Sword and Fairy Inn 2 is a simulation time management game from EastAsiaSoft. The game features familiar faces from the Sword and Fairy Universe, but that’s about where the similarities to the games end.
Becoming and Innkeeper and A Restauranteur
In this game, you begin by running your own restaurant. A brief tutorial guides you through setting your daily menu and assigning tasks to your workers. As customers arrive, you’ll need to select them and send them to tables, where your serving waiter will automatically attend to them. Once customers finish their meals and leave, you can seat more guests at their tables. A mood symbol above each customer’s head indicates how happy or upset they are. You even have the option to deny entry to customers—how rude!—especially if they’re becoming frustrated with the wait.
Once you get past your first day of work, you can assign one of your workers to be the manager. This allows the day to play out automatically, eliminating the need for you to seat customers.
This part of the game is quite enjoyable and emphasizes time management. It feels like it could be a port of a mobile game, as the controls can sometimes be a bit clunky. Some patrons will make a mess, and even after playing for a while, I still find myself confused about how to select a worker to clean up the mess and then return to seating customers.
Confusion Galore
It’s also after the first day that the game becomes downright confusing for me. While there’s an initial, very brief tutorial, it fails to cover everything that comes afterward. There’s a lot to do in this game, but it’s never adequately explained.
About three or four days into the game, I realized my restaurant was running out of ingredients, and customers were getting pretty upset when I couldn’t serve them any food. The game fails to mention that you can leave the inn to go to town to buy new ingredients or that you have a farm attached to your inn where you can plant seeds for your recipes (you can also buy more seeds in town).
Once I figured out how to replenish my ingredients, my inn was already on the verge of bankruptcy. At that same time, I discovered a room where you can talk to your workers and check in on their needs. There’s a separate room for you to assign a worker to train their stats, like speed and strength. There’s also a room where you can level up recipes with your chef. Additionally, you can send workers on explorations once a day when they become available. There’s even an area where you can send coworkers on dates to increase their fondness for each other.
Around the time I was getting very frustrated trying to figure out what I was supposed to do in this game, I encountered a cutscene that introduced me to a new character. In this scene, I was told that I could recruit him if I wanted to, but it didn’t explain how to do so. This added to my confusion, as I couldn’t figure out how to recruit him or even where to find him. Eventually, I discovered that he was in the room where my workers hang out, and I was able to recruit him from there. I also learned that I could recruit more workers from town. However, after doing so, I ended up going completely bankrupt, and my game came to an end.
All the frustration I mentioned only covers the restaurant portion of the game. You also manage an inn, but again, I have no idea how to run it properly. Customers come in asking to rent rooms, and eventually, you need to assign workers to clean them. There appear to be many rooms that can be unlocked for renting, but I have no clue how to do it. It seemed like rooms for rent only became available after I upgraded my inn once from the menu screen.
Conclusion
I really wanted to like this game, as there’s an astronomical amount of things for any gamer to do to keep busy. The chibi art style is also beautifully done. Sword and Fairy Inn 2 unfortunately fails to live up to it’s namesake. I just can’t move past my frustration with the controls and the lack of direction. Maybe I’ll return to this one in the future, but for now, it’s going on the back burner.
Sword and Fairy Inn 2 was played on an Xbox Series X and is available now on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch and Windows. A review code was provided by the publisher EastAsiaSoft.
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