I’ve had my eye on Granado Espada ever since I learned of the Korean official site for the game. It looked amazing, and I was taken in right away by the character art and their in-game counterparts. You don’t see those kinds of outfits anywhere else, that’s for sure.
I waited for a North-American beta to come along, and lucky me, I got access to the press VIP beta (I feel special now!). The game client actually gave me a very hard time to download, so much that the nice PR representative had to send me a CD with it. But that made my first contact with the game a lot more rewarding when I finally logged on.
Before making your characters, you have to pick a family name. This is basically all of your characters’ surname, since you will have the chance to create a large number of them.
I found out that I had already six characters made in my account, three level 40 and three level 24, but still plenty of room to make some more. They looked gorgeous and extremely detailed, every single one of them. And so does the “family room” where they all hang out in, waiting to be picked for an adventure. Right there, the game is already quite different.
The game offers five character classes: Musketeer, Fighter, Scout, Wizard and Elementalist. When you create a character, you pick the class, gender and select one from an array of outfits that are absolutely breathtaking in their 17th century Baroque fashion style.
As you select a character, he or she will move up to the front and wait for your orders. My instant reaction was to just run out with a group of three, I didn’t care who, I just clicked the button because I wanted to see the world that bad. The starting town was absolutely amazing, very reminiscent of European architecture.
Everyone who will talk to you will have a marker above their heads, and all those who will give you a mission have an exclamation mark like in WoW, but others will also offer quests. NPCs will also automatically transport you to the respective dungeon to complete a mission, while other quests are done in the different zones, usually by doing deliveries or killing certain types of monsters a number of times.
Based on the questing I’ve done so far, you can get money, experience cards and character cards as a reward. Experience cards allow you to attribute those experience points to a particular character. Character cards apparently let you unlock new characters to play as, but I haven’t found out how to activate the one I have yet.
It was weird to see my little group running around one after the other. I mean, the closest experience to controlling several characters at once was in Minions of Mirth, but it’s not the same since you only had one avatar there. Here, you see all of your characters in action at the same time, and you can either control just one directly and leave the other two to the AI, or you can control all of them at once, like a little army in an RTS.
I scrambled around lost for a while, then finally found an exit to the next zone. I picked up a quest and off I went, killing the strangest plants, crocodiles standing on their back legs and other colorful and exotic beasts.
I noticed my characters were “naked”, so I didn’t mind starting with the low level quests to try and get some equipment. I eventually found some weapons, a rod for the Wizard and a sword for the Fighter. Aside from weapons, equipment isn’t visible on your character at all. Apparently, the only piece of armor that will be visible are hats, so now the whole wardrobe selection at the character creation process makes sense.
Characters have special active and passive abilities to customize their combat, and you can also direct them to attack everything in sight, stand their ground and defend, and summon them if they get too far behind. The AI varies, since sometimes, once one of your characters attacks something, the others tend to come running to help, while in other occasions they will attack whatever is closest to them or finish killing whatever is attacking them.
I’m not too sure how “monster aggro” works, but with level 24 characters running in level 1 to 8 zones, I really didn’t expect to be surrounded by four things or more most of the time. It just seems a little odd. It became a little tougher in a level 17 zone, where I finally died for the first time. Dying means your character will lay there until a timer has ran out, and then come back to life at about half health.
The world map actually tells you what levels each zone are appropriate for, and when you zone over there’s a message stating it too, so you can be sure you won’t be getting into trouble by going into areas that aren’t suited for your character.
For those of you into PVP, rest assured SotNW has it too. You just don’t have to go around sneakingly running away from others not to be attacked, since it’s not an all-time feature.
Although the game needs work still as far as the translation goes (quests are written in very bad English, and some quest maps aren’t translated at all), I feel that the missions aren’t explicit enough to understand the goals. Basically, all I did was accept them, wait to be transported and then kill whatever I could. The timer didn’t make much sense to me either, since I ended up being transported out after a “missions successful” message but without really knowing what I have just done.
However, this is a beta, so by the time the game launches, I’m sure these issues will have been addressed.
As far as the gameplay goes, it can get a little complicated controlling your party of three, but after a while, all you need to do is watch and do a few mouse clicks here and there.
I’ve already mentioned how beautiful everything is, but I can’t praise the graphics enough, and I’m at a loss for words to describe them. It’s worth running around just for sight-seeing and admiring every little detail. The merchant stands in town, water running from a fountain in the middle of a plaza, the lighting effects in hazy heavy wooded areas, a waterfall coming down on a stone shrine… Even the monsters are worth looking at, and I actually got into some trouble while attempting to take screenshots during busy fights.
The sound is no less spectacular. The music is fantastic, from the piano melodies to the dance rhythms, it sure makes for a very unique atmosphere.
Stunning graphics and great soundtrack aside, what I really like about SotNW is that if I’m a healer or magic user, I don’t need to depend on others to protect me, and if I’m a fighting class I don’t have to find a healer to keep me alive. I don’t need to wait to find a group to go kill things anymore: I am the group. I can run out there with my own party and adventure on my own, three characters at a time. It’s perfect for me!
Special thanks to Mika Kelly and K2 Network for providing access to the VIP Beta.