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Fairytale Fights - TV Tropes

  • ️Mon Dec 09 2024

Fairytale Fights (Video Game)

Once Upon a Time... a quartet of fairytale characters - Red, Jack, Snow White and the Naked Emperor, for one reason or another, lost their fame. In order to regain their popularity, they decide to team up and embark an unstoppable killing spree across the world of fairy tales, because of course that's how it works.

Fairytale Fights is a Hack and Slash action platformer developed using the third installment of Unreal Engine, published by (the now-defunct) Dutch company Playlogic Entertainment. Combining elements of the Fractured Fairy Tale trope with the comical, over-the-top gorn frequently seen in twisted, violence-heavy cartoons like Happy Tree Friends, players get to control Red, Jack, Snow (White) and the Naked Emperor - to spill some blood.

Gallons and gallons of it.

The game was released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, allowing up to four players online.

The closer you get to restoring your former glory, the more blood you're going to shed.
Not that you mind, of course.

  • Acid Attack: Acid potions are Smart Bomb-type you can obtain, allowing you to rain acid into an area and melt enemies into greasy puddles. Flesh-and-blood mooks will be subjected to Stripped to the Bone.
  • Adaptational Abomination: Hansel and Gretel are now two heads fused into one gigantic body, fought as a boss before you face the Candy Witch. Seems like unlike the original tale, their game counterparts failed to escape the witch and is Reforged into a Minion.
  • Adaptational Heroism: Possibly in the case of the Magic Mirror (from Snow White); he's not serving the Evil Queen, but helping the player characters.
  • Adaptation Origin Connection: The very premise of the game - why would Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Jack and the Naked Emperor team up to kick all the ass across the land of fairtales, other than just because?
  • Adaptational Villainy: All instances being Played for Laughs.
    • The Lumber-type enemies are based on the benevolent woodcutter from the original Red Riding Hood story, who accordingly had a Face–Heel Turn and are now helping the wolves.
    • For reasons unknown, Gepetto from Pinocchio is working for the bad guys, and the titular puppet isn't his son, but a war machine he sics upon you. It's as hilarious as it sounds.
    • The Pied Piper is a willing, gleeful minion of the Candy Witch, whose introduction cutscene sees him luring children with his pipe into the witch's oven. The game also follows the theory that the Piper is controlling the rats from his tale all along - he'll periodically summon rats as backup during his boss battle.
    • And then there's the Final Boss, The Brave Little Tailor, who consumes a magic potion and goes One-Winged Angel trying to kill you... nope, the game doesn't attempt making any sense out of all these.
  • Alliterative Name: Fairytale Fights.
  • Anthropomorphic Food: The Candy Witch's minions are all sentient, hostile gingerbread men. That bleeds purple jelly after getting hacked to pieces. Some variants has laffy taffy in place of arms that they use as Combat Tentacles.
  • Ass Shove: In the opening FMV, Jack retrieves the golden egg goose he stole from the giants, ordering it to start laying. When the goose refuses, Jack shoves a hand up there and retrieves a sticky, shiny egg.
  • Background Boss: The Kid and Father Giant are both fought this way, since they're both too huge to fit into the screen - launching attacks from the back and occasionally trying to swat you, and you either wait for their hands and face to get close enough before you attack or hold out for a chance for you to use a ranged counterattack.
  • Beanstalk Parody: In a game like this, of course. You climb the beanstalk (if you're playing as Jack, you re-climb it) to reach the giant's home, with occasional platforming areas containing enemies.
  • Bear Trap: Shows up in the forest, placed by the Lumber-class enemies. They kill you in a single snap.
  • Bloody Hilarious: The selling point of the entire game - at least 70% of enemies, ranging from the most basic mooks to bosses, will expel gratuitious amounts of High-Pressure Blood and gorn, decorating whole areas with glorious, glorious red sauce. You can even use the blood puddles for sliding across a stage!
  • Boss Tease: The Beaver, Father Giant and Candy Witch all appears in the opening FMV.
  • Busy Beaver: A kaiju beaver shows up as the forest stage's boss, where it seems to be in charge of the Lumber-class enemies overseeing the construction of a dam. And since you just killed almost all its workers, the beaver is not very happy...
  • Chainsaw Good: The highest-level Lumberjack enemies wields chainsaws that chews you up, but after killing them you can collect their chainsaws and spill some (more) red.
  • Charged Attack: You can unleash a charged punch or slash by holding down the basic attack button. You obtain instructions for this move in the first stage's second area, right after killing some easily-disposed Lumberbobs.
  • Circling Birdies: Whacking enemies with a blunt weapon will make them see circling stars, and you can finish them off before they recover. You do suffer this fate if you're overwhelmed by mooks and receive too many hits.
  • Coup de Grâce Cutscene: An exeggerated example, since every one out of three to five times you finish off an enemy with a combo, the game will generate a cutscene of your victim dying messily - either their craniums falling off, splitting into sizeable chunks, painfully collapsing from getting their appendages hacked into stumps or bleeding a whole geyser of red stuff as they succumb. Given the frequency of these cutscenes popping up (in a game with five hours' worth of playtime), depending on your tolerance for cartoon violence it might get old rather quickly.
  • Creepily Long Arms: The Gingerbread men variant whose arms were replaced by laffy taffy that flops around when they run, as well as their creator - the Candy Witch whose arms drags on the floor everywhere.
  • Death Course: Tends to show up in every stage, where you'll outrun descending blades, trapdoors that drops you to your deaths, boulders, collapsing bridges in the forest, furnaces that discharges fire in the Candy Witch's factory, and the like.
  • Degraded Boss: The Beaver and Pinocchio returns in the giant's castle, as regular enemies.
  • Edible Bludgeon: In the Candy Witch's stage, you can obtain lolipop hammers, candy stick clubs, and jawbreaker-shooting rifles as weapons.
  • Excuse Plot: ...that you'll forget the game even has a premise after roughly half an hour, when you're decorating entire stages with the insides of slain enemies.
  • Exposition Fairy: The Magic Mirror from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs serves this purpose, showing up before stages to provide hints and instructions on how to execute deadly attacks. Doubly hilarious and ironic if you're playing as Snow White, considering the mirror's role in the original tale...
  • Fractured Fairy Tale: In which Jack, Red, Snow White and the Emperor attempts to regain their former glory via killing everything in as violent ways as possible.
  • Full-Frontal Assault: The Naked Emperor lives up to his name in every stage - clothes or no clothes, he will kick plenty of ass.
  • The Ghost: A few other fairytale characters, like The Little Mermaid and Goldilocks and the bears, are mentioned in passing between stages, but they don't physically appear.
  • Giant Hands of Doom: The Little Giant (as in, the son of the original giant from the Beanstalk story), fought as a boss, repeatedly sticks his hand through a hole trying to grab at you. You slash his hand until he backs off; let him grab you and your character turns into a bloody smear.
  • Glass-Shattering Sound: In the opening FMV, the Brave Little Tailor reaches the dwarves' cottage where they just finished placing Snow White into her glass coffin after she ate the poison apple. Instead of giving Snow a True Love's Kiss, the tailor instead starts playing the magic, golden harp just nearby, whose vibrations are loud enough to shatter the coffin all over the dwarves (one getting it in his left eye) besides waking up Snow White. Who was promptly kicked out by the dwarves for being alive and wasting the dwarves' time.
  • Grievous Harm with a Body: Before obtaining a weapon, you collect a rabbit and use it as a club.
  • Hedge Maze: There's one such maze in the Queen of Hearts' castle, just like the original Alice in Wonderland story, though navigating the maze is quite easy. The game even shifts to a bird's-eye-view in a few areas so you know how to locate an exit.
  • Inevitable Waterfall: The first boss fight against the giant Beaver is set on some river rapids where you're on a raft that the beaver tries chewing up while you attempt to fend off the boss, until it reaches a waterfall. The fight continues until the beaver gets dislodged, and falls over the edge, but then your raft falls as well with you on it.
  • Instrument of Murder: The Pied Piper shows up as a boss... and instead of using his pipe, here he plays an organ capable of blasting flames all over the place. You defeat the piper by sabotaging his organ causing him to be incinerated by his own instrument.
  • Kill It with Fire: All three bosses of the Candy Castle stage are disposed in this manner; the Pied Piper tries incinerating you with his fire-spewing organ before you sabotage the organ into roasting the Piper, Hansel and Gretel are both shoved into a burning oven, and the Candy Witch is disposed via furnace.
  • Level Ate: The Candy Witch's stage, a huge mansion made of pastries, cookies and candy, guarded by gingerbread men mooks.
  • Lily-Pad Platform: The moat in the castle of the Queen of Hearts can be crossed by jumping on giant lilypads.
  • Little Red Fighting Hood: The game's Red Riding Hood packs a punch compared to her original fairytale counterpart.
  • Living Toys: In the giant's castle when you enter the Kid Giant's bedroom. It's a Toy Time stage with you fighting sentient, animated toys - mostly tin soldiers, but there are some gnomes and stuffed animals - as large as yourself.
  • Macro Zone: The stage from the Land of Giants is set in the Giant's house, the Giant and his family searching for Jack who stole his precious goose that lays the golden eggs. Everything is giant-sized save for the playable characters, and you need to hop across teacups, platters, kettles and all sorts of appliances as impromptu platforms.
  • Mighty Lumberjack: Inverted with the "Lumber-" class enemies (Lumberbob, Lumberben, Lumberpete, Lumberjack). They're human mooks dressed in stereotypical lumberjack attire and swinging axes, but they appear in the first area and dies rather easily even with your most basic weapons.
  • Mook Debut Cutscene: Each and every basic enemy has one the moment they debut, shown on a panel resembling a page from a fairytale book. Same goes for bosses and their Boss Subtitles.
  • Mouse Trap: In the giant's castle, where mousetraps as large as yourself are another obstacle serving as the equivalent to the Bear Trap in the forest stages. They can kill you in one hit, too.
  • Perverse Puppet: Pinocchio shows up as a boss, where instead of a puppet brought to life he's a Clockwork Creature Geppetto activates to attack you on sight.
  • Recurring Boss:
    • The Beaver is fought twice, firstly after the Death Course in the forest where it attempts chewing up your raft only to snag its teeth allowing you to wallow him; after you send the beaver down the waterfall you travel a bit further down the next stage, killing some more Lumber-type mooks and fighting the Pinnochio miniboss... only to fight the beaver in a pier downstream. Then the second fight ends with you throwing the beaver into a set of rotating blades that chews him up for good, before the Father Giant suddenly catches the beaver on a fishing rod through the eye and presumably eats him off-camera.
    • The Kid Giant is fought twice, once as a giant hand trying to reach at you from a hole and later in his playroom. After his second defeat though, the Father Giant shows up, and he's not happy at what you did to his boy.
  • Ring-Out Boss: Hansel and Gretel - depicted as a two-headed giant - can only be defeated when you knock him/her into the exposed, burning oven. Kind of ironic considering how their original fairytale ends...
  • Shamu Fu: You collect swordfishes as an improvised sword during the second beaver boss fight. When the beaver starts roaring to expel gunge at your direction, throw the fish in.
  • Shield-Bearing Mook: Some of the Card Soldiers guarding the Queen of Hearts' palace carries shields, though getting past their defenses is a matter of spamming your slash attack.
  • Snowlems: For some odd reason, a few areas in the beanstalk-climbing stage are covered with snow (must be a really tall beanstalk), and will spawn animated snowmen as enemies. They look exactly like the gingerbread men enemies, but recoloured white.
  • Spin Attack:
    • Be wary when Pinnochio retracts his arms and legs - he's going to protrude blades from the sides of his body and spin around like crazy, trying to grind you up. If you defeat Pinnochio though, he goes haywire in a cutscene and spins so hard, he accidentally breaks the gate of the boss area allowing you to exit.
    • The Beaver can spin around to whack you via Tail Slap in his second battle.
    • The Brave Little Tailor, in his giant form, can spin around while spamming a Flechette Storm of needles.
  • Stunned Silence: The Naked Emperor's introduction in the opening cutscene sees him approaching his castle's balcony, before a cheering crowd in the castle's square out to welcome their king. Then everyone quickly fell silent when they realize their king is in his birthday suit, for several seconds... before someone lets out a horrified scream. Cue everyone vacating the courtyard.
  • Tactical Suicide Boss:
    • The Beaver, in both his boss battles, never considered flipping over the raft/pier you're on, instead choosing to launch itself on the surface you're standing... and get itself stuck. You then whack him before he unstucks himself. Rinse and repeat.
    • In his second battle, the Kid Giant will lob animated toy soldiers at you... and then peer through a background door to see you fight. You defeat the soldiers and then Go for the Eye, casuing the Kid Giant to stagger backwards and try launching attacks at you again. Just keep giving the Kid Giant his Eye Scream until he's done.
  • Xenafication: Snow White and Red Riding Hood are now mass murderers, who spends the entire game kicking copious amounts of ass and leaving behind piles of corpses.
  • X-Ray of Pain: Land some combo moves with your fists and finish off an enemy, and the Coup de Grâce Cutscene will show an X-ray cross-section of their bones - all of them - dislocating into pieces.
  • "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: A twisted one pops up in the storybook closing, over the credits:
    • Snow White returns to the forest and as a payback to the dwarves for kicking her out, had all seven of them entombed in a new glass coffin.
    • The Naked Emperor returns to his kingdom, still naked, and unfortunately his plans to restore himself to glory didn't quite pan out since he's an idiot... he does get a new job as the naked Court Jester for a new (and also) Naked Emperor.
    • Pinocchio was rebuilt after his defeat as a boss, but now as a clothes-rack.
    • The Little Giant somehow managed to retrieve the Goose that lay golden eggs from Jack, only to be threatened by a Giant Chicken.
    • The Candy Witch survived the destruction of her Candy Tower, against all odds. She quickly goes on an eating binge... on her own gingerbread minions.
    • The Beaver... stays dead. And is mourned by his wife and children.
    • ...and the game ends with a clip of Red Riding Hood chilling near a wolfskin rug, complete with the head of another wolf mounted on a wall.