ROSE Online - How Cute!
 ROSE,
or Rush On Seven Episodes, is the latest online RPG from
Gravity, the people behind Ragnarok Online. It's currently
in Open Beta and free-to-play, though given Ragnarok's development,
it's a safe bet it'll go pay-to-play in full version, so
be warned. It's kind of hard to spot what really sets ROSE
apart from other MMORPGs, apart from small cosmetic changes,
which are admittedly kind of cute.
If you've seen Ragnarok Online, you'll pretty much know
what to expect from the mood of the game. Bright, cheery
graphics, anime-style characters, and being snotted by incredibly
cute things, in this case giant jelly-beans. Unlike RO,
though, ROSE is fully 3D, and I don't actually think it's
an improvement. Clothes, for instance, look very blocky
and solid where they should be soft, and even some of the
background images, especially trees, really look like an
obvious bunch of polygons. Still, the graphics are pretty,
just not stunning, especially when compared with other third
generation MMORPGs like Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, and Conquer
Online.
The sound is simply awful. Background music is in short
bursts that loop as obviously as if someone was actually
rewinding the tape. Still, as always with music, you can
just turn it off, so it should never be enough to put you
off an otherwise good game.
 Character
creation is a bit limited, but with a few nice touches.
This might just be the only game where it's easy to make
your character look OLD. You can choose hairstyle and colour,
sex, face, and then you're in. Later as you equip your character
will start to look a little more unique, but to begin with
there are going to be a few clones around. You choose from
four classes; Soldier, Muse (magic user), Hawk (Ranger),
and Dealer.
Where ROSE manages to set itself apart a bit is in equipment.
It's not strictly medieval fantasy. There are guns and cannons,
siege robots, and travel by cart, little dune-buggy type
vehicles of unbearable cuteness. While it doesn't affect
game-play at all if you do your travelling by cart or horse,
airship or giant chicken, the novelty value is genuine,
and the fun of actually being able to shoot things should
never be under-estimated.
Monsters have a halfway decent AI, and will try to run
away when badly hurt. They also fight with weapons, no matter
how silly that might look. It would be nice if character
movement was as intelligent, and you didn't have to spend
five minutes painstakingly manoeuvring around a rock in
the road.
The party system is nice, and there's a unique touch there
in that your party has a level of its own. The higher your
party level, the more characters you can have in it. Also,
when your party goes up a level, everyone heals up, which
is always handy.
PvP comes in with the guild system, which in ROSE is either
clans (headed by players) or Unions (run by NPCs). They
compete on the Union Battle Map, but you can also earn unique
items by earning Union points on quests.
 ROSE
is in part being killed by its own popularity. Servers are
crowded, users are having to wait to log on, and then once
you are in, the game itself is so crowded that kill-stealing
is almost inevitable. This is a problem one would expect
to be solved over time as the game continues to develop.
Gravity are still actively bug-fixing. ROSE is demanding
on system requirements, too, given the full 3D graphics,
and lag is a real problem. Support isn't great, and neither
is the English on the site. It seems petty to carp about
it, but there are other Asian-based games doing much better
than this.
ROSE is a reasonably pretty, quite playable fantasy RPG,
and it's free. It's cute and bright and there are no real
complaints about the gameplay. It doesn't really own anything,
though, that makes it stand out from what is, right now,
a real crowd of these games.
Overall Rating: 7.2/10
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