Game Introduction: Prius Online

So a while ago MMOsite (who I subscribe to  on my rss reader) had mentioned Prius Online. It’s originally from Korea and its made by mostly the same staff who worked on Ragnarok Online 2 (before they all bailed which is why the game hasn’t had any updates in years.) While browsing NicoNico douga the other day they had an ad for the Japanese version of this game which apparently opened last week! Well I have been wanting to check this game out for sometime so I registered and downloaded it last night.

There are a lot of similarities that can be found in Prius and RO2. One thing is that in this game you have a loli partner called an “anima”. Basically it follows you around and helps you kill stuff and heals you (kinda like in Megaten except it’s not a deformed beast.) At the beginning of the game you can not only customize your character but you can customize your loli. Speaking of characters, the way this game works as far as classes is a little different. Rather than picking a “default character” and then a class, you pick a character whose class is pre-defined. For example I picked the human woman, who is by default a gunner. If I want to let’s say be a mage, I have to be the human man. If I want to be the priest class I have to be the woman elf thing etc. Since I play all my games for looks, and I didn’t wanna be a furry, I decided to just be a gunner ^^;

At the beginning of the game there’s a pretty hard core set of cut scenes. I say hard core because the  graphics are absolutely amazing. They even take into account how you have customized your character to be in part of the intro. In the “intro” you have your loli and you’re level 30. You fight amonst your “friends” (the furries I mentioned earlier) which is basically a way to help you get accustomed to the feel and play of the game.

The best part is a pretty famous cast is voicing some of the characters! Noteably the voice of the loli animas is Tamura Yukari! There are other noteable voice actors like Inoue Kikuko as well, and cut scenes aside, the voices remain well into the game. So for example if you do in game emotions, there will be voices to go with them by said seiyuu. I’m not really sure who voices my gunner lady though.

Anyway sadly at the end of the cut scene the loli disappears and you’re back to level 1 once you reach the noob grounds. You can get her back of course once you hit level 10 though.

I was playing around with some of the emotion lists available in the game. They range from her showing peace signs and going “BUI!” to getting angry and going “MOUUU!!” lol It’s cute when they add sound effects like that into a game, but it also makes me think a game like this would never make it into the US because they’d never want to pay voice actors to do this lol. I’d imagine just like with Holic Online, they’d leave the original Korean voices in.

I took more screenshots once I got to town and as expected they are all pretty amazing. The quest system and controls system is very similar to RO2. There’s even a quest board area but I didn’t bother with that yet as I had a ton of stuff to do in  town alone from the npcs in there.

A couple notes about this game: It’s very graphic intensive. The requirements on the site may not seem like you need much but JP’s laptop lags while mine’s smooth as silk. In addition it makes my video card temperature go from like 65 to 78 lol but I play in 1440 x 900 window mode.  While the game is of course in Japanese, they make doing and finding quests REALLY easy. On the map it will show you which area you should go to and will put red circles around which NPC you should talk to. The other similarity to RO2 is by pressing space you can jump up so you can jump from high places to take shortcuts. The downside is if you jump from a place too high you’ll lose HP 😛 Anyway this is gonna be another great game to introduce at my MMO panel in September but if you do decide to try it out, my IGN is 猫カフェ as always on the デュオ server.