Video game romances

Romances in games nowadays is something we expect, no demand. Look at the recent Bioware games. When Mass Effect first came out there was a character called Tali. Shes this female alien that wears a environmental suit because anything outside of her suit would kill her immediately. People complained that you could only fuck the blue alien and the human chick and wanted to fuck her too. So what did they do next game? In Mass Effect 2 you can fuck her. Yeah it somehow doesn't kill her. Bioware games seem to be really into this whole romance thing. Even during a Bioware interview the writer said something along the lines of, when people think Bioware they think engaging storylines and realistic romances. Realistic? You mean the poorly written few lines dialogue by talking with your companions and then all of a sudden she falls in love with you with terrible terrible terrible lines. Did I mention terrible?

Romance can be done good and it could be done terribly. Its like reading a book. You know which is written well and written bad. A game shouldn't be any different. Lets take some lines from a very terribly written Bioware game, Dragon Age Origins.

"I...have I ever told you I really like the way you wear your hair?" 

In which you must respond with 

"My hair? Thank you." 

If you do not pick it right she will think of you as just friends. Since my Mass Effect character was a male, I decided to try out a female for Dragon Age Origins just to see what its like. Well luckily for you, you can still romance the bisexual red headed French chick as female. She says more creepy things like she likes to watch your eyelashes flutter. You have to keep initiating to a point where she starts falling for you and everything that comes out of her mouth makes you vomit a little in your mouth. Who wrote this shit? Then for some reason this guy Alistar started trying to romance me. I didn't notice at first until I realized how pushy he was being. Like wow keep your dick in your pants asshole. Quit asking about me, I already rejected you so many times you don't have to keep crawling back like a lost puppy. But you know he was actually better written. Unfortunately to pick between a red headed French chick and a virgin man child who won't stop crying about his life and how everything in his life sucks. I would pick the former, but unfortunately the former is this chick who was locked up in a dungeon for weeks getting gang raped with blood shooting out her vagina. I'm serious look it up on youtube. I don't know about you but did this really need to be included in the game? This is what romance means for Bioware.

Is this the path games are going nowadays? Lets look at console games for a second. Japanese console games to be exact. I grew up playing console games and I played through my share of bad console JRPGs. I seen a lot of bad romances. Most console games come with stock cliche characters. The main character is almost always male and come in a few types. The first type is the hot headed guy who thinks with his penis. He would rush into danger going "we have to save her!" when you know its a trap or something and/or hand over the thing that will destroy the world to get the girl back. Unfortunately it never works. The second type is the quiet guy who is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets dragged along an adventure, usually by your best friend which usually happens to be the main female interest or jealous female interest. The last one is the apathetic guy who gets bullied by everyone including the female interest. Sometimes the types mix together as well making some sort of hybrid but these are the main ones. 

The main female love interest will be known right away at the start of the game. They are also cliche stock characters. The first type is the soft spoken mysterious girl who happens to be from some weird civilization, the last of an ancient race, or something mysterious. She also happens to be chased by things that want her because she holds the key to destroying and/or ruling the world. This may be an object on her. She is usually paired up with the first type of guy the hot headed guy. They will meet suddenly and the guy will want to fuck her and so chases after her and saves her from the "Evil empire" or monsters. He will keep following her until she gets kidnapped and trades the object that will end the world to get her! The second type is the childhood friend or sister or mother figure. Yes sister and mother figure. These are usually the less annoying types as they don't act like a scared pussy where you have to be a big huge retard and chase after her all game long. But unfortunately they're not great either. It is usually painfully obvious the girl has feelings for the guy but the guy never knows and ends up chasing the first type of girl if the guy if the first type. These are usually matched with the second type of guy. The girl will drag the guy around. If its a sister character she'll usually be a younger sister who you must protect and theres a lot of suppressed incest flying around until you two finally realizes each other's feelings. A childhood friend would be really jealous and/or violent. She'd always be extremely pouty until she finally confesses her feelings and becomes all lovey dovey. The last type is the bitchy dominatrix who is usually paired with the third type of guy. She'll be like a rich princess type who wants you to lick her feet and blushes thinking about it and have wild fantasies about torturing you and turning you into some kind of love slave.

Sounds familiar? If you're a JRPG console gamer I assure you that you've seen at least one of each type. Just being cliche doesn't mean that they're bad. Its the combination of bad writing that makes it horrible to sit through. RPGs are the most story driven games. Combat in RPGs are not innovative. Its the same for almost every JRPG. You have fighters and mages and you have fire ice lightning magic with heals and turned based combat. The typical. If its an action game you can have a shitty story but if they combat is engaging and fun its not so bad. Unfortunately for a JRPG, getting the girl is pretty much the whole story. Every story starts with a kid who meets a girl and then the whole game is spent on trying to get the girl. And probably just as important, save the world while getting her. Square games are notorious for doing this. Every single square game has the same stock characters, same exact spells and same exact summons. All that is different is the graphics. Everything is filled with cutscenes and useless chatter among your companions. With the hot headed guy going "WE HAVE TO SAVE HER!" and the soft spoken girl going "I believe in so and so we shouldn't do this! I will walk foolishly into a trap and then wait for you guys to come save me!" Worst part is they try to innovate the combat but not the story itself. Isn't an RPG's most important part the storyline? However the opposite is true. Like Xenosaga if a game is just all story and 90% cutscenes, then you would fail hopelessly too. A game should be a game it shouldn't be a fucking movie.

The one with the second type of guy, the wrong place at the wrong time guy usually has a more save the world oriented story as the girl is with you all along. You'll go on a errand for your mom or something with your best friend the main female love interest going "hey lets do so and so!" Then something mysterious happens and all of a sudden you're on a quest to save the world! Now the final one is rarer. Usually JRPGs are the first or second or a mixture. The last one is still popular but not as much as the others. You're a pathetic guy with girls walking over you. One big example for it is Okage. I don't think I can find a better example. Its more of a fairytale type game. You're a guy with a bratty sister. No she's not the love interest. At the start of the game your sister falls under a curse and to save her you give up your shadow for the evil shadow king. After getting the shadow king your "girlfriend" breaks up with you because to quote "I don't like what you have become. Going around showing off. I want a guy who would eat whatever I make without question and stand around holding my bags while I go shopping." The whole game you can drag your feet around. You're the slave of the shadow king and then you meet the runaway princess who you accidentally crashed into and she gets pissed off and turns you into her slave. 70% of you belong to her and 30% belong to the shadow king. Anyways as the game goes on you get abused more and more. The game itself isn't so bad, the combat sucks but the story is entertaining. 

What if the main character is female!? Yeah those are rare but its generally either reversed or no romance at all. Lets face it most guys don't want to go around hitting on guys as a girl. Lets look at Valkyrie Profile Silmeria. Its another square game. The main female is a 12 year old girl. You're this soft spoken pussy princess with a bitching dominating spirit of a valkyrie inside of you. The main love interest is some like 30 year old looking guy. He's the wrong place at the wrong time guy and gets dragged along by you. Then shit hits the fan and somehow you have to like save each other. I don't know the game is pretty much a final fantasy clone and its fucked up and I don't want to go into detail. Pretty much its the same story but told in the point of view as the female. You're getting chased by shit and the guy is protecting you the whole time. Then theres games like Rhapsody: A musical adventure. You're a little girl who has the ability to talk to dolls and your dream is to marry a prince and one day you meet a prince who saves you from a dragon. Then the queen holds a contest for all the prettiest girls to compete for a chance to marry the prince. Blah blah then the witch kidnaps the prince and its your job to save him! Its a complete role reversal. The characters aren't stock because well. Its pretty hard to make a stock character from something so weird. Its funny, its cute, its very...ahem...girly?

Western games and Japanese games have very different views on romancing. JRPGs usually focus the entire story on getting the girl while westerns usually have a story with shitty romance tacked onto it. Which would you prefer? Which do people like? Looking at Japan's dying game industry, I'm thinking people are starting to get sick of these. But they really can't be compared as JRPGs are targeted towards the 12-18 age range. You can tell by the age of the characters really, most of them are 12-16 with some stretching as far as 18. Western RPGs are usually targeted towards the 17-20+ range. So I want to ask. Do people relate to the main characters? Do people like the female love interests? Back in high school there was a group of us that liked to play console JRPGs. I don't think any of the guys liked the main character. Everyone thought he was a dumbass. But some thought that the female love interest is good. Why? "Because they look hot." Guys don't care about the character as long as they look hot. Like one guy liked Tifa because she had huge breasts. Another liked Rikku because he's a fucking pedophile. But for the girls they don't like the guy characters or the females in the game. They're like "the guy is a moron he just rushes in and acts like a stupid kid all the time. The girls are pathetic." I remember asking someone what kind of guy she wanted for a main character and she responded with something like "a strong guy, someone the opposite of you." I remember responding to something along the lines of "it'll be hard to find someone stronger than you" and I got smacked on the arm. Ouch tomboys. Stop giving us stock characters.

The question is. Is romance really that important in games? JRPGs focuses the entire game on romance, Western games focuses on a specific task and you as the player can choose to romance the person. The romance here is usually different. I know there are some better romances out there but I'm not here to tell you the good stuff, I'm here to share the terrible. For JRPGs we don't need to be told who loves who so painfully obvious. We shouldn't be able to expect what happens. Good romances you don't need someone holding your hand telling you so and so. You just know. The chemistry would fly. Western RPGs compress everything and you are the one who is out searching for whoever you like. Bad romances would be awkward, be out of place, and completely irrelevant to the story that you can take it out without any consequences. Its a kind of bonus for the gamers. Perhaps I watched too many romance dramas. My expectation for romances are too high? Maybe they should make characters we care about? 

How about something fucked up like this? I never played that game but if thats the romance dialogue then what the fuck? I'm pretty sure that was made purposely because nothing can be that funny and stupid by accident.

I went and looked up on top video game romances on google and all I find are like Mario and Zelda and other stupid shit. What the fuck? Thats good romance? I don't know anymore. Maybe I should stop gaming.

Torchlight - Outdated buggy index finger trainer

Remember the good old days where games all suck? Well now you can with Torchlight. Its made by the same people who made Diablo. So if you played Diablo you pretty much can expect everything in it in Torchlight. There are scrolls of town portal and identify. Also healing and mana potions and skill spamming with health and mana leeching. Pretty much everything that made Diablo is in Torchlight. Including the boring one town system and left clicking everything to death. What you will possibly gain from playing this game is a broken index finger or one that is so fucking powerful you can click 500 times a minute.

Back then when Diablo came out the idea was new. Everyone played it and went "Woahhhhhhhhhh." It was still pretty boring but when Diablo 2 came out that was when it really became popular. Multiplayer play really changes the game. But Torchlight is more like the first Diablo than the second. I haven't gotten very far but I can assure you its boring. Like Diablo your left click if your main attack. Left clicking a target will make you walk over and attack it, unless you have a ranged weapon like a bow then you will shoot at them. Your right click is a shortcut for skills/spells. There is a talent tree for every class. I use tree loosely here because its not much of a tree when there are no prerequisites you need to add. Pretty much a bunch of scattered senseless talents you wouldn't pick up or have no effect on the specific weapon or style you choose to play as. There is the warrior the rogue and the mage pretty much. It doesn't matter what class you choose you would be able to wear anything and use any weapon. You wanna be a gunner mage? Go ahead. A wand wielding warrior. Sure thing. Either way you would be spamming your potion key.

Before starting the game you can pick a difficulty and a pet. Looking around I see a Very Hard mode so I moused over it and it said, "Masochists only!" FUCK YEAH! A game that fucking caters to me! So I picked the rogue. I picked up a bow and started firing my bouncy arrow skill. It was pretty neat it pierces through the enemy and hits a wall or obstacle then bounces in an entirely new direction. It bounces like three times or something with a maximum range of some sort. Unfortunately the other skills in the game are underwhelming or senseless. You have talents to "reduce the requirement of armor by 1!" Oh wow. Why don't I just add a point into defense or strength and put that talent point in something better? The fuck are they thinking. Then you have shit like "lunge towards your enemies with a dagger" Which uses both melee and range damage to calculate the final skill damage. Why do I want that when I can spam the living shit out of the bouncy arrow. By the way, ranged weapons have a maximum range which is like only three characters away. The bouncy arrow can reach like 20 letting you kite indefinitely with it as long as you can outrun your target. It also doesn't have the shooting animation delay and weapon speed limitation of your regular attack locking you in place and letting the boss cast a ice fissure on you dealing 90% of your damage in one shot.

The stats make no sense. You have strength which adds 1% of melee damage per point and it will help you carry heavier items. Dexterity adds 1% of ranged damage per point. Health adds hit points per point. Defense which adds defense per point and is required for better armor. Ok what the fuck. I'm spamming the shit out of dexterity then all of a sudden I need like 16 defense for an armor. I ignore the shit out of that and then a new item drops, I need like 30 strength to put on a leather cowboy hat but I don't need any strength to hold the massive fucking cannon in my hand. WHAT THE FUCK.

Back then when Diablo 2 came out everyone was excited and played the pointless grinding game. Now our standards are higher, looking back at Diablo 2 we can see what a terrible game it is. There are people who enjoy these kinds of games but think carefully for a moment. What is it that you liked? Randomly generated dungeons? The ablility to see your character get stronger? Taking out waves and waves of monsters? I don't know. But I can tell you that this game doesn't get any respawns at all. You can go down a floor and go back up a floor and all the chests would respawn with rare loot but none of the creatures are there. What? Also want to point out that going to a different floor would take up to 30 seconds in load time. Nothing you can do but twiddle your fingers/toes/hair/mouse wire/cat's tail while slamming your head into the back of your seat going "COME ONNNNNN COME ONNNNNNNNNN WHAT THE FUCK IS TAKING SO LONG!" After the fucking hour it takes to load you meet a mob of monsters then you just spam the living shit out of your bouncy arrow and they all explode into oblivion. Then you take the next set of stairs down and repeat the process.

It also has stupid shit named mobs like in Diablo 2. These giant differently colored mobs with unique names. They all have dumb shit like Versusius the Vile who has a poison attack, Hamrock the Cold with a freezing attack, Cocknballs the Hard with stone skin. They die just as fast and they don't respawn. Yeah it adds fame for you when you kill them. But what does fame do? I DON'T KNOW! Do you have anyone to play with? No? Do you have quests that need fame? The fuck do I know! This game doesn't explain anything.

What about quests? Isn't there a story or something of some sort? Yeah, if you only like one town with a boring shit ass story. Like this magician chick you meet right out of town with a buff warrior dude beating the shit out of everything. This dude rushes off and the chick stays behind and tells you to help him before he gets into trouble. Obviously this is foreshadowing the horrible death he is about to incur. Isn't this a great way to start off a game? A scantily dressed mage girl and another stronger man that might threaten your alpha male authority. Then he suffers a horrible death by the master of the mage girl who was "turned evil!!!!!" by corruption of some sort and the girl goes "boo hoo my friend is dead please kill my master for me!" Then she stands around in town the whole time while you go back down slaughtering everything. In the end you probably kill the guy and the girl swoons over you and you wander off into the distance carrying her in your gigantic tree arms like Tarzan. Luckily before I could get there I hit a horrible bug where I can't go further.

I was stuck and couldn't move forward. The lever I pulled did nothing and checking on the forums sometimes doors and shit would get stuck if you don't open them in the right position. You'll need to reload the game or other stupid shit. I did that and it didn't work. So I just went fuck it because I don't want to start over again. I kept reading around and noticed how many bugs there were. Its already patch 1.5 or something which is at least 5 patches and they still have these bugs? Why did I even play this? I didn't really want to but hearing people talk about "the best thing while you wait for Diablo 3" I just had to see what the buzz is about. Its shit. Plain dirty smelling shit. You're better off waiting for Diablo 3. I don't really get Diablo 3 either. Its either going to hit or miss. It might piss off the "true Diablo" gamers or make them happy but lose the new players with a boring game. I personally is not looking forward to that game. If you want to play a dungeon crawler why don't you play something like Recettear? Its a short game on steam you can purchase for cheap and you spend your time paying money back to a fairy as a shopkeeper and you can hire adventurers to go dungeon crawling with you fighting bosses and picking up loot.

That game was fun. I didn't mind the grind because it was actually entertaining. You had more shit to do than walk down and left click everything and watch it walk over and swing and spam the shit out of potions. The left clicking games should be banned. Nothing has sucked this hard for me for a long time. Not even Persona can reach this level of suckness. Its a whole new level of suck. And the worst part is enough people liked it that they are making a sequel. Who the fuck liked this game? People who have a time machine from the 1997? The worst part is I can't even review the whole fucking game. My character is trapped by a bug that wouldn't fix itself. After playing the game I went and read the reviews laughing at every single bullshit line they typed out and then at the side I see "Games like Torchlight you might like... The Last Remnant. " That speaks for itself.

Fallout: New Vegas - Finishing games before release is a thing of the past.

Again, little late for this, but I guess I'm catching up on some overdue homework.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you've heard anything at all about Fallout: New Vegas, then you've heard about how buggy the game is. For the uninitiated, here's a taste: Quests break constantly and cannot be continued; NPCs disappear when you leave the area and come back, making quest hand-ins impossible; World entities such as items or even characters get jammed or lost or clipped about a mile below the ground. You NEED the developer console and the respective commands to just PLAY the game. If you're playing on the PS3 or the Xbox, you are fucked. Fortunately, the story is alright, and the setting and events fit together well. You'd expect that the major unification faction of the West (developed in previous Fallout games) the NCR, would eventually make its push eastward and encounter resistance. And the location matters: an invaluable energy source post-apocalypse, the Hoover Dam, and the blast furnace of a new economy, the casinos and resorts of Vegas. Trading companies from all over struggle for control in the area, but are considered insignificant in the highly discerning eyes of Vegas. However, the city needs power (the dam), and the power needs the city (money to operate and maintain it), and everything in FNV seems to fall into the balance in the same way. Fallout 3 wasn't quite as good in terms of seeking that balance in setting and lore, but felt like it had more content and hours of fun regardless. In fact, a lot of my experience in FNV was spent retreading old territory because of the bugs and the constant need to replay a segment to avoid it. Statistically, I made a total of fifty saves in FO3. FNV was near 800.

Bugs aside though, I was also a little disappointed by the lack of a climactic super weapon at the end of the game ala Liberty Prime and the FEV. While Helios One was a very very very cool location, it didn't have the significance and impact I wanted on the outcome of the story. The Boomers and their carpet bombing is pretty awesome though, but was unfortunately just a short fly by and a result of an isolated sidequest.

Hoover Dam, the final battle site, and also the major location talked about from beginning to end, is a popular topic in our reality for conspiracy theorists, who believe it was constructed to house a top secret American weapon. What better location than to put something awesome in an alternate universe storyline where America has plenty of money, no ethical boundaries, tons of robotics and is willing to pulverize their communist enemies in any manner? Disappointingly, FNV doesn't try to explore that at all, and the Dam is just a regular hydroelectric plant. After all that build up, that's all we get? Really? I was really hoping for a result or weapon that would have consequences on the world, not just the west coast, like you know, when in previous Fallouts they were developing viruses to turn EVERY human into a mutant, or maybe in Van Buren, where they were going to control all the nukes stored in the orbital bombardment satellites. That's heavy stuff.

FNV was good enough overall, but next time I really hope the developers actually finish their game before releasing it next time. The industry is already starting to copy their style of 'release first, finish later'. Just look at Age of Conan, or perhaps worse, Magicka.

A MMO for consoles? Disaster meets Final Fantasy 14

Upon reading Kittydog's most recent post, regarding experience caps in MMOs, I was reminded of the appalling experience of FF14 that I had hidden in the far corners of my mind... I can't help but introduce the rest of you to this gem.

MMOs are generally considered to be immune to being plausible ports from PC to consoles, but FF14 reaches out to test this boundary. There have been some console based MMOs like Phantasy Star Online, but that one is not even close to being as pitifully laughable as this.

The YOGSCAST duo has beautifully captured this game in a series of youtube videos, and I won't spoil the surprises this game has in store for potential players/viewers.
You can find the first part here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF7vrQ04_q4

Just for a few highlights, some of my favorite parts involve:
The fishing 'mini-game' in part 3
The map navigation in part 6
The quests and combat in part 7
The hideously painful main quest line that spans parts 9-10 and culminates in a head-bashing journey in part 11.
Part 14 is pretty hilarious at some points too, a strange highlight of everything wrong with the game, all at once: crashes, non-existent navigation, useless skills, and boring uneventful travels to reach quest destinations.

Go check it out; it's way better than anything I could have written here.

Vindictus and limiting game time for mmo gamers

One question I like to ask is. Why? There's always things implemented to limit game time for free to play MMOs. Whether its a fatigue system that limits a person from running dungeons or something like stamina in Valkyrie Sky. These MMOs all call themselves "free to play MMO's" and they limit your game play to like an hour or two a day before you hit your cap. And if you are doing farming runs it can be as short as 30 minutes. The only way is to do pointlessly boring things like fishing which takes like three or four hours just to get one more extra hour. I don't fish. I don't do shitty pointless stuff. So what about those that don't wanna waste their time fishing. Well there's a cash shop where you can buy more game time! Wow! What kind of bullshit is that.

In countries like Korea and China game time is limited by law so there are systems implemented to decrease game time. For example some games will stop your exp gain and drop your stats to 0. You'll have to log off for example, three consecutive hours before it is reset. But hardcore gamers would just make a new account and play while the first one is on cooldown. It just pisses people off in places where you're allowed to ruin your health playing games for five hours straight. If I wanna play for five hours straight after class or work then its my decision fuckers. Plus if you're fishing for five hours whats the difference? You're still letting your kid starve to death.

Lets take a look at Vindictus. It recently came out from beta a month or so ago. So whats it about. Well its a 3d beat em up type of game. It feels like a toned down God of War with up to 4-6 players in a single dungeon beating the shit out of stuff. There are three classes. A rogue with dual swords, a warrior chick with a sword and shield like Sophitia from Soul Calibur, and a mage who can be, instead of standing at the back lobbing magic like a pussy, go melee with an over sized scythe and battlemage it up. The customization of characters itself is pretty big. There are a dozen hairstyles and hair colors, eye colors, eyebrow types etc etc etc. You pretty much have to try real hard to find someone who looks like you. Then there are breast sizes for female characters. The classes are gender locked and my mage is female so there's a slider for height and breast size. Not wanting to be some short person holding an over sized scythe, I pulled the height slider up to like 75% which is taller than the default 50%. Now the default breast size is 30% and it starts at large. Not wanting gigantic ones I lowered it to 20% thinking who the hell would pull it to the right. Well when I logged in I had a friend who was making his sword and shield chick thinking, "breast size? Well then I'll just click the slider hold it down and drag it to the right." Well he has a character with gigantic breasts. Was I surprised? Not really. You should see how huge most of them are in the game.

The game itself is a pretty fun until you realize how lazy they are. The game has boats where you can go to dungeons at. Each boat has about 10ish dungeons. Each dungeon is set on the same map. Yes same map. Its the biggest slack job I ever seen. Each map is split into different sections. Each dungeon is a different pattern of sections with a different end boss with occasional mini bosses and secret bosses in between the start and the end. Now here's the big shitter. Every dungeon after the first boat takes two tokens a run. You get a maximum of fifty tokens which reset every Monday Thursday and Saturday. After seven runs the tokens cost three per run and thirteen runs the tokens cost four per run. You can use up all your tokens in a few hours if you're questing and 30 minutes if you're just farming. Then you wouldn't be able to play. But after looking up some stuff I realized. Who would want to keep playing? Because after the third boat the game ends. The maximum level is 38 and the level of the third boat ends at around 31. Which means you can beat the game in four days pretty much.

There are two types of levels. Your regular exp gives you levels where you can get more quests and learn more skills and get items. Then there are the AP which is exp for your skills. AP has no cap so you can technically farm it endlessly and max all your skills. That is a huge time sink and there is no point to max it all. Stats are gained from skills or from gear. Then there are titles which gives permanent bonuses to your stats such as doing a quest. Killing a boss in a specific way such as smashing it on the head with a broken pillar column or kicking 100 gnolls to death. A quest title can give up to like 30 stats each while kicking gnolls and other pointless ones may give one or two stats at most.

Combat is mostly button mashing. Left clicking on your mouse does a hit and each consecutive click does a combo up to a maximum of four hits. Hitting the right button at any part of your combo does a smash attack that uses up your stamina and deal bonus damage. Smash also adds up more damage to the stun counter on bosses making them get stunned faster. Classes like the sword and shield chick have bonus stun chances. Hitting space is a dodge move and you can see who sucks at this game by how often they hit their space bar. The dodge gets you pretty far away with the exception of the mage who can't really dodge very far but her dodge doesn't cost stamina so there is no reason to not be spamming that when you feel the boss is going to swing at your direction. Bosses can take down someone with a few swings of their paws or weapons. There are also secondary weapons that suck shit with their aim. You go into like a semi first person view of a spear in your hand and you let go and it flies nowhere near where you "aimed." You can throw spears that does damage and sometimes stun, bombs that bomb stuff, and chain hooks. You can hook stuff over or hook a boss and make them trip. Or get dragged by them.

Here's some combat of difficult bosses in Korea that we haven't gotten yet. Clicky

However, outside of combat there is nothing. And the game limits you to a few hours every three to four days. So half the time you have no reason to log in. You can't farm AP in the earlier dungeons. You can farm exp if you want. But why do you want to farm exp when you can just stay off for a few days then log in and quest and get MASSIVE amounts of exp for questing.

Overall the game itself isn't bad if you can overlook the repetitive dungeons but it can't hold your attention long enough. I hear the Korean version has 6 boats of dungeons. Which means the maximum level is somewhere about 60-70? Its still a pretty short game.