02.27.06
RF Online
As first impressions go, it’s not a bad game. Those Ticket Agents are way too cute. I sat staring at them for a good five minutes…
Done in the style of a Japanese anime, I thought. Lo and behold, it’s by Koreans – ‘manhwa’ then. So obviously, cute characters, rather than sexy or macho or anything in between. I am still a bit put out though that you can’t have a female Accretian (robot people). After being used to WoW and Guild Wars, it does feel a bit tame – lots of killing monsters, not much in the way of plots: runs along the line of ‘as long as you kill lots, you’ll get the xp and level easily’. Still, money is easy enough to come by, by going to the vendors, so no one there is asking ‘Plz giv me sum money’ like in SW or IF, thankfully. Plus, if you can get through the tutorial without the whole thing crashing (it kept on crashing for me), it’s fairly easy to play.
But… as ever, there is a huge ‘But’…there can be some stuff that’s fairly irritating. If you think you can ignore them, play by all means.
1) What happened to the translation process?! It’s not so much bad translation as bad organisation, actually. Words are chopped randomly because there isn’t enough space on the line – and that’s without using hyphens. It does make reading the channels a chore. (I can appreciate how that happened, but I’m sure the game translators aren’t that blind as to think Roman Alphabet works the same way as one of our Oriental scripts!)
2) The chat itself… well, depending on the servers as much as what race you quest with, they can be somewhat trying. ‘W00t’, ‘lol’, ‘leet’, ‘noob’ – none of these terms should be used in excess. Anywhere. I mean for fuck’s sake, if someone’s new to the game and asks a simple question (like where a particular item may be bought), it’s only fair to answer them rather than taunt them with repeated cries of ‘noob’ and ‘I’m so glad I was never a noob’… how inane is that? So far, the most helpful of the races to play with has been Accretians, though admittedly the range of names made me laugh – c’mon, Gundam-related ones?
3) Don’t play as Rangers… until the game makers fix that bug where none of the purple items can be used (affects all guns and bows). That just sucks.
I’ll have to see if this is a game that I can really get into though. Got a 30day free pass, so might as well. Community is just as important as plots et al, I believe, so if that’s going to be letting me down every time I log on, well, needless to say, I’ll be looking out for better communities in other games.