New post on Zenonia 5 on Hardcore Droid:
Zenonia 5, Gamevil’s latest installment in the Zenonia series, is a fantasy action RPG for Droid. Players enter an engaging fantasy world, with charming characters, oddly adorable monsters to fight, an epic destiny, and all the other J-RPG standards, but a frequent need to spend premium currency to progress, and storyline events that require familiarity with previous Zenonia make this delightful world very hard to access.
….
The story opens with a confusing argument between a king, a girl in a bikini, someone who seems to have killed a witch, and a dude who is becoming the devil because the wealthy have oppressed the poor. Then they battle! For folks unfamiliar with the previous Zenonia mythos, this is all pretty obscure, but in a moment, it seems that this sequence was all a dream! Your character is just as confused as you are! Phew! Your first action as a player is to have your crazy dream interpreted.
Via Love and Loathing in Las Zenonia on Hardcore Droid (No, I didn’t title it, I just wish I’d come up with that title myself.)
This was a fairly difficult review to write. I really wanted to enjoy a fantasy adventure, but I just felt like Zenonia hated me. There was too much — storyline, controls, etc. — that players were just expected to know going in, and while I usually prefer jumping in over a slow tutorial, the cost of that exploration was premium currency. I enjoy magic circle of exploration and interaction too much to love Z5.
Many thanks, and possibly many apologies, to Matt (of Matt Barth Sucks fame) for listening to my love/hate rantings and helping me refine it.
