Saturday, June 12, 2021

Taking a Wakfu off the Beaten Path

 Yesterday I read a pretty fun post from MassivelyOP that was a quick guide to the perfect MMO for you, and I stumbled upon a revelation . . .

- Dungeons and Dragons Online — CHECK!  In fact, I kept an entire separate blog about DDO and played it for what felt like years. Love the game. Love the offbeat community.  It's just all around great.  I even wrote a magazine article about it back in the day when print media was still a thing.

- Project Gorgon — CHECK! In fact, if there was new content for me to play, I'd still be playing it. I'm on the Discord server.  I've written a score or so blog posts about the game.  I even made a remix of the Serbule theme song.

- Wizard101 — LAFF!  Do I even need to justify it? I mean, this blog started as a Wizard101 specific blog and led to me getting a job at KingsIsle, so . . . 

- A Tale in the Desert — Tried it.  Hated it.  Didn't even understand what was going on. Sorry.

Which leads us to Wakfu.  Yeah, you know, that's one that I always thought looked interesting, but honestly, I was already wrapped up in another turn-based MMO (wink, you know which one), and never gave it a go.  Props to MassivelyOP for this suggestion. I guess I'm Mr. Off The Beaten Path because I downloaded it and actually tried it this morning based off of their suggestion.

My thoughts exactly, who knows, maybe you'll be useful...

I gotta say that onboarding was rough for me and that was the biggest hurdle.  

1- For some reason establishing my account was difficult and took a while just to get going.
2- The character creator left so much to be desired.  After you've chosen your furry of choice, all you really get to then choose is your sex and your hair style and color.
3- The long sessions of dialog on the starter world went on for entirely too long.

Given all that, I stuck with it and before I knew it, I was in a group killing strange fuzzy beasts.

Kill all the white cloud things with pink horns . . . GO!

Then some guy tried to duel me over and over, so I logged out and logged back on a few minutes later after grabbing a drink.

The class I chose is called the "Osamodas' Whip" I chose it because, surprise surprise, it's the pet class of the game.  So, eventually I figured out how to tame one of those goofy looking white cloud things with pink horns and made it my pet.  Not bad!

The tutorial area culminates in a grand battle against a pink and purple edgelord with a sword for a hand.  I like his style actually . . .

Oh but death does exist! . . . and I'm serving it up to you today!

I enjoyed the first area, but the game really opened up and felt good in that first post-tutorial area named Astrub. It was full of people with their packs on the ground selling stuff and finally felt like an MMO.

People and their packs on the ground in a Town Hub! That's such an eastern MMO thing to do!

Once I figured out how to click on the compass on the quest log and how that actually worked, I was off to the races. Before I knew it I had killed a couple hours and was level 11 with a full set of gear and a couple of different beasts I could summon to help me in battle. 

I totally get the attraction of this MMO and could see myself spending even more time here just because it's all strange but familiar.

blue skin with a giant pink helmet . . . LET'S GO!

I'm not sure how much more of the game I'll play.  There's a lot of clunky things that make this old game a little difficult to play, but there is a lot of charm and character here regardless. The music has an earworm quality to it that will get stuck in your head and it's a fun art style.  In fact, that's kind of a big thing about this game.  There was a 3 season long anime that coincided with the game, and you can even find all three seasons currently on Netflix. I may just watch a few episodes now for kicks.

So all in all, this was a great suggestion from MassivelyOP, who apparently knows me better than I know myself. It was definitely worth the free download just to say I had walked thoroughly off the beaten path.

Happy Dueling

No comments: