ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal

ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal Review

By, Nicholas Bale

Think Pokemon. Now replace Pokemon with fairies, pokeballs with magic spheres, and the main character with a girl named Amy from London who is the figure of a heroic prophecy. There, now you have Zanzarah. Ok, granted, this isn’t a pokemon remake. But it’s very close. That doesn’t mean it is merely a remake though. Read on and you’ll understand.

You are a girl named Amy who lives in more or less modern London. One day, an elf teleports into her house and drops off a box. Amy looks inside the box, discovers a rune, and suddenly, she is teleported to another world: Zanzarah. Zanzarah is a world filled up with varying races. There are elves, dwarves, dark elves, a few other minor races, and fairies, small creatures that fly. No humans live here. Everything was total bliss until recently, when plagues of rocks and spiky bushes (that’s right, rocks and spiky bushes) starting…well, plaguing the land. Suddenly, there was turmoil and all the wild fairies became very hostile all of a sudden. There is a prophecy that a human will come and return the land to what it once was. Surprise surprise, that human is you.

The game takes place from a third-person perspective, common for these types of games. Once you get a fairy or two, you will see one flying behind its master, you. The game is filled with impressive graphics; nothing new, but the world of Zanzarah is a colorful, vibrant place. The landscape is covered with little details like flowers beside the trees and tall grass swaying in the wind. There are also different areas such as swamps, snow-covered mountains, and dark caves where shadows lurk. The characters that you talk to are rendered quite well too, even though there seems to be only a few different-looking ones among them. An interesting point to note is how, unlike Zanzarah, London is a drab and dull looking place, filled with browns and grays.

Throughout the game, you collect fairies. There are different fairies, each with its own element, and with each element comes weaknesses and strengths against other elements. The variety in the fairy designs is very apparent. There are fairies which look like your stereotypical girl-with-wings, there is a fairy which looks like a mushroom, there is a fish fairy, a bug fairy, a fairy that is a metal skeleton, and the list goes on. There are a total of 12 elements in all, ranging from the normal fire, air, and earth to the more exotic psychic, chaos, and metal.

Each fairy can get different spells, which are its moves, and these are categorized into Active and Passive spells. The Active spells are spells which you cast with a left-click of the mouse, usually attack spells, while the Passive spells are those which occur automatically or constantly, such as raising your defence or preventing status changes such as Poisoned and Burned. The way to buy spells was probably the most aggravating part of the game. The magic seller, a bird-like creature, sells magic not by letting you choose, but by creating a randomly generated list from the spells that they hold, five spells at a time, for a total of ten coins for five spells. While this is an innovative way to do things, often I wound up either getting spells that I did not need or a whole list of blank slots, which are also included for spite, I suppose. This would happen over and over and buying spells would soon become an ordeal of loading games until I could get the spell I wanted.

Now the battle system. This is one of the most unique qualities of the game. Unlike most creature-based RPGs such as Pokemon, a battle is not merely two creatures standing apart from each other and blasting spells and attacks. In Zanzarah, when Amy walks near a fairy abode, which can be a tree housing a Nature fairy or a cliff face housing a Stone fairy, the fairy comes out and attacks. The fairy following you promptly starts battle in the Astral Plane. First you see your battle-ready fairies and the fairies you will be fighting on pedestals. At this place you can look over your opponents fairies to see what moves they have equipped. Then battle starts. This is no I-attack-now-you-attack battle. You are placed into one of many differently-constructed arenas which match the element you are fighting in (i.e. If you have started a battle with a wood fairy in a tree, you will notice Nature-type backgrounds and colors and whatnot), with your fairy on one side of the arena and your opponent’s on the other. The variations really spice it up, because instead of having merely a flat plane, there could be a gazebo-style arena, a wheel-patterned arena, an arena which is merely a series of different-leveled platforms, and so forth. You control your fairy here, and you can fly, attack, or switch the active fairy with one that you are carrying around (you can carry around five, you need to return to London via teleport rune to switch). It’s a real-time battle as you and the other fairy whiz around the arena blasting attack spells at each other, trying to hit one another as you dive behind a wall to avoid an attack. It’s a lot more entertaining then I-have-hit-you-now-you-have-hit-me. Unfortunately, sometimes battles become a game of hide-and-seek with some of the arenas as you do a bit of wandering, trying to discover where the other fairy is. There is an indicator which appears when you aren’t facing the fairy, but it isn’t effective when the fairy is behind a wall directly in front of you.

Often you will face fairy collectors/masters which will challenge you to fight. They often have more than one fairy, and as soon as you defeat the fairy on the arena, another one will appear to take its place until all are defeated. Sometimes you will even fight battles in which you face more than one fairy at a time! Frantic. A good and bad point about the fight was an auto-aiming feature. If you point your targeting reticle near the opponent’s fairy and fire, you will most likely hit it. While this can be a good thing, it tends to dilute the challenge, and it also means that the computer has almost no problems hitting you, and matches might become a lot more unbalanced.

After a battle, should the fairy survive, they get experience, and after a certain point, they gain a level, raising their stats. If the fairies get to a high enough level, they pokevolve…excuse me, they evolve into a different, stronger fairy. Eventually, you can collect every fairy in the game, and then feel proud.

Between battles you have the option of using items to heal your fairies or revive them. This is standard practice in an RPG, but, while the items are useful enough, I would have liked to see a little bit more variety than Little Potion, Medium Potion, Big Potion, Mana Potion, Herb, and Medicine. There are a few more, but nothing that affects your fairies too much. A cool little item which you can get is called the Fairy Moulding, and it lets you give your fairies personal names. This is a neat little thing that added a little personality to the game.

Speaking of personality, while the developers put a lot into developing it within the characters of the game, they seem to have forgotten about Amy. Except for the beginning of the game, in a movie clip which shows the elf teleporting into the house, you very rarely ever get to know about who Amy is. She doesn’t even ask about the fact that she has just been teleported into a strange world! If I was a teenager who had just teleported into a place filled with fairies and elves and dwarves, I’d at least have a couple of questions. Through the game, she merely becomes a vessel for which to walk around in and speak to people with. Some of the creatures, such as elves, that you speak to in this game seem to speak total gibberish as they introduce themselves (with captions, don’t worry), while some of the other creatures seem to speak, and I kid you not, French. Maybe it’s just me…. A problem I discovered in the game was a total lack of aim and direction. The only way you know where to go is by an exclamation point that appears on a map that you own. The map you own, which is given to you in fragments, shows your general location. Because of this, I often had trouble wondering where I was going, due to the lack of a compass. Exploring off the path often meant you got turned around, and it was very easy to get lost. Even so, when you do get lost, you can save and reload, because you start at the beginning of the area you last saved when you reload. Or when all your fairies are defeated in battle, or when Amy falls too far or drowns.

All in all, this is quite an RPG. I would probably say that the creators used Pokemon as a guide, and if you know Pokemon, you can see why. However, despite that, I had a lot of fun with this game. The fighting system is very interesting, and with the different elements, I had an enjoyable time developing the ‘perfect’ fighting fairy team. Despite some of the game’s annoying aspects (like after I pick up an item for the fortieth time, I do not need to see Amy do a little dance while the screen describes to me what the item does…again!), they were easy to get over. The biggest problem I had with the game was the lack of desire to continue. There was no grabbing plot twists, no mystery, no urge to press forward through the game except for the excitement of new fairies. Sometimes I felt like I had to push myself forward. Still, overcoming the childish overtones of fairies, the producers have created a challenging game that will appeal to RPG gamers of all ages.

Final Verdict: 88%

ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal Screenshots’

[Show as slideshow]

ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal Videos

ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal Intro

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAGFDhxY7Cw[/youtube]

ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal Guides / Links

ZanZarah Wikipedia Entry

ZanZarah Official Site

FAQ/Walkthrough

Fairy List

Item List

Spell List