R.O.S.E. Online

In the in-between time after I played Final Fantasy XI and before I played World of Warcraft I got a whiff of another MMORPG that was under development. And since those wacky game developers needs lots of help in the form of real-world testing and feedback, that meant that this game was going to be free to obtain and free to play.

And free is one of my favorite prices.

Now, I don’t really know what the story in the game is supposed to be. Something about some goddess creating some planets, and then some other god wresting control of one of the planets for his own nefarious ends. So she sends out adventurers to the various planets in the solar system to… um… stop him somehow?

After I downloaded the game and went through the character creation process, I couldn’t help but notice how cutesy the game was. Just about all the player characters look like they’re prepubescent kids, and the tutorial island is full of ‘jelly bean’ monsters for you to cut your fighting teeth on.

This is all well and good, but not exactly my cup of a delicious warm beverage.

But I slogged along anyway. I took my training weaponry and my training armor and attacked the training enemies with gusto. But I was mystified by the controls, I had a hard time targeting anything. I was stymied by the dialog boxes, text broke in weird places and didn’t have impeccable grammar.

So, after I finally killed a bagful of jelly beans and made it off the training island, I made it into the world proper, and decided to log out for the day.

Then I never felt compelled to play the game again. It just didn’t do anything for me. The whole thing was kind of ‘blah’ to me. I think the hype around the game was pretty much due to the fact that it was a freebie, and not because it was any kind of ground-breaking thing.

But, I hear that it’s going to be free to play again real soon now, so that’s something going for it, I guess. Even though I don’t think I’m going to take advantage of it.

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