RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Asda Story, perhaps most famous for its offer of $30 for those players who found it wanting during its beta period, is a game hampered by a large number of bugs, a very poor translation, and an uninspired overall design. Asda Story is one of the more “Me Too” free MMOs on the market today, offering bland combat, very basic quests, and little or no story. There are a few bright spots, as Asda Story does offer some unique variations on player interaction and sports an interesting visual style. But for the most part, Asda Story really shows its youth – there’s not enough content, not enough polish on the translation, and, at the moment, not a lot of reason to play it.

Asda Story‘s combat system is a singularly simple affair. Simply selecting a foe and selecting either a skill or basic attack will send the player character charging towards their enemy, weapon at the ready, swinging away constantly until either the player or the monster goes down. There isn’t any real strategy involved in this style of combat, aside from “run away if you get overpowered.”

Thanks to a small number of non-clothing character options, you’ll be seeing yourself quite often.

One of the more unique forms of character interaction offered by Asda Story is the Soulmate bond. Soulmates are two player characters that have been linked together in a sort of extended buddy system. The more two Soulmates party together, the stronger their bond becomes, allowing them to use some unusual and powerful skills. These skills, though ridiculous in name (Love Love Power is my personal favorite), are extremely useful in combat, as they allow a player to completely regenerate an ally’s HP, grant a huge boost in damage, or even borrow their Soulmate’s character. The whole Soulmate system is treated as the in-game equivalent of a marriage, which is an interesting choice given how early and how often the game encourages you to find a Soulmate.

Asda Story boasts of a wide variety of character creation options, but the vast majority of these are wardrobe-based. Players have only three different hairstyles, hair colors, and a few variations on facial expression and skin color, while the rest is largely based around what your fledgling character would wear. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if these clothes stayed around a bit, but a player’s biggest sense of individuality, and likely the part of their new character they spent the longest amount of time deciding on, will be overwritten as soon as they gain their first piece of armor about twenty minutes into the game. Asda Story‘s cash shop does offer a wider variety of hairstyles and other accouterments, but for the player unwilling to spend real money on the game, there isn’t much available with which to stand apart from the crowd.

Although a player may find it tough to distinguish themselves visually, it isn’t hard to do so with skills. Each player character starts off as a Novice, able to use only simple attacks and skills, but soon gains the ability to pick a Class. There are three major Classes in the game – Mage, Archer and Warrior – and these Classes are in turn separated into three schools. Players can mix and match skills from these three schools, creating, for example, a Mage with access to Earth and Lightning magic, or a Warrior with spear skills and defensive abilities. The variety of different paths a player can take their character down is pretty well done, giving players a wide variety of choices, though the poor translation does make it difficult to tell what any one skill does, on occasion.

Another thing that adds to character customization is the Sowel system, which is used to alter weapons and armor. To put it plainly, equipment itself is really just a shell. The bonuses on a piece of equipment, along with any damage reduction or damage dealing capability, are determined by Sowels, tiny gems that can be set in open slots in said piece of equipment. The Sowels available to players don’t really change the way a player will act in combat, but they do add a nice secondary opportunity for a player to distinguish themselves.

MMOs tend to be rather light on plot, but Asda Story really takes this to a new level. To put it simply, there is no story. There are a few vague rumblings about monsters, and the quests offered by NPCs will occasionally gesture at some vague mystery from the past, but by and large, there simply is nothing holding the game together. NPCs give out quests, players go out and kill monsters and come back for a reward, but without any real story-related reason for doing so. The world of Asda Story is covered in ruins and bizarre machines, giant robots wandering around the landscape, airships floating above cities, huge pipes sticking out of the ground without any rhyme or reason, but the game seems perfectly content to simply point players into the wilderness and say, “Ignore that, I need wolf skins. Chop chop, kiddo.”

As stated previously, Asda Story‘s biggest current problem is the huge number of bugs present in the game. Thankfully, most of the bugs are confined to fairly specific areas – the dungeons. When entering a dungeon, there is a roughly 50% chance that the player will not be able to target themselves or other players with skills or magic. This is easily enough solved by exiting the dungeon and re-entering, but there is also a second bug that gives players about the same probability to be unable to target *monsters* when they first appear. This is a bug of an altogether different nature, since it’s very possible to bring a large party into a dungeon and get wiped out when half of its members suddenly lose the ability to heal or use skills. The game also has a handful of failures in player interface. For a start, hit detection. Getting hung up on obstacles while simply wandering around is entirely too common, though whether this is an actual bug or just poor pathfinding is difficult to tell. Secondly, we have the distribution of EXP. With so little EXP coming from monsters, and with none of the game’s fairly limited number of quests being repeatable, it’s very easy to get stuck grinding for a long time in order to reach a level where new quests appear, simply as a result of the EXP loss included as a death penalty.

All that glitters is dirt, in all probability.

The visuals of Asda Story are fairly good, both in technical terms and in overall design. Costume design in particular deserves a specific mention. Armor is ornate and complex, but not so engulfed in fantasy as to be ridiculous – no cross-your-heart chestplates that lift and separate, for example. Monster design, unfortunately, is nowhere near as solid. Asda Story features a depressingly small number of monster types, most of which are distinguished from one another solely by palette swaps. The visual style of the game is done in a not-so-subtle cutesyfied variation on Steampunk, with rounded, oversized gears stuck on everything from robots to hats to signs. The use of this style is fairly consistent, and it is at least a solidly-implemented visual style, but there are definitely places where it goes a bit over the top. This is particularly true in the game’s first major city, which is filled with bright green and yellow trees, while red airships with rainbow-producing attachments float in the sky next to players using a bunch of bright pink pigs as balloons. Depending on a player’s personal taste, Asda Story‘s visual style can elicit either a chuckle or a reissuing of lunch.

The game’s music is fairly well written, what little of it there is. The music overall does a solid job of backing up the visual design – that is to say, it’s extremely cute with vague overtones of mechanical – but there are barely a half-dozen tracks to be heard over the course of the entire game. The same tracks are used repeatedly in dungeons and in the field, giving a very repetitive combat system an even more repetitive air.

Being an MMO, determining the actual length of the game is a bit of a tough proposition. With a dedicated party and a bit of competence in character building, a player should be able to breeze through the vast majority of currently available content in around 40 to 50 hours, though dying more than a couple times can stretch this time out rather significantly. On the whole, Asda Story isn’t a terrifically difficult game, though there are a couple places where the game forces you to either find a party or die horribly.

Asda Story as it currently exists feels very much like an introduction to MMOs, simple enough for any beginner to grasp, but without any of the more complex or interesting features that might encourage them to stick around once the system has been figured out. And with bugs, a laughable translation, and poor design choices running rampant throughout the game, one wonders that Asda Story would be able to hold anyone’s interest for very long.