Impressions: La Tale Beta

Staff writer Ryan Plas takes a look at OGPlanet’s La Tale, a sidescrolling MMOG. The game recently closed their open beta. Hit jump to read Ryan’s impressions of the game.

I will be the first person to admit, that sometimes I don’t understand why I am attracted the MMO genre so much. MMO’s as a genre are a social type game, and while I thouroughly enjoy playing MMO’s, I’m not exactly social half the time. Which in turn, I think, is a good reason that I love Free 2 Play MMO’s and eat them up like candy.

And speaking of F2P MMO’s, I recently had the chance to check out OG Planet’s La Tale closed beta. Upon first look, much to my dismay, the game looks a lot like Nexxon’s Maplestory. And personaly, while I understand that thousands of people out there love Maplestory, I didn’t last over 15 minutes in the game world. La Tale on the other hand, just had a little something that actually drew me back into the game for repeated play sessions.

One of the first things that I thought was interesting is that when you start playing you are greeted with a little story about the character Iris, who ends up being the main character of the game proper. It’s a nice little touch that adds a little more to just hack, slash and talk with your friends.

Controls took a little getting used to as I havent spent a lot of time in 2-D MMOG’s lately, but combat is pretty simple using the arrow keys for movement and some hot keys as well as keyboard letters for attacking. There are also a couple of classes in the game, as well as the ability to branch those classes again at level 80.

Graphics are colorful, and the music is cheery, both of which seem to be a staple of asian style F2P MMO. And of course, you can’t forget about the broken english load screens as well. All in all though, I actually had a pretty good time in the hours I spent with La Tale, especially when compared to what I feel is it’s closest competitor, Maplestory, which lasted a whole 10 minutes on my hard drive.

Open beta ended on the 3d of September, and La Tale is expected to go live on Sept 18th. Hopefully they have the XP rate down pat, and you can’t get massive amounts of XP just by running to the next ‘town portal” or ” Stone of Iris”, which you could do in OB. I look forward to giving the game a try when it goes live!