Character Customization and Equipment

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My Mercenary gear looks pretty spiffy!

As I mentioned in my first impressions, your character has a limited amount of customization choices when created. However, your character’s physical appearance can be customized further with purchases. For a million penya (a drop in the bucket at higher levels), your character can see a makeup artist for a little plastic surgery and can get an entirely new face. Or he/she can change hairstyles with the help of a hair designer. You can further customize your characters using the item shop, where you can use real world money to buy in-game items.

The item shop has a few functional items, but the majority of the items sold there are cosmetic. You can buy fancy clothes (all of which take different slots than your armor on your character), masks, fancy hair (such as Egyptian style, spiked up cactus style, or a fro), and even change the sex of your character. The premium wearable items from the item shop, such as masks, have a small stat bonus attached to them. Like the armor you can buy in game, or find as loot, all of the wearable items in the item shop are limited to the gender of your character. Female characters cannot wear the hip hop suits, male character cannot wear the workout suits (which is probably a good thing, since we would probably not want to see any R1ch4rdS1mm0ns in the game).

Armor that is found or bought is pretty snazzy on its own. Personally, I found it easier to buy armor after level 15. This is because the armor that is found by looting is limited by not only gender, but class as well. So it can take quite a while to find a complete set that fits your class and gender.

There are two types of weapons available for each class. Mercenaries can only use axes and swords. Assists are limited to sticks and knuckle weapons. Magicians have staves and wands. Acrobats use bows and yo-yos for their ranged attacks. Weapons that are found are not limited by gender, but are limited by class. Like armor, these can be bought as well as found in loot. It is easier to find a good weapon off a mob than it is to get a full set of armor.

Flying

The ultimate reason that many players want to try this game is so that they can fly. Flying in Flyff is quite entertaining. You gain the flying skill at level 20 and must then purchase a broom or a board to fly on. These are reasonably priced and shouldn’t be hard to find. The station master will instruct you on the controls and allow you to purchase your first broom or board. The controls are a bit tricky to master and airborne combat is unlike anything I’ve seen in any game.

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Flying in Flyff is easy; attacking while flying...that takes practice.

The controls for flying are fairly simple. To begin, equip your broom or board. Hit spacebar to start or stop, use your WASD keys for movement or use your right mouse button (the easier way, in my opinion). While flying, you use your middle mouse button (the scroll button) to change the camera angle. To dismount from your broom or board, simply double click the item in your inventory. There is no falling damage, so you can dismount practically anywhere.

Airborne combat takes practice. I still do not have the hang of it. Each flying enemy will have a red target box appear around it when you get close; to target, you must hit the Tab button. You can cycle through enemies by hitting Tab as well. The next best thing to do is to hit “Z”. This enables you follow the enemy you have targeted. This is where it gets tricky. You have to keep double-clicking the enemy to attack. You will lose your target if you stop flying (by hitting the spacebar) or fail to land an attack. If this happens, you have to start all over by targeting the creature again. Any loot that drops will land in mid air and can be picked up just like loot on the ground.

As a melee fighter (which is what I chose), you must be within melee range to attack. This means that you stand the chance of becoming motion-sick while attacking in the air, because you will continually circle around your enemy in order to attack it.

Alternate Activities

There are other activities available in Flyff for those who are bored with combat and wish to do something different for a while. For example, weapons can be upgraded by collecting materials from a collection area. This requires the purchase of a collector and its battery. During the collection process you have roughly a 50% chance to receive items that can be used to upgrade your equipment. These include stone pieces and card pieces. When you have 10 of these pieces, you can turn them in for a jewel or card, which are the materials used for upgrading.

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I didn't sell too much in my shop. Maybe I should have opened in a better location.

Another activity is the player shop. This is a good way to get rid of unwanted items and make a few penya as well. It’s also a good activity to begin if you are going to be away from your desk for a while. You can set up your shop through an option in the start menu, then just sit and wait for people to come and buy your items. There is a chat interface so that you can speak with your customers if you wish.

Pros and Cons

There are a few things in this game that did not sit too easily with me. Starting out can be pretty rough in the world of Roika, and the lack of direction is a big hurdle to overcome. For those who are just starting out in MMOGs, this could turn them off completely. There is nothing to do when you first enter the game, no friendly NPC that says, “we have an Aibatt problem, why don’t you go take care of a few for us and hey, it will help you gain some experience too!” The first quest isn’t available until level 7, hardly any of the NPCs will talk to you other than to introduce themselves and the only thing that there is to do until you can get quests is go out and kill stuff. The little guide is not that helpful either. He tells you how to move and how to attack, and that’s about the extent of his conversation with you. He sleeps in the lower right corner of your screen the rest of the time.

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You can't see the city for the chat!

Another turnoff is the chat and store bubbles. They are everywhere and there is no option to turn them off. It is hard to see, much less find, anything at all when in town because every person with a private store has a store bubble above their head. Add all the fragmented-English NPC chat and player chat and you have a cacophony of bubbles that makes my poor old computer want to cry while lagging.

Loot actually drops on the ground and can be picked up by anyone running by. This is something I haven’t seen in quite a while, and while the majority of the Flyff community is quite nice, there are a few scoundrels who will run up and steal your loot if you are not quick to pick it up. Quest items that drop are the number one target for these thieves and it can get quite frustrating at times. On the plus side, you become quite proficient at spamming your “Pick Up Nearby Items” button as soon as your enemy bites the dust.

Gender based clothing…I hate it. As a female character, I picked up so much male armor that I could have outfitted an entire male army to take over the world. Then, after conquering the world, I would have used my power to change the rule that females cannot wear male armor (and vice versa). Alas, instead, I simply grumbled, sold the armor and bought the female versions of the same armor.

On the plus side, I love the diversity of outfit styles available. Roika is a colorful world and the people that inhabit it exhibit that in every way. The outfits available in-game were cute, especially the starting Mercenary outfit. I looked kind of like a postal-worker-gone-runway.

Cute seems to be the standard for the entire world of Roika. Even the monsters are cute. Little puke-pukes running around with their oversized coats and magician hats, nyangnyangs that are catlike female creatures that meow at you while you kill them, and demians (Chuckie dolls on steroids) are all part of the colorful coterie that inhabit the island of Flaris and the surrounding land masses.

And lastly, flying is quite fun in Flyff, once you get the hang of it. If a game allows you to fly, all to often it’s only used as a form of transport. But in Flyff, you not only get to fly between locations, you get to kill stuff along the way!

Conclusion

I had my ups and downs with Flyff. There were parts of the game that I absolutely loved. Likewise, there were parts that caused me to pause and count to ten before continuing. However, as much as there were annoying parts to the game, I found myself wanting to continue playing it more and more each day. Especially so after hitting level 20 and getting into the actual content of the game, rather than just working on getting my character up to that point.

While I think that it wouldn’t hurt to add a few improvements (such as a tutorial at the beginning) to Flyff, overall it was a fun experience and one that I may not be finished with yet.

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(2.5 / 5 Hammers)

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Recommendation: