CABAL's shortfalls? A seasoned player's take.(1/3)

Those guys who know me very well would know that I can't survive without games. I'd go on another time about how I started playing something called "Three Dirty Dwarves" because of influence, but right now, I'll be talking about CabalSEA.

CabalSEA is of course, the South-East Asian server for ESTsoft's latest MMORPG offering. Clearly a game targeted at mature audiences, with a design schema for clothings that tend towards the more sensual or more rebellious, it's a far cry from MapleStory's 2D cutish image.

To digress, a little comical contest between a Dragon Knight and a Level 10x Blader would probably go on and on.

The game itself is not revolutionary than evolutionary. The basic premise of character leveling is still there, and grinding is still by and far an important thing not to be missed out. The idea of upgrading an equipment or slotting an equipment is not new either - I could think of Ragnarok Online with both - but skill rank leveling is a tad different.

Simply put, skill rank leveling would probably be a closer simulation to "martial arts practicing", in terms of grinding you have to do just for leveling skills. It does take a lot of time, and unlike character leveling it does not show results as immediately, but once you get used to the system it's everything goes. If you're up for grinding, that is.

Once again, the game employs the use of the F2P + Cashshop mechanism that has so far appeared in Trickster, Ragnarok Online Malaysia (one of its free servers), MapleStory... the list goes on and on, how about ijji.com GunZ with non-permanent avatars? Most of this is standard offerings, until one notices that there is a premium system available for those with money (i.e. kids, sorry, we don't *exactly* encourage you... that right, Asiasoft?) and then this throws the game into a weird tilt with no exact gauge of measure for balance. The rich levels faster and get rich faster; the poor, of course the exact opposite.

One thing I like for every game is to have some decent translation, not super-half-baked Engrish. I'm going to talk about DJ Max Portable 2 in the future, but this game - as well as another horrendous game called KalOnline - has the kind of Engrish that is absent in CabalSEA, for the most part. CabalSEA may have been ported direct off the CabalEU servers, though, so the jury is still out on whether it was translated for the EU or exclusively to SEA. Whatever it was, the minor errors are almost ironed out and only a few grammatical mistakes mar the game. Spoiler: The Sage Veradrix could sometimes be rendered as "the Veradrix Sage".

Excellent for a Korean-based company.

Next time, I'll be on to in-depth analysis of the game.