Preview : Spirit Tales
We are currently giving away Spirit Tales beta keys. You can find more information here.
There is only one word to describe the new Anime based MMO game from Koram Game Entertainment, and that word is CUTE. From the cartoony landscape, to the animal based characters you both play and encounter, everything about this game seems designed to make you go “Awwww”.
Now we only got to try out the preview version of Spirit Tales, and that only a beta version at best, but it allows us a glimpse of what the game will be like when finally released to the public. It is difficult to get a proper feel for an online only game that should be populated by other players as well as yourself when you are the only person in there besides the NPCs, and it is obvious they are still working on fully fleshing out the game. However even alone and in this early beta state, Spirit Tales gives you the opportunity to play, explore and have fun.
When you first start up Spirit Tales you log into a server and create your character, which is a fairly simple process where you pick from a few animal types and a couple of classes for each animal, such as a fighting or magic using based character. The game does lay out some stats for each type of character and class but it is not immediately apparent what effect those have on actual gameplay. I assume with further playing, or an extensive manual, that those stats would make more sense. The main thing you will notice when picking and naming your character is how adorable and cute they are. They are little animals, with the big eyes and smiley faces typical of many anime characters, just with armor and weapons. You can pick the costume your character wears too.
Once you start the game it becomes obvious what sort of game this is. I was immediately put in mind of the early Legend of Zelda type roleplaying games of the Nintendo type. You generally have a top down isometric perspective of the world, though you can scroll in and out to change your perspective from the high top down view to a close in 3d viewpoint. When you click somewhere your little character moves there. Clicking on a NPC allows you to talk to them with little dialogue boxes, which generally you don’t even need to read – the NPCs seem to be there to either sell you items or give you missions, or both. The items the NPCs sell allow you to customize and improve your character, with new weapons or outfits, and the money you need to purchase these items are generally received from completing missions. According to the game creators, there are 40 million different unique character model combinations.
The game guides you quite well from the opening, with a mission being presented to you from the start, and once you accept the mission you are guided to your objective. And I do mean guided… clicking the right place in the mission box will make your character head straight to the mission objective with almost no input from you, except for the occasional issue with path finding or encountering a monster. Because of this automatic guidance to the objective I did feel like there was little I needed to do to complete most missions besides clicking the mission box, fighting a couple of monsters, and then clicking the NPC again at the end to get my reward. The combat is simple but fun. Click on a monster and your character will attack it with whatever attack skill you have assigned to that mouse button. The fun seems to really come with picking the right attack types.
The rewards are varied though, with you receiving gold or items for your good deeds. These items can improve your characters abilities, such as getting better armor or weapons, or healing and mana potions. You also get experience points for killing monsters and completing missions, and like most RPG’s when you gain enough experience points you can level up, allowing you to unlock new skills and abilities such as new attacks. You get to pick which skills you unlock, and those skills can then be assigned by clicking and dragging to a spot on your quick access bar at the bottom of the play area, which in turn can be assigned to one of your mouse buttons by the same process. Items can also be put into the access bar, and pressing the appropriate number allows you to instantly access the item you’ve assigned to that spot. Most players should instantly be familiar with this sort of setup these days with the amount of RPG’s using something similar.
There does seem to be a high priority put on customization in this game. Every character can be dressed and outfitted in different ways, their skills developed in different ways, and even personal items crafted in different ways for them by finding the right components or ingredients. You can even find, or receive via missions like I did, eggs that will hatch into pets who you can have fight beside you, level up with you, and even have battles with other players pets. Even in this preview version of Spirit Tales there was much to explore and discover, not just on the map, but about your own character. I found it enjoyable seeing what new attack skills I could unlock for my Assassin character with each new level up, and each character class had it’s own set of unique abilities to unlock and try. I got the impression I barely scratched the surface in my few days with the game.
Graphically the game looks nice, with colourful cartoony landscape, characters and monsters, as befits this sort of anime based game. The monsters that I encountered were of a nature akin to this, that is mutated plants and animals that while dangerous did not really look threatening. Again, everything is CUTE. Sound wise, Spirit Tales is functional but nothing to write home about, and the music is not annoying like I first feared when seeing the sort of game this was.
Spirit Tales will probably not appeal to everyone. I can’t see a lot of macho male types sitting down and enjoying this game on a regular basis, but it will still appeal to many. The cuteness factor will both attract and deter a lot of people depending on their temperament. However it’s difficulty and complexity levels are such that it is easy enough to pick up for anyone including children, but has enough depth to it’s gameplay that it looks like it will keep more demanding players intrigued and engrossed. We will have to wait to see how the game plays with multiple human players running around in game, since I only saw a world populated by some NPCs, monsters, and my character, but it appears to have a lot going for it. If you can ignore how cute everything is.