This focus on humour rather than a coherent story comes right from the original Mado Monogatari games from the 90s, but it’s different here. Where I would have described the original games’ humour as “a lighthearted comedic tone for everyone”, I would describe the humour in Fia and the Wonderous Academy as “a bunch of annoying japes for kids”. Things get silly, the characters’ 3D models overreact, and the music changes from its usual repetitive tune to what I imagine is labelled in the game’s files as ‘funny_scene_2.wav’ to tell you that it’s time to start laughing. The game’s few legitimately funny moments are lost under dozens of scenes that run on too long, leaving you more likely to hit that fast-forward button before you even get to the funny part. This calibre of dialogue works for games like Puyo Puyo, but not so much in a multi-chapter RPG that presumably hopes you’ll form bonds with these characters as they change and grow with the story. I upheld a lukewarm interest in the story despite this, but the constant oh-so-funny back and forth really limited my investment. The visuals that could have contributed a lot to sell the scenes as funny look good enough on their own, but are fairly indistinct from any other anime game featuring chibi 3D models.

Unfortunately, everything else about battles gets in the way. It’s discombobulating to be able to move around and target enemies at will, but be prevented from using artes. Using the D-Pad to swap between artes and switch targets is awkward when you’re already using the left control stick to move. Regular dungeon battles are short, confusing kerfuffles that are often over before you’ve even been able to think about strategising with your elemental orbs. With repeated enemy designs across multiple dungeons, there’s nothing to keep the battles from turning into an uninteresting annoyance. Boss fights are an exception to this, providing a difficulty spike that feels almost jarring after blazing through a dungeon without issue.

With dungeons feeling trivially unchallenging in both their layout and combat: the only real obstacle you’ll face is running out of vitality, a pesky bar at the top left that drains slowly each time you do anything in the dungeon. If you’re a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon fan, it’s the same as the hunger mechanic, but harder to restore without having enough ingredients to cook yourself a curry. Occasionally, you’ll come across a teleporting device that will save your place in the dungeon and return you to the academy, which is a bit too useful: it refills your vitality instantly and allows you to drop the contents of your inventory into storage, which basically turns inventory management, one of the main mechanics of a dungeon crawler, into a non issue. Dungeons start including traps and obstacles from about the third dungeon in which adds a sorely needed element of danger to the explorations, though sadly, repeating enemy designs that just cycle through different colours to indicate their element prevent dungeons from feeling truly distinct from one another.