The Fairy Tail Photo Mode Is a Big Disappointment

Fairy Tail is a massive series with tons of detail packed into it. Even characters who aren’t part of Strongest Team get all this attention paid to them. What’s great is that when it came to Gust’s Fairy Tale game is that, in its own way, it covers all that. Lots of people are here, and you get to have plenty of folks in your party. You’d think that would make the Fairy Tail Photo Mode, added in the August 6, 2020 update, pretty great. Except, unfortunately, it’s not.

First, the Fairy Tail Photo Mode is free. After you download the August 6, 2020 update, you’ll get a notification in game telling you it’s available. Pressing the right trigger and left analog stick at the same time will bring it up wherever you might be, so long as you aren’t in the midst of a battle. All characters currently in your party can be brought into the picture. Any costumes you may have equipped will show up.

Initially, the specific character options don’t seem too bad. You can slightly adjust their height and positioning, though raising them up too high or too low will make them disappear. You have 15 different poses for people. If you arrange them just so and play around with angles, they can overlap with other characters or environmental objects. There are 11 optional frames you can use and 11 possible filters. Features like roll and zoom seem to be there and, at a glance, it seems fine.

Once you actually start using it, it is very not fine. First, characters have a habit of abruptly disappearing when you move the camera. It doesn’t matter what the pitch might be or how your movement changes. If you move left or right or perhaps up or down, there is a very good chance the person you were focusing on is now gone. You might even have to exit the Fairy Tail Photo Mode and enter it again to make them reappear, since sometimes resetting the camera won’t help. (This happened when trying to get the picture of Wendy leaping out of a barrel above.)

If this came down to knowing exactly how to position characters when moving certain people around to know how to keep them in frame and available, that would be no big deal. You can work with that. But the camera control in Photo Mode is poorly handled. You’re essentially moving the camera around in an open space and directing it toward an area might not send it where you intend it to go. Which can cause your targets to disappear, force you to recenter, and result in a lot of guesswork to get things right.

This all means the zoom function doesn’t always work well, due to the popping in and out of characters. But at least there’s a workaround for that. If there are a couple party members you want in the shot, it is better to go to the character specific mode, hit the toggle to slow down the movement speed, and then one-by-one position them by moving them closer to or farther away from the camera. You can better gauge the distance and set the scene, and it is easier to determine exactly when a character would appear or disappear when you’re moving them and not the camera. (That’s how I managed to get the Erza swimming shot above.)

There’s another downside, and it’s the copyright text watermark automatically applied to the bottom of every screenshot taken in Fairy Tail. This is the sort of game where the characters look really great and it’s a fantastic adaptation. Even though it can be a fight to get people posed the way you want in the Photo Mode, it’s possible. But at the bottom of every image, you have “Based on the manga “Fairy Tail” by Hiro Mashima originally serialized in the weekly Shonen Magazine published by Kodansha Ltd. ©Hiro Mashima, Kodansha/Fairy Tail Committee, TV Tokyo ©2020 Koei Tecmo Games Co., Ltd.” As you might imagine, it really detracts from any pictures you might take.

Fairy Tail is a genuinely enjoyable anime game. Gust got a lot of things right. Especially since things look great. But at the moment, the Fairy Tail Photo Mode feels unfinished, tacked on, and disappointing. It could have potential, but is in need of some adjustments and updates.  

Fairy Tail is available for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PC.