First Impression: Elsword

I’ve seen advertisements all over for this, so I decided to give it a shot. For those of you who are new, a First Impression is a review that’s done off the cuff based on the information gained in playing it for one day. Elsword is a side scrolling, semi-3D beat-em-up. There are four characters to choose from, each having their own methods of attack. For this I choose the Magic character, Aisha.

At first, I thought I would have a good time. The buttons were a standard attack, a special attack and four skills that could be set to hotkeys. As you level up you can allocate skill points to strengthen or acquire new Passive or Active abilities for your character to give them new tricks.

What MMO is complete without quests? I forgot to mention this had some RPG elements, but just like any game with grinding, your “quests” consist of repeating the same dungeon, just on a higher difficulty setting and it gets OLD REALLY QUICK! It’s just go in and go out (At least in Rusty Hearts your quests might have you repeating a dungeon but they added a twist like “finish without getting hit over 20 times or beat it with a certain rank”).

So I thought I’d take the magical girl into PvP, turns out she’s CRAP in the arena! Elsword (the character the game is named after) is supposed to be weak to magic (see: Informed Flaw) but I noticed no significant advantage to unleashing my magic on him but Elsword could tear me up nicely (then again he IS the main character, so he has to be superior to my character by default, right?). My next complaint is the mana system in the game. Apparently, your maximum Mana doesn’t increase as you level up (Aisha is supposed to be a genius mage) and you don’t start off dungeons or in PvP with max Mana either, not to mention the mana gets eaten up so fast when you use a spell, along with cool down time on the spells. WHAT FUCKING SENSE DOES IT MAKE TO HAVE A DAMN COOLDOWN ON THE FUCKING MOVES IF THE GODDAMN MANA GAUGE DOESN’T GET OVER 300 MP AND MOSTLY GETS CHEWED UP AFTER USING A SINGLE FUCKING SPELL!? Needless to say I certainly wasn’t feeling like a magic user at all, just some little girl beating people down with a stick. This would be a non-issue if only the spells hit harder in PvP (seriously, there seems to be no damage advantage to hitting anyone (I might as well spam the standard attacks) with them in PvP (outside of disruption to bail my team out if need be), ESECIALLY ELSWORD!

The boxes I find now and then are also asinine. They’re locked and you need to buy something to break the lock. Let me get this straight…the characters are too retarded to bust open the lock, or melt it off (Aisha, the Genius Magician MY ASS! NOTHING IN THE DISCRIPTION SAYS ITS HEXED AGAINST ALTERNATE METHODS OF OPENING)?

The next thing that led me to this tirade was the controls. Yeah, they were easy to grasp, but I got some seriously aching hands playing it for just an hour. If only this game had a setting for controller use. I took some serious points off for that. Speaking of controls, the game lacks a block button. You are limited to just sticking and moving and God help you if the opponents moves have higher priority than yours (in my case I could barely get in a hit without getting seriously pummeled). Part of the learning curb, so…yeah. To support how much Aisha sucks (as of this post) THERE ISN’T A SINGLE AISHA USER IN THE PVP TOP 10! The Elf is up there at the top, but nothing can beat Elves, right? Not even Elsword.

The final nails in the coffin were the cash shop and the stamina system. The costumes are asinine in price. Let’s say you find an awesome bundle to dress your character up in. The ones I’ve seen cost $13. It gets worse. The clothing goes away after a set period of time. They do have an option for you to keep it I believe (some of the text comes off weird in the Item Mall) all for DOUBLE THE PRICE! The stamina system keeps you from playing as long as you’d like (not like you’re missing much) and can be gone through QUICK with repeating the same dungeon over and over.

It’s all a pretty, pretty lie! I’m fond of Anime, but even my love for it couldn’t shield me from the suck that is this game. All I know is with all the factors I mentioned I can’t be bothered to go back into it to do a more in depth review, nor make a video to demo it because it frustrated and bored me too much. If you want, you can play it here, but you won’t be seeing me in game (if you love it, then good for you).

Sorry for another negative review so soon. I’m disappointed too because I feel like I’m coming of as a caustic critic.