Reviewed by Meagan Lemons
I’ve wanted to eat more healthily lately. That’s meant adding a lot of foods to my diet that I wouldn’t normally eat a lot of – celery, in particular. Now, it would be a lot easier for me to eat celery if it tasted more like, say, bacon. But as much as I want to like it, or say I like it, or trick myself into liking it, celery just doesn’t taste good, and it certainly doesn’t taste like bacon. So, having told you this, you might understand more clearly when I say that Aion is a lot like celery. I want to like it, I really do, but when it comes right down to it, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth every time I eat… er, play it.
This isn’t to say that Aion is terrible. It does a lot of interesting things with the MMORPG genre, and it does a lot of them right. First, there is the character customization system, which is thorough, to say the least. You can make your character as beautiful or as ugly, as tiny or humongous, as you want with so many hairstyles to choose from, facial features to tweak, and body parts to… resize. The character models are extremely detailed, especially the armor. The models for the two races you can choose from – angelic creatures with wings you can actually use (more on that later) – are also very beautiful.
For that matter, the rest of the art in Aion is really stunning as well. The monster models, appearing in gorgeous environments, are really impressive. They are as detailed as the player character models, varied, original, colorful, and aren’t overused. Instead of fighting bears and cats of various colors, you’re fighting darus, strange ram-kangaroo hybrids; snufflers, armadillo-like critters with trunks, and spriggs, small blue humanoids with rabbit ears. A lot of monsters have obvious influences, but most are completely original creatures.
Then there are the classes. There are only four to chose from when creating your character – Warrior, Scout, Mage, or Priest – but you’ll get a chance to specialize at level ten. Scouts can become Rangers or Assassins, Warriors can become Templars (defensive melees) or Gladiators (high-damage melees), Mages can become Spiritmasters (the pet class) or Sorcerers, and Priests can become Chanters (chain-wearing, party-buffing hybrids) or Clerics (straight healers). Each specialty builds on the original class in a different way, but they each share core abilities. For instance, the Scout class gives both the Ranger and the Assassin the stealth ability. Each class plays as one would expect, following the genre very closely.
There’s a little extra customization when it comes to spells and abilities, too. You have those which you can buy from your class trainer at a specific level – and in Aion you can buy the skills before you reach that level and hold on to them so you can level in the field, which is handy, for sure – then there are stigmas, ability stones that drop from monsters. When you socket one into your stigma grid, assuming you are of the right class and level, you gain the ability granted by the stigma. Some are so-so, others are awesome. Of course, the more awesome the stigma, the more rare it will probably be. By end game, you will have a total of eight slots for stigmas, so there can be quite a few degrees of individualization for each character.
Combat in Aion possesses an extra layer of strategy. When in combat, you are given bonuses to certain stats depending on your movement. When you are moving forward, for example, you receive a bonus to your attack stat. When you are backing away, you move slower but receive a bonus to your defenses. Moving sideways grants a bonus to evasion.
Let us say that everything I just described is the peanut butter on top of the celery. Sweet, creamy, peanut-buttery, everything peanut butter should be. Now let’s take the peanut butter off for a moment and look at the celery – the infuriating, pointlessly frustrating celery.
I have a minor contention with Aion’s leveling rate. It’s pretty slow, to say the least. I suppose you could look at it as if the game really has 200 levels rather than 50, though I don’t know that that’s any better. There are a few reasons why the leveling is so slow, which are where my more major contentions with the game lie.
First of all, while most of the quests are well-written and intriguing, there just aren’t enough of them. At times I ran out of quests at my level and was forced to grind on monsters until I was the appropriate level to do the next set of quests. And those that are there don’t give enough XP. A quest might give approximately the same amount of XP as five or six of the same level mobs. This means you’ll be killing nearly every monster that crosses your path if you want to level at a decent rate.
Secondly, there are no instances until level 25. None. And it’s a shame, too, because the mobs in the instances give a lot more XP than their outside counterparts. But wait, there’s more. The level cap for the first instance is 28, so you’ll only be able to enjoy the increased rate of XP for three levels, or about seven run-throughs, before you out-level it. But wait, there’s even more. There is a sixteen hour lock-out on the instance, so every time you complete it you have to wait over half a day before you can re-enter. I have to ask, what’s the point? It’s like the developers consider leveling a sin.
Don’t expect to get a lot from killing monsters as far as loot goes, either. Green items drop from time to time, which are a bit rarer than common whites, and I hear there are blue items, which make up the next tier of rarity, but by level 27 (50 is the level cap) I hadn’t seen a single one – and yes, I only made it to level 27, which may not sound very far, I know, but that took me all of about 175 hours for reasons explained above. So if you want to keep your character in the best gear possible, you’ll either be shelling out Kinah for armor and weapons on the market or crafting it yourself.
Now, I’m a crafter. I love crafting in games. I have to play MMOs with people who are willing to hold stacks of items for me because I regularly run out of space in my bank for things I need for crafting. Aion is no exception. The idea behind Aion’s crafting system is great. You have a few to choose from: Cooking; Handicrafting, which produces jewelry, staves, and bows; Armorsmithing; Weaponsmithing; Alchemy, which produces potions and magic weapons; and Tailoring, which produces cloth and leather armor, and you can take every one of them from level 1 to level 399 if you so desire, although you can only take two of them past 400. The two gathering skills – Extract Vitality and Extract Aether – are automatically trained. As you make items, or gather materials in the case of the gathering skills, you raise the level of that crafting skill.
Something neat that Aion implements are work orders – crafting quests you can take from your skill trainer for which you can buy materials from the nearby vendor to make a certain number of items. Completing the work orders gives you a chance to raise your skill level and also gives you XP, which helps supplement the slow leveling (though not by much). Taking work orders is an easy way to get your crafting level up to par so you can craft appropriate level gear for yourself, including blue items.
However, because of the way crafting works, you will spend countless hours and/or a fortune making that cool sword/spellbook/helmet you’ve had your eye on. Some white items you can make have a chance to crit into green items, and some green items you can make have a chance to crit into blue items. Some items require a green item to make, which can only come from a crit on another item. Some items require you to crit on an item, use that item to make another item, crit the second item, then use that item and hopefully crit on the item you were trying to make in the first place, because if you don’t crit it into a blue for your awesome level 20 armor set, your effort and money is wasted and you have to start over. This isn’t mentioning that you need so many gathered materials for one attempt at critting a blue item in the first place, you can’t possibly gather everything and still have time to level your character.
Oh, I almost forgot. Yes, you can fly in Aion, and, yes, you can fight other players in flight. This does indeed add a whole new element to PvP. I don’t have any problems with this mechanic. I think it’s great. It puts a completely new spin on the MMO genre, not to mention it’s so much fun. There just isn’t enough of it. First, you can only fly in certain areas, which only includes two cities for each of the two races and the PvP area. You can glide in other areas, and the designers did a good job of making terrain which you can jump from to catch some good air. It’s just not the same as being able to fly.
Even when you’re in an area in which you can fly, your wings have a timer. When that timer runs out, you fold your wings back in. If you are much higher than ground level when this happens, it almost certainly means death. Most of my own deaths in the game were directly caused by this, in fact. It’s also very easy to accidentally hit the key to fold your wings back in manually, and if you do this within a certain amount of time of deploying your wings the first time, you have to wait for your wing deploying timer to reset before you can deploy them again. In that amount of time, a couple of things can happen. Either a) you are up high enough to wait for your timer to reset and deploy them again, or b) you aren’t, resulting in your death. As you could probably guess, the latter is far more likely the case.
And let me tell you, death isn’t cheap. When you die, you lose XP. You can buy back a percentage of what you lost, but only at an exorbitantly high price, and you will have already spent all your Kinah on crafting materials and equipment to be able to afford it. I opted to leave the ever-increasing pale-colored bar at the end of my XP bar and endure its taunting rather than pay to have it removed. The good news about this is you can’t lose a level from dying, so there’s that small comfort at least.
Despite all my gripes, I still can’t say Aion is a bad game. And I admit, it isn’t completely fair to compare it to something so bland as celery. It does have a lot of flavor of its own. There was a lot of thought put into the game’s universe, the world is beautiful and original, the story is really fleshed out, and the writing is great. It’s just not a game for the MMO player who leans even a little bit toward the casual side. With all the required grinding, meta-gaming, and patience, Aion is for the seriously hard-core players and not many others. That could change, though. With new patches coming out at least semi-frequently, the game could veer back toward the casual side and appeal to more players.
And I hope it does. I need to eat more celery.