Despite the lovely Asian architecture and attractive environments, the enemies themselves could have spawned in just about any MMORPG. The enemies aren’t smart, there aren’t scores of them at a time and on the rare occasion you die, there’s no real penalty other than the loss of progress. Thanks to the combat system, clearing the level of the constantly respawning mobs is fun for a while, but it’s also easy. The quests themselves show a stubborn lack of originality: kill x number of monsters, fetch y number of some object, rescue z number of prisoners. The main story quests are voiced by earnest and American sounding actors, but sidequests are not and the quests themselves are grindy, a mixture of short instanced quests in mini-dungeons and environmental sub-bosses that are completed solo or by small ad hoc groups of players. After the well-produced cutscene-heavy tutorial chapter and in the game world proper, the player is quickly inundated by quests in service of one faction or another, leading them through the five major areas and dozens of locations. The anime-inspired story puts the player in the role of a mystical martial artist in training, whose school and revered master were destroyed by an evil sorceress, thus setting up the arc of revenge and retribution. As MMOs go, Blade & Soul ultimately feels like a lightweight experience.Īctually, Blade and Soul - like so many recent MMOs - consists of an essentially single player campaign that prepares the player for PvP arenas at level 45. An enjoyable and skill-heavy combat system is unfortunately wedded to an uninspired and ultimately repetitive campaign.
Launched in Asia in 2012, NCSoft’s MMORPG Blade & Soul has been released in the West and while it’s a polished and attractive game that makes a good initial impression, a more extended stay in its anime and martial arts-inspired world reveals some issues that impact its staying power.
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