Flyff

By all means, I wanted to like Flyff more than I did. An original idea (Flying) in an MMORPG plus interesting character design and nice music! Sign me up! Or not.

First of all, I'd like to outline exactly what I went through to get Flyff. First, you have to download the game client, about 400 megs of it. Not bad. After updating and signing up, I'm ready to go, right?

No.

Apparently, the makers of Flyff are stupid enough to not realize that their program tries to access the internet a lot like the virus "BD Blade Runner 0.80a". You think I'm kidding. So, to play this game, you either have to:
A. Turn off your Firewall, if you have one.
B. Make your computer vulnerable to the REAL BD Blade Runner by allowing it, or
C. Not have a firewall at all.

DUH, FLYFF. I would also like to note that this game has a "Hacking Prevention System", but I got around it and the fullscreen requirement quite easily. Not that I hacked, just that I like having a game on my screen while I type a review. So anyway, just keep in mind, this game is a security hole.



Flyff Online wants to be so much more than it is, but it suffers. The game feels quite a bit like Priston Tale by having the simplistic info on screen, and having relatively easy controls... but some of the controls, especially the battle controls, take time to get used to. Starting the game, I was literally launched in the proverbial "Middle of Nowhere" without a clue how to play the game, so I imagine this game gets it's share of stupid noobs.

No matter how they try to work it, Flyff is a standard fare MMORPG. There's a battle system, blacksmith, map, different towns, higher level areas.. yeah, this isn't anything revolutionary. The problem with this is that Flyff didn't put much into this, meaning you get left with a proverbial bad taste in your mouth.

Now to the "Fly for Fun" bit. Now, you would THINK that right off the bat you could whip out some hoverboard and fly around, but like FFXI and Chocobos, no dice. However, later on, the flying IS revolutionary to the MMORPG genre and makes it one hell of a lot more fun, but.... yeah, I kinda expected it to be right there on my plate from Day 1.



As for the rest of the game, it's standard Korean MMORPG fare. Bad translations, crappy talk interfaces, engrish all over the place, lots of non-english players running around with level 5-billion-and-1 armor.. you get the idea. Thankfully, MOST of the players of Flyff are pretty curteous, which is a marked difference from, say, Counter Strike. Well, everything's better than Counter Strike.

Well, let me think here. We've got a MMORPG with substandard fare with only one redeeming factor. Uh oh. See, if Flyff wanted to do it right, one of the first things I would have done would be to ADD SOMETHING UNIQUE. Then again, they did in Flying, but... considering it's not THAT amazing, I really don't see it. The overly cutesy characters make me want to puke as it is, making me run around doing stuff like fighting cartoon bats just makes me puke twice.

By all means, if you want a free RPG, this is a decent one. However, I'm just unimpressed with the game as a whole. The battle system and moving system are somewhat easy to use, but uninspired as it is. The term "Original but not original" comes to mind with this game. Maybe I've just played too many MMORPGs, but the standard "Click it to make it die" doesn't work for me any more.


Overall, this review can't say much about Flyff other than it's a generic RPG with a good idea that needs work. However, I will give it one bonus: Being free, this is a great game to pick up if you absolutely must kill hours of time. So, I give this three stars- it wouldn't hold it's own against MMORPGs like Everquest II, WoW, or FFXI, but it definately is a start in the right direction.

3 star(s) out of 5

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