Oh, round white moon
Oh how beautiful your light is tonight
How truly precious you can be
I look into your eyes and softly touch your hand
Farewell Love, and tomorrow we will meet again...
Oh, twinkling star above, how beautiful yet lonesome
As sad and lonesome as I am
I reach out, for your hand, we are two and one
Farewell my love---
At the very end of a summer that was all too short, the old man I was living with passed away. Even after all the years we spent together, I never knew his name. Later that evening, I dug a shallow grave in the front yard of our home and buried him there. At that moment, I was truly alone in the world.
When the game was over, I truly had no words to describe what I felt, what I had gone through. Every now and then, we come across something like this, a certain piece that is so hidden away from the public eye that its discovery becomes much more meaningful. A hidden gem, a diamond in the rough; that's what could accurately describe what experience Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon was like. It’s a game so obscure and unique, so potentially moving, yet so flawed and imperfect. Perhaps that is why the games remain hidden, perhaps not all have the willingness to seek them out, nor do they have the patience to come to terms with them. Yet, I find myself now in a position where I must tell you, my reader, about how much I love, I adore, this flawed, humble gem of a game.
Fragile Dreams is the sad and lonely game of involving themes and beautiful expression. It is the game that can be a tedious chore to play, but also disguising a heavy and valuable expression of auteurship, as well as a passion for the craft. This is a game that will bring in broken expectations of a project that was just not supposed to work, but still comes out feeling so meaningful and strong. It’s put together in such a fragile way, yet it's so enveloping in its highly specific merits. Though it can break apart easily, sensible hands can hold it closely and find that it’s truly a shining gem and a beaconing beauty.
How can I convince you to play this game? Is it possible to be completely honest about the experience, while also conveying the utter joy that it brings? Can Fragile Dreams hide a fundamentally broken experience with its own merits? Does the game successfully speak for itself to the player that is willing to listen? I believe it can. Though there are merits hidden away by layers of muck, I can still tell you of how much they weigh.
If you simply accept and believe my words so far, then I recommend you to stop reading this review. One of the best ways to experience Fragile Dreams is to go at it with a completely blank and open mind, untainted by expectation or knowledge of what the game will do. Discovering this game on your own will let you be surprised to discover what it entails, even if it requires patience to do so. However, if you're still not convinced, then please let me tell you of Fragile Dreams, the hidden gem of the Nintendo Wii.
It almost feels like there are two different Fragile Dreams. One of them is the tedious and boring blender mix of a plethora of genres, be it Action-Adventure, Role-Playing or even Survival Horror. Being uncertain how to make any of these genres satisfying, this game simply throws them together and expects them to work just how they are, producing some of the most numbing gameplay from the system. Yet, on another hand, we have the poignant game experience that I have been talking about, the one that is worthy of praise and understanding.
This dichotomy is very interesting, as it can only lead one to wonder how it could even happen. How can something be both good and bad at the same time? Indeed, the gameplay of Fragile Dreams is a near absolute failure when it comes to execution. Most of what it attempts to do in terms of interactivity, if there is anything it's trying to do, falls flat. Uninteresting and padded game design make this side of Fragile Dreams quite an honest mess.
There's no better way to begin than to talk about the game's controls. Being a Wii exclusive game, Fragile Dreams feels the need to utilize the Wiimote's pointer, and with good reason. The game was envisioned as an exploratory title, where the main character has to rely on their flashlight to reveal dark spots and hidden enemies. However, the execution of the controls is less than elegant, defeating the concept of using them entirely and forcing the player to ignore them as much as possible.
To mitigate the lack of dedicated camera controls on the Wii remote, Fragile Dreams uses the pointer both for controlling the direction on the camera and flashlight as well as the direction of the player, leading to a strange mix between tank controls and first-person camera controls. The controls lean more heavily towards the former however, meaning that the player must stop and reorient themselves whenever they want to make a turn or circle around an object, making movement very cumbersome.
Strafing would help mitigate the issue by locking the camera in the direction of the pointer while the player moves around how they please, however, this movement is severely limited by allowing the player to move at a decent speed only in a forwards direction. If the player tilts the analog in any direction directly behind or to the sides of the player, then their character will move in an agonizingly slow walk, breaking the flow of gameplay. This discourages the player from ever wanting to use strafing as a viable way of moving around, thus forcing them to constantly reorient themselves with the more standard tank control style. The issue only gets worse inside of cramped spaces, where the game locks the direction of the player character to what wall or collision object is directly in front of them, messing with the player's sense of direction.
Such a complicated movement style makes the game incredibly cumbersome and unnatural to control, which should be a massive problem with the game, if not for the player's ability to ignore the use of the pointer and play with a standard 360-degree control scheme. This just highlights how pointless and flawed the motion controls are for the game however, since it makes the main gameplay redundant for the console considering how little it needs the motion controls. Yet the controls continue to nag the player whenever they are forced to use the pointer for certain actions or moments in gameplay, such as using a bow or picking up items in first person. Besides that, moving with analog controls removes a lot of the exploratory depth of using first person mode often to truly take in the detail of the environments.
Wiimote concerns aside, the player's moveset is incredibly simplistic and limiting for the player. Movement is completely uneventful, consisting of holding a single direction on the Nunchuk stick without any variation in speed. It is a perpetual slog of walking forwards in the exact same way with nothing happening, unless the player encounters an enemy. Movement changes slightly if the player crouches, which is only useful for a severely minimal portion of the game, such as walking through unstable cracked floors or going through passageways. Otherwise, it offers no advantage to the player whatsoever.
Combat is very clunky as well. The only means of attack the player has towards enemies is a single button combo that locks the player in a slow winding animation, being unable to move or cancel their actions while performing it. The combo has no variation, except for delivering slightly stronger attacks if the player presses the same buttons with precise timing. As a result, combat is no more than a boring and even slightly frustrating button masher that does not satisfy in any way. The only variation the player can get from the monotony of combat is varying their approach to any enemy with different weapons, which carry the same problems, but at least attack in different ways. The game also lacks a dodge move, making combat a matter of simply attacking, while simply walking away if an enemy threatens to attack.
Outside of combat, besides having no other ways to influence movement besides walking forwards, exploration offers no obstacles or railroading, like puzzles or alternate pathways. Usually, areas are designed to be played in a strictly linear fashion, offering alternate paths only when the game expects the player to go through them to find an item that's necessary to continue walking down the same path. The only form of railroading that the game offers is very basic backtracking that forces you to go back to previous areas that you've already explored completely, leading to tedious repetition of environments.
Fragile Dreams mixes and matches genres however it pleases, yet it cannot really find a strict guideline to follow for either of them. It is designed as a hybrid between survival horror and Role-Playing for the most part, yet in the case of the former, it doesn't offer the challenge of a proper example of the genre due to a lack of puzzles or environmental roadblocks, an overabundance of checkpoints throughout at least half of the experience, and overly simplistic survival mechanics that can easily be bypassed or shifted aside.
The main mechanic for survival, weapon breakability, can add to the engagement of gameplay by increasing tension due to the fragility of the player's main method of attack, encouraging them to play the game wisely and use weapons only when needed. However, this is hardly the case, as it leads to one of two things happening. Either the player ignores combat altogether due to marginal benefits such as items that can be sold for money or experience, that only serve the purpose of encouraging more combat encounters which the player is already trying to avoid, or they stock up on weapons while plowing through every enemy to obtain more items and experience, which is more tedious than it sounds because the game is already so numbingly easy and frustratingly clunky to play.
The other important mechanic that limits the player's survival is their grid inventory, which offers only a limited number of slots that can be filled up by items. This system is more of an inconvenience than an actual hurdle for survival, as the player will have enough checkpoints more often than they don't to exchange and discover the items they find on and to heal their HP on, since every checkpoint also has the decency to heal the player. Even when these checkpoints become scarcer, the player can still easily manage their inventory by carrying only what they absolutely need and avoiding combat altogether if they ever run out of items.
When it comes to the game's RPG elements, there is not much to get invested on either, as they only consist of basic, linear character progression. The player earns experience after defeating enemies, earning them higher levels and stronger stats once they gain enough experience. Ignoring how character progression may or may not defeat the point of making the game survival horror by empowering the player through combat, the game lacks satisfying combat controls or investing mechanics to make it work as an Action RPG either way. Not like it matters though, because the player probably won't even pay much attention to the rate by which they level up, considering how the game doesn't have a way to track growth directly, such as knowing how much experience each enemy drops or having a bar that monitors how long until they level up. Players are only able to track their progress by checking the character screen over and over, taking note of how much EXP they earn from every encounter.
The enemies themselves are alright from their visual design alone, however, their attack patterns are very predictable and easy to avoid, even considering the game's lack of a dodge move. This is probably done to mitigate the game's cumbersome pointer controls, since the player is intended to fight enemies by pointing at them with their flashlight, causing them to appear before them. Yet, this mechanic is completely negligible in the long run, considering the player always has their flashlight on and the player can highlight enemies simply by facing their direction when not using the pointer. Trying to play the game as intended only makes combat worse, since the player is locked in a struggle between fighting the enemy and fighting with the controls.
Enemies don't play nicely either. Often the player will be forced to take a hit due to being locked into their attack animation, unable to cancel it in time to walk away from an incoming attack from either the same enemy, or another enemy entirely. Enemies will often be flung backwards whenever the player performs a full or even partial combo on them, making the enemies disappear and appear elsewhere, further extending the amount of time the player must spend fighting them. This becomes increasingly frustrating when enemies disappear, only to appear right next to the player while they are locked into an animation, forcing them to take the hit. These mechanics and attack patterns don't make the game more challenging, and instead, make the experience of fighting enemies even more annoying.
An aspect both genres share is exploration, which Fragile Dreams does decently enough at first. Through the first half of the game, environments are lush and full of small and meaningful details that can be discovered, something that's particularly impressive for the Nintendo Wii. The player can frolic in the game's world, taking their time to take in the environment, appreciate the beautiful visuals, and uncover all the hidden little details, such as drawings or story items. Even at this stage though, the game's lack of truly meaningful things to explore persists. Any alternate pathways the player may find usually lead to a dead end, meaning that after some time, the player will stop trying to explore as much and simply move onwards thanks to the accumulation of poor combat, unrewarded exploration and cumbersome controls.
By the second half of the game, the level design only gets progressively worse. Though the game becomes more challenging by this point, the level design stops being inspiring and becomes instead a strictly linear slog of literal corridors and hallways with bland and boring industrial designs. The pacing of the game takes a hit, if it hadn't already taken one, because the player lacks any kind of motivation to continue besides wanting to arrive at the next cutscene.
The game's objectives and quests also suffer from a tiresome simplicity, offering no interesting deeds to perform but chores and minute tasks. The player's objectives either consist of following the linear path that is already laid out for them clearly or forcing them to backtrack to a previous area to do an unimportant and menial task, such as collecting an obviously placed item or following the whims of the story and level design, which may hide a new area behind a previously inaccessible door. As a result, the game just turns into a complete slog; a tiresome chore of walking in a straight path hoping for another cutscene to occur, with not much else to hold the player's interest.
The image or description I've explained of the game sounds like something foul, almost like a tiresome waste of time. However, that is not at all how I would define the Fragile Dreams that I personally experienced. Though I did encounter these many issues that I listed beforehand, there is more to the game than what I perceive to be its many failures. Yet it continues to beg the question of why Fragile Dreams is such a captivating experience? Is it truly possible for the game to overcome all its self-imposed troubles and failures and come out on top?
I'm going to try to explain why Fragile Dreams, despite all its problems, was such a special game to me and many others, to try and convince you to try it out on your own terms. It's important for me to do this because nothing else quite resembles the kind of dream-like, mysterious, yet moving and beautiful essence of Fragile Dreams. The game is very much so an experience, a vacuum that drags you and pits you into its own world that hides so much yet shows you all you wanted to see. It is a game that constantly gives you something to discover, something to think about and something to get emotionally invested on.
This is particularly true for the game's gorgeous art direction. Using moon and stars as a basic motif for its aesthetics, the game takes place mostly at nighttime, highlighting the beauty of nature, light and darkness. Its usage of deep blues, blacks and shining lights give the game an almost somnolent look, which is beautiful to stare at. Fragile Dreams' sparse use of color and its high contrast with the difference between pitch black objects in negative space and tinted environments gives the game a highly artistic and picturesque look that is completely captivating, especially during scenes that expand this basic palette and present with miraculous visual spectacles.
When it comes to architecture, Fragile Dreams presents you with highly detailed human built environments that are run down and dilapidated. The abandonment of these areas is oozing with a very specific kind of desolate and reflective tone, showing things that are familiar through a perspective that is unfamiliar, contributing to the game's surreal feeling. By making the player think about the fragility of our civilization through its destruction and abandonment, the game can show how beautiful the world can still be, even after its been broken down and brought to its end, contributing to the game's core themes of isolation and demise.
The game also paces its environments really well. While the player is often going to explore majorly creepy, dark, indoor areas for a long amount of time, the game often adds some variety as a reward for continuing the game. After working through the constant, abandoned and claustrophobic hallways of commercial buildings or underground passageways, the player is rewarded with and motivated by the beautiful scenery of dawn, morning or dusk, which is so perfectly captured by the game's art direction, which highlights the beauty of even the simplest things.
Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is pervaded by a very specific tone and atmosphere that not many other games even come close to being familiar with, at least in the exact same way that the game portrays it. When exploring each of the game's areas, the player must face the constant and oppressive forces of isolation and aggression from ghostly entities. It is very easy to relate to Seto, the main character, since the player truly feels like the last remaining remnant of a world that is now dominated by phantoms of old and the despair of regretful voices of old.
The game rides a very careful line between being relentless and salvaging, sticking to a middle point that highlights the opposing viewpoints of carefully contrasted ideas. The crux of the game's tone is exemplified by its conflict between crushing and defeatist nihilism and hopeful optimism and soft encouragement, both of which are balanced in the grand scheme of the game's story. This very specific kind of drama that the game created inspires the player to keep going, keeping them enthralled by the narrative and world of Fragile Dreams.
This drama is portrayed in no better way than Riei Saito's beautiful and moving score for the game, which perfectly complements and enhances this feeling. Her minimalist piano score highlights the lonely and nature of the quest as well as the beautiful simplicity of the barren world around you. She practices a great deal of restraint in using other instruments for most of game, leaving only the most important tracks in the game to receive the special treatment of a more robust orchestra, highlighting the fleeting yet singular moments of happiness, sadness, danger and comfort.
Her design of the score and the beautiful melodies that it presents are delightful to say the least. The music of Fragile Dreams is an essential component in making every single beat of the narrative work as intended, forming a symbiotic relationship with the experience of playing the game and the experience of listening to the music of the game. Each song is so representative of the feelings that the game emanates, yet it's not capable of reaching any heights without it. It's truly an excellent summation of the game's components that helps it reach higher than it ever could.
Music not only influences the emotions of the story, but the characters as well. Without knowing much of the character that each track represents, you can still feel their emotions behind their tune or even with the titles that they are given. Any given theme is different and helps the player connect to their personalities much further by offering themes that can be sorrowful, ominous, simple and even wonderful. Without such important compositions, the game would not have been able to become so resonant with its players.
More importantly for the sound design however, is the game's use of silence to highlight the mood. Each scene can only be so moving and meaningful when their carefully placed silence can give them a sense of minimalist majesty and charm. Even among the scenes that have music, the player can consider their importance when contrasting the emotions of the melody to the stillness of silent exploration, forming a careful melodic harmony between the two moods. Only a world so lonely can be so silent, and only a world so silent can be so beautiful.
Sound design in the game is fantastic, especially thanks to the aforementioned use of silence and stillness. However, what is also important is the game's layering of atmospheric ambiance and muffled noise. The feeling of loneliness is only highlighted when the player has nothing but their own footsteps and the world's ambiance to hear for a duration of time, and danger only makes itself present when something besides yourself begins to make a sound.
The game shows many examples of this; a sense of minimalism and simplicity. It presents itself as simple, rudimentary, even humble, yet with all those things it can achieve so much because it has a point of comparison between the simple and the complex. Although simplicity is the heart of the game, the complexities it shows are what make it such an engaging and touching title. This isn't exemplified in any better way than the game's own story, one which is humane to a crushing degree, but beautiful and moving as a result.
After all, Fragile Dreams is a sad game, though it's not exactly sad in the way that sadness is commonly seen and portrayed in media. It is not a tragedy, as it does not focus on the very specific outcomes or events that become the crux of a larger drama. Instead, sadness is just a general feeling that the game presents, acting as an overbearing cloud throughout the experience. Fragile Dreams is not a sad game because of the specific things that happen in it, but because of what everything in its story and artistic design contributes to.
One of the ways the game contributes to this general feeling is by emphasizing the importance of the past and memory when telling its story. For instance, the player can find certain items in each area that can be used on a checkpoint to reveal the backstory hidden within them. These sub-stories tell many different stories with a very distinct range of styles and character, yet they are all connected by the basic theme of memory, regret and loss. They help reinforce the themes of the game and tell of a larger story in its world, being well written on their own, but also adding hidden details that the player can piece together to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the many memories that the world holds.
In general, the story, lore and world of the game is packed with so many details that the player won't even notice their first time around. So many elements or even small pieces of the story are interconnected, leading to larger realizations that are not explicitly told to the player, but grant them a more thorough understanding of the themes in question when fully taken into account. Fragile Dreams is a game full of mysteries, some of which are left unanswered and some of which the player can find an answer to by looking at all the small little things around them, making the story feel grander while retaining that sense of simplicity and heart.
Going back to memory, the story is framed as a recounting of Seto's life experiences after he has already gone through the events of the game. This framing further expands the use of memory as a plot device to exemplify the fragile nature of the story. What the player sees, what they experience, is no more than a fleeting and minuscule moment in the life of the character, and through this specific framing, the player is reminded of the inevitability of the end, holding a shaky, but also special connection to the events that happen.
The past and memory is also important to the characters of the story as well, as they are shaped by the passage of time from a past they long for. Crow is out for the hunt to understand his past by regaining his memories, Sai is greatly affected by the things that happened to her during her life, the many ghosts that the player fights are the embodiment of all the living regrets of people and the other souls that roam the earth, who must come to terms with the things they left behind in the past to be put to rest.
Besides memory, the other major theme of Fragile Dreams is isolation, loneliness and the longing of other people to share our lives with. The game deals with the lives of people who have only themselves to rely on and the inner conflicts they embody. It explores the feeling of loneliness that these people feel in a world where none but them remain, and their desire to share their life experiences with someone else and to make the world they live in just a little more inhabitable.
The interpersonal dialogues between these characters greatly portray their conflicted and lonely nature. Whenever they speak, they do so in a way that's detached, with long pauses, aloof reassurances and awkward responses that all show their inexperience with communicating with other people, but also their inner necessity and desire to connect to others. Characters are eager to become connected to one another, and to acknowledge the other's presence, even despite their incapability, just for the sake of fulfilling their inner desire for connecting with other people. Such a subtle display of dialogue and conversation makes each character much more inherently human and relatable to the player, as they can showcase a great amount of depth and feeling without outright stating it.
Dialogue wouldn't be as effective if not for the game's voice acting, where each individual actor understands their characters and brings their dialogue to life in the best way. Johnny Yong Bosch's portrayal of Seto is at the forefront of the game's vocal performances, contributing to the great relatability of his character's troubles and conflicts thanks to his strong performance. But this is not exclusive to Seto however, since every character is portrayed by an actor that understands and portrays the character's flowing and endlessly complex emotions, bringing the game's script to life in a concrete way.
Voice acting is not the only way that the game expresses the plight of its characters. Through the game's tone, the player can more easily connect to and understand the issues that everyone, the main character in particular, are dealing with. When you experience that sense of loneliness, isolation and survivalist hardship and oppression for yourself, you can hold Seto's conflicts much closer to heart and truly strive for the same thing he's striving for, not only joining him in his quest but being motivated to feel like you're a part of it.
The isolation of our characters only makes the current state of the world and their lives even more tragic and difficult. Fragile Dreams' tone is delicately positioned between life and death, optimism and nihilism. By giving the characters oppressive anguish and then putting it away for scenes of relief and companionship, or by giving the characters hope and then taking it away when they need it most, the game is as crushingly grounded as it could be, never keeping things idyllically optimal nor devastatingly hopeless. Its juxtaposition of closeness and distance between the characters makes isolation feel like a constant, no matter how close any of the characters may seem.
It is because of this overbearing sense of loneliness that our characters seek each other out and become willing to become closest to each other, no matter how different their personalities and backgrounds may be. Thanks to this, the smallest and simplest relationships in the story can become some of the most meaningful ones. Even when their interactions are minimal and even if these characters know little about each other, we understand their desire to be together and their desire to care for each other, since no one else cares for them in the lonely world.
Their longing, their desire to enrich their lives by finding something they are missing, is another core concept in the story that is explored. Every character that we encounter is driven by a certain desire, one that they carry as a reason to continue living in a world that no longer lives. It is thanks to this sense of longing that the characters persist throughout their journey, even when their resolve is tested in the most tragic ways and even when the end result of their efforts is uncertain and unclear.
Aside from the individual longing of each individual character, another idea that the story explores is the inherent longing that humans have for communication and empathy. One of the biggest difficulties of living in a society is coming to terms with our individual differences and our inability to fully understand others. That's why Fragile Dreams explores the lives of characters that have an inner burning desire to be understood, but have trouble communicating and understanding other people due to the loneliness that the world has cursed them with, testing their resolve to overcome these barriers for the sake of themselves and their own happiness.
This theme is given life through Seto, the main character of the story, and the driving force behind the chain of events that happen. Out of all things in the world, all Seto ever wants is to be with someone, no matter who it is and no matter how it happens. His life had been forever marked by a lack of human contact, only being able to perceive the phantoms that were left behind in the world and deprived of the warmth and presence of another human. Because of this, he accepts the company of anyone due to his strong desire for companionship, even if he doesn't expect much out of that person and even if he doesn't quite understand them. His dream to be with the silver-haired girl is shaped entirely by this singular desire of having a life-lasting companion, one that he can share his discoveries and experiences with to give his life a deeper meaning, even if their interactions aren't complex.
Yet his cause is flimsy, since everything around him is fated to one day disappear from his reach, much like his lifelong caretaker. Even if he is successful, he also has no assurance that the interactions he'll have will be positive, or that he'll be successful in becoming friends with the silver-haired girl. But these are the hardships that make Seto want to try harder to make his dreams come true, since the alternative of remaining alone in the world for his entire life would be his greatest nightmare. Seto's lack of experience in communicating with people is what drives his desire to do it more often, even if it's aloof, because even the smallest of interactions make him feel like the world has something else to offer other than himself.
The villains of the story represent an antithesis to his character, because instead of embracing their need for interaction, they reject it. The conflict of human empathy became too overbearing for them, because their desire for longing was met only with rejection and hatred. Their suffering led to their ultimate rejection of empathy and communication altogether, realizing that humanity is incapable of communicating their true nature to each other, deciding that destroying human empathy altogether would also cut off humanity from its own sadness and conflict.
If any flaw can be brought up with the story, then it’s the hasty development of the game's conflict in the last act of the game. As interesting as these ideas are, and as clearly as the game might present them, they are simply introduced very bluntly in the middle of a story that, up to this point, did not have a conflict. This development then escalates too quickly, to the point where it becomes a little overwhelming for the player, making it difficult for them to connect to the story's resolution.
However, this does not distract from the complexity and raw nature of the story and themes. Through the game, the player is presented with the question of whether human empathy is truly possible, and whether people can successfully fulfill their inner desire for longing and interaction by communicating with other people. Seto challenges this question by overcoming his anxiety and insecurities due to his pressing need for companionship, even if it brings him suffering in the end and even if his attempts may be futile.
It is for this reason that the world disagreed with the ideals Seto represents, instead accepting that human empathy was too difficult to be possible and opting for an easy way to empathize and communicate with others, even if it may not be the best outcome for the world. Seto's perseverance makes him reject this flawed notion, because he also embraces the suffering that interaction, empathy and communication brings, since his suffering also stems from the great happiness that talking to others and being with others gives him
And this is the beauty that Seto finds in such a dilapidated, broken world. He finds his happiness in people and in all the little things that he can say and do to feel like he is not alone. When the world lacks so much value and brings so much suffering, there is still something that can be found and something that can be created from it. Even if it is for a short and passing amount of time, the happiness that it was able to bring far exceeds the inevitable nature of its departure.
It is thanks to themes and messages like these that Fragile Dreams can be so captivating and touching. After all, Fragile Dreams is not a sad game but a beautiful game instead. It is a moving game, a game that understands the attentive contrast between being detached and close, crushing and hopeful, as well as being devastating while also being heartrendingly moving.
Fragile Dreams is a game that understands the human spirit, taking inherently humane ideas and conflicts and tackling them in a way that is uncommon and raw. The game doesn't throw themes at the player, hoping that lofty explanations are enough to make its ideas land, and instead lets them experience all of these ideas firsthand, letting them come to their own conclusions about the experience. This creates an experience that is personal, that is unique, and that is unlike anything else, forming a game that is as beautifully charming as it is mysterious.
And after spending so much time telling you why I love this game, I simply cannot come to a conclusion about what the game is like overall, because the experience is just so beautifully subjective. No matter how hard I criticize the game and throw it against the wall for its many flaws and imperfections, I cannot EVER hate this game. No matter how much I love it though, I still can't hide the many problems that it has. Fragile Dreams is a human game, filled with flaws and imperfections, but it's still up to you to decide how much you want to value what it offers.
For this reason, I have only presented to you the reasons why I personally love this game and nothing else, leaving it to you to decide whether you want to experience it on your own terms or not. If you decide to follow my advice and give it a shot, then I promise you an experience that can understand you, that will touch your heart, that will change you, that is deep and that is complex in all its minimalism and humble simplicity. I promise you that Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is a game that you will remember, if only you give it an honest and patient chance.
So, I speak to you, directly, not as the impersonal writer of this review but as the person who experienced all that this game has to offer. I ask you to give Fragile Dreams a chance, with patience and with willingness, and with an open heart; because a gem that is so hidden cannot shine as bright if you don't cast it against a light that will reflect all its beauty. For all its merits, for all its faults, Fragile Dreams dug down deeply into my heart...
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