It’s nothing like its predecessor. It’s short and doesn’t end well. (Content warning: Contains discussion of suicide.)
It all started with a quote from Joe DeVader on our Slack channel.
“Fata Morgana developer releases spin-off to repurpose characters and assets to tell story of indie developer and his fans being otherworldly into his fantasy game” on my bingo card There was no.
The concept sounds downright silly, but given my feelings about the House of Fata Morgana, I should have taken the risk and bought the 7th Rare. A few hours later, I reached for the antidepressants I was using to get through Persona 3 her portable and burst into tears trying to figure out how to put my thoughts down on paper for this game.
As Joe flippantly put it, Seventh Rare heavily reuses Fata Morgana’s character model and background for an entirely new story. This is stated on his eShop page for the game, and they’re saying it honestly because FM’s character is literally credited by name: ‘you’ character is from the Paris-based game A developer, playing his Dark† Knight, a hacker alias. Dark†Knight is making some small indie his releases on his own his website ‘Royaume Heaven*’. After a bit of creator block, he announces a new release on April Fool’s Day, only to lose consciousness when the game goes live and awaken as a hero character in an apparently Dragon Quest-inspired JRPG. Regular members of the forums start appearing as other party members and in one instance also NPCs, and the party must work their way through the game using only Dark†Knight’s memories of the game’s planning notes. must be After a few sequence interruptions that make Super Metroid Speedrunner blush, Endgame reveals why the character was brought into the fantasy world in the first place.
Unlike its predecessor, Seventh Lair is a short adventure. I was able to get over it in a few hours. There are no story options, and apart from a short post-credits “short story”, that’s all you get with the main plot. Unfortunately, the editing of the story itself is a little rough, there were more typos/missed words in this short adventure than in Fata Morgana as a whole. It may have gone, but MangaGamer has published the original English release of Fata Morgana that the console release (published by Limited Run Games or its predecessor) was based on. will be up.
Considering the reuse of open assets, they have successfully adapted the characters and environments into a “fantasy RPG” world. There’s even a reason the protagonist has incredibly long hair in space. “One Cut Deep”, “Nowhere Land”and especially “Fairy Voice” Stand out. (The last of them is actually also used as part of the plot.)
I don’t regret it took me hours to read Seventh Lair, but it did take me a few minutes to calm myself down at the end of the story. With some text cleaned up, it could be the best visual novel of all time, but for now it’s a solid one with a few things worthy of discussion.
