Review: Kitaria Fable is a Cute but Shallow Starter Adventure

Being a cat throwing around a sword to defeat adorable villains, with their trusty talking macaron sidekick to help, and getting to live your best cottagecore life on your down time with farming and running food errands for the village- sounds like the perfect life to me! Kitaria Fables does its job in transporting you there, however the cutesy tale might not be all the high energy fun that it’s cracked up to be.

Kitaria Fables was released September 2nd 2021, developed by Twin Hearts and published by PQube. You play as Nyanza Von Whiskers, Nyan for short. He’s the grandson of a famous protector, stationed in Paw Village to defend it from monsters that are running amok. With the help of your trusty pal Macaron- a pink, talking dessert, the village chief, and the rest of the residents of Paw Village, you learn magic spells for combat, collect ingredients to build better weapons and armor, farm fruits and veggies for food, and prepare for the looming danger ahead.

Your first day, you go around helping villagers get items they aren’t strong enough to gather on their own, whether that’s getting stingers from forest bees, or picking up after bats and getting lost in a cave. You can test out your combat skills on the farm’s scarecrows, and even customize your look and try out different cute fur patterns (calico was a personal favorite). 

While playing, I looked forward to seeing what kind of little animal I’d get to talk to next. Will it be the grandpa goat ready to welcome you into your new life, a sun hat-wearing rabbit trying to get you to understand the basics of gardening, or maybe the polar bear warlock who likes to remind you that magic is illegal? Kitaria Fables does an amazing job giving interesting dialogue to its sweet characters- Timmy’s commitment to giving you the best of the best for better combat, Ms. Apple’s talent of special health treats and care of her niece, and Chief Oliver’s comforting trust in you made me look forward to starting each new day and seeing what tasks they might have for me. Another errand to gather ingredients? Maybe drop off a gift? Look into a strange noise coming from afar? 

As Nyan runs those errands, Kitaria’s map has various types of fun places to explore. Players can find themselves adventuring throughThrough dreamy autumn forestry, swampy treacherous terrains, spooky graveyards, dark caves, deserts turned beaches, and more! As you find more areas to visit, you’ll meet new enemies like odd colored ghosts, Shadow of the Colossus-type stone creatures, and pot-bellied orcs.

The visuals in Kitaria Fables are a Pokémon fan’s dream. Carrot cats, chubby cute trees, spiky mushrooms, the cleverly created little fellas you might find will keep you exploring! Villains during the day and night time do change, with enemies creeping around at night being just a bit tougher to fight.

If you’re met with a tough fight, and caught off-guard  with how strong some enemies are, the game does an excellent job not punishing fallen players. If you run out of health, you wake up in your bed and are ready to start a new day. You don’t lose any items you collected before getting KO’d, nothing goes missing. I guess the only drawback would be if you went through a lot to get where you were before losing health, you do have to walk back, but that’s just a video game norm, and quick travel can help cut time spent running back.

As you learn magic spells from Alby, a cloak wearing polar bear, become an expert gardener, help out the little Dobermann knights, and stretch your abilities to further seek what you might find behind the locked areas of the map, the gameplay loop becomes mundane. The swapping of combat weapons to gardening tools, having to check back what magic abilities you can collect next, and the map jumping (even with the help of the quick travel beakers) turned the game into a sluggish chore.. The long stretches of the same song on loop in 4 different areas of the map slowed things down even more. Kitaria Fables had a lot of instances of “feeling” empty and unfinished, so for a few hours, the stagnancy of the game felt like a whole other challenge to get through.

While Kitaria was not for me, it was a perfect fit for someone else. Upon its first day release, I booted the game up for my younger sister to play, and only having played ONE video game before, the pacing and learning of it all was perfect. Farming and gathering special stones became her favorite thing to do, and she spent more time just seeing what she could collect and gather before continuing the story in large pockets of time. As a starter RPG, Kitaria Fables eases the getting used to of running back and forth that a lot of JRPG’s love to do, the immense reading, and can help younger players get the hang of those darn dodge mechanics (unlike me, who has refused to dodge since KH1 days).

Kitaria Fables is available now on Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and PC.