By Brad Cook
Let us take you now to Far, Far Away, a place populated by characters from your favorite fairy tales. A magical setting full of wondrous creatures. A land where many conveniently-located Fairy Godmother’s Potion Drive-Thru locations serve all of your magical potion needs.
Yes, Far, Far Away just happens to be the setting of Aspyr Media’s Shrek 2, based on the wildly popular animated movie. You’ll likely recognize most of the characters in the game, but if you’ve seen either of the films starring the eponymous green ogre with a penchant for the gross things in life, you know they aren’t quite the same characters who have starred in bed-time stories for decades. In Far, Far Away, the characters you meet are actually satiric distortions of their original selves, aimed at providing a piquant commentary of the world in which we live. For example, those Potion Drive-Thru locations poke fun at the fast food joints that litter our landscape.
Play the Movie
Like the film, the game opens with Shrek and his wife, Fiona, getting ready to go see her parents, who don’t know that she’s really an ogre, as revealed in the first movie. While the game largely follows the sequel’s plot, it often diverges from the story, giving you many opportunities to see parts of Far, Far Away not shown in the film. In fact, before your trip to see Fiona’s parents even start, bandits steal a wheel off your wagon, forcing you to defeat them to get it back.
The first few adventures place you in Shrek’s stinky green feet, but soon you get to try out the role of Donkey, his wise-cracking sidekick. Later you play as Puss in Boots, hired by the king to off Shrek when Fairy Godmother reminds him that he had agreed to marry Fiona to Prince Charming, and as Giant Gingerbread Man, a variation on the same character from the first film. The game also places you in the feet and hooves of the transformed versions of two characters, but we’ll leave you to discover who.
Of course, no adventure game is complete without power-ups to collect, and Shrek 2 obliges in several ways. Grab gold coins during your journey and redeem them at one of the Potion Drive-Thru stands for magical elixirs, powders and other concoctions. When your health drops precipitously low, find a Hero Bar and munch it for an energy boost. Search around for four-leaf clovers, which permanently increase your health level, allowing you to withstand more punishment from the bad guys. And don’t forget to look for the Wanted posters that Lord Farquaad’s men have posted all over Far, Far Away in their hunt for such characters as Pinocchio and Rumplestiltskin. For every three you find, you gain access to a bonus level in the game; there are 12 posters total.
An Important Point to Remember
Like the movie, which some see as a parable on race relations akin to the classic film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, the game has its own message to impart. In addition to poking fun at the world in which we live and showing us how absurd it can sometimes be, Shrek 2 gets to the heart of a very serious matter. And that is: Swinging boulders, much like any incredibly large obstacles in life, can come along and knock you silly when you least expect it.
What, you were expecting something serious? It’s a game, not a graduate course. Go have fun.
