There’s just something about beautiful looking RPGs. Especially those that derive a lot of asian influence from anime styles. Dofus was just another MMORPG. Or so I thought. The attraction to it really came from the beautiful artist renditions of the game, but even so, seeing the screenshots were the deal sealer.
This game was done up in Flash, which isn’t a very obvious choice for most online games, but it was definitely something to try out first. But installation wasn’t easy for a Mac user. Perhaps it’s easier with the Windows client, but I didn’t test it out.
Installation was a pain because although it was just a Macromedia Flash launcher, you had to set it up so that Flash would trust loading files from a certain directory (the installation one) and would allow it to cache files in that directory. This is because when you load the game, bits and pieces are stored in the game folder outside of your usual fun user interface. After toying with the settings a bit, and clicking the solution help that was actually helpful, we were off to the races.
What was tremendously interesting was the amount of thought that went into designing each and every race. Each server had different world on them that I could tell, and each one had multiple subworlds that could be visited. With character creation, you first chose a race. There were twelve races in all, and each of them all had their own special skillsets, weaknesses, and advantages. Everything was spelled out to the “T” and there was a sudden flashback to rolling the dice and seeing what the Dungeonmaster said about my necromancer. Yes, the world seemed to be in a nice RPG heaven.
Most MMORPGs have questing as a secondary source of experience and such. But I didn’t have high hopes here due to Flash and most browser games are not as complex or complicated. Boy, that was the wrong assumption. It came out that you start straight up exploring the world. You’re not expected to do battle at all with anyone unless you choose to do so, just don’t click the monsters randomly like I did. Even better is that the first sub-world seemed to have all the levels of the monsters posted right there. You don’t want to get squashed, don’t fight the guys bigger than you. Talk to anyone with a first and last name since those were quest people. Anyone with a Guild or one name? Another player. And it was actually fun!
Graphics wise, they stuck to what they were good at and the limitations of Flash. Since Flash for the most part can only handle 2D animations, they did what the next best thing was. 2D overlayed on a pseudo-3D field. Think Final Fantasy Tactics as far as a field layout, and using the old Final Fantasy characters that ran and walked up and down by flipping the legs. Pretty much similar to that, but a bit more complex on the actual switches and movement. The nice thing about this is that they basically maneuvered the artist’s concept art directly into the game. There pretty much is no difference in the characters except the game itself is more in a miniature form.
I spent a good deal of time just exploring and messing with the quests. Questing is pretty simple for beginners since all you do is do whatever they tell you to do. Most of it was… go here, go talk to this person. Go there! Go talk to that person. Or fight, this, that, or another beastie. Not too complex. The battle sequences are done on a turn-based timer. You have a limited amount of time to figure out what you want to do on the battle grid. Then you make the move and set up the fight. Never did manage to get to a spell casting yet so I’m not sure how it works out, but I’ll dabble with it later.
Any limitations or bugs? Sure. It’s flash. The game is complex enough that it was easy to find a way to cheat yourself out of death if you managed to take on someone you really didn’t have a chance in hell of beating. You could run, but I didn’t see a flee option. So I just quit the game. Apparently if you log off in a battle, then nothing is saved and you go back to a spawn position. Very cool. Phew… didn’t want to die there. I don’t believe I’ve had this much fun with a Flash game before and it’ll be interesting if I would with any others. The truly great test will be to test this game on the Wii and see if it can handle it. This definitely would be a great RPG for the Wii… maybe even better than Adventure Quest in my opinion.
Not sure because your kid might want to play? No problem. At least according to Ankama Games, this game is rated 12+. Worried you can’t get a spot after getting bitten by the bug? No problem. You can subscribe and pay for premium services for a pay only server. The pay versions allow you to subscribe with a number of choices:
1 week: 6.90USD
3 weeks: 20.00USD
6 months: 38.00USD
1 year: 65.00USD
Also a very nice fact that you could pay with usual Visa or Mastercard, but they also had a variety of other payment methods that are often seen in micropayment type games. I was actually somewhat surprised that they supported Paypal. With 2 million accounts and counting, there’s a lot to choose from! If I had more time to spare, I would probably be continuing the quests and trying to see if I could find the Dofus. Alas, I’m only level 2, and there’s 100 maximum levels so it’ll be a while.
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