If there was such a thing as visual novel royalty, ebi-hime would be rocking a crown and throne. Prolific but without cutting corners, their novels have included Strawberry Vinegar, Blackberry Honey and A Winter’s Daydream. With ebi-hime’s work, you can guarantee lavish art, a strum of the heartstrings, and some reasonably chaste tonsil-tickling.
The Fairy’s Song, again courtesy of Ratalaika Games, fits snug as a bug into ebi-hime’s bibliography. Everything we’ve mentioned is present and correct, and if you’ve liked or disliked their visual novels in the past, then it will be the same reaction here.
The tale begins with Marnie, a teenage goth who must spend a week with her grandma in the sleepy hamlet of Fenchapel. Her parents are off on a bizarre pilgrimage to see a septuagenarian pop star (honestly, we wondered whether that was the story that should have been told), and Grandma isn’t the person Marnie would have chosen to stay with. She makes that fact abundantly clear, and we worried if we were going to spend a novel with an entitled little brat.
Grandma is a bit of a fantasist, as she believes that the forests of Fenchapel are riddled with fairies, witches and the like. She gives Marnie a protection charm (spoiler, that might come in useful later) and pushes her into the forest to have a picnic. We don’t think The Fairy’s Song gives Grandma enough credit: she’s blatantly using Marnie for a spot of fairy-fishing.
As you might expect, Marnie has a fae encounter and becomes a believer. She first encounters a cursed knight, doomed to protect a lake for centuries, before bumping into a sleeping beauty who the charm wakes. This is Leofe, who Marnie brings back to Fenchapel, and it turns out that she, too, has been in the faerie realm for centuries.
So begins the fish-out-of-water middle-third of The Fairy’s Song, as Leofe comes to terms with Soleros, Tesco and the joys of Grandma’s shepherds pie. It’s also where we’ll stop, as we’re in danger of spoiling the plot.
There’s a bit of a bait and switch going on with the plot in The Fairy’s Song. We thought we were in for a fantastical romp through the fairy realm, an Alice in Wonderland or Chronicles of Narnia but with added eyeliner and sulking. But ebi-hime is more interested in the relationship between Leofe and Marnie, which is something that blossoms as they both come to terms – in different ways – with having to spend a week in sleepy Fenchapel.
We won’t lie, we were a bit disappointed. Yuri visual novels aren’t uncommon, and we’ve experienced plenty of will-they, won’t-they romances, not least in ebi-hime’s back catalogue. By focusing on the romance, the fairytale stuff gets sidelined until a final act that absolutely crams it in. It leaves The Fairy’s Song a touch unbalanced, with all the worldbuilding and mythologising coming in the last half hour.
That’s not to say the budding relationship has no merit. It’s really rather endearing, with Marnie thawing thanks to the ebullient enthusiasm of Leofe. The writing is just deft enough to convincingly show Marnie shifting from frustration to endearment and finally a bit of moonlit smooching. Ebi-hime has always been a confident writer, happiest when sieving the emotional events between lovers, and they remain on top form here.
If there’s a criticism of the writing, it’s that it’s got a wayward sense of what the reader probably finds interesting. As mentioned, I was all in for the fairies, knights and dragons, but that gets fast-forwarded towards the end. Instead, we get some lengthy descriptions of gravestones (we genuinely wondered if the names on the stones were Kickstarter backers: The Fairy’s Song spends far too long reading each one out in detail), and other distractions. Food, books, memories and more can feel utterly irrelevant, but they get given the full descriptive treatment. There’s a good chance that we were the wrong demographic or wanted something else from the game, but it’s hard to make a case for these sections being essential to the plot.
It’s also got that extremely common visual novel disease of over-narrating. The Fairy’s Song is told from Marnie’s perspective, and she’s a true teenager, worrying overly about what people think about her, and cogitating over what people really mean when they say something to her. It has the effect of slowing down the action, and we found ourselves skipping through chat faster than we possibly should have. We got the gist, now can we get on with it?
What is uncommon in terms of visual novels, though, is the gorgeous artwork. We’ve sat through a few sloppy ones recently, but The Fairy’s Song is sharp as a spinning wheel’s spindle. The characters are all top notch, and have a wide range of variants for all the emotional needs. Cutscene tableaux are great too, with the characters actually looking like the ones in the main visual novel (something that’s all too rare). The Fairy’s Song really is rather ravishing to look at.
It’s certainly not interactive, though. This is a kinetic novel, with no choices or branching to keep you engaged. That’s par for the course with ebi-hime, but it’s something you should know up front. We were fine with it – it allows the author to construct something more meticulous in the final act – but you might equally scoff at it. Xbox’s are for games, after all, and you might get snooty at the mindless tapping of the A button.
Sidestep the obvious criticism that there’s no interaction or choice to speak of in The Fairy’s Song, and you have one of the better kinetic visual novels. It’s polished to a crystal-like sheen, and the characters all grow to become endearing versions of themselves. It keeps making safe choices when we hoped it would be more imaginatively wayward, but – for a few hours – we were under its spell.
