Dear Diary,
Today, after a couple of decades of being just a little too interested in Japanese culture, and after several trips to Japan proper, I learned – in a ramen shop in Oregon, of all places, that Cha Shu is NOT just the Japanese pronunciation of char siu.
It is, however, still tasty. Just rather unexpected.
I used to have a bit of a comic book problem.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, I lived in Los Angeles about a mile away from an absolutely amazing comics shop run by a pair of guys who were very good at talking me into trying new series and checking out old ones that I’d missed. At the same time, I was going on a bit of a nostalgia kick for the comics I’d read as a kid.
The end result was that, by the time I moved OUT of Los Angeles, I owned about 7,000 comics, all neatly cataloged in a database, all sealed away in protective bags and boxes and the like.
I kept collecting for a year or two, but not with quite the same fervor. This was a period where DC was actually doing me a favor by canceling titles that I had read and enjoyed and I wasn’t picking up new things because I didn’t have the same pair of pushers talking me in to trying new things.
After that, my interest kind of waned. I’d pick up the occasional graphic novel from Barnes and Nobel, but that was about it. I stopped doing THAT after I bought into the Infinite Crisis hype, read it and realized that DC had gone screaming off the deep end in an effort to be, I dunno, gritty or something.
Then I hit a point where I needed to move again, this time for school, realized that moving 7,000 comics represented a startling amount of both space and weight, and started purging the heck out of them. The first batch, carefully screened to make sure that they were all-ages appropriate, went to Goodwill. Subsequent batches have gone to comics shops or into recycling bins.
Yes, recycling bins. When I was a small child and buying comics that cost 40 cents each, the local comic shop had a standard buyback for any comic book: They would give you a nickel each in case or ten cents in credit. Now that I am a grown man and comic books cost $3.00 each, they still offer the same nickel each or ten cents in credit. I’d rather get nothing and put the paper back into circulation. But I digress.
I still have a single plastic storage bin full of comics that I haven’t been able to replace with digital versions. Some of these I may never be able to replace, but it’s still a lot less to move the next time.
Anyway, I have written an awful lot of words here about how I have completely kicked the comics bug, which makes the following just a little vexing:
I was browsing a forum thread about the latest Bat-movie and someone posted the following page, taken completely out of context, and I thought it was brilliant – it was actually FUNNY, which is something that I don’t take for granted from comics any more, and I may just have to track down wherever this came from and read the rest of it.
Seriously, there’s just something about the faces in this. Must read more.
A couple of weeks back, I had occasion to go down and wander around my university’s campus. It’s only been a year or so since I graduated, so there honestly haven’t been a lot of changes, but I did notice that the Mediterranean restaurant near campus had replaced its kebab special – which had remained unchanged for the two years I went to school – with a schwarma special.
I’m not going to come right out and say that this was a direct result of the gag in the Avengers, but I’m going to point out that the timing is rather coincidental.
Anyway, since I was, thanks to the Avengers, rather curious as to what schwarma actually was, I went back yesterday to see for myself.
Turns out it’s basically meat and veg in a pita with a nice tangy sauce, very much comfort food and something I’ll get again. Sure, it’s become a bit of a meme, but if you’re going to eat memetic food anyway, better this than bacon.
Apart from feeling like I’d had a good lunch, this had one other effect on me – it reminded me to go and check the Wikipedia page for schwarma, which has now become my go-to page for pointing out just how silly Wiki’s editors can get.
See, immediately after coming out of the Avengers, this is the page I went to in order to find out just what this schwarma thing WAS, and I was amused to see that someone had already added an “In Popular Culture” thing with a one-sentence mention of the gag in the movie.
A couple of days later, I was chatting with a friend who mentioned that he’d done the same thing but that there was no such mention on Wikipedia.
Fortunately, Wikipedia keeps detailed edit histories, which I went back and read through. This is the geek equivalent of getting a prime seat on the sidelines at a hair-pulling-sissy-fight-tournament.
If you’re anywhere near as geeky, I recommend doing the same thing. Basically, there are one or two Hard Working Editors dedicated to Keeping the Schwarma Page Pure who have been trying to Beat Back The Heathen Masses ever since the Avengers came out. This fairly insignificant page devoted to a fairly obscure bit of fast food has become an Edit Battleground of reasonably epic proportions, with one particular editor being so pedantic about everything needing to be sourced that it has, as of this writing, FIFTEEN source links for a single page worth of text about schwarma.
It’s a thing to bring tears to your eyes. Bring popcorn. Or, I guess, schwarma.
Hmm. Maybe a little too much Joseph Conrad. Anyway, moving on.
So, I fell absolutely in love with TERA for a couple of months, and now we’re going through a rocky breakup. This sort of thing happens.
I still can’t say enough good things about the first, oh, 55 levels of my TERA career. The story quests were engaging, I was loving my jaunts into dungeons, I felt like I was getting progressively more and more badass as I got new skills and new gear, and in general I was loving running around as a cute bunny girl with a massive axe.
After 55, though, things started kind of declining. I was still loving the combat, but it was starting to take longer and longer to fill up the experience bar. Quests were rewarding less and less experience proportional to the amount of experience needed to level, and the stuff that I was having to kill for them had turned into massive bags of hit points that needed to be slowly whittled down.
It got worse at level 58 or so. The dungeons available in your late late 50s are pretty tough. They have to be, really, because you can have level 60 players in your group, but it also means that people get discouraged a lot. Discouraged players leave, and all of a sudden you’re looking at having wasted a couple of hours with no real progress made. I stopped doing dungeons and focused on questing and grinding my way up. I’d gotten to level cap in much tougher MMOs, after all, so I knew that I had the patience for it.
Eventually I hit level 60 and rewarded myself by hitting up the auction house for a new outfit. There’s not a lot to spend money on in Tera as you’re leveling, so I had about 3 grand in the bank. As a result, I managed to put together a full suit of really high-end armor at the cost of about half of my available funds.
I was, and this is a term that I do not use lightly, PIMPIN’
This is where I suddenly had a vision of the future, and it wasn’t a good vision.
See, the best armor in Tera is all enchantable, which means that it’s OK when you get it, but you can make it REALLY good through a process which involves sacrificing one piece of gear for the chance at making another piece of gear better.
So you can start with a plate breastplate, say, and melt down another breastplate that you’re not using, and you have a chance of getting a plate breastplate +1 out of the deal, and you can keep throwing spare bits of gear at it with the hopes of getting to +2 and +3 and so on and so forth. The chance of actually getting a new bonus goes down as the piece gets better, of course, and there are horror stories of people needing to melt down 50 or more items just to get their +8 sword or breastplate or whatever up to a +9, which is the highest you can generally achieve. (Some pieces, quite rare, can actually go up to +12, but that’s an even worse undertaking)
This, then, is the reason to run dungeons once you’re at the level cap. It’s not getting better gear, because you can afford great gear off the auction house for, basically, peanuts. Rather, you are running dungeons for the chance that gear will drop that you can melt down for the slim chance of making what you’re already wearing marginally better.
Compare this to your traditional MMO. When you run a dungeon in one of those and an Awesome Plate Breastplate Of Ultimate Tankage drops, you get to cheer for the tank who gets to loot it because you know that he has just gotten a new piece of gear that will make him a Better Tank so your group can take on bigger and nastier challenges. This is the sort of thing that has made Blizzard and Sony Online Entertainment about a gazillion dollars over the last decade and a half.
In Tera, in the same scenario, it’s kind of “Well, Leroy, congrats on the breastplate, stick it into the furnace and let’s all cross our fingers for another +1!”
I tried to put a good face on things at this point. I took all the spare gear in my bags and bank, and then spent a few hundred more on the auction house to buy some more stuff, and I threw all of it at my shiny new armor and prayed for it to stick, and I actually had pretty decent luck with the enchanting lottery. I wound up with all of my stuff enchanted up to +5 and still had money left over.
And that’s where I logged off.
I am kitted out to the point where I can credibly walk into any dungeon in the game and have a good shot at pulling through it, but I can’t muster up the enthusiasm to actually DO it.
I do, however, look awesome.
So, to sum up my two months of Tera: AMAZING for the first 55 levels. There’s a ton of stuff in the game that I hope other companies steal for their own MMOs, particularly the combat and character customization options, and the localization team deserves particular acclaim for making some of the quests genuinely funny. I firmly believe that it’s a game that anyone who likes MMOs should experience for themselves.
Just brace yourself for the heartbreak at the end.
I just noticed that the site passed the 200K visit marker earlier this week. That’s a lot of people who have taken a couple of minutes out of their lives to read something I’ve written, and that’s kind of neat.
Thanks for visiting. 🙂
I really didn’t want to download Save Toshi, because it looked like a game designed specifically to cash in on people in their Oh My God Japan Is So Cool And Everything About Japan Is Just So Awesome phase.
I don’t like to use the “W” word, but it keeps bouncing around in my mind as I write this.
Still, iTunes kept recommending the damned thing, and I eventually broke down and dropped the two bucks on it.
As an aside, it is surprisingly refreshing to play a game where you can simply spend $2 and be done with it. I think I’ve played too many freemium games of late.
But, to get back to the game, Save Toshi is an iPhone/iPad physics puzzler where you must get Object A, that being a cute pop singer, onto Point B, that being a dance floor. If you get A to B, she dances for you and you move on to the next level.
The levels are made up of blocks of various materials – wood, stone, ice, rubber, a couple of others – all of which have their own properties. Some can be broken, some are quite slippery so other things slide easily across them, that sort of thing. Oh, and there’s dynamite for spice. You manipulate all of these things by throwing baseballs at them.
Toshi dies immediately upon contact with water, by the way, and all of these levels take place in the middle of a lake.
That second picture there, by the way? That’s an early and quite simple level. You simply throw a ball at the dynamite on the left, it explodes and sends the massive green ball flying. It hits Toshi in the back and knocks her on to the dance floor, on the right.
Once she gets on to the dance floor, she cuts loose while the camera spins around her and music plays until you get tired of it and hit the next button.
Every twenty levels or so, you unlock a new outfit for Toshi. Eventually, the end-of-level music changes. If you persevere to the end, the spin around Toshi dips down and you get the inevitable panty shots.
None of this is why you should play the game. Actually, there are some very strong reasons not to play the game, starting with Toshi herself. She’s a caricature of everything that westerners think about Japanese pop culture, complete with horribly racist broken English of the five-dolla-me-love-you-long-time variety, and the first impression I had of the game – that it was a shallow and calculated cash-in on the Cool Japan fad – was also my second and third impression.
Then it started growing on me, because, well, this game may ostensibly be about saving Toshi, it’s actually about being horrible and abusing her. She’s fairly durable, which is essential considering how you knock her around levels on the way to the dance floor, but she’s far from indestructible. In addition to deaths by drowning, which are quite common, you can blow her up with dynamite, launch her into low earth orbit from mainshift seesaws, or simply throw baseballs at her if you’re not feeling inventive. She dies a lot and she’s got a few choice phrases she uses when she dies and comes back to life, and without spoiling them I will simply advise that you download the demo version – if you can’t be arsed to drop the two bucks on the full game – and play it on a day when you are in a dark mood and need something to put an evil grin on your face.
There are even achievements for killing Toshi enough times:
I realized very quickly that this game, is, on the face of it, designed to suck a couple of bucks out of the wallets of the worst sort of anime fans, but it’s also a marvelously therapeutic game for people who are more than a little sick of the the craze and would like to, well, throw baseballs at idol singers with cat ears on. This is, of course, a horrible, horrible thing and I should be ashamed of being such a terrible person.
The game DID give me countless chances to redeem myself, as follows:
You are, from time to time, faced with situations where you have obviously failed the level due to clumsiness but Toshi has somehow survived. You can simply push the “Restart” button to begin the level anew, or you can bean her in the head with a baseball first.
This is a test of character which I frequently failed.
Way back in “The Day”, I played Everquest over Ultima Online because, well, Ultima Online had full-on PvP combat, which scared the hell out of me, on all its servers, whereas Everquest only allowed PvP on one (later, four) of its servers.
I’ve spent the intervening 13 years playing various MMORPGs and avoiding PvP servers all the way. I did get rather into Rift’s battleground things, but those were rather more like soccer matches with swords than “real” PvP, really.
For the love of God, I even played on the “Geharis” server in Dark Age of Camelot, the SINGLE server that game had that wasn’t a PvP server.
The whole time, though, PvP servers have had a little bit of a mystique. PvP players always had a bit of a swagger to them, throwing around terms like “carebear” and “bluebie” to divide the world into Real Men and People Who Played On PvE Servers, and I’ve always wondered – could I make it in a PvP environment? Could I manage to dodge hostile players while questing and leveling and all the other sorts of things you do in an MMO? What would the world be like, with that extra bit of spice, that elusive drug known as Open World PVP?
That lead to me deciding, last Sunday, that I would make a character on Tera’s “Valley of Titans” server (reputedly, the single largest Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy in the Tera world), that I would play for ONE HOUR, and that I would keep a log of every time I got killed during that hour, what level the person killing me was, and how quickly I went splut. I’d then log off, write up a quick post about it, and generally feel good about finally braving the PvP world.
Thus was born Riski, the Elin Berserker. I figured I’d go with a Race/Class combination that I’d gotten familiar with.
10:11 AM: Riski arrives in the newbie zone.
It quickly turned out that my initial plan wasn’t going to work. New players in Tera, even on PvP servers, are shielded from PvP until level 11. They’re also safe as long as they stay on the newbie island or in any city or outpost. I was going to have to level up if I wanted to get ganked.
An hour later, I was level 8. That wasn’t bad.
12:07 (just shy of 2 hours after starting): I reach level 11 and can finally engage in PvP combat. Also I was an adorable disco squirrel by this point, having picked up this particular outfit at around level 10:
I still had a couple of quick quests to finish up, though.
12:18: I leave the newbie island and arrive at the first major city. I get some quests that I didn’t get on a PvE server. One teaches me about dueling and the other gives me a skill to flag myself an “outlaw”, able to attack other players without their consent. Finally I feel like I’m actually ON a PvP server.
12:31: I leave the first major city and am finally in the wilderness, where anyone flagged as an outlaw can attack me freely.
12:42: Level 12. No combat yet.
1:07 (3 hours after starting): I am level 13 and nobody has yet tried to lay a finger on me. I take a break.
I log back in at 1:57PM, play for 40 minutes, and log out at 2:37 still untouched.
I log out and speculate about this. Well, I think to myself, it IS Sunday. Perhaps it’s a gank holiday.
I describe my predicament to my wife. She groans at the “gank holiday” joke and I am pleased.
The next evening, I log in at 9:28. Perhaps the late night crowd will be more prone to attacking cute, defenseless squirrel girls.
At 9:32, I make level 15.
At 9:57, Level 16. Still without incident.
at 10:08, I’m in the middle of fighting a creature when FINALLY someone shoots me with an arrow. Their first shot takes off a good 20% of my life, and their second knocks me down almost as much again. I spin and face them – they’re a level 23 character, 7 levels above me. I am DEAD MEAT.
I charge them anyway, because what else was I going to do?
They run away.
No, seriously.
A level 17 character sees this and decides to join in the chase. Mr. Level 23 archer sprints back towards the nearest town and safe zone, so we can’t touch him. Back to questing, though I am newly invigorated. I have finally had someone at least make a token effort to gank me.
10:45. Level 17. While running around, I pass a person, about my level, flagged for PvP. I stop and turn back, wondering if I should go and start something.
I waited too long. He had already been jumped and killed by a couple of other players.
At 10:50, I log off.
Tuesday night, at 6:44, I log back in. My new goal is to get to level 20 and run a dungeon that I missed when I was leveling my first character in the safe refuge of a PvE server, if I can possibly make it to level 20 in a world crawling with PKs just looking to cut another notch in the hilt of their sword.
There is just a little sarcasm there.
6:53, 7:17, 7:51, 8:33: Levels 18, 19, 20 and 21.
I look even more adorable by this point and have actually graduated from chain armor to plate:
At level 21, I queue for Bastion of Lok, the lowest level dungeon in Tera. 7 minutes later, I get a group and we merrily set about clearing the dungeon.
Shortly after 9:30, we’re done and I’ve gotten level 22 without a single death to player OR monster. I did get a new breastplate and axe from the dungeon, which I cheerfully put on even though I’m not ever planning to come back to this particular server. My final, most adorable state looked like this:
So, to sum up: I played on a PvP server for about 8 hours and was eligible to be attacked for 5 of those. I traveled openly, following roads, and went into safe zones only for as long as I needed to to pick up quests and sell my accumulated loot. The worst thing that happened during that time was one guy sticking a couple of arrows in me and then running instead of finishing me off. Heck, even the general chat channels, as full of testosterone as they were, were actually LESS annoying than the general channels on my PvE server.
At this point, you should actually be able to HEAR the sound of my illusions being shattered.
I’m tempted to log back in, set myself dancing in the middle of a busy intersection in the forest, far from safe zones, and walk away from the computer for a bit. The only thing stopping me, really, is that it would be terribly, terribly depressing if I came back an hour later and was still dancing there.
My latest MMO addiction continues to consume a surprising amount of my evenings, though I have found a way to get at least some of my time back.
Simply put, I park my adorable butt in town, put myself into the dungeon finder queue, and then get work done while I wait on the chime that says I have a group available.
This has slowed my leveling way down. I made 52 last night, so I still have 8 levels to go until cap, and those are reputedly fairly slow even if you are making a concerted effort to chase yellow exclamation marks and grind quests. It’s going to take me a while.
This isn’t such a bad thing, however. I find that I’m really enjoying the dungeons, and rushing to cap would mean cutting myself off from many of the high-40s to low-50s instances. I already cut myself off from the low-20s dungeon before I realized it, so I’ll need to make one of those nasty alt things if I want to run it at level.
The instances definitely are getting a little more complex as I level. It’s still pretty basic stuff – this boss summons adds, this other one enrages and kills the whole party if he’s not defeated in time, this one drops barrels that explode, er, explosively if you hit them accidentally… It’s enough to make the fights interesting, but not so much as to be overwhelming. I’ve been able to finish every instance so far in a pick-up group with, at most, two wipes.
Compared to, oh, EQ2, where some of the “group instances” were nigh-impossible without having the perfect mix of classes and all members equipped with better gear than actually dropped in the zone, it’s night and day.
After recent trysts with the Tower Defense genre, I think I’ve actually gotten to the point where I can consider myself a fan. It’s a genre that can be very formulaic at times, but I believe the similarities between tower defense games actually serve to accentuate the creative touches that make particular titles stand out. Of the ones I’ve played and enjoyed – Defense Grid, Plants Vs. Zombies, Fantasy Defense – I can point to something about each one and say “This is fun, and this makes it worth playing this game.”
Then we get to my most recent flirtation with iOS gaming: Defense Witches, which I played because I figured, well, I seem to like these Tower Defense things, and I like me some fantasy, so this really ought to push all the right buttons.
I can save you a lot of reading by saying “It didn’t, and I really can’t recommend this game”, but that would be rather anticlimactic. So, please forget that I said anything and let’s continue.
The plot of Defense Witches – and it does have a plot, of sorts – is that there’s a magical academy, see, and that it trains witches – oddly enough – but that most of the upperclassmen happen to be away on holiday at just the point where some evil demon god king decides to make YET ANOTHER attempt to break out of his magical prison where he has been sealed away blah blah blah so you’re left to defend the world with, well, the ones that just happen to be left in the building.
Something like that. The plot is kind of skimpy.
No, seriously.
Surprisingly, “skimpy” is an adjective that applies to the plot but not to the outfits on the witches. There’s a certain Touhou vibe to the character designs, all frills and lace and generally modest. It’s almost enough to make me skip my traditional “Oh, JAPAN” moment.
Then I read the character descriptions from the entry in the iTunes store:
Nicola : She pretends to be a calm character but actually tends to follow the surrounding circumstances. She is sensitive about the growth of her breasts. She likes Daisy too.
Oh, JAPAN. What are we going to do with you?
Admittedly Nicola IS a bit boyish in the girlish department, but STILL…
Anyway, so you have witches instead of traditional towers. You start off with one witch:
This is Daisy. She’s your basic short-range rapid-fire witch. Even though she’s the very first unit you get, she’s really quite useful.
Adding another witch gets you Becky, a long range slow-rate-of-fire witch whose attacks add a damage-over-time component.
Then comes Chloe, who adds a PBAE stun. Mixing your Chloes and your Daisies is pretty damned lethal.
I just wrote that last sentence with a straight face. I’m still having trouble believing it.
The last character I unlocked was Nicola, and I ground through the levels to unlock her solely so I could see if her character bio screen in the game had the same comments about breast size that the iTunes application description had.
When I say “ground through the levels”, you might imagine that I had to beat quite a few levels to unlock Nicola, and I actually didn’t – that’s part of the problem. You unlock Nicola after level 10, right when most Tower Defense games are starting to slowly ease back on the training wheels and get interesting, and right at the point where I realized that all I really had to look forward to was tedium, and no amount of cute witches in frilly outfits was going to make up for it.
Now, I have put up with some pretty B-grade games in exchange for cute girls, so that’s saying something.
Unfortunately, Defense Witches drops the ball on being fun in a few crucial ways:
First, the game really doesn’t give you a whole lot of information. I spent a lot of time upgrading my witches during levels, but I was never sure whether I was making good choices. I know that Becky does MORE damage than Daisy, for example, but I don’t know if a level 3 Daisy does more damage than a level 1 Becky.
Second, there’s no fast forward button and no way to rewind. I failed one level at the very end, something like the 25th of 25 waves and had to start over from scratch, watching wave after wave of slow-moving critters tediously drag themselves across the screen to be slaughtered by my Daisy force, not really needing to pay attention until roughly wave 20. A rewind button would have been nice to give it a go again from roughly wave 24, or a fast forward button would have made sitting through the waves a little less painful. I got neither.
Third, while a free application DOES need to support itself via a cash shop, the one in Defense Witches managed to rub me exactly the wrong way from the get-go.
Most free apps-with-cash-store have some sort of in-game currency. For Montowers, it was “Tokens”, for Fantasy Defense “Hero Points”, and Defense Witches has “Crystals”.
Most free apps give the player a little chance to earn some of this currency through playing, even if it’s only given at a trickle. It needs to be just enough to give the player a taste of what he could get in bulk lots for a very small fee. Defense Witches doesn’t even give you this trickle – if you want some crystals, you’d best be pulling out the old credit card.
This wouldn’t be TOO bad if it weren’t for the next bit: The stuff you buy with crystals is all temporary. Want an advanced witch unit on one stage? Pony up some crystals, she’s yours – but if you want her again next stage you’ll be paying again for the privilege.
I may be just a touch cynical, but it really feels like the developers are hoping that you’ll get frustrated enough at failing a level that you’ll pay a little bit to get the edge you need to get through the level, get to that next level – or maybe the one after – get frustrated again, and, well, you’ve already shoveled some money into the application and it feels stupid to give up now…
In the end, it was three-strikes-and-out for me. I’ll be keeping it on my iPad so I’m alerted of updates – maybe they’ll tweak it and it will become just a little more player-friendly, after all – but for now there are lots of other games to be playing.
Even though i spent a surprising amount of time trying out assorted F2P games earlier this year, it’s been a while since an MMO managed to get its hooks into me past the first four or five hours of play. Lucent Heart managed it for a while but I took a break that turned into simply deciding to put it behind me, and I’d honestly decided that I was probably over MMOs until EQNext came out, if that ever actually happened. I’ve occasionally logged into EQ2 to pay rent on our guild hall, but that’s been the extent of things.
Even so, after seeing a fair number of screenshots from TERA (and, while it is technically an acronym and ought therefore be capitalized, I will refrain from doing so henceforth) I wound up interested enough that, when I was at our local Walmart shopping for groceries, I somehow wound up tossing a copy into the cart.
I installed it, made a couple of random characters, got to level 20 or so on one of them but just wasn’t feeling it, so I was pretty sure that it was going to wind up a flash in the pan.
Then my wife asked if she could make a character to try it out. This was at 10PM or so, so I walked her through the introductory island, went off to do something else and eventually went to bed.
When I woke up at 7, she was still playing.
Now, I hadn’t really gotten attached to the characters I’d made, and Amazon was having a sale on Tera that dropped the price to $30, so I figured that it might be worth picking up a second copy for myself and giving her the first account.
So, I made a new character on this new account and… got it up to level 20 or so and wasn’t feeling it, at which point I put the game aside for three weeks, until Enmasse emailed me to let me know that my free month was almost up.
I figured that I would log in one last time, get a few screenshots so that I could write a post about trying Tera and it not really pushing my buttons, and then the third time turned out to be the charm. I lost about 16 hours that weekend, and I’ve been spending at least a couple hours a night since grinding in the vague direction of the level cap, which is currently 60.
I hit 36 last night and it has been addictive fun the whole way.
Tera’s big draw is, of course, TRUE ACTION COMBAT its combat system, which is far more action game than traditional MMO fare. Enemies actually dodge, roll away, flank you, give little tells to warn you that they’re about to attack, cast AE spells that have visible areas of effect that you need to avoid… It turns the normal mind-numbing MMO grind into something much quicker and more enjoyable, since you’re actually looking at the center of the screen rather than being focused on four rows of buttons and watching for stuff to come off cooldown.
Like most modern MMOs, there are a dreadful amount of “go kill 10 wolves for me” quests, which were mostly added to the American release of the game to ease the reliance on grinding in the Korean version. These quests are largely optional but help give you a reason to go and kill wolves other than “there are wolves there, and wolves need killing”
There’s also an overall story quest that guides you through the game world. Quest NPCs for this are marked with different color quest indicators, so you can – in theory – ignore all the non-essential quests and just focus on the storyline, which has been pretty fun so far, with lots of angst and epic betrayals and saving the world and so on and so forth.
The game has gotten a little bit of a bad reputation based on one particular race, the Elin, who are all tiny girls with animal ears and tail who tend to rush into battle wearing outfits charitably described as “battle lingerie”, which were even more eye-rollingly-disturbing in the original version but which have been censored somewhat for western audiences. They’re still pretty bad. I tried playing an Elin sorcerer and it pushed my “I’m actually ashamed of this” button, which is pretty hard to push.
If you’re curious, here’s a site which shows the differences.
My Elin berserker, on the other hand, is a melee character instead of a caster, so she tends to rush into battle wearing sensible plate armor and carrying an axe twice her height. No battle lingerie here. Her armor does have a bow on it, yes, and it’s color-coordinated to complement her pink hair, but it’s still fairly practical as fantasy armor goes. 
I will be upfront here; a good part of the reason that I’m finding so much enjoyment in this game is that I get to play the World’s Most Pissed Off Bunny Girl, with a facial expression that doesn’t so much say “look at me, I’m so cute” as it says “get out of my way or I’ll cut you off at the ankles”.
You can, as is generally the case in most post-WoW MMOs, cheerfully solo your way to level cap and avoid all that pesky social interaction, but there are lots of opportunities to group up and the grouping community seems quite healthy. The game design actively discourages playing multiple characters at once, and there are as yet no DPS meters around to encourage people to blame you for not pulling what they see as your weight. It does have an enforced item level for joining instances, but that isn’t much of a concession to the min/max crowd and I’ve had no trouble hitting the item level with quested gear.
Groups are five people. This particular one has me, two other bunny-Elins, one Popori (Elin bioweapons based on cute fuzzy critters), and one weirdo playing a human.
Overall, I think it will easily hold my attention until I hit cap. After that, there are several different activities, mostly revolving around killing harder and harder stuff to get better gear.There aren’t really any raids, per se, though there’s something akin to Rift’s public events that you can take part in at 60, so there’s no real pressure to get into a high-end guild.
I’ll take it as it goes. For now, there are ankles to whack with an axe.
Baud Attitude 