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Hello Steemians and gamers alike!
Today we're diving head first into my recent adventures in Mabinogi! For those of you unfamiliar with Mabinogi, Mabinogi is a cutesy anime style inspired MMO that released back in 2007. Published by Nexon North America and created by devCAT Studio. Mabinogi right off the bat sets itself apart from most traditional MMO's by having a unique combat system. A system which actually challenges the player. For instance when encountering enemies you have the option to choose various attack forms. Some are counters to others and so comparisons to rock-paper-scissors are made often. In fact the new player tutorial makes this comparison for you during the combat tutorial stages. In addition to having a rock-paper-scissors style combat, you're also able to combo abilities in order to maximize your fighting efficiency.
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There's a lot to be said about the game and as such, I will try and do my best to cover as much as possible. So far I've spent a whopping ten hours in game. The world of Erinn is comprised of three continents, Uladh, Iria, and Belvast. As a new player you have the options of choosing three races, human, elf, and giant. Each will spawn in their respective home cities on either three continents.
From there you're able to customize your character to your liking. I was a little disappointed in the lack of customization here and quickly realized that many of the customization appearances were locked via a pay wall. Very typical of Nexon games, however I can't complain as the company needs to make its money somehow, being that it is a free to play game. More on that later. Despite the lack of options in character creation I decided to move forward as I was far more interested in what the game play had to offer. Immediately you're confronted with a cut scene, something this games does a lot. I don't mind, in fact sometimes it's nice. Unfortunately there's no voice acting so that leaves something to be desired.
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Moving on, after the initial cut scene you're met with a cute, big breasted female elf named Nao! Yes I said it, BIG BOOBED! Why can't my character have big boobs? I'm not particularly into the whole anime style game and their drastically disproportionate characters. Still I was intrigued as the game has a nice way of emerging you in npc dialogue, rather then the usual small chat bubble or floating window of text which you usually get with most games. Nao explains that everything is going to be okay and that we have "rebirthed".
Rebirthing is a game mechanic which allows your character to essentially start over in character level while retaining your current character skills and stats. The reason for this mechanic is to allow players to reach the highest possible ability points cap. More on this later. After rebirthing you're then transported to a short new player tutorial that goes over movement and other user interface elements. I always find this part to be funny considering that almost all games universally use WASD to move around. If you hadn't gotten this far then I'm pretty sure you'd be screwed considering the game doesn't make it a point to mention this earlier on.
There's not a lot to say about the new player tutorial other then that it's pretty simple and straight forward. You talk to every NPC that you encounter. Follow their instructions and continue proceeding step-by-step throughout the quest chain. One little detail I noticed was that quests don't complete themselves automatically once you've finished each task. Instead you must hit a, "complete quest" button that can be found in your quest menu. I guess that might be confusing for some people who're not used to having to click an extra button.
I did wish that the tutorial area was more extensive because as soon as you're able to enter the game world you're bombarded with many others tutorial quests which you can choose to complete or not. As a new player I inevitably chose to do them hoping to learn more about the game. Most of them off the top of my mind weren't crucial in order to understand the game more. There were a few though I thought helped a lot, like the new player bulletin board. The bulletin board offers a lot of combat training, unlike the initial tutorial, the bulletin board will cover basics, intermediate, and advanced combat techniques.
I guess there is no better time to talk about the games user interface. It's so far my biggest complaint. Most of the windows are very clunky and there is a lot of right clicking with your mouse key in order to interact with your inventory items. Your bottom menu is unmovable and your skills bar is locked to the top left corner of the screen. I cant stand it, it's infuriating! The chat box window by default is hidden and when activated pops up. Yet again taking up more space on your screen. I can't even begin to imagine playing this game on a lower resolution, if that isn't enough to blow your brains wait till you hear this. Every time you enter a new zone your mini-map which resides in the top right corner of your screen is reset. In other words no matter how much I try to tweak and edit it to my liking it always reverts back. Similarly other windows do not remain in locations which you specify them to stay and overall winds up being a cluster fuck of a mess.
The game world and the graphics are at best dated. If you're the kind of person that has to have the best, top of the line visuals then this is definitely not worth your time. Most of the game world is comprised of blocky textures. When you load in and out of zones it usually takes a moment for things to load fully in and often the screen will flash a few times before correcting itself. I'm not sure though if this is an isolated issue on my part. I use two monitors and that may or may not be creating this issue.
Hopping over into the settings menu, you might need to change your games aspect ratio depending on what type of screen and computer hardware you have. For those of you who're using outdated graphic cards, should be safe playing this game as it requires little to no graphic power. It took me a little bit to get the game working properly on wide screen mode, again might be an issue with having a duel monitor setup, but I eventually got it to work.
While stumbling around the world of Erinn, I was met with a lot of friendly people who've been playing the game a lot longer than I have. This was super nice and it helped ease my transition, in fact it's one of the few things that keeps bringing me back into the game. Otherwise I don't think I would be playing it. At first it's very easy to get lost as there's a lot to do and so much to see. Throughout the initial stages, you're talking to many ncp's, all of which will be throwing items your way. This over time started to become a problem as bag space seems to be an issue. I hate not having bag space for stuff and so I found myself dropping lots of items along the way in order to carry things on me that were needed for quests, lame! Though apparently you're able to get bigger bags later on, its something I've yet to receive or figure out how to get.
Like I said there's a lot to do. Mabinogi is a game where you're grinding skills rather then just pushing your character level to the maximize. Yes character levels are a thing in this game, but they seem far less important then obtaining ability points which are used to power up skills. In the game there are many professions both combat and life which can be chosen during character creation and later on after you rebirth. There is no limit to what you can do or be. I started out with the melee combat profession, I like to smack shit and cause as much damage as possible, it seemed like a very good choice for my play style. I've only rebirthed once so far and I plan to train my melee combat skills to the maximum before rolling over to a new profession.
Before ever playing the game, I read that the main story was one of the best in any MMO. This of course is a bold claim and so was another reason why I was inspired to try the game out. So far the main story has been good and I want to use that term lightly as I haven't progressed to far into it just yet to have a solid opinion. With that said there are some interesting story elements which shows that the developers didn't half ass it and actually put some effort into their game. It is always nice to see as many games now-a-days don't really bother with trying to create a decent story. Afterall MMO's are often categorized as rpgs and as such should have a good story. In part two I'll be cover more about the story when I'm further along.
So far the world is under threat by fomors which in this case are beasts and monsters from a different dimensional plane ruled by the goddess Morrighan. It all seems pretty cliche and I'm hoping that as the story unfolds it will take a turn that isn't super predictable, I'm not holding my breath though. Despite being and older game I have to say that I am pleased with the visual aesthetics of the game. Call me old, but I do enjoy some of these older style games. I do understand however how that might be a big deterrent for other gamers.
I'll post some in-game screenshots that I took while playing, with that said part 2 will go up as soon as I have it finished and as always don't forget to leave a comment bellow letting me know your thoughts, vote and I'll see you guys soon!
This is a screenshot of Tir, one of the beginner starting towns.
Stay tuned for more.