I gave it a shot and it wasn't horrible. The voice acting however, is beyond atrocious. I'd rather they just ripped out all the voice acting and left it as text only. It's really that bad. The scene where you learn about anima death/resurrection was by far the worst. Hearing that Lon Mas say "Muahaha, it's about time we put an end to this!" in the worst possible voice imaginable killed it for me. I think you actually have to try to get voice acting that bad. Even taking random people off the streets and having them read a few lines into a mic would sound better. I'm not even joking about that. Seriously.
The race/gender locking of classes is bad as well. I wanted to try the Minstrel out, but had to play as a Beriah female. The closed beta text was horribly mangled, so I had no idea what was even going on half the time which is never good.
I also see people commenting on Aika's Pran system, but it seems that Prius came out first over seas and that Aika copied it but just came out over here first. Or so I'm told anyway.
I'll have to check it out once the game goes into OB/live since the CB was extremely limited with the low level cap and whole areas closed off. It looks like OB will be about a month after CB finishes, so hopefully they fix it up in time.
Can Prius Online's Vibrant World Keep Us Playing?
Senior Staff Writer Chris "Pwyff" Tom tried to immerse himself in Prius Online, but just couldn't stay submerged for the whole experience.
It seems like every month a new free-to-play MMORPG gets ported over from Asia to North America and, for the month of May, gamers will be getting their "new MMO itch" scratched early with the announcement of gPotato's Prius Online. Of course, with the market already as saturated as it is, Prius Online will require something to set it apart from the masses, so I hopped into its closed beta test (which ends on May 8) to see if this new MMO will sink or float in our big, wide ocean of F2P MMOs.
Prius Online comes with a rather interesting plot: in the beginning there were "Star Creators" who competed against each other by creating their own separate worlds and life forms. The youngest of the Star Creators, Hooul, takes the longest to create his own world, Prius, but when he finally finishes, he decides to throw an enormous birthday bash on his new planet. However, all but one of Hooul's fellow Star Creators is too busy to attend the party, so they send their various creations instead. Hilariously enough, the one Star Creator who does attend the party, Aira, ends up getting her "star seeds" stolen, and she retaliates by trapping all of the party guests on the planet and then declaring war on them. To make a long story short, the various races found on Prius are actually stranded intergalactic party guests, trapped on a foreign planet and cut off from their respective creators.
With this eccentric background, I thought that Prius Online would have some unique races to choose from, but it seems like all of the Star Creators had anime on the mind when they were creating their respective races. At the time of my playing, there were a total of four races to choose from: the Humans (Hume), the scantily clad demi-beasts (Lon Mas and Lon Femina), the small elvish girls (Beriah) and the tall flamboyant elvish males (Ayin).
Unfortunately, having four races doesn't actually translate to having a lot of choice, because all of the classes in Prius Online are gender and race locked. Basically this means that if I wanted to play an offensive mage, then I'd be stuck playing as a skinny Hume Male Occultist. If I wanted to be a healer, then I was going to be a female Beriah Minstrel. Prius Online's one tank class, the Berserker, is assigned to the bulky male Lon Mas, while the female Lon Femina is given the role of Huntress, a support DPS class. For physical DPS, I had to choose between playing as a female Hume Gunslinger or the male Ayin Legionnaire (Rogue). I settled on a Hume Gunslinger for my adventuring needs.
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Tags: Editorial, PriusOnline