This is the first blog I've ever written. Pretty crazy, eh? I don't know what's come over me. I'm also using correct punctuation, on the internet! Giant Bomb is some crazy shit. Anyway, I digress.

I guess i should start with what's going on today. It's currently 8:05am on a Tuesday, and there isn't really all that much to do. It's damn cold, and my heater is busted, so I'm here at the PC where its warm (finally a use for overheating PC towers) and typing away at stuff. Well, typing away at this blog, and THEN I'll get back to typing away at stuff.

My first big sub got approved today. I know it's a bit crazy, but it made me all tingly inside. I don't know, maybe I'm just sad. It's given me a bit of a confidence boost, really, and I've been going hack with submissions. Hey, would you look at that! Just got an E-Mail telling me my Fou-Lu submission was accepted. Rock on! Oh crap, I just noticed some spelling mistakes. Where's a copy editor when you need one? I'll have to double check my submissions in the future to avoid that.

Other than tapping away at submissions, I've recently been wasting some time with some free MMORPG's. Yes, I know. I am crazy. The thing with free MMORPG's is, you can play one, and immediately find out the good and bad parts of the game in the first few hours you play them. It's a shame they get such a bad rep, because many of them have some really awesome ideas and apply them really well. Unfortunately, ideas and concepts don't equal all that much in the overarching entity that is the rest of the game, and so you see them falling over in more places than they can pick themselves up. Add to that the obvious Cash Shop imbalances, and, well, you know what they say. You don't get nothin' for free.

One of the free MMO's I've been screwing around with lately is called "Atlantica". Being a classic RPG completionist, this game actually appeals to me, since it has all the trappings of a really old-school Japanese RPG. Let's dispense with the story. No-one cares about story in MMORPG's, and if they do they're crazy or Blizzard fanboys.

The combat is turn based, and rather than fighting with a single character, you have a Hero and a party of up to 8 (starting at 4 and increasing as you level). You can change around mercenaries and their place in the formation, which is a 3x3 set of spaces, outside of battle. The formation you place your dudes in becomes pretty important, with your typical instinct to put tanks in the front and squishies in the back. Of course, some monsters can attack ignoring, or penetrating, your front line, and some attack multiple ranks at once, or cast spells that can effect your whole party. The classes in the game, as well as having a very small amount of skills to choose from (1-4, at most), all have different ways they can effect an enemy formation. For example, any character can only initiate an attack on the front row of an enemy formation, except for the Archer class that can fire at any single member of the enemy party regardless of rank. Gunners can initiate an attack on the front rank that will pierce up to three ranks, Vikings swing their axes in an arc and can hit both the target and adjacent ones to the left and right, etc etc. Your formation becomes very important as their limited skill pool means you really need to be thinking about what your party can do as a team rather than the individual. The class choices start out small, but eventually you can acquire elite class mercenaries with more unique and specialized powers.

The monsters are milling about in the overworld, and making contact with them shunts you into a random-battle, where you choose actions with your dudes and the cpu will slap you fucking silly with theirs. There's an AP (Action Point) system where your characters with more AP act faster, and different attacks take different amounts of AP to use, and of course, needing a base amount of AP a turn to act. AP is randomly generated each turn and adds to your reserves, and 'Wait'ing in battle will allow you to save up your AP for later turns to use more powerful spells and skills, 'Guard'ing using up less AP and reducing damage you take, and so on. You have a 30 second time limit to make all your moves, after which the monsters take their turns.

In the beginning, things are pretty simple. In later levels, though, the classic RPG stalwart comes into play though: If you bring the wrong thing to the party, you're totally screwed. Some of the bosses are very unfair, as well, although they can be defeated with a combination of luck, spell scrolls, and good ol' overleveling your characters to a point where their attacks suck. This is a shame, though, because the game actually does fairly well in shunting you along with quests rather than making you grind a whole lot. When you reach a boss you cant beat, though, you're pretty much stuck at that quest and need to grind up some more levels so you can progress.

Crafting nuts will be happy with the wealth of crafting options available. You can craft pretty much anything in the game, including weapons, armor, potions, food, bullets, arrows, skill books, even buildings for your guilds town.

Speaking of which, the guild town stuff is pretty nuts, and sorta reminiscent of Sim games. Your guild buys a town with the points you accrue from doing guild quests and such, after which you need to convince people to join your town and make it a thriving community. There's wandering dudes that you can convince to come to your town, increasing its population, but of course, not everyones gonna like your town. To make your town more attractive, you have to do town quests to raise the towns commerce, food stock, culture, and other levels to make your town more attractive. Making buildings will raise the max amounts of these values allowing you to better attract people and house more people. Every wanderer you convince to join will bring an amount of people to your town, and your entire guild gets an exp boost depending on that value. To add a bit of a twist, other guilds can 'cut you off at the pass' and convince wanderers your guild has convinced to come to their town instead. The wanderers will go to whoevers town is more attractive, giving you more incentive to make your town a better place to live.

Other carrots-on-sticks include recent RPG staples like a monster list that you can fill by repeatedly fighting monsters, with three tiers of data: name, location, and drops. Having more completion rate awards you with more Will, which is a sort of value that recharges slowly and it used for things like teleporting between towns, teaching other people crafting, persuading would-be residents, etc. Theres also an item list too, which will tell you the vital stats of the item and also whats needed to craft it, handy for saving up materials youll need for later levels of craft.

Theres pvp also, including arena battles, duels, regular automated tournaments with prizes, betting on arena battles, all that good stuff. it won't be everyones cup of tea, though, considering it's turn based, meaning your team makeup, strategy and levels can make all the difference. Still, you don't need to be any good to bet a few thousand gold and come out with a few hundred thousand.

In all, Atlantica is a pretty decent free MMO if you're really into turn-based RPG's. The learning curve is shallow, although the difficulty does ramp up considerably as you go through, and the combat is fairly deep when you get well versed in it. There's plenty to see and do, the world is decently large for a beta version, you can craft out your wazoo if you like that shit, and it hasn't been ruined by Cash Shop yet. There's always the looming presence of typical MMO grind, but if you're playing an MMO you sorta come to expect that. If completionistic turn based japanese rpg-esque MMO sounds appealing to you in any way, you might wanna have a look at it.

Hot damn, that actually turned into a review. Maybe I should add Atlantica to the database? Nah... Free MMORPG's aren't real games, are they? :P

Signing off,

Makari