Recent reviews by Elith

Excellent game, it's everything you love about DragonQuest but now in a build your party format. Great exploration, highest difficulty is fair and fun. Itemization is great and now with a twist being some gear can change personality's changing the spread of stats you get on level. Some classes have passive abilities, you can soft prestige classes at 20 to carry over skills. Game goes open world quite early giving away to fun exploration.

Story is slightly lack luster but to be expected, lots of Japanese dialog is spoken very plainly, often NPC's tend to be very boring. lack of emphasis markers, Japanese onomatopoeia. Lots of quirkier stuff you would expect in later titles to be missing. On the bright side the game is a haven for early japanese language learners. You can select from Non-Furigana, Furigana and full hiragana. Because of the simple dialog you might find this very approachable at N3 or even N4. It's still a fantasy game so be prepared for lots of lookups.

Visuals are very nice looking, they went for the 2DHD style, it compliments the world very well and very much modernizes a very old game. When building your party you get to also choose the look and color of your hand crafted unit. Battles sprites look great but I feel like there was loss of potential here as the camera zooms in on the monster when you actually strike. This is a weird cost saving measure to not animate the sprites attacking with the number of different weapons. Going the extra mile could have been great here.


Game has some slight controversial design choices such as toning down the bikini warrior culture (changes impacting both the Japanese and English versions) Use of スタイルA and スタイルB but nothing that matters in the grand scheme of things. You are neither man or women but npcs will still make assumptions. Picking Style B creates a lot confusing situations.

All things said this game is a great remake.

The game has a fun leveling experience and decent dungeons but after those get stale all you are left with is the meat of the game but there is more fat than meat. PVP Arena has no gear normalization so 3v3 is essentially a gear score check, the game does not even bother to try and mach you to relative gear scores.

Open world PVP can be fun sometimes but it has a similar issue. You can outplay people to a certain extent but even fully traited in blues working on your purples. You'll never kill a fully kitted purple player.

The developers for basically what was linage 3 were let go and a new development team has this project, but that is mid development for their main project. So even if you were looking forward to new stuff the game is basically on life support.

KR servers don't fare much better, level55 , same dungeons tiered 2,3 stars some more map to explore, systems that let you gamble away all your materials. Possibly new weapon coming to KR in december (Not sure now after the NCsoft news). Fishing is boring, life skill systems are non-existent. Weekly's are basically just dull chores that you have to do, abyssal contracts are fun at night, but once you run out of tokens you have to farm the stale ass dungeons to replenish that currency. There is always a sense of urgency to do these things on cycle and the systems exist to keep you logging on.

Do your 3 dungeons a day, do your 2 event candy corn dungeon runs, run your 10 single player contracts and finally your multiplayer contracts and 5 portal globe keys.

Goodjob now do it every single day for months.

Game has problems with your position while mid air and flying, there is nothing smooth about being airborne in this game. Infact the jank will probably get you killed and those who have played probably know exactly what I'm talking about.

This game is fun but also a flop, its more bad than good. I get it endgames have to have a loop of some kind or the game gets stale but in horizontal based MMO games at laest I have no urgent time limits. Games like GW2, RO,FFXI classic,Warframe hell even BDO all at least value my time when I get on. I have no obligation tied to do chore sim and can just enjoy the endgame content.

I initially thought this game was hot garbage, but later realized its a gem in the rough. There are a lot of minor gripes but also a lot of good from this game. It has a very slow start, but picks up the pace at the mid point. There is a lot of fun to be had here. The games lows are all nitpicks at best.

I can't believe I did not get 1000 hours on this.

Its good, thats about it.

Damn this game has hands.

An amazingly well designed game that has enough complexity to keep you thinking but not enough to overwhelm you. You would hardly be able to tell this was a early access game. The game play loop is solid enough to keep you coming back for more. It's a city building rogue like that is basically a manipulated rush to gain x amount of reputation before the queen gains x amount of impatience. Whichever bar fills up first determines the winner/loser of a match. Completing goals lowers the impatience bar while raising the reputation bar.

There are some nitpicks, the upgrades aside from the main line upgrade gives you actual fundamental changes but you will not sit there weighing your mind on choice up upgrades, this unfortunately makes the premise of rewards after each match only incrementally making you better stat wise. I would like to see some more complex upgrades and maybe upgrade trees where I am forced to pick one or the other upgrade with the ability to reset. I would ideally like upgrades to play around my preferred winning strategy. There is also a lack of icons making the upgrade tree quite boring.

I would like to see more variety for win conditions, I would also like to see reasons to stack props next to each other or props that require to be near a road or distanced from another to fulfill required effects. I would like to see harder difficulty also include relief events to the player and would also like to see complex events that can throw a player for a loop like a glade opening without being revealed or a timer on a glad to open up if not revealed. The design and scope of this game allows for a lot of complexity so there is room to play around with many effects in development.

Despite the nitpick, the game has a lot more to offer than what this review can do justice and with a very large road-map it could very well be on its way to being a very amazing title.

Great job on this game Eremite Games, keep up the good work on this title.

The quality and love shows in this port, Square has really done this game a disgrace. On the positive it allows you to select Japanese language. The game in general is great but the port is awful. touching up a world that was already just painted looks really weird, the overworld is very blurry looking. The font is nice and crisp as well as the portraits.

The game has a lot of hit and miss qualities and for 20 dollars its not going to break bank but it might not really be worth it either. If you already own this on PSX you might be better off just dusting off the old playstation.

So, this game released a while back ago and was advertised as an open ended no ties MMORPG and it is correct in this instance. However, BDO is still not without flaws. The time sink to actually get into this game and play competitive PVP is massive. The company does try to alleviate the grind by having consistent events, to keep people within a reasonable gear score.
However this only really helps in mass PVP situations where things are chaotic, in a 1v1 situation, your class and gear can sometimes be what determines if you can even win the fight. You basically need to set the bar for your gear way higher than the average to do well in 1v1 where you can't focus fire targets down.

So why am I giving it the thumbs up? Despite the issues, the game comes together to simulate the right direction MMO's should be taking. More freedom is much welcomed and this game offers plenty of stuff to do and keep you entertained. If you can stick with it you'll eventually be established enough to not get bodied out of your usual grind spots. Life skills all feel like developed trades and invokes another aspect of the game in which to help you waste time.

Simply put, BDO is just alot of fun even slaughtering monsters mindlessly for hours and getting that rare drop from a specific area is very satisfying, sometimes its going on an adventure and just increasing the knowledge of the games world. This game can keep you busy for hours and feels like a traditional game if you ignore the MMO factor.

TLDR: BDO is worth playing but its not for everyone.

The game is back and it has been fleshed out again for the 2nd time. Like some kind of fifa or generic sports game, it keeps making me come back for more. New editions to the game include waypoints, villager/resource counts, graphical enhancements. Some new civ's have also been added to the game. There are tons of new stuff in this version of AOE2. But unfortunately while I can give it the thumbs up because it does what it sought out to do. I would like to point out some very major problems that can be easily corrected.

This version of the game as of 12/13/19 is plagued with lots of server stability problems which will lead to frequently dropped games. You are not even safe in local host mode, In fact I think I've lost connection to games more under local lan than actually on the server. This makes the game very frustrating as in older editions to the game, you were allowed to wait for people to reconnect, save the map. In this version if you are dropped from the game, you immediately lose with no chance of reconnecting.

The rest of my gripes are quite small, nothing new but the new civ's are quite strong in the current meta but not unbeatable. Cumans are probably unfair in high level play though. The cursor bug still exists where you can easily guess something is somewhere simply by hovering over it.

Despite the problems, I do think the game is worth looking at and it looks like there are updates beyond the horizon.