I really hate to have a bad review of a game.  But seriously, if I have to compare the game with the pioneer of 2D side scrolling MMORPG, Maple Story, Ghost Online is just a me too product of the genre.  I still don’t have a chance to play Dragon Gem, the other title of this genre.  But if this title is not far from it’s competitor, they will be dead.

Story

A long time ago, a person name Master Nogun is sealing an evil mage that control the evil army in this world.  And to be able to do that, he has to master a skill called Soul of Universe.  This skill enable him to gain more an enormous power by absorbing any soul from creature that he help or slay.  He finally able to seal them with the cost of he is slowly transforming into the new master of evil, if he doesn’t do anything to prevent that.  This is happened due to many evil creature soul that he already absorb to gain the power.

 So he start to wander to find the cure.  Before he go, he decided to divide the Soul of Universe skill to 12 parts and submit them to his 12 disciples.  Off he go to find the cure.  But the 2^nd disciples, Yang Ping, got greedy and want to acquire all the 12 skill, start by killing his elder. 

When he seek the other disciples, they’ve already gone knowing something wrong with the 2^nd disciple intention.  While on the other hand, Master Nogun finally found the cure at the cost of his soul being divided into many and lost his abilities or memories.  This scattered soul is known as the devil buster, and that’s you the player.

Graphic

Many people said that Ghost Story is better than Maple.  But how come?  The graphic is not as fresh as Maple.  Even the opening and login screen is very plain.  And since I have played Maple Story before, obviously I will compare Ghost to Maple.  Including the login screen.  One thing that I like about Maple is the fresh color of the environment, and they build it since the login screen.  But Ghost failed to give me one.

Also, the character is not as cute as the predecessor of the genre.  Wel the theme is about ghost.  So I can understand the “dark” environment that they built.  But why don’t they emphasize the cuteness of their character?  They even replace the face emotion with emoticons.  When you play Maple, and you express your emotion, it is going to be displayed right away in your character face.  And now, in Ghost, they replace it with emoticons!  One of the main factor that attract people to play 2D side scrolling MMORPG is because they are CUTE!  Take a look at these example:

I have chosen my character face as a serious type one.  But if he want to express a laughing emotion, a paradox scene is what we get.  A laughing emoticon with an emotionless face.  NOT CUTE at all.  Well although at some points the graphic are quite fresh, but overall, they fail to bring us the cute sense.  That’s what I thought about the graphic.

Character

If I ask people whether they like being forced on little choice or rather a wide range of choice, I believe most of them will answer the last one.  Having many choices is better than being forced on little one.  In nowadays MMORPG world, where most game offer so many range of job and race to choose, this game just offered us 3 jobs of choices!  A warrior, a mage, and an assassin.  Melee, magic, and range.  That’s it.  And as far as I know, they don’t have any plan to expand that!  That makes only little variations in the game’s world.  And I have to say, having only little variation only means one thing: BORING!

 Status and Skill

One thing that I like about a customizable status is that people will have a wide range of variety in the game.  One can choose the same job but has a different characteristic compare to other.  And yes, you can choose which stat that you want to add in this game by allocating certain point that you get when you level up.  BUT the logic of stat allocating in this game IS very very out of ordinary.  Out of ordinary can be good if the game can offer us a different way of playing.  BUT (again, OMG I shouting a lot of BUT in this review, ARGH!), this game stat is SOOOO WEIRD that it became the nerd and weirdos in its class!  How can your melee damage is greater when you increase your DEX compare to the damage when your STR being increased???  And that’s happened to the warriors job!!!  It is very obvious, that if you want to increase your melee damage, the common sense of nowaday MMORPGs, is to increase your STR!

The skill is somewhat interesting.  BUT (word of the day, eh?), I just felt that at certain point, it is implemented in a ridicilous way.  This game is trying to make everything easier by giving support skill to get the fast paced feeling compare to its predecessor.  So they gave players freedom to use their support skill without mana or sp in town.  However, this policy is not implemented in a consistent way.  In the battlefield, if you use the sprint skill, it will cost you some mana.  In town, you can run whenever you want without fear of losing any mana.  BUT if you use the high jump, wherever you use it, you WILL LOSE your mana!  Imagine if the structure of the town is vertical and you use too much jumping skill, you have to rest each time you reach certain height!  That’s ridicilous!

It is very common to rest during your windows shopping in town.  It is already painfull to have a rest during your grinding, and now YOU HAVE TO DO THAT IN TOWN???  WTF!  Look at me there, resting while I was in town.

Gameplay

The gameplay control is a standard one with arrow point to move and jump your character.  Default attack is spacebar with ctrl as pick up item.  And several shortcut to access items, skill, and related windows such as item window, skill window, character status window.  You can customize it though.  You talk with NPC using left click of your mouse.  I have no problem with the control.

The chat windows is “enter then enter again after you type” one.  I don’t really like this kind of typing message style.  Cuz when someone start to chat, you can’t respond it right away.  There’s a messaging system in this game, and even the character that you try to contact is offline, the message will delivered when he or she’s online.  An arrow will be shot from upper left of your screen to the bottom right of the screen letting you know about the message.  That’s a quite nice messaging.

For the hunting part, when you kill a monster, you will get an exp, a chance to get an item, and a chance to get a flying orb.  The flying orb has many effects.  The blue and green one can replenish your mana.  The white one replenish your hit point and mana.  Red orb is to fill your anger gauge, and by pressing shift you can be in the state of “limit break” like in Final Fantasy.  I am not sure about the gold orb function.  But as for the purple orb, it is to fill your soul trap equipment.  The soul trap equipment is enhance your items.  There are various type of soul trap equipment.  Here’s some of the example.

In this game, you can draw a lucky card once a day.  And you can get an additional status based on the card that you choose.  This is like a traditional Chinese fortune teller card type by combining the evil card and good card.

Another feature that can be done besides hunting (or training) is fishing.  You must buy a rod and a bait to do this.  There are certain area to do this, you can not fishing anywhere you like.  I don’t know about the function of this feature in the future, but as for now, the only funcion of fishing is to gain more gold.  Here’s me fishing.

Now with that kind of feature, how could you expect someone not to get boring quickly?  I mean, if you know that there’s already a game out there having this kind of feature, and people are start to complaint about it, why don’t you make a better one or additional feature so that you can postpone the complaint?  I know it’s hard to make a game.  And I won’t say something like “my grandma can do that better”, BUT we live in the age of hyper competition!  I suggest all the developer to read some marketing book first before they try to develop a new game.  I still remember, reading a book called Purple Cow by Seth Godin, saying if you don’t have something in your product, that people start to talk about it, you will see that your products is going straight to the graveyard.  Have something different and powerfull like showing a purple cow to the world!

Another thing, I was quite motivated to do the grinding because there’s a chance that you can get an S type equipment in this game.  So I decide to keep the levelling even if I have to slay thousands of the same type of monster.  BUT in the middle of last month, suddenly they add a new feature that make my grinding a waste of time!  A mining system so that player can change their weapon into the S type!  Yes there’s a chance of failing in upgrading your equipment, but in my opinion, adding that feature is like pushing yourself to the hole of your grave more quickly.

Now talking about grinding.  You call Maple Story a grinding master?  Try this game!  Not to mention a nature of easy ks in 2D MMORPG.  Well I can’t blame that ks is happening in this genre because controlling where to hit is easier using point and click rather than aiming it with keyboard arrows control.  But that would make your hunting process a grinding one!  But that’s not it.  Take a look at this picture:

You see that big porky pig guy in the left?  Correct, he is a mini boss.  Slaying him would need 50 to 60 hits using my warrior.  Now you see the little skinny grey zombie guy in the right?  I would need about 4 to 5 hits to slay him.  BUT THEY GIVE US THE SAME EXACT EXPERIENCE POINT!  Not to mention there’s a quest that need you to slay that porky pig several times to find a seal that only sometimes being dropped by that fat ass!  Now you call any game grinding?

Well another thing to avoid the boring period of grinding is to do quest.  But the quest is still much the same as grinding like I have mentioned with the fatty pig up there!  I can still stand this IF they reward me well.  OR even if it’s not rewarding well, it is still count as a reward.  BUT at certain level when grinding is already painfull, there is no quest at all!!!  Now have you smell the graveyard like I do?

The only interesting point of playing this game is the PVP system where you ask someone to have duel with you and if he or she accepted, you can rite away go into the battle.  And it happened several times where a lv 20 guy beat a lv 30.

There’s still another features but I don’t think it’s significant enough to provide the game a medal of worth to be praised.  The community of this game in my country is not as bad as Maple Story.  And there are so many “adult enough” people who play this game like I do (yes I am not in the elementary school anymore).  But I wouldn’t recommend this game for anyone who can’t stand grinding.  This game was positioned as Casual Martial MMORPG.  But grinding is NOT a part of casual.  If you open your dictionary or wikipedia, casual is about comfort.  So they made a big mistake with that kind of positioning.  I smell graveyard for the life of this game.