Arcane Saga lvls 1-45
Be warned, this review is long, there is an intro, the bad and then the good -
I have been super excited for quite sometime ( years !! ) that a company was remaking Prius Anima and bringing it back to the mmo world.
It finally came to OBT and I played it til 44 ( where I am now ) and here is my honest opinion.
The negatives:
If you played Prius you will find this game disjointed and lacking. You will have to get over your old memories of the game if you choose to play it. Anima is nowhere near as interactive. You get no gigas, no atrium, none of the wacky story.
The job skills. When you create a character it is a little unclear so when you star the game you are dumped into your start zone with random skills which not be what you wanted to play. This is your “solo” job for questing. At around 30 you finally get the quest to get your second job or your “party” job for dungeons. The problem is, you only get limited amount of times to switch between both a day ( 4 ) and after that you need to pay for a CS item to switch more.
But four times must be enough you say? Not if you’re a healer because in healer role you have NO dps spells. That’s right, none, zero, zilch, nada. In healer role you cannot quest and level yourself. It’s a shocker when you realize that.
The positives:
The game is still the beautiful Prius world with some slight alterations.
You are still able to tame mounts ( which are in the dungeons ) and you can still customize the heck out of anima. Right now the CS offerings seem totally random but there’s already bits and pieces to buy out of this list here from the Prius JP wiki so I’m only expecting more awesomeness to come; http://tinyurl.com/kto7tsn
Crafting is pretty excellent. It’s definitely there to help allowing you to make sets that you can apply to your solo, party or even pvp ( much later in the game ) role. You can made food and potions to your hearts content there’s none of the having to depend on others because you can only have X amount of professions.
The game isn’t terribly hard. How is this a good thing? Well I like the fact that you can jump right in and bring along a noob and not suffer too terribly much. I was able to do a dungeon with some really challenged people and while the last boss was tough, it definitely wasn’t insurmountable.
So honestly my opinion of Arcane Saga is that I’m happy it’s here but it’s got a long way to go in attracting players. The f2p/b2p competition is too fierce and it seems like some of the decisions they made go against attracting and keeping players.
Once they get a story, fix the way jobs work and give us back what made Prius special ( which they said they are working on in a future update ), I think this game will be around for a long time to come :)
