Review: Tales of Pirates (2)

Hey guys, Little Miss Squish here. When I thought about what to review next for the blog, I had a LOT of choices. Frankly, too many. I wanted to do something that was familiar to me and that I could review easily. I pulled out my list of MMOs that I've played before and soon found myself staring at Tales of Pirates. I remembered loving it, since it was one of my first MMOs, and wondered why I had stopped playing it. I redownloaded the client, now Tales of Pirates 2, and logged in.

I quickly found out why I stopped playing. And by quickly, I mean within the first two minutes. It's THAT bad.



I know y'all will read this and say "well, it can't be THAT bad. And that's only an opinion, surely there must be merit to it!" I really, really, really had a hard time finding any merit to speak of. Before I get into why this is a festering pile of crap, I'll give the game information and my ratings.

Game Basics:
Title: Tales of Pirates 2
Publisher: IGG (I Got Games)
Genre: Fantasy Adventure MMORPG
Website: http://top2.igg.com/
Cost: Free-to-play, pay for extra features

Ratings:
Graphics: 3/5
Character Customization: 2/5
Beginning/Tutorial: 2/3
Class Skills, Character Development, etc.: 3/5
Story, Quests, Content: 3/5

Most of IGG's games feature cute, chibi-style, cartoonish graphics and Tales of Pirates is another one of those games. ToP's graphics are actually pretty decent, with nice textures and an environment that is cartoonish without being overbearing, which is nice. The equipment looks really cool when it's equipped. The music has a similar feel to it, in that it's playful and kinda catchy but you basically hear a handful of songs per region of the world (not individual maps) so that can get annoying if you play with the sound on. The one cool feature about it is that you get the traditional newbie boxes, which you can open at certain levels (Usually every 5). In ToP you get newbie boxes for quite a few levels-- at least level 30, that I can remember. It provides one or two pieces of equipment (usually a weapon and a chest piece) and some miscellaneous items that will vary depending on your level, most of which are helpful, but should be saved for trade. You also are allocated stat points every level into the traditional stats.


And that's all of the good things I have to say about this game. Seriously.


Let's start off with the character customization. There practically isn't any. Rather than choosing races, you choose "characters": "Handsome Lance", "Tough Carsise", "Pretty Phyllis", and "Cute Ami". And, of course, choosing your character determines which classes you can pick from. And the game gets INCREDIBLY sexist at this point. Basically, if you're a male, you can choose:

Lance:
Swordsman
Hunter
Explorer

Carsise:
Swordsman

And, if you're a female:

Phyllis:
Hunter
Herbalist
Explorer

Ami:
Hunter
Herbalist
Explorer

So, basically, men can be melee classes and women can be either long-range dps or healers. Say goodbye to female sword-wielders. Say goodbye to male healers. They don't exist in ToP's world. Lance and Phyllis are the more "normal" looking two of the group, the traditional character models. Ami comes up to your knee (which is perfect height for punting!) and Carsise towers over everyone else by a good head or two, which I guess makes the game feel more cartoony. Or something. And, of course, certain equipment can only be used by not only certain classes but certain characters! So, if you have a chestpiece that's GREAT for an Explorer or Herbalist, you better make sure that YOUR specific character can wear them, otherwise, tough luck and sell it! If you are after a specific hairstyle and it's not offered with the initial character cutomization (ie, either hair cut or color), then ToP basically shoves a cactus into your nether parts because it's THAT painful to get. Not only is it INCREDIBLY expensive to do, you have to get a handful of items, including a one-time-use hairstyle book (which sell in the player market for hundreds of thousand, if not millions, of gold), several pieces of dye in the color you want (each one made of a number of SMALLER dyes which are hard to come by to begin with), and then two hairstyling items, such as a brush or scissors, and then you have to go find the styling NPC in one of the major cities and sell your left kidney and an appendage of your choice to have it done. My suggestion is to find a hairstyle you like in the character customization screen and don't bother changing it because you'll want to kill yourself if you try.

The interface in Tales of Pirates BLOWS majorly. Not only can you not use keys to move around, but the mouse moving system is a PAIN, because it combines both point-and-click AND hold-to-move ON THE SAME MOUSE BUTTON. So, here I am, wandering around a forest, when I accidentally hold my mouse button down EVER so slightly longer than I normally do, and I go charging past NPC Bob that I was supposed to speak to and INTO a group of monsters where I'm torn apart and eaten for Sunday brunch. Brilliant. There's also no way to tell if a monster will attack you on sight as if you've offended it by existing or if it'll accept your presence but ignore you. So good luck finding a place to camp out if you're nowhere near an NPC village and need to move away from the computer. The skill bar is also next-to-useless; in order to use a skill on something, you have to click the skill, hope to god you don't actually delete it off your skillbar as well (because that's also conveniently placed on the left mouse button) and then target and click your monster to use a skill. There's no way to use a key rotation for your skills so you're wasting your time clicking between skillbar and monster and taking TONS more damage than you would have if you were able to hit a few keys on your keyboard. Oh, and self-healing? It uses the same process, so by the time you actually get to heal yourself (if you're a woman Herbalist) you're already dead and the monster's teabagging you. Yes, healing does a WORLD of good when you're dead.

The Skill system is also just fucked up. Period. Every time you level up, you get a skill point, which can be spent on either class-specific skills or "life" skills, which don't really affect you that much. In order to get a skill, you have to buy a book from the grocer (why a grocer would have books is beyond me... you'd think it'd be at a class trainer!) and then spend one of your skill points to learn the skill. If you want to level up your skill, you need to spend more skill points, obviously. And, of course, in order to learn certain skills, you need to have "prerequisite" skills completed; in order for you to learn skill B, you have to have skill A leveled up so many times, and you have to level up skill B so many times to get skill C, etc. So if there's a skill you didn't want to have or have too many levels of, odds are, tough luck. It seems rather superfluous to have to spend so many skill points to get where you want to go when you can only have so many at a time.
There are supposedly item crafting and enchanting systems but I rage-quit the game before they were introduced so I don't know anything about them.

And then there's my main problem with Tales of Pirates 2: there isn't much "pirating" going on! When I first played this game, I never went out to sea or anything. Sure, you have the option to BUY a ship (why you can't just TAKE one like a pirate would is beyond me) and fight out at sea, but it doesn't really make a difference if you do or not. There's also no pillaging going on and there isn't a whole lot of treasure hunting to speak of, either. (The only way that I've seen treasure hunting going on is through New Sheepskin Scrolls and I only did so once with very poor results.) The closest that a character would naturally seem to get to piratedom is the Explorer class, which is basically some goofball running around with a magic conch shell. I'm not even kidding. They fight with a conch shell. It's almost laughable, really. But, if you remove the "Pirates" portion of Tales of Pirates, it's basically still the same game, which makes me wonder why they'd call it Tales of Pirates. IGG also had the nerve to make a "sequel" for Tales of Pirates, ToP 2 (Ooohhhhh, how original!), which, I swear, is the exact same game. I went from level 1 to 30 without ANY change in the game from ToP 1 to ToP 2. That's sad.

Why did I like the game so much when I first started playing MMOs? I'm not sure, to be honest. It was a great "learning" game, to be sure, in the sense that it's good for people who haven't played MMOs much before. But for more experienced gamers, it probably won't be what you're looking for. I do know that the servers can be fairly populated and I know of people who like the game, for sure, so of course my word isn't law and I'm sure some of you will try the game and like it despite what I've said. It's just not my particular cup of tea. My overall judgement: it's probably not a game you want to play.