SCORE:
Gameplay: 4
Graphics: 5
Sound: 5
Overall: 5
Pros: Nice looking graphics and character artwork, not too shabby sound score.
Cons: Dreadful character dialogue and particularly poor translations from the original language.
We’ve lately had a look at Sword Saga, another free-to-play browser-based fantasy MMORPG from R2Games that thrusts players into an adventure world of swords and magic and is pretty much on line with several others games of this kind published by this company.
Entering the game, we realised that it would result in another run with one of the same 3 classes available for choice: Shooter, Magician and Warrior. It didn’t surprise us anymore that players aren’t given any opportunities for customising, but were only able to opt for a male or female character version for each class.
Once this character choice was done, the game started to load up and we were meanwhile presented with a written narrative introduction to the game’s lore/ story or rather that’s what were presumed it was, since we were only given roughly estimated 3 seconds for each paragraph before they disappeared again, meaning that we actually don’t have the foggiest idea of what they narrated or what the story was all about – quite absurd.
When eventually in the game, we noticed some especially long loading times that resulted in some pixelated backgrounds and missing character artwork that took a moment to load up. This issue could have undoubtedly been at our end of the connection; however, we usually don’t have any problems with long loading times and we’re convinced that this actually is an issue for the Asian community with their insane Internet speeds.
When eventually loaded up, the graphics actually looked quite imposing, just like we’d expected, as the character and environmental artwork in these games is always particularly top-quality; it’s an aspect the developers are seldom stingy with. However, there’s still a little complaint we’d like to put forward: during our initial half-dozen fights, we already noticed that the same background is simply repeatedly used, even for different areas. We still had a background at the edge of the town when fighting some walls. You could perhaps try to excuse this laziness, as it takes quite an amount of time to design such artwork, yet this unquestionably doesn’t leave a great impression.
Regarding general mechanics, features and the combat of Sword Saga, they are all a staple of R2Games and to be honest, we’re afraid we wouldn’t have noticed many differences if it were any other of the company’s titles. It’s exactly the identical speed grind through levels, automated travel and combat, same Mercenary features, Battle Ranking, constant icon pop-ups with free giveaways... to put it all into a nutshell, there’s nothing new.
Sword Saga’s most important weakness, although simultaneously the one that provided the most entertainment, was the dialogue. R2 Games are responsible for converting these Asian games to market them for a European audience. Apart from the fact that actual dialogue between NPCs was extremely ridiculous and cheesy beyond comparison, the translation to English was in fact badly done, which sometimes resulted in reading the quest text being a chore trying to figure out what they meant. We can only presume that this lack of attention isn’t of any major importance, as the majority of people undoubtedly speed-click through the quest dialogue trying to burn through levels and unlock later game features where we can only hope the real gameplay takes place.
The progression between NPCs and locations wasn’t too bad, picking up some companions early and at the heart of it there is obviously a semi-decent story running between the bad typos and failing humour; or more of it would have probably made sense had we been able to speed-read the intro paragraphs.
The truth is that Sword Saga doesn’t offer anything that considerably differs from other titles published by R2Games. And if all that really changes from game to game is the story and the narrative. then they have failed spectacularly given that the major problem with the game is the translation into English and the horrible script between characters. On the whole, not as great a first impression as some of the other MMORPGs, even those from R2Games, but as publishers it’s hard to punish them score wise simply because this game came after the others.
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