2010-06-15, 07:15 AM
Double posting
I finally got a chance to give this game a spin. The installer was still stupid and would close if my internet stopped working, but at least I was downloading at ~400 kb/s without the proxy open and everything worked out. I still have a lot of complaints about the process of getting the game to run at all, but I'll get to that later. If the game comes out in English, I assume it won't be nearly as difficult.
The actual game is actually quite a lot of fun. There are a ton of parallels to Dungeon Fighter, so I'll have to compare the two. You have a small town that acts as a central hub with quest givers and shopkeepers, and then you have a large number of dungeons to explore that get progressively harder. The area leading to the dungeons is a little map where you can assemble a party of up to 4 people. The gameplay is also in the 2d side scrolling beat-em-up format. The only real difference that I saw here was that the characters in Elsword look a lot better than the ones in DFO.
I only got to level 5 and didn't understand enough Japanese to bother raising any skills, but so far the game looks better than Dungeon Fighter overall. Instead of a flat field like that of TMNT, Punisher, and all those other arcade games, it's a platformer. You have some terrain to work with to approach enemies from different ways. I prefer this style; you may not. The innate arsenal of skills is also much larger. You start with two skills as in DFO, but DFO has a very limited number of character actions that are not skill-based. In DFO, you have normal attack combo, dash attack, and an aerial attack that remains the same no matter if you're jumping forward or straight up. In ES, you have two basic attack options, which lead to many combos that you can do right off the bat. The control is also a lot more fluid, although I found it pretty difficult to consistently do some of the combos that involved holding a direction midway through my normal attack combo.
Playing the Japanese version of this is a real peach, though.
- Need to do the VPN pomegranate
- Need to close the VPN at the right moment if you don't want the download to be really slow
- Installer closes if your Internet hiccups
- For some reason the site never lets me log in the first time; it forces me to enter a CAPTCHA in Hiragana. I know enough Hiragana to get half the letters and where to look at a reference chart for the others; good luck if you don't know any.
- I couldn't get the game to run without the VPN open; the game closed as soon as it loaded due to what is presumably a lack of a connection. This wasn't too bad though, nothing was slow except picking up items, which is automatic anyway (just run over them and watch them fly to you a few seconds later)
I finally got a chance to give this game a spin. The installer was still stupid and would close if my internet stopped working, but at least I was downloading at ~400 kb/s without the proxy open and everything worked out. I still have a lot of complaints about the process of getting the game to run at all, but I'll get to that later. If the game comes out in English, I assume it won't be nearly as difficult.
The actual game is actually quite a lot of fun. There are a ton of parallels to Dungeon Fighter, so I'll have to compare the two. You have a small town that acts as a central hub with quest givers and shopkeepers, and then you have a large number of dungeons to explore that get progressively harder. The area leading to the dungeons is a little map where you can assemble a party of up to 4 people. The gameplay is also in the 2d side scrolling beat-em-up format. The only real difference that I saw here was that the characters in Elsword look a lot better than the ones in DFO.
I only got to level 5 and didn't understand enough Japanese to bother raising any skills, but so far the game looks better than Dungeon Fighter overall. Instead of a flat field like that of TMNT, Punisher, and all those other arcade games, it's a platformer. You have some terrain to work with to approach enemies from different ways. I prefer this style; you may not. The innate arsenal of skills is also much larger. You start with two skills as in DFO, but DFO has a very limited number of character actions that are not skill-based. In DFO, you have normal attack combo, dash attack, and an aerial attack that remains the same no matter if you're jumping forward or straight up. In ES, you have two basic attack options, which lead to many combos that you can do right off the bat. The control is also a lot more fluid, although I found it pretty difficult to consistently do some of the combos that involved holding a direction midway through my normal attack combo.
Playing the Japanese version of this is a real peach, though.
- Need to do the VPN pomegranate
- Need to close the VPN at the right moment if you don't want the download to be really slow
- Installer closes if your Internet hiccups
- For some reason the site never lets me log in the first time; it forces me to enter a CAPTCHA in Hiragana. I know enough Hiragana to get half the letters and where to look at a reference chart for the others; good luck if you don't know any.
- I couldn't get the game to run without the VPN open; the game closed as soon as it loaded due to what is presumably a lack of a connection. This wasn't too bad though, nothing was slow except picking up items, which is automatic anyway (just run over them and watch them fly to you a few seconds later)