Okay we just came from the Paskuhan celebration at UST last night, which they hold every year. Well, sort of. We were in the area but we (Mikey and I; Abby was somewhere else with Cat) weren't in UST itself. Mikey and I were at a cybercafe called Zone.com on the P. Noval side of UST. All we really got to see from the Paskuhan celebration was a lot of people, a few glimpses of the big tree, and a bit of the fireworks display at the beginning, with a view very obstructed by trees and buildings.

At the cybercafe, however, we played RF mostly. Mikey is still there now, and he'll be playing until about 3 AM I guess. He'll be sleeping in the cybercafe too, as he has a class in the morning, from 7 to 9 AM. I kinda envy him really, because I've always wanted to do that. Staying at a cybercafe with the beautiful specs and the excellent broadband, and playing until morning? Hmm. Nice.

Okay so since I got to play RF (I saw Francis almost as soon as I logged in by the way), here's my objective analysis:

The game system is pretty different. It's the only game that I know where even monsters that should be below your level would cause you to spam pots. Everything does too much damage, and you don't seem to do enough. As I read on some forums, RF is basically a game of pot-spamming. This being said, you lag = you die. Techniques are even being developed by players to allow pots to be spammed automatically, including sticking paper into the function keys on the keyboard so they stay jammed down, etc.

The game graphics aren't so heavy (I'd say it's about the same as Silk Road), so it can run on my PC, theoretically (even the benchmark on their website says so).

Levelling at low levels is very annoying, because at first you're friggen poor (you start out with 0 money). And the newbie monsters can kill you if you're unlucky, as an effect of what I mentioned above (everything doing too much damage). And since you can't afford potions yet, death is too easy to achieve. Sooner or later though money starts to come by easier, at around level 8-10 and onwards. You'll start picking up equipment that's better than what you have, though often it's at least 4 levels above your current level.

Pretty much all the quests you'll get consists of monster-killing, with the monster targets getting ridiculously harder as you roll on. Some quests you get are probably not meant for you to complete until a few levels later, when you can equip some better stuff and afford to buy more expensive potions.

The main redeeming factor, though, is that this will all be a blur by the time you reach level 30, which should only actually take a few days to over a week, depending on your dedication. By level 30, you can join the war (and actually be useful that is), and that's actually extremely fun from what I've seen. I saw some coordinated raids on enemy territories. I'm not sure if the races are at all balanced, but whatever. The only downside to this is that when it gets really chaotic, like in the middle of the battlefields, it puts a heavy strain on your machine, because so much is happening. Even the good computers at the cybercafe we played at can't handle it!

Okay the review is getting long, so it's time to summarize. To me, RF is good fun from maybe level 20 onwards, and only if you have a reliable broadband connection (doesn't spike or get disconnected) and a pretty powerful machine. And even at that, when it goes P2P, I'm not sure that I want to spend any money on it at all.

As for Flyff, which I've also been trying, it seems like fun so far. I may have to wait to get broadband first, which should be at the beginning of next year if not sooner, to really play it, because I have to download the international client yet, which is something like 500 MB. And from what I've seen so far, I actually enjoyed Flyff much more than RF. rofl o_o