If you want an idea as to what this game is like, try combining Castlevania 2 - Simon's Quest's gameplay with Atelier Rorona's art style and Dark Souls' AI / difficulty in your mind. The storyline is adorable and the graphics are colorful, but the play control and difficulty will give you a massive headache. Wandering monsters with stun mechanics or knockback abilities will ruin your day as they are extremely difficult to dodge. Bottomless pits are everywhere, so knockback enemies are particularly dangerous here. There is no status immunity and there is no way to overlevel to make the game easier - the game caps your level dependent on the number of a certain relic you've obtained.

If you're in for a challenge and enjoy sidescroller ARPG gameplay, you will like this game. If you're the average COD or Madden obsessed gamer, stay at least 50 feet away!

I don't normally review games I haven't finished. There are loads of games I just don't like and I couldn't bring myself to finish. I never bothered to give them a poor review simply because they weren't my cup of tea; to me, that's a bit disingenuous. However, if I cannot finish a game due to design flaws so astonishingly glaring and blatant, well... then it's fair game. And Fortune Summoners is definitely fair game.

This game is broken. Full stop.

Let's start at the beginning. Fortune Summoners is a side-scrolling action RPG developed by former indie game dev Lizsoft. Apparently their games haven't sold enough to warrant further investment, so I heard they shut down. It's a very charming game with graphics reminiscent of the 16-bit era's "last hurrah" during the mid 90s. The characters are adorable and well-designed while the story is simple but cute and a nice refreshing break from all the blood, metal and grime that seems to permeate gaming these days.

The story may be simple but the game's combat system has a lot of depth. There's quite a bit of different techniques you can pull off, with Arche, the protagonist, having a wide variety of sword skills that can be used to deal with various enemies. Sana and Stella are the mages, where water-aspected Sana fills the support and healing role with only sub-par offensive magic, Stella brings the pain with fire-based damage dealing. The AI scripting controls two of the characters while the player controls one--you can swap between them on the fly in the middle of a fight and it feels like the developer expected swapping character control to be a major facet of gameplay.

So what's the problem, you might ask? How is Fortune Summoners broken, if it has no major bugs and seems to be a cute little Japanese indie title?

Two words: difficulty and controls.

Fortune Summoners suffers from the absolute worst difficulty curve I've ever seen in any game I've ever played. Part of the problem here is that everything is so extreme. Arche can take a reasonable amount of punishment, but when she does damage she might as well be wielding a feather instead of a sword. Even basic enemies at-level can take such an enormous number of hits before they go down. It's simply tedious. Sana and Stella have the defense of wet tissue paper and enemies can rapidly kill them, especially since all of their best offensive powers--their magic, of course--takes some time to activate and any hit will interrupt their spell-casting. It doesn't help that Sana's first offensive spell cannot be aimed directly forward, but forward and down, making hitting anything at all nearly impossible without getting right in its face (and then being interrupted forever). The magic-users hit hard, but they also take hits hard and trying to set them up to kill things is quite a chore (though Stella does make things a lot easier once you get her on your team).

The difficulty of this game is beyond challenging and enters the realm of punishing. Monsters can strike you repeatedly and you do not get a moment of invincibility after being hit, so you can easily be juggled to death by a small group of basic enemies around you. The enemy AI scripting is way, way too tight--enemies will read your moves as you use them and dodge your more powerful techniques with annoying regularity. This, to me, is poor game design--if you want to make a side-scroller where the enemies are very good at dodging attacks and the skill factor is placed on precision and timing, you really can't also turn every basic mook into a damage sponge. That's just absurd.

The difficulty settings don't seem to do much, either. Setting the game to "Easy" didn't seem to affect damage dealt or received. Monsters seemed to still have exactly the same number of HP. The only real difference I could even detect is that you receive less XP from monsters (how backwards is that?) and the number of healing items that drop from slain enemies seems to be higher.

The difficulty curve is bad enough, but it's exacerbated and amplified, cranked up to eleven, by the controls. The controls in this game are an utter trainwreck. I've played unlicensed hacked NES cartridge games with better controls than this game. Movement is very imprecise and "slidy" with a significant amount of inertia to almost every movement. Turning around is slow, especially when enemies are hitting you (and, of course, you get no invincibility frames after being hit). In order to perform any of Arche's special moves, which you'll need to do in order to fight effectively, requires that you tap out a combination within a very narrow window. It feels like a bad fighting game in some ways, where instead of rolling your thumb across the d-pad in a quarter circle and then pressing Attack, you have to tap down, tap left and, while you tap left, also tap the attack button. It's terribly unintuitive and needlessly finicky.

For a lighthearted title like this, combat should be relatively easy to learn but potentially hard to master with a smooth curve from being able to kill the enemies and progress to pulling off insane combos and specials in rapid succession once you've practiced. This game is not like that at all. The gameplay is brutally demanding of precision and exact button timing to the point where the entire combat system feels like a giant disjointed string of quick-time events rather than smooth and fluid action.

The combat system in Fortune Summoners could be a joy to play if they fixed the absurd precision requirements. For example, you should be able to hold the direction while using the attack button to perform a special move, rather than having to tap both buttons within a few milliseconds of each other else the attack simply fails and Arche performs a basic standing attack. Turning around should be faster. Executing a dodge roll should be a single button press or a double-tap of left or right, and the dodge roll should yield invincibility frames for the entire animation.

Even running and walking is needlessly clunky. To run you have to double-tap the d-pad... and it doesn't matter which direction you double-tap. I can't count how many times I've run off an edge and fallen into a pit in the middle of battle because I tapped two opposing directions too rapidly in succession. That should never happen; in a game with two movement speeds, you should be able to hold a button down to run or walk! The jumping mechanics in the game are extremely strange as well, allowing a great deal of movement while in mid-air as well as your run speed unaffecting your jump distance. You can leap over a large pit from a dead stop and trying to get a running start adds no distance to your jump. This is unintuitive and runs counter to basically every platform side-scroller ever made. The controls in Fortune Summoners are so horrendously awful and counterintuitive that I spent the entire time playing, all six hours or so, trying to intentionally forget the muscle memory I built up from years of 8- and 16-bit console gaming.

I really wanted to like this game. I really did. It ticks most of my boxes when it comes to RPGs and being a side-scroller had me feeling a bit of nostalgia. Cute characters, a charming and light-hearted plot, something nice to balance out the endless waves of "grimdark" games that seem to dominate the market these days. Unfortunately the game is, in my opinion, so frustrating that it's virtually unplayable. If you're in the market for a side-scrolling hack and slash action RPG, don't buy Fortune Summoners. Do yourself a favor and pick up Dust: An Elysian Tail, which has many of the same elements as this game (and more besides) with excellent controls and fast, fluid combat.

Fortune Summoners has effectively awakened my long dormant love for video games.
Despite having been an enthusiastic fan of games since the 80's, I fell out of the mix around 2000. Since then I've played modern games like Dark Souls and Left4Dead2, and liked them, but the nagging urge to alt tab the game and do something else was always there. But not with this game. What a refreshing feeling.
I can play this game all day and not have any nagging urge to do anything else. Its retro jrpg style mixed with modern anime design is so well done that I feel like I'm a part of this magical world.
The characters are all lovable and the dialogue is funny, and the gameplay is engaging and challenging. It's not just a button masher. The game is very immersive by the time you get used to the controls and the brutal difficulty.
10/10
Wonderful game.

What stood out the most for this game was just how hard it can be. It's not terrible, but you have to be willing to learn to progress or even the low level slimes in the beginning will kick your butt. Every character has various moves that are performed via short and fast code-like combos.

Mashing attack will get you literally nowhere - enemies react quickly to your moves. And they all play to win. If you just walk up beside an enemy and start mashing attack it's ducking under or jumping over and countering your attack with something of its own. The game plan ultimately is to catch them in a position they can't block or dodge - such as dodging around their attack to strike. The NPCs are alarmingly more unpredictable and fast to respond as the game continues so getting down your moves is a much needed talent for the player to have. You have to perform various moves as well or the enemy will catch on and start hitting via weak areas (normal attack is a simple overhead strike. Low range and no movement while performed - thus lunging or attacks that strike further in general would get through your attacks easily).

The concept of the story and setting feel like something you'd see in a Miyuzaki film; adorable little children learning to be witches in a school for witches. Rushing around an old fantasy-themed world for the purposes of everything from class field trips to dangerous dungeon crawling (though it's all fairly dangerous considering).

It's cute and fun. Can be frustrating if you don't take every fight with some level of seriousness. Even seemingly weak enemies have a sense of self-presevation.

I like this game. It is effing hard-♥♥♥. Play it one step up from normal, please do. This game will dominate you. Not because it's cheap, but because -You are not good enough.- It is a grand challenge of combo mastery, gaurd and dodge game, precision, platforming, and good rpg sense. By all means, try. I like this game, because it is challenging, and I like challenges.

Also, your heart might grow three sizes if you play this.

Just don't let anyone see you.

If I were to keep it short : This game is an experience. A really good one while at that. And I hope a miracle happens that creates a sequel.
Usually, I'm not a fan of RPG games. Turn-based, real-time, the random loot ones, you name it. I honestly despise the genre.

And yet, somehow, I fell in love with this game. The cute art, the gameplay, the atmosphere and the brutal difficulty made me literally not stop playing it until the point where the sun is shining and I realise that I just played it for 6+ hours straight. I mean it, I pretty much didn't stop playing it until the sun started to shine or I completed it. At the time of writing the review, I had 27 hours put into this game. This includes moments where I got lost for a few hours and had to figure out what to do as I refused to make use of a guide.

The story and the characters while not really being that unique, completely work within the game and actually give it quite a bit of charm.

Aside from that, the movement might take a slight amount of getting used as turning around to face the other direction takes a split second. Along side that, you might want to adjust the run input sensitivity until you no longer can tap a direction twice at a slow pace to run.

If you're going to have doubts after reading this..thing, there is also the demo which I believe is the entire prologue of the game.

Fortune Summoners is a brutal game, it does not hold your hand. Early on, at least.
The whole brutality comes from the fact that this game is more similar to a fighter or a more complex beat em up game than an RPG at its core where you are more likely to focus on guarding or avoiding attacks via Arche's mobility or the other characters backwards hopping neither of which provide you with any invulnerability frames and only serve as a method of avoiding. I guess there's jumping too as a method of avoiding damage.

As such, the thing that you must learn early on is either to avoid/block things or to learn ways to hit your target for as long as possible to prevent it from hitting you before that. Oh and, the enemies will actively try to guard or if they're unable to guard, move out of the way of your attacks in the similar manner that you yourself are able to. They will also actively try to make sure you will not be in a position to fight back by mercilessly beating on you. No one will blame you if you die to your first enemy even if it feels humiliating.

The only help you will have at the very start is that there's an option to guard for you when you are not attacking, jumping or doing the dodge moves.

The main characters here all feel different to play, with there being some similarities between the two mages.

The playable characters are as follows :

Arche, the first character in this game that transfers in to the magic school, while she wishes to learn magic she is more capable in the ways of the sword than magic. Thankfully, due to the fact that she uses a sword, she has become rather agile. Alongside that, she is the most durable of the 3 characters and will take a few hits. Unlike the other two characters which primarily use spells, Arche has a rather large move set that expands as you level up. Some of these moves also chain together and if you focus on playing mostly her, you will have to make use of the moveset to defeat things.

Sana, the second character that you meet shortly after. Using the water element she is more of a support character than an offensive one. Having excellent support abilities but rather small set of offensive abilities. Unlike Arche, she does not have a huge set of moves, and she does not have a dodging ability until way later on in the game. Thankfully, since she is a mage, she has a wide variety of magic that expands as she levels up. Even if most of these are support skills. As a mage, she has casting time before she can make use of her magic.

Stella, the third character that you encounter much later on in the game. Using the fire element she is purely an offensive mage with minimal support abilities. Unlike Sana, she has her dodge ability from the start. Outside of the part where she is an offensive mage, and as such has mostly high damage dealing spells of varying sizes or usage situations. Her magic behaves similarly in that you select it in the same way and it also has casting time.

This is where the game surprised me. With no co-op multiplayer of any description, I expected the worst when it came to the party members. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised as the CPU is incredibly competent in combat without having strange priorities nor being horrible at following you.

If you're playing Arche, Sana will use her buffs primarily on you, healing whoever has the lowest hp first. If both of these are not currently possible, she will make use of her weaker offensive spells instead. Stella meanwhile uses her shorter range or defensive spells if there are enemies near her, longer range or homing spells on enemies further away or if the enemies are above her she will use spells that primarily hit the air instead.

If you're not playing Arche, the CPU for Arche expects you to fill the same role as the CPU you just replaced, in the way that she will leap straight into combat, making use of the sword moves that close the distance if she has them. In most cases she is able to handle any situation she is thrown in without much of an issue. You will however need to support her in the same way the CPU supports you when you're playing her.

This is the other and later method of hand holding the game provides you, in the manner that your party members actively assist you in combat. I can't really complain about it either because the game is difficult as it is and if the CPU was incompetent I'd probably just ragequit the game and never play it again.

While the story and characters are nothing special, they work well enough with the art and the game itself to give it a unique feel while being written well enough to make the game entertaining.

The game is also adorable. Mostly because of the writing and the artstyle this game has as it gives the game tons of personality. The backgrounds, the character portraits, the character sprites and animation. The enemy sprites, animation. Just all of it gives the game such an adorable feel that it's impossible to not mention it. It's honestly hard to believe that such a cute looking game is incredibly merciless when it comes to the difficulty. While the cuteness might be a turnoff for some people, I feel that if this were the case they would've already left the store page upon seeing the screenshots. The music also adds to the cuteness.

For a game made by a single person, they have done a great job at making the game seem alive and fun to play. Not to mention making it completely adorable.

With all the praise I gave the game, surely there are some flaws. Right? Well, yeah.

One of the major issues I've already mentioned at the very start is the run input sensitivity, but that can be easily adjusted.
Outside the lack of steam overlay making screenshots rather difficult to upload (Although, there is a guide provided for that) the largest issue is also the game's brutality, as silly as it sounds as I've been praising it earlier. Just like in a fighter game against the CPU, your enemies will be reading your input to avoid or block your attacks the very instant you hit the attack key, and they will also not hesitate to punish you for doing that. This means that unless you know what exactly you're doing or switch to one of the mages to allow Arche CPU to fight for you, you will have to stay on the defensive most of the time. Responding and punishing the enemy accordingly to what it does, rather than being the one to attack first.

This can be an incredibly frustrating experience and might be a huge turnoff from the game for some. If this seems like it isn't for you, I suggest you to try the demo before you buy this.

This is an incredible game. It's gameplay and AI are nuanced and clever, making for a challenging and engaging combat system in which both your enemies and allies make intelligent moves. The storyline and characters can be summed up in one word; endearing. It is by no means a groundbreaking event, but it stands alone through a combination of solid characters and clear plot.

I can see myself revisiting this many times in the future.

Carpe Fulgur does excellent translations of Japanese games, and while Recettear was a massive hit for its item shop, Fortune Summoners is a bit more standard. It's a 2D dungeon crawler with AI companions you can switch to and fighting game-esque moves for main character Arche, many of which you learn as you progress. The plot and writing are on par with Carpe Fulgur's prior works, though there is a lack of "Capitalism! Ho!" moments.

The combat early on is centered around Arche and the tight swordplay she provides, with a heavy emphasis on spacing. Later on, though, the party acquires not one but two squishy mages whose heavy artillery evolves the flavor of combat over time, as some encounters become obliterated in a flood of water or explosion of fire. When Arche finally gets a use for that MP bar of hers, using it gives *everything* a radically different flavor.

In all, highly recommended.

THIS GAME IS AMAZING.

The combat is deceptively deep and active for a game with a veneer of a cute and simple action platformer. The amount of finesse the game demends of you in controlling Arche's swordplay is really satisfying to a dedicated player. That said, I can see how the difficulty might turn people away. The party system and the AI for party members is actually impressively responsive and adaptive. Your allies feel like real people, and are not often a source of frustration.

The plot is intriguing, and has an undertone of Magical Girl anime, but not the kind that gets wrapped up in its genre trappings. It really takes care to construct a world and real characters that have a lot of dimension. Again, CarpeFulgur's OUTSTANDING localization shows through.

Highly recommended for action RPG fans, fans of quirky action games, and magical girl fans.

Okay this game has a nice feel for all ages. In this game it's basic dungeon hunting, friends come along, quest, you move to a new town, magic, swords, and a bit of fun. I think this game did envelop for me a nice reminder of old school rpgs and fun. Yet this game brought me much enjoyment and let me be honest. Very adorable, adventure running, and a nice story. I find that this game reminds me of older games but in a more styled fashion. Still the game has it's prime moments to me. I was impressed. 9/10

A cute little game about cute little girls having sleepovers, buying candy for school trip and stealing underwear from strangers' homes. There's also some monster slaying involved. Visually it looks great and the combat is surprisingly challenging. Enjoyed playing it from start to finish.

Probably the most fun action rpg I've played since the super nintendo era

A decent action RPG in 2008, I must say. I guess you could say it's really "moe~!" in otaku term.

The story is about a young girl name Arche moved back to a town that she was first born. She then goes to a magic school then unsupervised adventures comes along...won't go any further than that summary there...

The gameplay is a side scrolling action RPG style. So I recommend using a gamepad controller and switch up some of the controls up. My only complaint about this game is that you gotta anticipate and time it correctly to attack your foes. Mashing buttons wheter it be on your keyboard or controller will just make you an easy target. So it could be a little challenging....well that and the analog stick to move can switch to camera movement which is confusing to turn back. So sometimes I have to close the game to make it reset to moving the character. So when using a controller, do be careful...

Cute lolis with swords and magic, a story that's heartwarming and light, yet engaging and a difficulty that reminds me of the classic JRPGs and like. While I do agree the controls _could_ be a bit better, they're far from unusable. They're also not that bad once you get to them. The strange movement inertia on anything you do is annoying at first, but once you get the hang of it you can compensate your timings accordingly. I see a lot of people complain the game is impossibly difficult but I'm on my first playthrough on hard and while it's certainly challening, it's definitely nothing new to people who are familiar with "difficult" games like Ys and the like.

As mentioned in some other reviews, buttom mashing is a one way ticket to an endless loop of dying. Learn your combos and figure out what works on what enemies. What you can use on a slime won't work on a mothbee. What works on a mothbee most certainly won't work on a Cocorat. What works on a Cocorat won't work on a Merkid Mage. Each character you use will obviously require different tactics to use and with each character, your combos and tactic will again change depending on which enemy. It's a challenging game in that you need to be able to quickly execute, chain and modify your tactics as you go because rarely will you ever be fighting just one type of monster at a time.

The game itself is immensely adorable and the localization by Carpe Fulgur is absolutely fantastic. If you're like me, you'll come to love the characters very quickly. (And also feel terrible when you accidentally die. Whoops) The art is definitely a double thumbs up and the variety of character portraits for dialogue really add to the atmosphere and feeling of the game.

One thing I also want to highly praise is the music. I know it's not an international award winning soundtrack or anything, but the cutesy, lighthearted music is really enjoyable.

Overall, just be prepared for a steep learning curve that'll be mercilessly brutal, but once you get the hang of it and you get the ball rolling, oh boy oh boy is this an enjoyable game. Arche's adorable.

If you like anime, 2D platformers, dungeon crawler cRPGs and button mashing, you'll love it. If you dislike any of those, you won't love it.

2D Dark Souls feat. little anime girls
10/10

It's super fun. So much stuff in such a small game.

Before trying this, let it be known that it has a huge cliffhanger and the main developer has quit making games as they just weren't making enough of a profit.

With that said:

Don't let the cute anime little girls fool you, this is a great and challenging game, where you need to pay attention to enemy patterns, know your and your partners moves and watch out for them. A controller is highly recommended as playing with the keyboard might be a little painful.

What I expected: A-a-a-am I kawaii, uguu? What I got: Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, hear the lamentations of their women.

10/10 would play again

A light platforming adventure JRPG, it actually borrows some mechancis from fighting-type games, of all places. Enemies dodge basic attack spam, so you often have to find tricks of combos to pin them down. It's occasionally frustrating when you can't get anything working, which other reviewers seem to harp upon, but when you learn how to make everything work, it's a ton of fun, and feels like the real accomplishment for the difficulty.