What Knights of Fiona Gives You Free on September 3, and What the $18.99 Story Pass Unlocks

On September 3 you can download Knights of Fiona on Quest or SteamVR and pay nothing for it. What arrives is the introduction. You get the hub city of Geogallia, its quest board, its NPCs, and enough of the combat system to work out whether swinging a sword with your own arm for an hour is something you want to keep doing.

Free-to-start is the studio's own term, and it means what it says. The download is free. The opening is playable. The game continues if you buy in.

Buying in is one purchase. The Story Pass costs $18.99, or 3,000 yen, and it unlocks six story chapters with Japanese and English voice acting, every battle mission, and unlimited access to the trading tables. Steam's listing carries the usual in-app purchases flag, and CharacterBank has not described anything sitting behind it beyond the pass.

Who is shipping this matters more than the structure does. Knights of Fiona comes from CharacterBank, a small Kyoto studio, and its last VR JRPG was RUINSMAGUS in July 2022. RUINSMAGUS still sells for $34.99 up front. Same team, same genre, four years apart, and the price model has been torn down to the studs.

CharacterBank was direct about why. After "looking at how limited demo experiences can be, and the current state of the VR industry," it decided this was the better path.

Read that as a demo problem rather than a monetization trend. A VR demo has to sell you on something a screenshot cannot show, which is how a game feels on your arms and in your stomach. Store demos are bad at this. They expire. They sit on a separate listing nobody wishlists. On Quest they are often a second download you have to go and find. One free install that becomes the whole game after a single purchase clears all of that away.

How the co-op works

Three players, maximum. That is a good number for VR, where six people swinging weapons in one arena turns into noise and two feels thin. Cross-play runs between Quest and SteamVR, so you are not sorting friends by hardware first. Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest 3S are all supported. Play solo, or with one friend, and AI companions fill the empty slots rather than the encounter scaling itself down around you.

Weapons progress on cards. You merge them into upgrades and slot passive effects into the result. Localization went to Nob Ogasawara, who translated Pokemon, Dragon Quest and Yakuza, and that is not a name you often see on a VR credits list.

The project was funded on Kickstarter, raising roughly $22,600 against a $9,400 goal. Backers get unrestricted story access, an exclusive in-game title, and a choice between a storage upgrade and a one-day friend ticket. An open beta ran August 13 to 16 on both stores, so a chunk of the community has already played the opening that everyone else gets free in two weeks.

Check two things before you commit

Wishlist it on Steam or the Meta Horizon Store, then play the free portion before you decide. That is the whole point of shipping it this way. It costs you a download instead of $18.99.

First, stamina. Physical combat over a long RPG is an endurance question as much as a design one, so pay attention to how your shoulders feel at the forty-minute mark rather than the five-minute one. Second, find out whether the free portion lets you try three-player co-op at all. A party game whose party mode sits behind the pass is a different purchase from one where you can test the exact thing you are buying it for.