So in a long boredom streak of nothing to do in FFXIV and otome game oasis being on the dry side I decided to check out this Chinese MMO that’s apparently on mobile!

I started the game on my tablet, but I mainly play on my PC using an android emulator called Nox because  the game graphics are pretty nice and its easier for me and won’t overheat my tablet. It’s a free to play game with a cash shop, as mobile games would have it, so I didn’t expect to stick around for more than a few hours. However because of a very rich cast of voice actors they cast in the main scenario, I ended up sticking around for a few days now.

The game begins with you as the protagonist waking up in some snowy village in Siberia, Russia in an orphan village. Turns out all the orphans in this village have been experiment rats to mix with some blood of the dragon (cue FF14 references) that gives them special fighting powers…at the cost they could turn into a dragon/die. Once you’ve found out the secret they try to kill you but instead your blonde friend here takes a hit for you, pushes you into the ocean and somehow you end up swimming from Russia to Chicago and waking up at Cassel Academy where all the other dragon blood people are now attending. From there you meet the protagonist of the game, Ro Meihi (pardon the name differences as I am playing the Japanese version) who is a complete wussy loser and constantly needs someone to protect his sad ass.

He has this endless crush on his friend Nono, but too bad for him Nono is marrying her boyfriend Caesar and despite this Ro Meihi can’t get over her. Cue some fighting and then suddenly we meet another heroine – Eri who loves to play video games, and instead of speaking she keeps drawing dinosaurs and somehow everyone, but me, can actually understand wtf she’s trying to say.

Apparently she has blood of the oni, along with her brother so she’s kinda been kept locked up in this Japanese palace for a while. So then we end up being betrayed by her brother under the sea and somehow we survive and all of a sudden MANWHORE CLUB:

I don’t know why our 3 main heroes end up becoming hosts but for some reason they do, and then a bunch of other people decide to start shipping Eri with Ro Meihi because apparently when she’s with him she’s calm and won’t go out of control and destroy Tokyo. So now you end up becoming their 3rd person date camera / love specialist while the entire yakuza is looking for them.

So after being a conbini slave to Eri, hearing about Ro Meihi’s romance drama dreams about Eri and Nono, eventually the two say goodbye as she decides to return to her brother and suddenly I found myself in a long flashback about So Shihan’s past love life too. I don’t know it’s become like some weird Korean drama where it’s like a trainwreck but I just CAN’T LOOK AWAY. So now I’m trying to grind levels, extremely slowly to see the rest of the main scenario. I’m also enjoying playing for free just to see how MUCH I can get. You get quite a lot of things from doing dailies and just well logging into the game. Up to level 80 you skyrocket in levels but once you hit 80 it slows down significantly.

One of the first features I absolutely loved in this game was the photo mode or as FFXIV calls it group pose. But basically it gives you features that even xiv doesn’t have such as more filters and a nice bokeh to make your photos look nice. If you go through dragon raja twitter tags most people’s screenshots are hideous IMVU rejects, but you definitely can get some nice photos going in this game like the one I took above of my character ^_^.

That said as most of these Chinese pay to win games, if you want to really glamor your character, be powerful, have a lot of items etc…you need to pay up. For example, say you want to dye a piece of your gear. You need to first buy a cash item to unlock a >RANDOM< dye on the list and you better hope it’s a nice dye otherwise welp. With some cash items you can buy them on the market board from others, but for some specific reason, unlocking dyes is either obtained via some kind of free daily reward or by buying it with real money. I can definitely see people getting trapped in the pay 2 win mentality for this game, but I’m kinda casual about it and if I get  free stuff – cool, but if not – oh well.

The only other mild annoyance I have with the game is it FORCES you to play with others. Like yea I know it’s an MMO and I don’t mind doing some stuff with people but this game has this thing called “Clubs” and you HAVE to join one. I mean literally if you do not join one the game will just throw you into a random one. Me and my husband were in a loop of joining> leaving until we realized it was impossible NOT to be in one of these clubs. Fortunately we did find a nice group of people who got us both into the same club so now we don’t have to deal with that anymore. Obviously because of time zones we don’t really interact with our club members that often but they have been helpful in answering questions about the game. Because I started the game in Japanese there’s still a ton of stuff I don’t really understand  so I often have to find English guides with English interface to figure out what I’m doing. The English voice acting is ultra cringey to me, so I would rather play on the Japanese servers so I can hear all my fav seiyuus xD.  I wish it was like XIV where you had the option to play in an English client but hear Japanese voices instead!

Overall it’s been one weird ride, and there’s still a lot of stuff I don’t quite get and I’m sure I’ve screwed up my stats somewhere. However I am looking to try out the housing system which appears to be instanced  so there’s tons of empty slots (unlike certain MMOs I know *cough). Furniture also appears to be tied in with only the housing system itself so it’s not like you gotta go run a dungeon to get a furniture item (however you can get currency to buy furniture by doing dungeons). It seems like mostly a game focused on doing “dailies” while you slowly level up to see the MSQ or do events with your friends. While I’m still mostly just playing with my husband, we sometimes try to join random parties as it appears they give you a 25% boost if you run with 5 people. There’s even side jobs such as being a culinarian or being an idol which give you exp.

Anyway I’m looking forward to seeing how far I can get in this game during this month while I play for free. The next XIV patch isn’t until August so I got plenty of time to be the best F2P player I can be 😂