ADVENTURE QUEST

An RPG written in Flash, which plays in the browser window rather than requiring you to download and run a client. Free to play, but for US $20 you can become a "Guardian", which allows you to unlimited access to the server and various other things that serve no readily apparent purpose.

You choose a male or female head, which is then stuck onto an androgynous body. Character creation is now over! You wind up in a town with some default equipment, and then proceed to battle monsters by pressing the large, red "BATTLE MONSTERS" button. Eventually, you'll end up with enough money to buy new equipment, which has all the usual elemental strengths / weaknesses, or to pay a trainer to increase you stats. That's it.

It's possible to change classes by visiting a guild master, and your class level is based on how many successful missions you accomplish for them. These missions involve fighting random monsters until you can "roll" a high enough number on a virtual dice, then fighting a much stronger monster, with no variation ever. For some ungodly reason, I did this ten times, which was enough to max out my Vampire level, giving me the ability to do a combo attack 35% of the time. WOW! This took somewhere in the vicinity of three hours.

You can't interact with other players, and, while you can travel to other towns, all they offer are more random encounters with a different backdrop. All the dungeons are just a series of fights with the occasional treasure chest, except for one dungeon which actually has a map (!!!). I got to the second floor and thought "You know what? Fuck this".

It's not confusing, and because it runs in the browser window, you could... play it in a library, I guess. The graphics are nice, even if a lot of the monsters look really stupid.

It's really, really boring. Like a Greatest Hits album from Bizarro World, it has all the boring RPG bits - tedious combat, over-reliance on power leveling, repetitive palette-swapped monsters - but none of things that make them tolerable. There's no goal aside from becoming stronger, but since the game is a totally solitary experience, there's nobody around to notice or fight against. I mean, you can't interact with the other people playing it at all, so what's the point of it even being online in the first place?

The online aspect ends up making the whole thing more trouble than it's worth, because the server can only support 6000ish players at once, meaning that you have to camp on the login page until a spot opens up. This can take hours, which is far more time than anyone should devote to something like Adventure Quest. The major lure of paying for a special "Guardian" account is that you can always log in, but for $20 you could just buy a better game. Like Pit Fighter. Aside from always being able to log in, you occasionally run across a situation like this, but who in their right mind cares if their directionless character is now capable of killing dragons with slightly less difficulty? Especially since I played the game for like five hours and didn't see any dragons.



It doesn't work as an online game because there's no way to interact with the other players. It doesn't work as a single player game because it's repetitive as fuck and there's no goal to work toward. It doesn't work as an amusing diversion because you have to wait in line for hours to get a shot at it, by which time you will have thought of something better to do. Don't bother.

One and a half Notorious BIGs out of five.