“Five years ago, a witch’s curse beneath the red moon turned Chante into a fairy. Now she and her sister Elise search for a way to transform her back into a human, and in their travels they come across a particular town, which is home to a number of nearby ruins, as well as a peculiar shopkeeper named Aira, and a strange, mercurial fortune-teller who calls herself Elma. Could this place hold the key to returning Chante to normal? Or will it lead to more answers than our two sisters ever wanted to know?”
Chantelise comes from the Japanese indie developer EasyGameStation, who you may know as the group that created Carpe Fulgur’s previous release Recettear. Chantelise actually pre-dates Recettear, being EasyGameStation’s first game to feature their own characters and story instead of being based on an existing property. Though you shouldn’t go into this expecting a premise and experience as unique as Recettear; Chantelise is just a simple 3D action adventure game.
Players take control of Elise, a young swordswoman who travels with her sister Chante, who happens to be a fairy. Combat is pretty straightforward: Elise can perform a short combo with her sword, jump, and dash out of the way of attacks, and Chante participates in combat by casting magic, which can only be done when the player picks up magic stones that enemies drop. The magic easily adds the most variety to the combat, allowing you to use multiple magic stones at the same time to perform different kinds of spells. There’s a spell list in the menu, though for some reason it only appears to list spells for using multiples of the same element, and doesn’t include any of spells for using a mix of elements. That defeats the purpose of the spell list since it’s easy to remember to use two fire stones to cast a stronger fire spell whereas other combinations and their results aren’t as straightforward, and it seems like an oversight on the developer’s part.
