A look at Anime MMORPGs

Since most free to play MMORPGs are developed in the East, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of them are Anime MMORPGs – visually speaking. In fact, most free to play games available here in the West through publishers like Aeria Games, OG Planet and Alaplaya are all developed in places like South Korea, China and Japan – where Anime is popular. To give you guys a better idea of where these MMOs come from, the most well known Korean MMORPG developers are Nexon (Think Vindictus and MapleStory) and Webzen (Think Soul of the Ultimate Nation). The most well known Chinese MMORPG developers are probably Perfect World Entertainment (Think Jade Dynasty and Battle of the Immortals) and ChangYou (Think Zentia and Dragon Oath). The biggest Japanese MMO developer is probably Square Enix with Final Fantasy 11 and maybe CyberStep with Getamped 2 and CosmicBreak.

Anyway, with so many anime inspired MMORPGs available from the super cute Luna Online to the more serious yet bright themed Cloud Nine, MMO gamers have a lot of choices available to them. In my opinion though the best anime MMORPG is probably MapleStory from Nexon. After that, other great anime inspired MMORPGs are Mabinogi, Fiesta Online, Secret of the Solstice and Grand Chase. I think more than half of the free to play MMORPGs out there are anime inspired. The first free to play MMORPG which I’ve played is Ragnarok Online from Gravity. Back when I played it, it wasn’t free to play, but I played on a private server. The game is free to play now, at least one one official server – Valkyrie. I’m actually not a fan of Japanese anime television / manga, but I still enjoy playing anime inspired games. I really love the art style – more so than realistic games actually. I mean, realistic MMORPGs like Karos Online and Sword 2 are good, but I just prefer the look and feel of anime inspired games more.

There are a lot of other anime MMORPGs which I didn’t mention here. If you know of any awesome ones that I didn’t bring up, leave their names in the comments below! I’m actually currently playing Grand Fantasia from Aeria Games and it’s a lot of fun. It’s definitely one of my favorites!

Grand Chase Needs More Variety

Grand Chase isn’t a bad MMO. It just needs a bit more variety. The game is currently being published by Ntreev, and is basically a cooperative dungeon crawler. Players work together with each other to complete stages and beat bosses. It actually plays more like a cooperative Mario game with RPG elements than anything else. The only thing Grand Chase is really lacking, in my opinion, is variety. As is there are a fixed amount of stages in the game. Once you clear them all, there’s little left to do. It’s almost like playing Lunia after beating all of the episodes. The most obvious remedy to this is for Ntreev to release more content, but that can take a while. I feel that next time Ntreev adds more content and levels to the game, they should make it much more difficult. Players shouldn’t be able to finish all of the late game stages with such ease. Players should need groups of top tier players and excellent cooperation to beat levels. This is an easy way to extend the game.

Another way for Ntreev to add more variety to the game would be by adding additional characters. As is the game has a good selection of classes, as they offer 8 playable characters, but more would always be better. Realistically speaking though, Ntreev could add more job advancements to the game. As is characters progress in an extremely linear way. Players should have more control over their character’s growth through more variety in terms of total skills and job advancement choices. Job advancements should branch out into 3 possibilities at each advancement, maybe try something like Ragnarok Online, rather than the current system where players advance in an incredibly linear way.

I’m not trying to say that Grand Chase is a bad game, because it’s not. Ntreev makes some of the better free to play MMOs out there in my opinion, as both Pangya and Trickster Online are great titles. I’m just suggesting that the game would benefit from more variety. Games like Lost Saga and League of Legends are amazing because they have so many different characters, so more variety is almost always better.