Recent reviews by RidireGeas

I have been playing this game since it's CBT (Closed Beta Test) back in 2011, and watching it evolve over the years has been an interesting experience. To make things simple, I will list 5 things that the game does really well, and 5 things that it does really poorly.

★ Positives!

1. Incredibly fun and intuitive combat system that is mechanically nuanced and fun to master. The game sets itself apart from other MMORPGs by focusing on the player's mechanical skill more so than it's competition, especially during the endgame dungeons which further explores the platforming aspects of the game as well as it's fighting genre traits. This also means that the PvP aspect of the game is a very fun and rewarding experience to play in, at least most of the time. It also helps that the game IMMEDIATELY throws new players into it's dungeons without wasting any time on needless fluff like story exposition.

If you're a fan of games like Super Smash Bros. and/or the Tales Of series, then you will definitely love how this game plays.

2. Very fun and fascinating character designs and backstories. For an anime game, they are surprisingly well written and are very fun to read and watch unfold. While there are a ton of tropes and bland writing for the first few hours during the initial grind to level 99, the midgame and endgame quests are genuinely fun to read and the characters actually feel pretty cool. It helps that most of the cast are fully grown adults by the midgame quests so they drop the cheesy shōnen tropes almost entirely.

3. Despite lacking a character creator and that every playable character is their own person within the game's lore, Elsword features significantly detailed customization tools to truly make yourself stand out from other players.

4. Incredibly fun and welcoming player base that is endearing to be a part of. The developers also interact with the players very consistently, even after a decade of being active. The constant events and player interaction makes the experience very welcoming to newcomers and inspires a strong sense of community that a lot of other MMORPGs tend to lack.

5. A pretty charming art style that is reminiscent of games like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Tales of Symphonia. While they do obviously show their age in comparison to modern day anime games, the game still remains rather pretty and nice to look at despite that. Also, a lot of music in the game is just...incredible. If you want to hear some examples of this, just search up "Underground Waterway Elsword OST", "Dragon Nest Elsword OST", "Altera Plains", and "Ponggo's Hideout".

★ Negatives...

1. The game features Gacha mechanics, specifically in the form of costumes. Costumes in this game offer slight stat bonuses, on top of being able to be socketed with stats just like regular armor. While the game constantly gives away free costumes during it's many events, the indisputably best costumes are the Ice Burners costumes, which have significantly better stats and bonuses compared to normal ones. The only way to obtain these are to buy Ice Burners with real world money which are priced at $1 per Ice Burner, and opening one gives a SMALL CHANCE to obtain even one of the pieces of these costumes, which combines an obnoxious amount of RNG alongside slight Pay-To-Win mechanics. While these stats don't matter too much in the endgame, where 75% of your stats you actually have to work for and grind, that extra boost can still be really frustrating to a new player trying to survive in PvE & PvP.

2. The English dubbing in the game is rather odd. While the voice acting for the main cast are actually of a really high quality, the dubbing for the NPCs are cringe inducing at best. Also, the voice acting in the story cutscenes and dungeons are cut off frequently due to the cutscenes being paced around the length of the spoken sentences in the original Korean dub, which results in characters constantly talking over one another or even interrupting their own sentences with English voices on. On top of that, most of the "new" content added after 2018 (Yes, you've read that right. 2018.) hasn't even been dubbed at all, resulting in the game going back and forth between English and Korean voice lines which becomes obnoxious very quickly. Audio mixing is also an issue with the English dub, with some characters being incredibly quiet and hard to hear even at max volume, with the biggest examples of this being the playable characters Add and Lu & Ciel.

3. The game gatekeeps a lot of it's endgame content behind power walls. The only way to get around these walls are to grind for weeks, sometimes even MONTHS at a time doing daily quests to slowly but surely obtain enough materials just to craft the armor and weapon enhancements needed to prove your strength. The enhancement system is also absolute garbage as the odds of a successful enhancement are minuscule at best once you get above the +8 range, and the endgame content expects you to be running AT LEAST some +10 gear. Since it's possible for your enhancement attempts to not only downgrade a weapon instead of upgrading, but can also COMPLETELY RESET IT BACK TO +0 or EVEN BREAK IT, the enhancement system winds up becoming an extremely miserable experience to tolerate. The game demands a lot of your time just for a little in return, which can be very insulting to players who simply wants to enjoy what the game has to offer. This has resulted in a lot of the player base getting burned out and is the main reason why new players tend to run away the instant they get to the midgame.

The enhancement system can only be overcome with enhancement materials that can protect your equipment from resetting or breaking.....but they are (mostly) only obtained through the cash shop for real world money. Needless to say, THIS is why 99% of the community calls the game Pay-To-Win. THIS is the reason why the game has that reputation.

4. The game is very poorly optimized. I can give it a slight pass since the game was released in 2007, but don't go into this game expecting it to run well due to it having a cel shaded art style. The poor optimization and the amount of particle effects that are constantly flying around in dungeons can make even higher end PCs cough up blood struggling to run the game above 60 fps.

5. About half of the endgame content uses licensed music, which can be read into more detail on the fan made wiki “ElWiki”. While there's nothing inherently wrong with using licensed music, it does make the game lack a bit of it's own identity using music that other media could be using as well. But at least the music tracks themselves are still really well done and nice to listen to. The game continues to frequently gets it's own original compositions, but it's still rather bizarre for them to take this route with the game's OST.

You can see for yourself just how much licensed music there is by going into the "Elsword/data/music" directory and seeing how many music files have the "li_" prefix at the beginning of the filename. As of posting this review, 226 out of the 515 music files in the game are licensed music, which is nearly half!

★ Final Score.

Overall, I'd still recommend the game if you're a fan of action & fighting games and/or MMORPGs. Despite its flaws I'd still give it at least an 7 out of 10, as it does more good than bad despite being a F2P game. I still have a lot of fun playing it to this day.

While I haven't played this game in quite a while, I still have a soft spot for it due to having well over a few thousand hours of playtime when I was younger.

Ronan is definitely one of the coolest characters I have ever played.

While it would be easy to rip on this game like everyone else, I'm instead going to put some actual effort into this review and judge the game as a whole. To keep this simple, I'm going to list 4 things that the game does well, and 4 things that it does poorly.

★ Positives!

1. The game is actually fun to play! The original Overwatch was plagued with unfun mechanics such as an egregious amounts of stuns, awful maps with tons of chokepoints, and sluggish movement. Meanwhile, Overwatch 2 actually overhauls the gameplay entirely by removing the vast majority of the stuns, revamping old maps to have less chokepoints while making sure the new maps have little to none of them, and actually giving a large portion of it's heroes (Both old and new) faster and more involved gameplay and movement options such as Doomfist and his...everything, Pharah's jet dash, and Mercy's guardian angel jumps.

2. Above average customization options! Alongside Skins, you could also choose multiple different Sprays, Voice Lines, Weapon Skins, various colors of previously mentioned Weapon Skins (As of writing this, there's only Gold & Jade to choose from, but I assume there will be more?), Name Cards, and Emotes among a bunch of other things. With that said, this game's customization leaves a LOT to be desired...which I will bring up in the negatives later on.

3. Incredible art style & animation! Unlike most other shooters which usually aim for a realistic art style, Overwatch 2's art style is very reminiscent of Disney films, which makes it look & play a lot like a animated movie. As a result, I can see this game aging extremely well as time passes, similar to games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

4. Diverse cast of characters! It's really cool how the majority of the heroes are from various places of the world, with most of their voice actors even being bilingual and having multiple voice lines in different languages! It's pretty cool!

★ Negatives...

1. Broken promises. We all know this by now, but promising a story mode for over 3 years just to cancel it left a very deep burn. They couldn't even give us a scrap of what was hyped up in the trailer by having skill trees or custom abilities in the few story missions that we did get... On top of this, hyping up various things that wound up being disappointing in the end was pretty lame such as Mythic Skins being marketed as "Full Customization!" despite most of them only having 3 or 4 premade color options (Which was conveniently kept secret until their release...).

Also, locking heroes behind battle passes at the beginning of the game's life was obscenely stupid. I know that problem has been rectified now, but the fact that it ever happened to begin with is straight up VILE. They knew that doing that would completely go against how the game was designed, and it went against what Jeff Kaplan said in 2016 about not wanting to sell heroes.

2. To continue off from the earlier points, the customization in this game is only about above average. To repeat myself again, Mythic Skins only having a few color options makes me question why they're even called a tier above legendary to begin with as there are multiple legendary skins in the game that already have 3 or 4 color options such as Reinhardt's "Blackhardt" skin having a red, white, and pink version of it. Hell, most of the legendary skins AT THE ORIGINAL GAME'S LAUNCH IN 2016 even had custom voice lines and changed effects such as Hanzo's "Lone Wolf" skin!

On top of this, a lot of customizations feel either half baked, or a whole lot of...nothing. Let's be real here, nobody cares about souvenirs, weapon charms, and the voice lines. The weapon variant options are still minimal (Only Gold & Jade? After 8 years?!), the worth of various highlight intros vary wildly depending on the heroes who have them (When was the last time you saw an Ana POTG?), and the name card system feels only adequate at best. I wish they took a page from Splatoon 3's implementation of this and added stuff like badges to put on your name card to further customize it, and player titles that AREN'T premade and instead had a Adjective + a Noun that you can select from. Not only would that be very easy to implement, it would practically be free money and can make battle passes not feel bloated with a ton of garbage!

It bothers me that a game released in 2016 would have less customization options than Team Fortress 2, which was released in 2007, had it's first cosmetics released in 2009, and introduced a very large variety of colors to further customize those cosmetics in 2010 with the paint cans!

3. Questionable balancing. The game is surprisingly extremely well balanced for the most part, but it still falls into the Blizzard pitfall of making 1 or 2 heroes incredibly unbalanced for the season (Which, at the time of writing this, is currently D.Va and Sombra). While it's admittedly pretty funny how literally every Blizzard game is balanced in this way, it's still pretty annoying wondering which hero(es) are going to massacre every match they're in every season.

4. Overpriced cosmetics. I understand that a Free-to-play game has to make a profit somehow, but offering skins for around $15 to $20 a pop is just...gross.

★ Final Score.

With all of that said, I will still give this game a solid 8 out of 10. While this game has a LOT to improve upon, I can't deny that it does more good than bad and is a lot more polished than most of it's competition.

This is my favorite war-themed hat simulator.