Mythwar II and Angel Online
IGG runs about ten MMORPGs. I'm not sure how different they are from each other. Are they more different than, say Mario Party 5 and Mario Party 6? More different than Namir Deiter and You Say it First?* I had suspected they would be the same game, repackaged with different sprites. Their webpage does very little highlight the differences.
I tried two of them, Mythwar II and Angel Online. They were both isometric 2D sprite-based games (hence my suspicion).
There were differences. In Mythwar II, monster encounters would be random and would take you from the overworld to a separate combat screen. It reminded me a lot of the original Final Fantasy. More accurately, it reminded me of those parts in Final Fantasy II when I was wandering cluelessly and kept getting ambushed. It had Active Time Battles, which premiered in Final Fantasy IV.
Mythwar has four races: Humans, Mages, Centaurs, and Borg. I'm not sure how they avoided an infringement suit from Paramount. The second thing I noticed was the Centaurs. None of the other reviews I saw mentioned this (which makes me wonder about the standards of internet game review journalism). The centaurs? Two legs. Not horselike in any way. Slightly less horselike than the humans, actually. I found that slightly odd. It's the kind of thing you'd think someone would notice. One of the subclasses of Centaurs is "Elves". I suppose I can accept that because this is Mythwar. The myths are losing.
Angel Online has about twelve different classes. There are four different kinds of fighters. They all start out hitting things with sticks. There are four different crafting-oriented classes. They ride around in giant robots....that hit things with sticks.
Both games drop you in the middle of a giant hub city with minimal instructions. Angel Online has a "tutorial" that shows you how to talk to people and hit things with sticks. My next character was a Mechanic, which apparently mines ore and builds robots out of it. I got the same tutorial on hitting things with sticks. How do I build robots? No idea. I guess I just didn't have the Spark.
It's difficult to make a game about angels. There are two ways to do it. You can either have a very preachy religious game or you can have a game set in fluffy-cloud heaven designed by somebody who fell asleep during sunday school.
The important NPCs include the archangel Raphael, the archangel Michael, and Cupid. Presumably because he has wings in some of the Renaissance paintings and because, like the Centaurs, they just didn't care enough. The backstory includes a love triangle between Lucifer, some girl angel, and some boy angel. It didn't end well. So, yeah, fluffy-cloud heaven. I'm not sure if this is more sacreligious or less sacreligious than the alternative. Probably less, considering that the alternative involves smiting rats and wolves with the Power of Jesus. And only doing 38 damage.
Anyhow, how different are the games? About as different as Mario Party 4 and Mario Party 6.
*: That's a false comparison, mind you, because after the days-long archive trawl, keeping up with both takes an extra couple minutes a day. MMORPGs pretty much demand a few hours at a time to progress.
I tried two of them, Mythwar II and Angel Online. They were both isometric 2D sprite-based games (hence my suspicion).
There were differences. In Mythwar II, monster encounters would be random and would take you from the overworld to a separate combat screen. It reminded me a lot of the original Final Fantasy. More accurately, it reminded me of those parts in Final Fantasy II when I was wandering cluelessly and kept getting ambushed. It had Active Time Battles, which premiered in Final Fantasy IV.
Mythwar has four races: Humans, Mages, Centaurs, and Borg. I'm not sure how they avoided an infringement suit from Paramount. The second thing I noticed was the Centaurs. None of the other reviews I saw mentioned this (which makes me wonder about the standards of internet game review journalism). The centaurs? Two legs. Not horselike in any way. Slightly less horselike than the humans, actually. I found that slightly odd. It's the kind of thing you'd think someone would notice. One of the subclasses of Centaurs is "Elves". I suppose I can accept that because this is Mythwar. The myths are losing.
Angel Online has about twelve different classes. There are four different kinds of fighters. They all start out hitting things with sticks. There are four different crafting-oriented classes. They ride around in giant robots....that hit things with sticks.
Both games drop you in the middle of a giant hub city with minimal instructions. Angel Online has a "tutorial" that shows you how to talk to people and hit things with sticks. My next character was a Mechanic, which apparently mines ore and builds robots out of it. I got the same tutorial on hitting things with sticks. How do I build robots? No idea. I guess I just didn't have the Spark.
It's difficult to make a game about angels. There are two ways to do it. You can either have a very preachy religious game or you can have a game set in fluffy-cloud heaven designed by somebody who fell asleep during sunday school.
The important NPCs include the archangel Raphael, the archangel Michael, and Cupid. Presumably because he has wings in some of the Renaissance paintings and because, like the Centaurs, they just didn't care enough. The backstory includes a love triangle between Lucifer, some girl angel, and some boy angel. It didn't end well. So, yeah, fluffy-cloud heaven. I'm not sure if this is more sacreligious or less sacreligious than the alternative. Probably less, considering that the alternative involves smiting rats and wolves with the Power of Jesus. And only doing 38 damage.
Anyhow, how different are the games? About as different as Mario Party 4 and Mario Party 6.
*: That's a false comparison, mind you, because after the days-long archive trawl, keeping up with both takes an extra couple minutes a day. MMORPGs pretty much demand a few hours at a time to progress.