Free Game Friday: Pandora Saga: Weapons of Balance first impressions (Level 1-10)

So another Friday means another free game for you to piss away those weekend hours on.  This week I bring to you a free MMORPG available on Steam called Pandora Saga: Weapons of Balance.  Due to the fact I've been playing other games and I've been keeping busy with my job and such, I've only had a chance to reach level 10, so I'll give you the story so far.

First, this is a game developed by Atlus Online, the company that also gave us the likes of Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online.  Quite frankly, last time I played SMT: Imagine, it sucked so fucking hard I wanted to rip my own fingernails out.  I'm a huge fan of that series and even I was bored to death grinding through its boring world and uninteresting dungeons.

Luckily for us, Pandora Saga is nothing like SMT: Imagine and the first 10 levels have actually been pretty good so far.  So the story so far is as follows, I started playing on Monday and I created a elf spellcaster.  Now here lies my first issue with the game, not a huge dealbreaker but a issue none the less.

This is what a male elf looks like.  The reason I picked an elf is because they are naturally adept at magic, and being a spellcasting class I thought this would be a good choice.  The only problem is, all the elves look like fucking children and there is no way to de-shit a Pandora Saga elf.  That said there are quite a few playable races (off the top of my head I think it's 5) and the elf is the only really stupid looking one.  For those that have played the game and are reading this anyway, yes, the elf has a shitter design than those silly little dog bastards.

Anyway, so when you fire the game up you don't get bogged down in stupid long winded tutorials, your in town, surrounded by a load of high level players selling shit, and your only direction is to go talk to the city guard guy and get a quest.  The game basically tells you nothing and has you figure most of it's shit out for yourself, which SOUNDS like a bad thing, but it's not so involved that you can't figure it out with a bit of common sense.

So the quests in this game are standard free MMO fare, "go kill X amount of bastard Y for item Z" etc. but what more do you expect from these kind of games really?  For the first 10 levels that's all I've really been doing, but it doesn't feel like a grind because you're never asked to kill huge numbers of monsters and the rewards are big enough to give you a level each time.  However I have run into a few technical issues with monsters clipping into the scenery and when they do that you can't hit them.  It's just been a mild annoyance now but I've got a horrible feeling it's going to fuck me over hard later.

 Also, this picture is a little small and it's kind of hard to see, but that is a level 44 stray wolf just milling around the first quest area.  Sure, this doesn't seem like much of an issue at first but putting an enemy this high level at the start of the game makes me question how big the world is going to end up being.  I can't seem to find a complete world map, but then again I've not looked very hard for one.  Aside from that, the gameplay is smooth and it plays a little bit like Lineage 2 which is a game I used to have a massive MMO boner for but even if you weren't part of the old L2 crowd I still think there is some enjoyment to be had here.

The other thing I want to touch on here is the skill system in this game.

 It's a pretty cool idea where every level you get a certain number of Stat and Skill points.  With the stat points you can really fuck yourself over if you go drooling all over your keyboard and put them into parameters you don't need.  But if you don't have severe brain damage this really isn't a problem.  The real cool thing is the skill points.  Every level you get a skill point to apply to one of your abilities, in my case the various schools of magic.  Once you learn a skill from that area, you can then level up that area further by using those skills.  This means, that even if you go make a load of stupid choices early on with your skill loadout, it can be fixed with enough grind.  It's a cool idea and I can't wait to see how it plays out later on.

There is also a shitton of other systems such as horse mounted combat and a warring nations as well as guilds and PVP etc.  but I've yet to try any of this out so hopefully I'll have more on that when I do another post when I hit 20 (providing I don't quit before then).  There is also a cash shop but I've not even looked at it, no idea what's in there or how it may help/break the game or whatever, but I've been doing fine without it.  Finally, the game is plagued with gold spammers that sometimes makes chatting to other players impossible.  Luckily these fuckbends come and go so it's not a problem that is present 100% of the time and hopefully ATLUS will do something about it eventually (Not fucking likely).

Anyway, that's a little overview of Pandora Saga, check it out, it's worth a chuckle or two at least.