This is a hint and review file for "Fairy Nights", an H anime Windows 
game in English and Italian from Milky House/Four Nine. It is sold by 
J-List and JAST USA, and other H anime game companies. I don't know 
what the Japanese version of this was called, possibly something 
that can be abbreviated to "YUME", but I believe it was by Excellents. 
I'll only be discussing the English version as played on a PC here, 
but it should also work on a Macintosh. NOTE: No Italian version 
provided in the initial release of this game.

The Japanese version website is at:
http://www.excellents.co.jp/
but I found nothing for Four Nine except a single mention in text, 
and nothing about either game.
The English version website was at:
http://www.milkyhouse.com/  [site basically gone now]
which said the Japanese game is from Excellents Japan and Liberty 
Soft (a name not mentioned anywhere else).

Pete's mini-review:
Excellent "omake" (bonus/gift/photoshop)! Without playing the game at 
all, you can view all of the H images and many of the non-H ones too, 
play all of the music, and view the "Let's Bingo" images as well! 
There are also images from other JAST USA products on the disc, in the 
"Extras" directory, and the JAST USA catalog too. There are scrolling 
images (as .AVI files) of girls/fairies in the hidden YUME directory 
too.
A few translation problems were noticed, but the game is set up so you 
don't have to read the text anyway, so they aren't as important as in 
other games. This game is made so you can blitz through it by either 
viewing the H images right away, or skipping practically all of the 
story in "fast forward" mode.
There is no installation of this game on your hard drive. It plays 
completely from the CD. I didn't see any way to save progress, but 
you can jump to points in the middle of the story by guessing where 
you were on the "From the Middle" list.
The "Battle Mahjong" sounds interesting. But even though it is shown 
in a little more detail in this second game, compared to the first, 
there isn't enough to do it justice. One question that I have 
though: If Jango Abe gets to see H pictures of girls that he defeats 
in Tobanjan, what about guys? The way the girls/fairies talk when 
defeated and you see 3 escalating H pictures, it's as if they are 
actually playing multiple rounds of Battle Mahjong with Jango, and 
losing each time. Even with the Mahjong tiles this time, you still 
aren't seeing how the game is played. So I guess there really is no 
Battle Mahjong game to show us, if it was even there in the Japanese 
version. Too bad. It could have been interesting, even if the rules 
had to be explained to us gaijin.
Anyway, graphics rather good (and uncensored), music not too 
annoying (except for the slow CD and scrolling mentioned above), no 
noticeable sound effects. Extremely easy to play, images and music 
very accessible. No repeatability though. Only improvement I can 
think of would be to add the Battle Mahjong game, but then you'd need 
a save/load game functionality as well. No photoshop patch or 
walkthrough is included in this file, or needed to get through the 
entire game or see all the H images.
Note that the suggested retail price on the Milky House website is 
only $19.95. For the interesting story, good graphics, and excellent 
omake, it's certainly worth it! This one seems to have a longer story, 
and more H scenes, than the first game (Legend of Fairies). Getting 
both of them at once isn't a bad idea.

Hints on play:
Just left-click anywhere except the bar full of control buttons to 
advance (like the "Play" button) when playing the game. You don't 
need to keep the mouse pointer on that little button. Unfortunately, 
I couldn't find keyboard equivalents for any of the buttons.
The "final" H images for each girl/fairy will scroll. During the game, 
these do so when you left-click on anything but the Exit button. In 
the photoshop area, you make them scroll by holding down the mouse 
button on one side or the other of the screen - the dividing line is 
invisible, and you can't always tell which images will scroll or in 
what directions. Note that the mouse will scroll even when outside the 
game window boundary. A minor quibble is that the names aren't shown 
in the lower area until you mouse over them. Another is that when you 
press Exit from a full-screen image, you often pop back to a different 
group of pictures.
Double-click when an image is "dissolving" in "Let's Bingo" to end the 
dissolve effect quickly.
The relatively slow CD drive on my laptop made it obvious that the 
scrolling images shown with music when new girls or fairies appear are 
putting a heavy load on the CD mechanism. It took up to 10 seconds to 
scroll, sometimes with long pauses or annoying jumps, because the 
music files and image files are in different places on the disc. So, 
while there is no requirement on the box for how fast your CD-ROM 
drive is, I'd say 2x can be too slow for comfort. Then again, a video 
card that has trouble with .AVI files, or a computer that can't handle 
an AVI and music off the same CD simultaneously, can happen to 
anyone.
The background music is in the hidden YUME\BGM directory, this time as 
AIFF files that can be played with QuickTime. In the first game, the 
music files didn't have the .AIFF extension.
The program crashed several times in "Let's Bingo" - the screen would 
flash white several times and then the program would exit. Probably 
due to me jumping in and out of the program to write this file. But 
compared to how badly my system has crashed lately from malfunctioning 
web browsers and conflicting plug-ins, this was nothing. You may have 
to restart your computer if the sound doesn't come back when you try 
the game again.

This game was the sequel to "Legend of Fairies", using the same major 
characters (Jango Abe and his fairies) and occurring one year later. 
Strange that they didn't wait until seeing how well the first one did 
before releasing the second. Especially since the Italian Readme file 
for the second game says that they don't actually have the Italian 
version finished in the first release of the game disc. They promise 
to provide a free copy of the game with the Italian translation if you 
request one. Unfortunately, they slightly mess up the email address 
link, and leave an English message in there that reveals the whole 
situation rather badly. Like I said, they could have waited on the 
second game until they saw how the first one did.
Or maybe they didn't for an interesting reason... It looks like this 
disc is nearly full, but most of that is the BGM, and all the 
scrolling AVIs from the first game are in the hidden YUME directory 
plus all the scrolling H images from this game. So I think it's 
possible that both games were originally targetted to fit on one CD, 
and they separated them for non-Japanese release. I don't know for 
sure though. But it's interesting to see how well Macromedia can be 
used to produce an H game.
There's a hint of a sequel at the end of this game, so I wouldn't be 
surprised if there is a 3rd or even a 4th game someday. There is 
certainly potential left in this series.


If you have anything to add to this file, let me know.

Pete Karsanow - bishoujo.helper[AT}sbcglobal{DOT)net
http://www.geocities.com/hentaihelper/