around a properly generic adventuring guild, which you promptly join before setting out to fulfill missions posted on the community board.

As a properly generic adventurer, you choose a class from a set of four, then set out into dungeons to earn XP, find loot, fill out a skill tree, and engage with other more bespoke forms of progression. Pets are a big deal in Phila Fantasy for example, as well as a Magic Belt that you can insert cards (gained from grinding monsters) into for various passive bonuses. It can overheat if you overuse the same cards, though, so there’s a weird bit of build-juggling going on if you bother. I’m a lifelong berserker, though, so I’m more concerned about swinging my big axe around anything that moves. Magic’s for nerds.

Bountiful buttons

Source: Another Indie

This is a relatively simple game, but there are a lot of buttons. The UI looks kind of busy, but ultimately what you’re playing is something like a mash-up of Zelda and Diablo. It’s an action-RPG with resource management and skills you assign to buttons after learning them. But there’s also an element of environmental puzzle-solving, including abilities that do things like make plants grow into de facto platforms. You could make comparisons to the Mana series, although Phila is incredibly light on storytelling, so don’t mosey over here looking for Square Enix levels of narrative ambition.

Fighting words

Source: Another Indie

Combat itself is… fine. It’s fine! Your approach will vary based on your chosen class, of course. But generally speaking, the action moves fairly slowly and you’re not going to be facing down hordes of enemies at once. Typically as you go through a dungeon you’ll be stopped in a room, and asked to deal with no more than three or four critters at a time. They come at you at a leisurely pace, and you can dodge their attacks without much intensity required. They don’t give a single iota of a hoot about hit stun though, so mashing your way into a crowd is a fast way to eat preventable damage. Not great news for a berserker, at least not until you get some healing skills. The point is, the pace is quite slow, and enemies are often chunkier than you’d expect. So since there isn’t exactly “sauce” on the plate here, things can get repetitive pretty quickly. Even when you unlock new skills and buttons to play with.

There is some spice when it comes to bosses, however. These things are big and really bring out the skill from the game’s artists to the forefront, both in design and animation. There’s a fun anime-like introduction for each one, complete with a Mega Man-style name splash and wonderfully cheesy guitar riff. The mechanics get wild too, with all kinds of screen-filling attacks, bullet hell spreads, and challenges that test not just your reaction speed, but your ability to parse what the game is trying to communicate. If you can’t decipher the situation and remedy, you’ll eat damage. It’s good stuff that incorporates all your tools, even the environmental puzzle skills that aren’t normally part of combat. They’re big ol’ HP sponges, though, which lends to the repetition problem I’ve alluded to already. Once you’ve figured it out and put the boss on the ropes, you’ll have to repeat the loop a few more times too many.

Long story short, Phila Fantasy is cute. It’s a neat, simple action-RPG that sets out to do a few things, and accomplishes them well enough to offer a dozen or so hours of fluffy entertainment. If you like to run around a new world, bonk some monsters, and make some numbers go up, you can do worse. You can probably do a lot better as well, though. If you’re concerned about the limited time you have left on this planet, you might come away from this adventure a little frustrated. But if you’re the type of digital adventurer who likes to dip their toes into everything possible, there’s a nice little chunk of video game to enjoy here. Just don’t expect to find your new favorite this time.

Philna Fantasy is available now on the PC. A code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He’s far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.

Pros

• Pleasant art and sprite animations
• Engaging mix of RPG elements and environmental puzzles
• Cute pets

Cons

• Kind of generic, shallow writing
• Nothing about it really stands out
• Repetitive combat mechanics that stand out due to durable enemies

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