The bad: The story is not engaging. Leveling up your fairies will require long, tedious grinding. Evolving your fairies will not always make them stronger. The graphics are dated by today’s standards. Only one save slot per game, and it is automatically used whenever you change areas. The game lacks an automap feature.
The tally: 8 / 10
About the Game
Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal was first released on December 2002, and it shows. The graphics are dated by today’s standards. Despite that, the game play is engaging, and if you can look past the graphics, you’ll find yourself coming back to Zanzarah again and again.You play Amy, an eighteen-year-old English girl who is magically whisked to Zanzarah, a world where elves, dwarves, goblins, and fairies had happily co-existed until recently. It seems that fairies have gone mad, attacking hapless folk for no reason. To top it all, shadow elves have appeared on the surface and are attempting to take over the land. It was prophesied long ago that only a human can set things right, and of the six billion or so people in our world, Amy was inexplicably chosen to be that savior.
The story is where Zanzarah is weakest. It merely serves as a pretext for Amy to go on her adventure. There is no deeper motivation for Amy to help the folk of Zanzarah, no opportunities for personal growth and development. All the characters are two-dimensional, except for Amy, who has no personality to speak of. You will never feel any strong emotions toward any of the characters. There is a lot of potential for a story about a girl who meets fairies, but all this has gone to waste in this game.
In Zanzarah, elves, dwarves, and goblins are civilized folk, and they never resolve conflicts by beating up or hacking at each other. No, they let fairies do their dirty work for them. If you, as Amy, are to earn a modicum of respect from the local populace, you would do well to collect your own set of fairies and train them to defeat others. This method of conflict resolution seems somewhat stilted, and one wonders how the game would have progressed if someone like Max Payne or Duke Nukem had been chosen to save Zanzarah instead.
Make no mistake about it. Zanzarah is a Pokemon clone. You’ll even use something like Pokeballs to collect the fairies that you capture. Nevertheless, there are enough differences in its game play to justify Zanzarah’s inclusion in my list of standout games. Combat is implemented as a first-person shooter, in which you control one of your fairies and blast the opposition with its spells. Offensive spells are powered up by holding down the left mouse button and fired when you release the button. If you hold down the button too long, however, the spell will backfire.
Your fairy flies up whenever you click the right mouse button. Flying expends your fairy’s stamina, however, and if your fairy is too tired to pull itself out of a bottomless portion of the arena, it will die.
You can keep as many as five fairies with you at any point in time. The set of fairies that you have with you is called a deck, a term that seems to hearken to Pokemon’s incarnation as a trading card game. You choose your deck from your entire fairy collection, which is kept in your house in London, and you take your deck with you wherever you go. If, during a battle, you want to switch your current fairy with some other fairy in your deck, you may do so. Only fairies that participate in and survive a battle earn experience points, so if you find that your fairy is being beaten to within an inch of its life, you will probably want to switch it with some other fairy.
You will also meet elves, dwarves, and goblins who are fairy masters, just like you. They will challenge you to a duel of fairies, pitting their decks against yours. Since fairies fair better against some types of fairies than others, both you and your opponent will do a lot of fairy switching during the course of the duel. You cannot capture fairies that are owned by other masters, so feel free to obliterate them as you please. Sometimes, you will also be attacked by a group of fairies that have no apparent master. As these fairies are not wild despite having no master, you will not be able to collect them.
As your fairies level up, most of them will eventually have a chance to evolve into some higher form, yet another concept that was borrowed from Pokemon. Evolving a fairy will not necessarily make it stronger, however, so unless you want to collect all fairy types, you may want to cancel a fairy’s evolution before it takes place. The only way for you to know if a fairy’s evolved form is weaker or stronger than its previous form (short of looking it up on the Internet) is to allow it to evolve. If you’ve saved your game before one of your fairies evolves, you can revert back to your saved game if you prefer to keep you fairy in its current form.
It is tempting to try to have each fairy type represented in your collection even though the game does not reward you for catching them all. The appearance of your fairies range from the genuinely creative to the downright silly, so having a chance to look at each of them at your leisure may be motivation enough to complete your collection.
Considering the large number of fairy types to choose from, you are bound to spend a considerable amount of time leveling up some fairies only to find another fairy that you will want to use instead. Leveling up your fairies will turn out to be a long and tedious grind, a necessary evil if you are to hurdle the tough encounters that await you.
Saving and reloading are instantaneous for all intents and purposes. If Amy dies or loses a fight, the game will automatically reload from your save slot. Unfortunately, you only have one save slot per game, and this gets automatically overwritten every time you move from one area to another. Also, your character’s position in the game world is never saved, so every time you reload, you will be repositioned at the starting point of your current area.
The world of Zanzarah is vast, and you will have to revisit some of the areas a number of times. Fortunately, you will have a chance to get rune stones that can teleport you to some of the areas that you have been to. A number of areas have twisting paths that double back to themselves, which would have made an automap feature welcome, if only the game had it. Because the game lacks such a feature, however, you are bound to get lost in these areas quite often.
Room for Improvement
Zanzarah does a number of things right. A creature collection metagame emerges out of its design, just as it does in the Pokemon games. Its combat system is an improvement over Pokemon and makes for an appropriately brief and exciting experience. Nevertheless, I’ve mentioned a number of shortcomings that could have been improved upon. The story could have been better, and an automap feature would have been welcome. Also, it would have been nice if there was more than one save slot in the game and if Amy’s location could have been saved as well.If I were to choose just one aspect of the game to improve upon, it would be to tone down the difficulty of the non-random encounters while increasing their number. The way the game is currently designed, you would have to seek out way too many random encounters to level up your fairies sufficiently to survive the non-random encounters that Amy will have to hurdle so as to advance the story. I would have kept grinding to a minimum, ensuring that each set encounter will prepare the players' fairies sufficiently to survive the next set encounter. I would have to increase the number of set encounters in the process, but at least I would have minimized the players’ reliance on random encounters that do not advance the story in any way.
