Legends of Awen: Rise of the Fianna Preview - A very promising green shoot, but a lot of work lies ahead

Sometimes it's hard to adapt to new environments in RPGs, even if your main activity is to master them in all their variants. In the case of CRPGs, it also takes a longer period of time to learn their systems and controls than in other variants of the genre, such as JRPGs or action RPGs. To make matters worse, recent successes like Disco Elysium or Baldur's Gate 3 only make it harder for me to see where the potential is to have something interesting on my hands. And I must say that in the case of Rise of the Awen that potential is indeed there, but it's been a pretty serious struggle against the elements. Because Rise of the Fianna still has a lot of work to do, and a lot of corrections and tweaks to the game's balance and user experience. But it has soul, and that's enough to stay a little longer and keep exploring it.

I'm Spanish, so Celtic folklore and mythology only touches me personally in a very distant way. Only a few areas on the north coast of the country had real influence and cultural contact with the Celts, although later those very people migrated to Ireland, where this medieval fantasy is set. Here we are the space envoy of the Queen of Tara, a region with two warring factions on the brink of civil war whose ruler, now sick and dying, must choose between his two sons to see who will rule the land. The High Queen sends us, Finn Mac Cuwall, leader of the Fianna (a word for bands of mercenaries and freemen who lived in the outlawed forests, whom the king could summon for certain matters), from whose background our stats and playstyle will come. In my first game I intended to take things with an eloquent philosophy and put all my eggs in the Charisma basket, but after being soundly defeated in my first fight, I decided to go back to the main menu and build myself a heroine more balanced between the three available stats: Charisma, Wisdom, and Might. Yes, I probably could have won using only those speech skills, but at least in this first fight, everything is so confusing that I had to opt for brute force.

Neither the interface nor the options are well highlighted in the turn-based action, and the combat system seems to be based on combining different moods (such as angry, calm, or confident) with abilities that can affect the characters' will to fight or, if nothing else, their own health. But those abilities work in area, and affect enemies and party mates alike, so by a bad position you could be healing health to an enemy or debuffing a teammate who was going to have a turn next. But you wouldn't know that either, because there is no indication of these turns.

I'm sure it's pretty clear by now that the combat system in Legends of Awen: Rise of the Fianna needs a major overhaul - as of today, and thankfully, its developers are well aware of it. Many of these concerns or interface bugs I've alluded to are already known and will slowly be fixed, and that gives me some hope for the final product (although there's still a long way to go before we see anything definitive). What really makes me see the potential is that it makes a fairly elaborate representation of Celtic traditions, and that it also has a very neat graphical presentation. The art design is remarkable, and even in the less relevant backgrounds of this build you can see that there is a lot of talent behind it.

I've taken these first sessions with Rise of the Fianna as a brief glimpse of a project that I'll enjoy much better in a few months. For now, the project is as green as the grass in the Ireland it is inspired by, so let's let Hawkswell Studios do the cooking.