Scarlet Blade: A pleasant surprise
I have been playing Scarlet Blade, and I got to admit: IT IS AWESOME!
I feel really terrible now, because I gave my friends who play Scarlet Blade a hard time: They said it was good and I refused to believe them and then one night a group of us partied up and decided to give it a go and it was actually quite good.
Now, I did the same as you, and probably the same as many others: I saw the homepage, cringed, and moved on. Aeriagames is relying heavily on it being a “mature gameâ€, I disagree: Why would you attempt to ruin a great game with a gender lock and a lack of clothing?
I didn’t get to review all the features that the game has to offer, I got told by my friends that all the good content comes after level 20. (Levelcap during this beta is level 29). If that’s true, I’ll definitely play it more, because I’m already impressed by the game. So let’s talk about the game!
Scarlet Blade offers 6 classes: Defender, Medic, Punisher, Sentinel, Shadow Walker and Whipper. I had a hard time deciding a class, because they were all somewhat new to me since I don’t dwell in sci-fi games often but I settled on a medic. Each class is a different girl, with a different personality, voice acting and background. The medic was cute, small and a little too confident in her own skills of “harboring the lives of her entire partyâ€
Don’t you just hate running back into town to deliver all your quests and then back out the same way you came? You don’t have to deal with that in Scarlet Blade! It’s a futuristic MMOrpg after all: you can pick up and accept quests out in the field and even when you are in town, you can use a portal to go to areas surrounding you: it’s not free, but it is cheap!
What are even more impressive are the sound effects, I never thought I’d actually find a decent F2p-mmorpg that had voice acting; real English voice acting. One of the classes even has a touch of a British accent, at least according to me. Not all quests have voice-acting, but the important bits do! Besides the voice acting (where each character gets her own voice, I did say that right?) the music in the game is amazing. Opening windows, clicking all sorts of buttons, all have a sound effect. Sound effects I can only label as “sci-fiâ€. It fit’s so well with the game and creates a mood where it simply was hard putting the game down when it became too late to game anymore.
There is a few downsides though, one of them being the auto-walk feature. It’s great, I like it, but it could use some work. It is just beta, so it might be one of those features that will be improved, but there was a time when I was standing right next to my goal but I clicked “auto-walk†and went in one big circle around my goal. It was a huge detour, but I suppose if you bother to read your quests you won’t get lost mid-quest either.
Another downside is that I played with a party, and there is two minimaps: One in the bottom right corner that shows the map, where you see the roads, quest destinations and such. There is another one at the top corner, which is more like a radar system: You see monsters, party members and such. Problem is, I got a total tunnel vision and only saw the one at the bottom! I spent half my time ingame being annoyed of not knowing where my party was, which kind of made it experience not-as-ideal.