Pixie Hollow:Disney Interactive’s Fairy MMO
Jul 3, 2009 Articles Recommend|1,118views
I was tempted to subtitle this review with a tongue-in-cheek, “Camping the rare blueberry spawn,” but refrained. That would neither have been fair nor accurate of this game. I shall explain as I get into the quests section but first, let’s talk about the game itself.
Pixie Hollow Online by Disney Interactive is based on the Disney Fairies franchise, solidly driven by the main fairy herself, Tinkerbell. You register an account, create a fairy, selecting a fairy talent such as Water, Garden, Light and Tinker, and customize it by selecting faces, hair colors clothing and accessories, such necklace and bracelet. Each talent has a color theme and talents are a personal flavor rather than imparting any stats or skills. You select wings, pose your fairy, and away you fly into lush landscapes accompanied by orchestral music, the ambient sounds of the area you are flying around in, such as birdsong and bullfrogs and the shimmer of bells and trail of lights as you fly. Just like Tink.
Disney could have created a website with some simple games, lots of advertising and sold toys to cash in on the popularity of the Disney Fairies with little girls, but they didn’t. Instead, they’ve launched a beautiful interactive landscape with mini-games and quests built into the game. They’ve built an actual MMO. Even the shops may be frequented by more than one fairy at a time, and you can hold parties in your fairy house.
This game is completely web based and does not require any client downloads. The space in which your fairy can interact is two dimensional, but the artists have managed to render it to look like three dimensional space. Pixie Hollow Online is also available Free to Play, but the best features, the quest storyline and crafting are pay subscription only, and that runs $4.99 a month.
How do you Play?
Pixie Hollow is basically a collections game and you get medals for achievements. You create your little fairy, and you fly around the world. Hooray! A New Fairy medal! You make your first friend. Hooray! A Friend medal! That’s just the very tip of the iceberg. Medals are awarded for exploring all of the zones in an area and there are four at this time: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Then there’s the gathering game. In every zone, items spawn randomly at various points. You fly over it to collect it, and as you collect them, you earn medals as well. These items are used for purchases at the shops and crafting. Twigs, dandelion fluff, blueberries, rose petals, meadow grass and acorns, etc. are the in-game “currency” for fairy fashion accessories and each shop keeper wants different kinds and numbers of items for her wares. Some can be pricey, such as 72 acorns for a cute little top. Better yet, 243 spider silks for a Dance Party item for your house! Don’t forget also, that you are competing against a bunch of other little fairies for these rare commodities, and fairy players are found all over the world. They aren’t shy about swooping in and snatching that raspberry or spider silk from you either!
Crafting is a set of mini games and only tailoring is available at this time. Each tailoring recipe must be unlocked by tailoring practice and uses different items in game, such as Oak Leaves and Spider Silk plus dye, and dye is bought from a Fairy shopkeeper with items as well. The mini-games involve bouncing a little rolly-bug to dye your material, cutting your pattern pieces out by luring a hungry caterpillar with cake, piecing your pattern pieces together and finally, “click” stitching with a swinging spider at the right spot.
Another game that kids can play is the window shopping game. In every store, your fairy can try on and model clothing, accessories and even check to see how a new hair-style and color suits. It’s actually quite a bit of fun customizing your fairy that way.
Quests
The overarching story / quest line sends you all over the maps and introduces you to all of the named Fairies as well as the mini-games, and here is what I meant about camping the rare Blueberry spawn: I got to the third stage of Tinkerbell’s story quest and was asked for three blueberries by Fawn. I was playing on a Saturday afternoon on a quiet server - which still had lots of other little fairies flying around on every map - and hadn’t yet seen a blueberry. Raspberries, sunflower seeds, meadow grass in plenty… no blueberries. Then one popped. I grabbed it, imagining myself beating out all of the other fairies for it. Now… I could fly around other maps and hope for more blueberries or camp this spawn. Not that a blueberry always spawned there, there’s a spawn table and something else such as a sunflower seed or a twig could spawn there instead. I decided to ignore the quest and play mini-games instead. Then my seven year old niece asked what I was doing muttering about blueberries and told me. “Play the Harvest game, Aunt Carol.” Yes… Fawn’s mini-game found on another map in the Autumn lands gave me blueberries as a reward. Doh! Kid’s game, dum-dum… it can’t be that hard!
Mini-games
Most zones have a mini-game and unlike some games with mini-games that are all just variants of “match three,” they are quite different. One required you to bounce fishes in bubbles up the falls with a lily pad. Just beware the falling prickly brambles. The game continues until you lose all of your lily pads. Boosts that enlarge your lily pad and additional lily pads could also be obtained.
Another was lighting up fireflies. Your fairy received three baskets with which you had to pick up a light then catch up to the ever-moving firefly and light it with a mouse-click. This one was rather fun as you could light more than one if you caught them together, and as you progressed, there were different colored lights that did different things. One passed from a firefly to another as they met, another lit an area for a short while and all fireflies passing through were lit. Then there were moths which knocked your basket out of your hands and some would actively go after you if you had a light in your basket.
One run by Tinkerbell was a sorting game where you grabbed things off a conveyor belt and put them in the right basket. Some items actually would fall off into the correct basket, so we did not have to worry about those, but it went from one conveyor to two and increased from three items to sort to six.
Each mini-game gave you a choice of three different rewards, so if you prefer not to flit around competing for the item spawns, you could simply play the mini-games. Prowess in the mini-games also gives you Medals.
Sound and Graphics
Sound and Graphics are top notch. Disney is the granddaddy of epic movie cartoons after all and the artists have managed to create an amazingly beautiful and lush web-based flash world. Movement in a zone is seamless and the zone is seen in an ornate window with your fairy centered. Once your fairy starts moving toward the edge of the pane, you know you’re at the edge of the zone. For players with less powerful machines, each pane of the window will load as your fairy flies to the edge of the pane, and an arrow indicates that there is more “pane” to fly to. UI elements are outside the window with representative icons such as a bag for your ingredients for crafting and a trunk for inventory items such as additional pieces of clothing. The fairy journal gets you to your crafting recipes, your profile, quests, and etc.
Social and Community
Designed for little girls 7 - 14, Pixie Hollow is COPA compliant and chat is limited to Menu-chat, although kids above 13 have Menu-chat plus which allows you to use short typed phrases. Girls love making friends. You can expect to receive invitations to be friends everywhere you go, and the stream with the Goldfish game in Neverberry Thicket seems to be the happening place where fairies gather. There aren’t any official forums, but fan forums have popped up where fairies gather to chat about the game and just about anything else. Every fairy gets a fairy house and these can be decorated and fairies can throw a party and invite their friends to their party.
Phoebe’s Party Place is where you buy parties and games for your parties. To encourage this social activity, the activities are relatively cheap compared to say… getting your hair colored or re-styled, costing 12 blueberries instead of 62.
Live events happen quite often as well and last over several days, the last being a Games Week where the zones were decorated with bunting and party streamers and the servers were hopping with fairies who came together to play mini-games.
Reviewer’s Opinion
If you look at Pixie Hollow from a hardcore gamer point of view, it’s unbelievably “grindy.” It’s a collections game and the trendy items you want for your house or your fairy can require a large number of these items. Unlocking tailoring patterns require doing the same mini-games again and again to “practice” your skills.
However, little girls don’t seem to find harvesting a boring process, and neither do they have hours upon hours to play the game like hardcore gamers do. They actually harvest together, flying to zones in pairs to harvest and talk about what and how many items they got, and there are other activities on the website for young girls, such as printing your fairy for coloring.
I tried the game out on several young children, girls of ages 7, 9 and 12. They don’t play the game every day, but the seven year-old’s favorite thing to do is to fly around picking up stuff. She’d rather collect things than play the mini-games, then rush to the store to see if she has enough to buy more accessories. The nine year old loves the mini-games and the 12 year old bribes her 10 year old brother for help to unlock more tailoring patterns. The five year old boy loves the mini-games and doesn’t care that they are all girl fairies as he watched the Disney Fairy movie just as many times as his sister did. As for myself, there are nights where I just want to kill something and nights when relaxation is just… flying around harvesting so I have half a bazillion dandelion fluff and acorns to restyle and color my fairy’s hair
Tags: Disney, Fairy, Pixie Hollow