RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

With a glut of free-to-play MMOs on the market, it isn’t easy for one game to stand out amongst the crowd, especially with so many of them using the same happy-happy theme. LaTale may be one more cute RPG out there, but it is definitely one of the higher-quality ones, featuring an entertaining combat system, a reasonable variety of character customization, and some great visuals and sound. The US release of this Korean-made game is a little under-featured, still missing a variety of fairly important sub-systems and a few critical areas and dungeons, but it is at least more or less bug-free and undemanding to run. Although marred by a few missteps, LaTale is a very solid casual MMO that should appeal to players looking for something easy and fun.

LaTale‘s combat system bears a vague resemblance to that seen in the Tales series. A 2D action combat system, the player is encouraged to string basic attacks and techniques together into long combos, with extra-long combos being rewarded with extra EXP and money. The system starts off fairly unimpressively, but it becomes far more interesting as the player gains new moves to string together, as combat quickly becomes a very entertaining exercise in combo construction. The game also allows players to swap between two different sets of weapons, but doesn’t provide all that much encouragement to actually take advantage of this. In order to string long combos together, players need multiple weapon-specific attack skills, and since players get so few skill points per level with which to learn new skills and abilities, splitting them up amongst different weapon skill trees makes it a lot more difficult to keep everything at a useful level.

The first instance dungeon represents a pretty serious jump in difficulty.

One thing that becomes apparent about the combat system nearly immediately is how easily it can be abused by players looking to steal a kill. Players equipped with bows and magic have a huge range and learn skills that strike multiple foes in their area of attack. This makes it exceptionally easy to simply wander into an area and blast away around other players, snatching EXP and money with a fraction of the effort. This is especially obnoxious given how many quests in LaTale require you to kill a certain number of a X, Y, or Z monster in order to finish. The ease of kill-stealing is also very counterproductive to the game’s overall theme of friendship and floaty Care Bear hearts.

The amount of character customization in LaTale is fairly solid, though a great deal of it will require a player to spend real money on their character. Initially, players can select their character’s gender and are presented with a reasonable assortment of different faces, skin tones, and hairstyles and colors, but the game really focuses on fashion to give characters a bit of uniqueness. Players can buy a wide variety of costumes, from traditional clothing to getups that are genuinely bizarre. Furthermore, these fashions can be worn over top of a player’s armor, meaning you won’t have to sacrifice combat proficiency in order to look your best. Now, most of these fashions are only available to paying customers, but there are still a fair number of fashions that can be purchased with Ely, the in-game currency, meaning that players who want to customize their character but don’t want to spend cash on clothes aren’t forced to fork over their hard-earned money.

In general, this is one of the things LaTale does very well – balancing optional pay-to-play content without making things frustrating for those who can’t or don’t want to pay. For example, LaTale uses a waypoint system that allows players to teleport to a variety of positions throughout the game world, both in dungeons and towns, but it’s only available to players who shell out for the Warp Crystal in the cash shop. Non-paying gamers, on the other hand, can purchase Teleport Capsules, single-use teleport items that can send you instantly to a specific town. It’s less functional than the Warp Crystal, but not so crippled that getting from place to place is a pain. This balance between free and pay content is extremely well done and helps to make sure that players don’t feel they have to spend bundles of cash to get the most out of LaTale.

The game’s overall control scheme is very solid and offers a great deal of customization, since nearly every command a player can use short of actual movement can be assigned to hotkeys, but control is badly hindered by the way the game handles commands. Basic movement is handled directly on the server – essentially, instead of your computer telling the server where your character is, the server tells your computer where your character is. What this means is that, unlike some other 2D MMOs, if your connection gets interrupted or you get bogged down in lag, there’s a very good chance that monsters will eat your character alive simply because the server didn’t receive your commands in time. Granted, the alternative is having a game that not only lets players escape combat with no penalty any time there’s a connection problem, but becomes much easier to hack. In all honesty, there needs to be some sort of happy medium, because there is little more frustrating than losing 3% of your EXP to the death penalty simply because the wireless hiccuped.

One of LaTale‘s biggest problems is that, in its current incarnation, it lacks polish. There are a disturbingly large number of systems yet to be implemented, and the game’s translation is very uneven. The translation is near flawless in some places, while in others, it borders on Babelfish comedy. As to the missing systems, the pet system has recently been introduced, but a number of essential features of the game are still missing, such as crafting, enchanting, PvP, and one or two subsections of the Guild system. There’s a shortage of quests as well, which start to become sparse around level 35 or 40 – only halfway to the game’s only class change, and less than one-fourth of the level cap of 200. Towards the end of available content, many of the quests players receive will be for instance dungeons only, often requiring three or four runs in order to complete once, which leads to some rather slow and boring grinding.

Boss fights end up being pretty epic confrontations.

LaTale‘s soundtrack is quite good and a great deal less cutesy than one might suspect. There’s a fair amount of variety, though most of the OST comes off as being vaguely stereotypical – the pumping rock boss theme, the Jingle Bells-derived snow theme, et cetera – but the music has some very catchy melodies and uses some unusual instrumentation in places. The sound effects used by the game are a bit less impressive, mostly being a collection of fairly common-sounding slashes and whatnot. The character voices are a bit more unique, but with most of them being high-pitched whines and squeaks, these voices come off as being overly cutesy and a bit annoying.

LaTale‘s main storyline has to do with the disappearance of Iris, a legendary adventurer who, along with a close-knit group of friends, ended up facing off against a nasty critter called the Beast. Iris vanished during the battle and hasn’t been seen since, which leaves the player, in the role of a newbie adventurer, in the position of tracking her down and finding out just what the heck happened. In its current state, there’s not a whole lot of plot actually going on in LaTale – only two Scenario Quests are currently available in the game, and they don’t reveal anything particularly edifying about the story one way or another. The unfinished nature of the story makes it difficult to tell what direction the plot will take or how well it will eventually work with the game’s overall theme of friendship.

Perhaps LaTale‘s strongest point, the visual style is very colorful and creative, cute without being overpowering. The costume design presents an interesting mish-mash of traditional Korean styles and modern wear. It’s not unusual to have characters outfitted in Korean-style kimonos and dresses wandering around in the same area with characters in jeans and trucker hats. The various towns mirror this sort of combination of new and old, with skyscrapers in one town giving way to Pagoda-style buildings in the next. The vast majority of the game is sprite-based, with some very nice painted backdrops and illustrations, creating a visual style that meshes surprisingly well given the disparate nature of the design elements it includes.

With a fairly lenient death penalty and a number of repeatable quests, LaTale is a reasonably easy game for an MMO, which is good, considering it’s billed as a largely casual game. The current dearth of content means that players will only need to spend about 40 to 50 hours to reach the point at which new quests start to become scarce, but there are still a few things to do to tide one over until the next update, such as hunting down rare items and messing about with pets.

On the whole, LaTale does a good job of finding its own happy medium. The game is cute, but not overpoweringly so; simple, but not so simple that it becomes dull; though it offers a variety of payed content, it won’t frustrate players who don’t spend an arm and a leg. Though it may not stand out too strongly amongst the sea of cute MMOs on the market, it is a well constructed, solid game with an entertaining combat system, and so should find a fairly broad audience.