NosTale in 2020 – How is the Anime MMORPG?

NosTale in 2020 - How is the Anime MMORPG?

So it has been a long while since I played NosTale. A year? Two years? Either way, it’s been too long. I’ve heard for the longest time now that the game is still alive and kicking but never had the time to really jump in.
The game is a little older than what I typically play after all and I know for a fact, after having played Tales of Pirates and FlyFF for the longest time that these kinds of games have a large time investment required.
But that isn’t bad – I just don’t have that long to dedicate to more than one, maybe 2 games at any given time anymore.
So I figured you know what? How about I message Gameforge and make them a little proposition: I wanted to do two videos for the game: One at an introductory level, and one at a much higher level.
Thus I asked them if they would be willing to sponsor a playthrough by providing Mrs Stix and I both two high level characters. That way we could do two videos, from two perspectives, showcasing two different stages of the game.
Thankfully they agreed, and.. yeah, well here we are.

So, NosTale is a free-to-play Anime inspired MMORPG released back in 2006. Yeah, no kidding, the game was released back in 2006 – it’s been online now for 14 years and is still played by quite a significant portion of players.
The game actually employs systems that you might not really be all that familiar with if you haven’t played games from that generation.
Movement is controlled by clicking, as opposed to moving with the more traditional WASD keys. Not only that, but combat is.. well, I wanna go ahead and say tab-target because that’s probably the closest thing you can compare it to.
But it isn’t tab-target. Instead, you’re kind of required to hover over the enemy with your mouse and click to attack. Like most MMOs you also have skills you can cycle through with whatever you keybind them to.
I plan on hopefully expanding on that a little bit in the follow-up video when I have access to a larger variety of them.
Accompanying you into battle is your trusty.. slave? I wanna say pet but at the same time you literally go about capturing these things by beating them half to death with a stick.
So you’re essentially mentally and physically abusing them into submission. That’s the definition of a slave! These poor things are our slaves and they do our bidding.
From what I gathered there are plenty of different creatures that you can collect. It’s almost like a Pokemon game in that aspect.
We started off with chickens and ended up with sheep, but Mrs Stix wanted to catch literally every thing she could. You’re only capable of capturing monsters of lower level than you though and we didn’t come across many of those.
I will admit that monster levels increase by area quite substantially.

Right, on that note, the world is segregated. It isn’t open-world, instead having players take place within a “zone,” kind of like Final Fantasy XIV or Blade & Soul.
Each “zone” has their own suggested levels along with monster levels and quests associated with them.
Then there are these instanced “missions,” which are small little instances that you can enter either with other players or solo.
They’re multi-roomed, having waves of enemies you have to defeat before the timer runs out. But that isn’t all – we made it to one point that stated we could actually begin a raid by initiating the instanced “mission” queue.
But I mean.. we were too low level for that, and even if we were high enough level, I can’t say there would be anyone within our immediate level range that would even wanna party with us.
The instances themselves give some pretty good loot though. We both got a head piece and glasses – and if you know Mrs Stix, you’ll know she’s a bit of a fashion addict.
Any opportunity to customize her character and she’s gonna jump at it.

We only made it to around level 12. But that was because we wanted to run around and explore as opposed to just pursuing the main story.
I just wanted to see how the combat was, see the graphical style and gauge the general difficulty of the game.
I can safely say that this game is incredibly difficult. It doesn’t hold your hand – it doesn’t provide you with quest markers and requires you actually pay attention to what’s going on.
While yes, at times we had an arrow direction us appropriately, most the time we were left hovering over NPC names on the map trying to find out where we were supposed to be going.
This is something sorely missing in MMOs these days and I kinda miss it. But then again I don’t have the same time I used to to just wander around aimlessly, so I still like being told where I need to go.

Overall, the game is difficult. Monsters almost killed us both several times.
But exploring around and running those instances for both gear and cosmetic items – even in the low 1-15 areas was interesting.
I’m honestly curious to see how later-game looks especially since we’ll get to see all the other players actively participating in content.

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