Offi­cial Site

I once thought that after the love affair with Mabinogi, I am unable to enjoy any more of the old hack’n’slash “click­ing games”.  Gladly and once again, I proved myself wrong~  Grand Fan­ta­sia, licensed under aeira games, has recently under­gone open beta and the intro­duc­tion of a new game server.  I was look­ing for a brighter piece of fan­tasy as a coun­ter­ing mea­sure­ment for inhaled too much of Dragon Age’s dark medieval atmos­phere.  Hav­ing fully known the lim­i­ta­tion of the genre of Grand Fan­ta­sia, I began a jour­ney that, prob­a­bly isn’t grand, but cer­tainly can be con­sid­ered fantastic.

Grand Fan­ta­sia, or pre­vi­ously known Dreamy Jour­ney Online (name used in Tai­wan ver­sion of the game) is devel­oped by Easy­Fun Enter­tain­ment, a Tai­wanese com­pany who prob­a­bly is bet­ter known as the devel­oper of Holy Beast Online: another MMORPG cur­rently run in the US under the license of Cyber­Step.  Play­ers who have first hand expe­ri­ence from Holy Beast Online can eas­ily tell the same friendly art style in Grand Fan­ta­sia.  By inspec­tion, I feel GF is *prob­a­bly* more about game play and less about chibi char­ac­ters com­par­ing to HB… Ok, get­ting off topic at the sec­ond para­graph; def­i­nitely not a good sign.

Although the game has an offi­cial trailer, but sadly the video does a poor job on *intro­duc­ing* the game to play­ers who haven’t played the game yet.  There­fore, the fol­low­ing game­play video will be doing the job.

First and fore­most, allow me to repeat myself: this game is a hack’n’slash game; therefore, excessive expec­ta­tion for GF to be inno­v­a­tive is not needed.  This, how­ever, doesn’t mean that the game is another hack­neyed attempt of putting some 3D, anime-style graph­ics together in aim for your cash.  Grand Fan­ta­sia pos­sesses a few sig­na­ture sys­tems that you may be fond of.

Classes — Being only a mid-level (lv35 Cleric) player in the game prob­a­bly doesn’t qual­ify myself for pass­ing down a gen­eral state­ment… but due to my obser­va­tion, there is a very sat­is­fi­able degree of class bal­ance in this game.  Class diver­gence of GF is very clas­si­cal and sim­ple: melee DD and tank, assas­sin and ranger, necro­mancer and wiz­ard, healer and… jack of all trades: sage.  Each class listed above are the final spe­cial­iza­tion after lv30.

Solo PvE — As much as I wanted to avoid solo­ing, it is only nat­ural to start the game off with a fair amount of time with­out other party mem­bers.  There­fore, it did not trou­ble me a bit as I went along the road to become a healer, since even now my char­ac­ter can still grind quest mon­ster in open field with­out crip­ple due to my spe­cial­iza­tion.  Indeed, the abil­ity for all classes to solo mobs casu­ally is a fac­tor on keep­ing the pop­u­la­tion diverse.  How­ever, every­thing has its trade-offs.  Allow­ing dif­fer­ent classes to do things in sim­i­lar meth­ods risks the very need of sep­a­rat­ing char­ac­ters into dif­fer­ent classes.  It is a delight to see GF did well on this aspect of game­play: each class does fight dif­fer­ently, and more dif­fer­ence is achieved by fur­ther spe­cial­iza­tion.  In fact, the only neg­a­tive com­ments I have in mind on GF’s Solo PvE is about the genre: the game boils down to click­ing mouse and press­ing key­boards.  It can become quite mechan­i­cal (hence the term “grind­ing”) when one decides to pur­sue a repeat­able quest.

Quests — The game’s quests are very easy to under­stand: kill n amount of mon­ster X, col­lect n amount of item Y, or go to loca­tion A to talk to NPC Z (usu­ally in com­bi­na­tions).  Yes, it does sounds bor­ing, and most of the time, it is bor­ing.  Such bore­dom vic­tim­ized some­thing else that might have been inter­est­ing: the story behind each quest.  Of course, we aren’t talk­ing about the same of ded­i­ca­tion, in writ­ing, as one may find in most sin­gle player RPGs, but still I found them to be min­i­mally amus­ing.  In fact, I do believe that the trans­la­tors did a good job on proof-reading the quest logs than any­where else of this game.  Sadly, most peo­ple tl;dr the quest logs and only able to see the quest objec­tive and reward.  And for those who are won­der­ing about a main plot over­ar­ch­ing the entire course of lev­el­ing… the answer is yes, there is a main quest chain, the objec­tive is to reach cer­tain level, the reward is usu­ally some equip­ment appro­pri­ate for that level, and that is it.

Group PvE — Like almost all other MMO’s, party-play must exist.  The first form of orga­nized group PvE a new player will expe­ri­ence is the lv20 dun­geon: Prairie Cave.  Dun­geons are instanced to par­ties, and mobs spawn only once per instance.  Sev­eral bosses are in the dun­geon and they are often being slaugh­tered for dun­geon quest rewards and their drops.  There should be no ques­tion on the fact that dun­geon­ing pro­vides more fun than solo­ing out in the fields… because for the bosses, a party can only emerge vic­to­ri­ous by its mem­bers know their role and carry out their jobs dur­ing bat­tle: It’s a game of endurance and con­cen­tra­tion rather than reflex.  I heard big­ger boss raids will be pos­si­ble in the future… hope­fully it will hap­pen :p 

PvP - Cur­rently, there are two modes of PvP: 1vs1 duels and Sprite Arena group pvp.  1vs1 is like in any other games: one side becomes a win­ner when the other side is out of HP.  In Grand Fan­ta­sia, how­ever, duels have a hard coded time limit and if the time limit is reached, the player with more hp wins (thus not dis­crim­i­nat­ing against heal­ers in such duels).  No score is recorded for such per­sonal duels and also, no penalty or reward is imposed to either los­ing or win­ning side (other than the los­ing side will have his or hear hp and mp bar emp­tied).  Since play­ers can eas­ily con­duct duels and have no con­se­quences when los­ing, one can just grab a friend or stranger and start duel­ing while wait­ing for things like, a dun­geon party get­ting assem­bled.  Real actions come with the Sprite Arena.  One can sign up for the arena when char­ac­ter is above lv30.  Arena match starts when 30 peo­ple are signed up for it, and once it starts, play­ers are divided into two evenly dis­trib­uted (level range and number-wise) and oth­er­wise ran­dom teams.  The match is some sort of cap­ture the flag… win­ning requires plan­ning and form­ing tac­tics.  Scores from arena bat­tles are archived and is ben­e­fi­cial.  So, Sprite Arena is one of the rea­son why it is said that the game truly begins when you are lv30+

Sprite sys­tem — I per­son­ally think the Arena and Sprites are the most enjoy­able part of this game.  These lit­tle emo crea­tures are vital to all play­ers because they craft equips, col­lect mate­ri­als, and recy­cle use­less stuff… don’t men­tion that if you have one of them out dur­ing bat­tle, the sprite will bless you with buffs.  Indeed, they are a cutesy to be adored, but it is even more prac­ti­cal to fid­dle with them dur­ing grind­ing or semi-afk.  Of course, to effi­ciently use sprites, one must train the sprites for dif­fer­ent tasks.  In short, you prob­a­bly can fig­ure out end­less com­bi­na­tions of assign­ing tasks to sprites to max­i­mize their out­puts with­out putting them into a bad mood (bad mood -> decreased productivity). 

How­ever you may adore sprites, they will frus­trate you when they fail your crafts after spend­ing a lot of time gath­er­ing or per­haps buy­ing.  There is no indi­ca­tion of per­cent­age suc­cess for craft­ing in this game… gen­eral rule of thumb is: higher the require­ment level of an equip­ment, the more likely it will fail.  I’ve attempted to find some kind of pat­tern from their behav­iors… but I guess the only sure thing to say is… let the crea­tures rest when their sta­mina bar is below 50%.

Econ­omy — GF’s main mar­ket is the mar­ket board where play­ers can list items on sale or buy from oth­ers and there is no player ven­dor shops or auc­tion house func­tions in game.  Because you can sort items of by price, it is some­what assured that you can always find cheap­est goods pos­si­ble.  Equip­ments, in this game, can­not be traded upon wear­ing <- this is a major set­back to the econ­omy because this pol­icy greatly lim­ited how many times an aver­age item can be exchanged.  But I guess this can be a good thing to play­ers intended to become crafters to make money by sell­ing equip­ments made by their sprites… though there is no need to buy one’s own equip­ment from mar­ket because all play­ers can have three sprites… and that is enough to make all one char­ac­ter needs.  So, in the end, GF’s mar­ket can be con­sid­ered a pure model of sup­ply and demand; it’s a good thing isn’t it?

Pre­mium — Yes.  I under­stand the impor­tance of the bal­ance between pre­mium items/services and the real cash needed.  Grand Fan­ta­sia runs strictly on an Item Mall, and there is no “item” that quan­ti­fies peri­od­i­cal ser­vice.  Some pop­u­lar items are: 10 extra bag space ($5), fully repair an equip­ment ($6), sprite extra action cook­ies x50 ($5), and raise sprite mood two lev­els ($0.5).  Some other items include gam­bling mys­tery backs, tem­po­rary boost­ers and stuff that can be found on the game’s offi­cial web­site.  Sub­jec­tively speak­ing, I don’t feel the items being sold are rip­ping off play­ers who don’t pay.  Though most of the stuff in item mall are con­sum­ables, things like inven­tory expan­sion are per­ma­nent and should be worth pay­ing for.  Sell­ing for­ti­fi­ca­tion (weapon upgrade) and alchemy chance booster is giv­ing a ques­tion­able amount of advan­tage to play­ers with a lot of RL cash, but in my opin­ion, it’s not an issue since the boost isn’t very effective.

I think that’s all the inter­est­ing aspects of the game, for now, at least.  Again, I am only lv35 in game and we all know that online gam­ing is a chang­ing experience. Now sum­ming all these up.  Grand Fan­ta­sia is the MMORPG of the old, yet non-conventional fea­tures such as sprite sys­tem, is wor­thy of a closer inspec­tion by your per­sonal pref­er­ence :)

PS: for­got to men­tion, I’m on server Siropas ^^