Is CLOSERS Worth Playing in 2022? | An MMO Review

Is CLOSERS Worth Playing in 2022? | An MMO Review

Closers is one of 2 South Korean MMOs I actually brought attention to before they were licensed for distribution within North America and Europe.
I did “let’s play” style videos documenting my and my little sister, Wiggy’s slow progress throughout not only the Korean version, but also private servers for the game, before En Masse finally licensed it and allowed for me to officially play the game translated legally into English.
And after years away, I’ve finally come back to see if the game is worth investing time into in 2022.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome back to another episode of “Is it worth playing?” A series where we analyze every facet of an MMORPG and come up with as objective of an opinion as we can on whether the title is worth playing in 2022.
Today, we’re taking a look at Closers.

Now I last played Closers back in.. 2018. Oh, wow, it’s been almost 4 years. I guess that explains a few things.
Back then, there were tens of thousands of active players, towns were filled with clones of your character, local chat was spammed with gold sellers, you had to actually work towards obtaining gear. Ahhh, what a time to be alive.
Upon my return, I created a brand new character – and there are a lot of characters to choose from now.
Each character has their own faction affiliation, however, it really doesn’t serve any purpose in my opinion.
Character creation is non-existent, thus my comment about all the clones running around the towns. There is customization, however. There are outfits, hairstyles.
You gotta make money somehow, and cosmetic items are one of the most popular methods with which to drain every last cent out of your cultured playerbase.
Each character has their own unique story, and their own unique starting area. Although admittedly some of those zones are shared.

closers-2-min

So there I was, jumping into the game for the first time in 4 years, not knowing what anything did or that I actually had an entire set of gear that allowed me to 1-shot every single monster, including bosses, for the hours I spent streaming this.
Yes, don’t be like me. Make sure to click all the notifications when starting a new game. More often than not, you’ll be gifted with gear so powerful, it’ll actually make you quit due to a lack of meaningful progression.
And that’s actually what kind of happened here. I spent over 3 hours doing nothing but clicking my abilities once each, and massacring entire hordes of monsters. There was absolutely no challenge present whatsoever.
You can see the drained look I have on my face. The sheer utter disappointment I had having learned that the fun, action combat I had once loved so much was now utterly pointless until much later through the game.

And I mean, don’t get me wrong. I understand the bulk of the game takes place at endgame. But Closers is the type of game that requires you re-run the same content in a vicious, repetitious cycle that is entirely unfulfilling, and just.. not at all fun.
Closers is a hub-MMO. Meaning that there are towns, cities, central “hubs” that players can co-exist within. You can see players, you can interact with them, and you can group up with them so you don’t have to push through content alone.
Progression takes the form of running dungeons. There’s no world to explore. You run instances. These instances consist of a couple different rooms with the same monster type, complete with a boss encounter towards the end.
These instances take a few minutes to complete each. Now imagine completing dungeons for hours where you do nothing but hold your right arrow key to move horizontally, and cycle through a few AoEs bound to your WASD keys.
If the dungeons were varied, that wouldn’t be so bad. But here? They send you through the same dungeons repeatedly, across several difficulty levels, where the only difference is how long the dungeons take because they increase the bosses HP’ exponentially, drawing out the encounters.
So in essence, you’re re-running the same dungeons repetitiously, engaging the same single monster type for hours at a time, all by yourself. For a new player, this isn’t the experience you want, and is likely not the experience to grip you. To retain your attention long enough to get to the better content.

closers-3-min

Thankfully, the combat is a saving grace. To a degree. Since you spend roughly 95% of your time in combat, and the other 5% skipping all the text the game is so cluttered with, it’s a good thing it’s not only highly fluid, but also incredibly flashy.
Interestingly, you move your character with your arrow keys, as opposed to your WASD keys or your left mouse button. This is something I don’t really see done in the MMO scene, and I understand why. It’s clunky moving your right hand between arrow keys and your mouse.
There are plenty of abilities you can learn, giving you a little in terms of individual class identity, and you’re capable of leveling every ability up. Honestly, I never have any idea what I’m doing so I always end up YOLOing it and hoping for the best. It hasn’t let me down yet.

Graphically, Closers utilizes an Anime aesthetic. Character models look stunning – they always have. They honestly possess some of the best looking characters you’ll find in an Anime MMO – better than PSO2, better than Aura Kingdom, better than SoulWorker.
These characters are incredibly well endow-er, developed- oh god, there’s no way of saying that without it coming off as… Ahem. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is pretty basic.
When you have characters that look as good as these characters do, and you have combat that is as stunning as is present within this game, and then everything else just looks so plain – ordinary – bland, you’re left with this sense that they really didn’t care about the world itself.
And again, I’m well aware the world isn’t the focal point of the game, but it wouldn’t have hurt them to put a little more effort into it – both inside and outside of the instanced dungeons.

Unfortunately, outside of the intro to the game I felt as though the narrative was pretty empty. “You’re an agent, go do this, kill that, talk to them.” It’s about what you’d expect out of a side-quest in an MMO – not the main scenario.
I attempted to read some of it but I felt it was just so unimportant and pointless that I ultimately ended up skipping it. And I’m a massive fan of story in my games. If there’s no story, typically I skip the game. I need to feel a sense of connection – to become enthralled in what’s going on so I remain interested and playing.
That’s something that Final Fantasy XIV has done for years that no other MMO has.

closers-1-min

In terms of content, there’s – well, a plethora of dungeons to run. The entire game is just one large dungeon-adventure. There are raids, although I’ve never actually participated in one. I don’t believe the population was ever large enough to support raids of this scale.
There’s PvP, although I never participated in it because… well I didn’t know it ever existed. I had to Google this to verify it did, and apparently it does. But given there are 70 people online right now.. I’m gonna speculate it isn’t popular enough to warrant even investigating.

At the end of the day, Closers has changed quite significantly from what it once was. And not in a good way.
This used to be filled with players, and while it’s impossible for any game to truly weather the test of time, it’s sad to see everywhere I went completely empty.
I found it awkward being thrust directly into the game at almost level 70, with no understanding of where I was, what my abilities did, and what gear I had. I wasn’t instructed to equip my gear – I had to manually redeem it from the mail. Something I honestly forget to check when starting new games, because I never anticipate anything being there.
Seriously, who’s gonna be mailing me? Having to grind the same monsters within the same instances over and over was something I wouldn’t wish upon any new player. It’s unenjoyable. Unintuitive. Uninspired. Unbelievably boring.
There isn’t a single thing, outside of the waifu-bait that I would say truly stands out about Closers anymore. When it was released 6 years ago? Sure, maybe. But there is no question in my mind as to why this game is dead. And yes, with 100 people logged in.. this game is officially dead.
I don’t think any amount of work could save this from being worth it when there are just better alternatives out there like Dungeon Fighter Online, Elsword, MapleStory, PSO2 or SoulWorker.

Is this the greatest MMO? No. Not even close to being a contender for that title.

Combat – 5/10 Honestly, for an Anime MMO this game has some pretty damn fun action combat.
Graphics – 4/10 Graphically, the character models were incredible to look at but everything else was flat and uninspired.
Narrative – 1/10 The narrative.. started off strong, and just.. disappeared. Even though I’m sure there’ll be the odd person in the comments section that argues that point.
World – 2/10 The world is.. small, and empty. There’s no reason for it. You might as well just queue for content from a small overview of zones.
Content – 5/10 It has about what every MMO has. Dungeons, raids, PvP. A lot of dungeons, though. Almost to a ridiculous level. I just wish so many of them weren’t copy/pasted.
Overall – 17/50 Honestly, I ended up rating this a little higher than I had originally thought I would. But that is mostly due to the character models and the combat.

Admittedly, Closers is a very basic hub-MMO. It doesn’t really provide anything worth playing – there are alternatives that offer everything this game does, but better. Better combat. Better graphics. Better worlds.
I loved this game. This was one of the games that really put our channel on the map, and it’s a shame to see it end up where it is now. But every good thing eventually comes to an end, and with Closers’ population as low as it is, it’s only a matter of time before it sunsets as well.
I guess this might genuinely be my last time ever playing it.

  • author image
    SunOh Reply
    Oct 31, 2022 @ 18:58 pm

    I changed a few things to make it more acceptable maybe and I added a few arguments, you don’t have to accept my previous comment. I couldn’t edit so I just wrote a new one.
    I hope you won’t leave my comment in “awaiting moderation” forever…
    Closers got so much to offer unless you don’t like 2.5D sidescroller (it’s also a very fast paced action game).
    Stix, please, don’t make this kind of ratings if you have close to no knowledge about the game, I don’t want people to get wrong ideas about the game.

    Story (narrative) :

    Please read before rating? You were literally skipping dialogues.
    Mirae isn’t killing those people and those childs. Her phase power is the scythe. She grew up on an island where a disease is spreading, seeing everyone becoming sick and dying since she’s born, while she stays alive because of phase power. The metaphor with the scythe was creative and sad at the same time. I read through story on a lot of characters, and I would legit put it a 10 out of 10, Closers’ universe is infinite. I don’t want to spoil but those chads implemented a lot of Eldritch Gods into the game. The game got voice overs during all main story dialogues and cutscenes for all the characters, areas and sectors there is. Not many MMOs out there have emotional and detailed stories with as much character development as Closers does. The devs also made the game in a way to make you read, and they succeeded, the majority of people I met read the story and enjoy it, just all the korean videos on youtube and twitter posts related to Closers story is enough of a proof.

    Combat :

    You said yourself it was fun. Why?
    It’s the best part of the game, the combat’s just insane, it got a lot of complex mechanics, similar to punishing gray raven for example. It gets harder pretty fast, first during leveling and by a lot in raids. Yeah quests give some gear but that’s all, and you never one shot bosses, not even mobs later on, trust me, Centum is rough with only story quests gear. You have to do late levels content on almost all characters as soon as you finished story quests (you can start before). Unless you took jumping event which happens once every season I think. Or it might be a bit more rare than that.
    To anyone who wants to start the game : Be aware that you’ll need fast reactions for perfect dodge timings, pattern learning and character knowledge. Once you get used to it you’ll be on fire don’t worry.

    World :

    The most questionable rating to me, but I’m not surprised either since you haven’t experienced anything to be able to give a rating for it.
    For a hub-instance mmorpg I sometimes wonder if it’s not an open world.
    This game got so many areas and sectors, going from South Korea to Afghanistan to USA to literally External Dimension.

    Graphics :

    Hard to say anything like this but the rating is nonsense. If you don’t believe me I can just show you because you’re severely wrong. But then again, same problem as for your World’s rating. Though, on this one, even the island area that you saw looks really good (not to mention the characters but you at least admitted they look great). Just that there’s much crazier and detailed designs out there.

    Content :

    Seriously?
    Everything I said before should be enough.
    More examples if it wasn’t.
    Fly King, Lust King, Machine King, Beast King.
    These 4 last raids we’ve got from Fantasy World: Dream Theater by themselves got 4 bosses each (4 different maps, different mechanics, music,..), including the core being the last you fight.
    Then the training programs in every city, all the other end game content from maps like Ancient Dragon Historic Site, Planar Gate/Puri ops.. which are basically comparable to raids (they are, just old)
    Yeah, I’ll stop there.
    Wait, no.
    Even events on Closers got their own stories, areas and sectors.

    (1st section added) F2P/P2W :

    If you are wondering, Closers is f2p. Unless you consider being in the top tcp (total combat power which is your overall stat) rankings a MUST for a f2p then I can’t help you (the rewards are not a must either but you’ll get something whatsoever even as a f2p you can still get good place on boards).
    The only thing I recommend to pay for is the VVIP of the game, if you want to grind credits to buy many costumes especially. For a fashion addict like me, it is needed.
    I consider p2w as paywalled content and Closers doesn’t have.
    Closers raids do not have stats requiremements which means you don’t have to minmax to join end game raids, you only want one thing, the recommended TCP (at least be close), and you NEED two things : skill, pattern knowledge.
    Everything you need gear wise on Closers to match recommended TCP, you can get by easy grind. End game will be much longer and heavy grind when you’ll go over the recommended tcp of the actual last raid though for example. But it’s still nowhere close to some grindy game like BDO or WoW lol.
    Fanguides are on the Closers World discord so if you wanna start the game join it so you know leveling advices, how to gear yourself up til you reach endgame, and of course how to build/play your characters. You’ll also be able to find a crew there, so don’t worry 👍
    Well, there’s also a lot of help that you can find in game, but it’s always better to talk with people.
    Fyi, you don’t get gear items just from one raid, you get them all from different places.

    (2nd section added) Devs – Community relation :

    I want to add this section simply because I believe it’s important. Closers is one of these games where the devs – community relation is actually taken into account all over the world. For 6 main reasons that I’m gonna mention.
    1. They do roadmaps, like this one : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQUUkGwkRTo (they even speak in english!)
    2. There is a discord official server for the World server.
    3. They do Q&As, like this –> https://www.closersonline.com/naddic_news/20221031-qa-with-the-closers-world-devs-answered/
    The discord had a specific channel for it and everyone could participate.
    4. There’s what’s called a Player Council in the discord.
    5. There’s a channel exclusively for bug reporters, anyone can get the role and get access to the channel to report bugs.
    6. The customer support is reactive and efficient.

    Sorry if I’m being salty, but I really love the game, I follow it since a long time and Naddic rarely disappointed me. For a lot of reasons *, it is underrated and unpopular, mainly because most people don’t know about it, but the game is alive and doing well thanks to the developpers doing their best with what they have, it’s the only reason Closers got a niche but loyal playerbase, of course in Asia there’s much more players but there’s at least a thousand active players here in World server, and even more with private server. You could have made a first impression review, but giving such ratings with your knowledge about the game, I can’t take it.

    *There was also the 2018 scandal because Naddic had a feminist artist and you know of feminism is seen in Korea, it’s getting SLIGHTLY better with the new young generation but that’s all. People left the game and when SoulWorker was at the edge of shutting down because of the release’s critical failure, Lion Games basically said feminism was bad and fired a feminist artist as well as deleted her artworks. Then people moved on SoulWorker. Despite the Closers’ feminist artist still working for Naddic, those same people are slowly coming back on Closers because of Lion Game’s CEO’s greed and I don’t give SoulWorker much time left considering the actual KR’s state.

  • author image
    SunOh Reply
    Nov 1, 2022 @ 5:09 am

    Things I may have forgot :

    – The music in the game is top tier and not only that but there are songs with lyrics as well.
    (examples of where there are songs with lyrics : in game cutscenes, each character’s song and themed costumes trailers on their youtube’s official channel -Nexon Closers-)
    – There’s a big diversity in the characters, everyone got very unique playstyles and they are all different from each other. (19 characters as of now, being 4 teams)
    – Coming back to the *, if it wasn’t clear enough for anyone who read my comment, yes, back in 2018 Naddic refused to fire the feminist artist and decided to stand for the cause despite the loss of income and players.

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