Zenonia is one of the earliest hack n slash RPGS on Android and Ios I can remember playing. You take the role of a young boy named Regret, a child who was found in a decimated battlefield between the Holy Knights and the Dragon Clan. It is up to Regret with the help of a fairy companion to find out the truth about his origin as well as the disappearance of his father.
Story
The story of the first Zenonia game is rather lackluster and it shows that it is one of Gamevil’s first attempts at this genre. While it isn’t the worst story in the world, Zenonia just plays it extremely safe. It attempts to break up its pacing with some comedy every so often, but there really isn’t a whole lot to fall back on. There is a good/evil system in place to dictate which side of the story you fall on, but the choice is really locked in at one of the first encounters of the game and there isn’t anything to change it. Both sides don’t really differ all that much outside of some dialogue changes, so there’s not much replay value. Overall, Zenonia seems unsure with what it wants to do and just comes off as an extremely generic evil vs good story.
Gameplay
Zenonia is a top down hack n slash game, reminiscent of other retro titles such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The virtual dpad is… Decent. It actually features a better virtual dpad than most games I’ve seen in this era, and while it is a little rough here and there, it holds up fairly well.
You’re presented with 3 class types, being the Warrior, Paladin and Assassin. For the most part, the warrior and paladin play the same outside of a few skills. It really just comes down to a preference of more damaging abilities vs healing. The assassin class acts as the games hard mode, dealing low but fast damage and dying just as fast. This can be brutal by the late game as even warriors have to deal with monsters chunking their health.
The skill hitboxes can be a little dodgy where if a monster isn’t within 1 block of you, then a hit simply might not register even if the animation reaches them (except in the case of an all map attack such as Thunderstorm or Meteor).
There is a hunger system in place which reduces the amount of mana you have when you’re hungry. While I am alright with this type of system, the only problem is that your hunger is partially tied to your spells. The more you’re using, the faster you get hungry. Rinse and repeat. This becomes much less of a problem later on in the game with one of the special merchants you can find. They sell a piece of food for 10,000 gold that will keep your character for 72 hours in game time. By that point, gold is extremely abundant and there should be no issue getting that amount.
Music
Zenonia features some catchy tunes here and there, but it’s more or less 5 to 10 second loops that don’t always loop properly. There isn’t a whole lot of variety to be seen here as each track is recycled throughout the whole game. The song you hear when you started the game will be the same one you hear by the time you’re running through the end game.
Final verdict
If you were considering giving Zenonia a try, there isn’t a whole lot of options anymore. From the looks of things, it has been removed from every store front, seemingly indefinitely. With no way to purchase the game, that leaves the only choice to find a backup somewhere to play it. As far as android goes, it either requires an older phone, an emulator on pc or a separate app, such as VMOS pro.
Although it did capture a great art style similar to other retro games like Secret of Mana, it just played everything else a bit too safe. It was a short and sweet game, giving us a journey that only lasts a few hours. All in all, I’d give the first Zenonia game a 6/10.