Disney Princess My Fairytale Adventure

[Benita Vandervoort]

DisneyPrincess: My Fairytale Adventure is a 2012 video game released for the Wii, Nintendo 3DS, and PC. The game was published by Disney Interactive Studios as a part of the Disney Princess franchise.

Players become the Fairy Godmother's apprentice and use their magic wands to stop a dark spell that has been cast over the kingdoms. They can enter the worlds of Disney princesses such as Belle, Tiana, Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Ariel and discover locations from the Disney films, including the Beast's castle, Rapunzel's tower, and Cinderella's ball. Players are also able to interact with supporting Disney characters from the films, play minigames, and personalize their characters and rooms in the Fairy Godmother's castle. They can earn gems while doing quests, which can then be exchanged for unique items.

Canadian Online Gamers gave the game a score of 83/100: "As far as Disney games on the 3DS are concerned, Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure ranks among the better ones out there. The visuals are vibrant, and the varied gameplay will keep all those aspiring Princesses busy for hours on end. While the gameplay does tend to get tedious at times, the reality is that the game's target audience, girls anywhere from 5 to 10, will definitely enjoy the game, provided, of course, they adore those Disney Princess characters".[1] Common Sense Media rated the game 4/5 stars for "quality", writing: "Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure is a non-violent adventure game in which kids take on the role of a customizable fairy godmother-in-training. Its simple themes of friendship and doing your duty are safe for kids, and its intuitive controls and elementary activities are suitable for kids as young as four or five years old. The only potential concern is that the game features plenty of commercial Disney characters and goes a little heavy on Princess glamor".[2]Gaming XP gave the game an 82/100: "The game is perfectly designed for children and has a good mix of Disney flair, difficulty, and gameplay. In addition to that, it looks good, especially with the 3D effect, and has a fully localized language edition. Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure also comes with collectibles, so a more in-depth experience is produced. Too bad that the playing time is a little too short; otherwise, an even higher rating would have been easily possible."[3]

Nintendo Life was less impressed with the game and gave it a rating of 2 stars out of 10, describing it as "crawling with glitches, slowdown, repetitive gameplay, disinterested voice actors, and stiff controls [...] less a game than it is a mess of unfinished code. [...] Young gamers will likely get a kick out of interacting with their favourite characters, but the magic fizzles all too soon when the adventure is this uninspired. There are many opportunities to customize small aspects of the game, such as your character's appearance and a bedroom you can decorate, but it's simply not worth the effort".[4]

Disney has a long history of using video games to place its familiar characters into unfamiliar contexts, often mixing several disparate worlds together for the sake of effect. The best part? It quite often works. From Mickey Mouscapade to the Kingdom Hearts series to the upcoming Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion, it's usually great fun to see heroes and villains working together and clashing in unexpected combinations.

Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure is quite literally a game starring you. One of your first tasks is to design an avatar that you'll control throughout the game. Of course, since you're the protagonist and this is Disney, it's impossible to create a character that's anything less than moderately gorgeous, which may help to reinforce a host of body image issues for yet another generation of young girls.

You play an apprentice to the Fairy Godmother of Cinderella fame, and one evening as you toil in the garden you accidentally turn a fairy into a mischievous imp. We've all been there, right folks? In an attempt to restore the creature to mindless, hovering goodness, you accidentally turn a whole slew of other fairies into imps as well, and if you don't change them back fast they'll get up to all manner of trouble... such as flying in circles and waiting for you to show up and fix things. So it's not exactly a fate worse than death, but let's not be picky.

That's the main plot of the game, and as you can tell it's devoid of tension by design. Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure doesn't want to scare anybody, and we understand that, but it would at least be nice if there was some sense that this adventure was worth having. As it stands, it just seems like the fairies got a little uglier. Hardly the stuff of urgent panic.

You're guided on your quest by the Fairy Godmother, whose voice actress stumbles over her lines and emphasises bizarre syllables, making it feel like you're hearing the first take of a non-English speaker trying desperately to sound out a script. It would actually be quite funny if she didn't interrupt the gameplay every few seconds to remind you of what you're supposed to be doing, often in tandem with unskippable text boxes or cut scenes.

When your main levels are no more engaging than your hub, your game has issues. Unfortunately, that's just the tip of the iceberg, as Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure is barely playable, and always seems to be on the verge of crashing your system.

Loading times are also preposterously long, often making it feel like you're running this game from a cassette tape. The controls are sluggish, with your character jumping or waving her wand sometimes a full second after you tell her to do so, and interacting with things is random and irritating: most objects, even if they seem like you should be able to do something with them, do nothing. Others simply trigger another long, unskippable explanation from the Fairy Godmother, who still sounds like she's struggling to string together her first English sentence.

There are some additional and optional tasks to perform, but they don't so much break the monotony as provide another flavour of it. You can customise and redecorate your bedroom in the castle, for instance. You can also visit your garden to plant new flowers, which is certainly what one should prioritise after accidentally unleashing a terrible spell upon the kingdom. And you can continually give your character plastic surgery, changing her facial features whenever you feel the desire to do so. Her wardrobe is also yours to select as you unlock new items along the way, and if you predict that your lowly apprentice character will eventually blossom into a beautiful princess, then well done. Give yourself a cookie.

Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure sounds fine on paper. You get to explore whole new worlds, and interact with your favourite characters from classic films. Unfortunately it really just proves the old adage that you should never meet your heroes; they'll only disappoint you by sending you on fetch quests, glitching through the floor, and being impaled by a chronically confused camera.

Crawling with glitches, slowdown, repetitive gameplay, disinterested voice actors and stiff controls, Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure is less a game than it is a mess of unfinished code. Young gamers will likely get a kick out of interacting with their favourite characters, but it's a magic that fizzles all too soon when the adventure is this uninspired. There are many opportunities to customise small aspects of the game, such as your character's appearance and a bedroom you can decorate, but it's simply not worth the effort. This is one Princess that's quite simply not worth rescuing.

Wait, you actually had to play this Phillip? I know you have to review all the bad games but, seriously, I hope you didn't play this on public transport or anything... People may get the wrong idea...

Sometimes its just fun to read a review of a game we all know is going to be bad... Maybe upper management forced Phil to play and review this game out of punishment for doing something bad. Did he over-feed an office fish?

@TrollinDerpette and everyone asking why we bothered reviewing this: the target audience may be young, but they deserve quality, same as the rest of us. we get plenty of parents coming through who are curious as to what games will be good for their kids, so on occasion, if we're given a review copy, we'll go ahead and give it a run-through. if you know already that you're not interested, no one's forcing you to click the link and read the review, y'know :3

Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure centers on your custom-built character, who is the apprentice to the Fairy Godmother. The adventure portion of the game revolves around a series of events that lead into the friendly Sprites transforming into horrible and mischievous Imps who are wreaking havoc all over the lands of Disney. Throughout your adventures you traverse the lands (and sea) to visit the likes of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Belle, Ariel, and Tiana. The story as a whole was simple, but still drove home the point in what needed to be accomplished as you progressed.

The custom princess creation is fairly straight forward and simplistic, but advancing through it actually stalled me for a while. It was in the creation phases in which I learned that the typical buttons for Accepting and Canceling actions were reversed, which surprisingly proved to be quite the obstacle to overcome in a weird and fascinating sort of way. No matter how far I progressed in the creation I accidentally kept undoing my creation of epic proportions, resulting in countless remakes. While it is a small hurdle, it actually proved to be a major annoyance as I attempted to choke this game down and push onward.

Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure has a bit of everything for the youngest of gamers, but absolutely no noteworthy qualities for gamers over the age of ten. With throwbacks to classic Disney movies and characters as well as copious amounts of slightly varied puzzles, Disney Princess is able to show variety yet never offer a decent challenge, proving to be adequate for young gamers who want their intelligence insulted and grow up in a world where they are never challenged or faced with the consequence of giving a wrong answer. Just take my word for it, and never play this game if you have the slightest inkling of being too old for it.

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