The History And Development Of Fnaf World
Fnaf World is an RPG developed by Scott Cawthon and was released on the 21st of January in 2016. The game was originally available on both Steam and the Google Playstore, however, both have since been taken down due to a barrage of negative reviews.
The Story
For once I’m not going to spend 80% of the article blabbering on about the story. You’re welcome. Surprisingly, Fnaf game, the story is actually easy to follow and understand. GASP! (If only the rest of the games followed that path). Anyways, the main conflict is this, there’s a virus going around the animatronic lands and you have been tasked to go solve it.
And how do you solve it? You go into glitchy trees and run around as a pixeled Freddy until you find a suspiciously orange glitchy box that you touch. There’s a little more to it than that, but that’s the main gist of it.
The Gameplay Part 1: Party Members & Combat
At the start of the game, you will have eight party members to use, the original four from fnaf 1, and the toy animatronics from fnaf 2. Each party member has three different moves at their disposal, with varying effects, you may also notice the colours next to each move. These colours indicate what kind of move it is.
For example, moves with pink borders often provide buffs to the party (Healing or otherwise) and dark orange borders are reserved for attacks that deal a notable amount of damage.
Speaking of damage. The combat system is turn-based. However, unlike your usual RPGs, every character, including the enemies, is on an invisible timer. When the timer is up, that character can attack. There are moves in the game that can increase or decrease a character’s speed, though they’re only temporary.
Scott also decided, for some reason, that you can just continuously spam the same attacks over and over, which means you can find a really powerful attack and abuse that for the rest of the encounters.
Enemy encounters, outside of boss encounters, are completely random, although certain enemies are specific to certain areas. On top of this, you can find new party members. But how? I hear you ask, well, you beat them into submission and then join your team.
Unfortunately, you can only have party members at a time, so if you want to use the new party member. You’re going to have to swap out one of your old levelled-up party members, for a new one that only has one level and is significantly weaker.
Technically, you don’t have to swap your characters out at all, as you can beat the game with whoever you want, though some are certainly more broken than others.
Also, as a small side note, running in this game requires you to hold down a button and pray that the enemy won’t K.O your entire party. It’s admittedly the weakest part of the combat experience.
The Gameplay Part 2: The Shops & Chips
As is the case with most RPGs, Fnaf World contains a number of shops and minigames. One shop ran by fan-favourite character Lolbit, contains these little things called Bytes. Bytes are essentially little bots that do different things, for example, some attack enemies, some heal you or reduce damage and one group of them just melts a boss’s HP down for you.
Along with the purchasable bytes, there are two unique bytes, one can be obtained by collecting all party members and the other one we’ll talk about in a minute.
Along with bytes, you can purchase armour upgrades from the character Mendo. While much more expensive than bytes, they do boost the defence of every party member by a fixed amount, so they are a least a little bang for your buck.
Finally, we have the fishing mini-game. Hosted by none other than the Satan spawn herself. DeeDee. Yes. That DeeDee. I can feel every person who’s attempted 50/20 mode clawing at their desks as I type this. Thankfully, DeeDee doesn’t immediately spawn Nightmare Chica to come eat us like she does in UCN. Instead, she just demands you play a difficult fishing game.
This is where you’ll get your second special byte from, grab the pearl at the bottom of the screen five times and it’s now a permanent addition to your collection.
The Graphics and Music
The graphics certainly look a lot different to most Scott Games. Instead of the uncanny decrepit look that we’re used to. They’re all cute and cuddly looking, well, maybe except for Purple Guy but what sane human being would go near Purple Guy in the first place? Emphasis on SANE.
Anyways, the music is fine. It’s not bad, it’s just kinda mediocre, though it is kinda nice that the Greenlands theme has the same melody as Pop Goes the Weasel, which is Freddy’s death theme in Fnaf 1, so that’s a nice touch.
The controversial launch
A lot of people on launch called this game lazily made. Which, even Scott Cawthon had to admit, was due to the rushed release of the game. Many criticisms of the game mention how the graphics and animations feel unappealing, which I do agree with to some extent. It’s very different from most of the Fnaf games, being the only one (barring Security Breach) that isn’t actively trying to be scary. And unfortunately, the change in models didn’t really help anything.
The combat system has also been the subject of criticism, with many calling it uninteresting as if most RPG combat systems are that interesting anyway.
After the controversial release, Scott made an official apology, took the game down and encouraged his fans to refund the game. Later, Scott updated the game, adding more characters and even more mini-games that vary in difficulty.
Conclusion (And Was the Criticism Valid?)
So, was the criticism valid? Yes, but I don’t think Fnaf World is as bad as people say, at least, not after the two updates. Yes, the graphics aren’t great and the animation is a bit stiff. Yes, the plot is basic and underutilised and yes, the lore reveals are hidden behind some very easy combat encounters if you know what you’re doing. But, it did at least have some passion put behind it, and had been made free by Scott officially. So that’s got to count for something right?
