Aura Kingdom, Elsword, Mabinogi, Dungeon Fighter, Flyff, S4 League (was not a MMORPG but if you know, you know), Blade and Soul, Eden Eternal, Fiesta Online, Dragon Nest, and Nostale. These were the anime games that I was born and raised on. And by born and raised I mean the only games that my shitty laptop was able to run. I say shitty, but it was pretty decent for the times. At the end of the day laptops just aren’t meant to be gaming capable powerhouses unless you spend big boy bucks, which isn’t something most parents are willing to do and rightfully so when talking about younger kids. That meant the only games I could really play and enjoy were ones that were ridiculously optimized so as to reach the biggest audience possible and also free. Thus entered the anime MMORPG genre. I had to play most of these games on low potato settings (except Nostale which actually is a potato of a game), but that didn’t stop me from having a blast as a kid. So what if I could barely tell what my character looked like, I knew he was a badass assassin who for some reason had healing powers? Hey I didn’t balance the game.
So why do I talk about these games like they’re all dead and gone when plenty are still available to play? Well because I’ve gone and made the mistake of growing up. And when you fuck up and make that mistake, you suddenly find yourself short on the whole “time” thing. Grinding and MMOs go hand and hand, but for some reason it felt like anime MMOs took this concept and expanded it way too much. Some of these games would hit you with a “do this boss 10 times over” quest or the classic “kill monsters and collect 30 steak that each have a 1% chance of dropping, this is good gameplay right(?) quest”. And then you had to PRAY to god that doing the quest would actually level you up. Another big problem is I wanted to play a lot of MMOs in a solo fashion (I know, counterintuitive), however many penalized players for wanting to go their own way and made it virtually impossible to level up past a certain point without doing guild shit all the time *cough* Nostale *cough*.
Minimal requirements AND free??? Hell yeah! Sign me up!
Oh fuck... it looks like this?
So did I sit down and write this article to complain for three paragraphs? No, only two. You see while you lose time when you grow up, you do in fact gain knowledge. Knowledge of these naughty little inventions called… private servers. What are private servers like? Each one varies, but the ones I’ve tried appear to share a common theme: let’s crank up the experience rate by 1000% and see what happens. From a balance perspective, it’s a nightmare. Most private servers fail to build solid PVP and sometimes even PVE because upping the experience rate and money rate lead to disastrous consequences on the economy. On the bright side it often doesn’t matter. Most players on private servers are older players with little time anyway who just want to see what it’s like to get to play as the maxed out super badass classes like dimensional mage, shadowstep assassin, or godlike warrior instead of a basic ass Lv. 21 Archer without having to sink a ton of money or time into the game. Nobody is really there for a super rich and complex competitive experience so it becomes a bit of a non-issue. If you used to play an old MMO and had to quit because you got busy or lost interest in the grind, I do recommend checking out the private server scene sometime just to see if any “interesting” servers have popped up. I know I had a blast playing different classes on an Elsword private server last year.
YESSSS, I could finally PLAY as these classes instead of just LOOK at them!
There’s some more bones to pick here, like how anime MMOs and even other genres of anime games love to milk their audience’s time and wallets dry instead of providing an engaging and fun game, but that’s a discussion for another day. For now, I want to hear if you guys ever got into anime MMOs back when they were really big in the 2000’s and early 2010’s. I say “really big”, perhaps they were only really big for poor kids with non-gaming PCs. Regardless, let me know your thoughts. Have you played anime MMOs in the past? Are you playing anime MMOs these days? Have you checked out any private servers for games you used to play? Log in to the server, set your graphics settings to “Lowest”, and leave a comment below!
