Well, so far in GE Japan, it's really been a learning experience for kanji recognition. I've had to memorize the kanji for buy, sell and trade and other similarly common MMO terms.

Since the JP server has been up for a while now, and most people are high level, like I thought, I have the low level dungeons to myself for the most part. This has made leveling extremely easy so far, however, I'm suffering in that there's almost nobody hunting for items at low levels, so it's hard to get good equipment by buying from other people.

Also, because of the high average level, the economy is really rocking right now. Stuff that you can get rather commonly can be sold at high prices because the people that need them are rich. For example, you can sell Bellem Boxes (boxes that drop random items) for about 20K or more in the market, whereas in the SEA server they were only worth about 4K. In contrast, you can buy the Catherine card for only about 5 million vis, or even much less, if you're lucky, whereas in the SEA server, it was about 7 million vis just for her hip.


In other news, Abby brought home BioHazard 4 to play test, since she was supposed to write a simple review for it for work. So we got to play test it, and if it was really good for the console thanks to analog controllers, it's terrible for the PC due to lack thereof. I can imagine the game could've been exciting, but the frustrating controls and poor camera control made it more annoying than enjoyable. Mouse support would've been much appreciated. Nobody in real life would spend 4 seconds aiming at an enemy that's only 4 feet in front of you and still miss.


Still other news, apparently Ragnarok Online 2 is in open beta now in Korea. The website Ragnarok-Tale.net has some early info. When it goes into international open beta, I'm surely going to try it. Similarly, I'm downloading RO1 again to play on another server where Kill Switch, my old friend, is playing.