Ten Ton Hammer’s  href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/giveaways/2009/001"
target="_blank">Why Not YNK? Giveaway just ended
on February 15, 2009, but I was intrigued by their titles. I had
already played and mostly enjoyed  href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/49990" target="_blank"> style="font-style: italic;">Rohan, so
Seal Online
seemed like a safe bet. I understood that style="font-style: italic;">Seal is a
completely different animal than Rohan;
the former uses stylized graphics to please the younger crowd while the
latter employs realistic graphics to draw in older gamers. Once I
played Seal,
I discovered other differences that took me by surprise.

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It looks so
innocent in the beginning.

The surprises didn’t come with character creation. style="font-style: italic;">Seal uses the
typical setup of asking players to select their gender and allowing
them to make a few customizations to try to look different. Gamers can
choose their class at creation or pick a generic type of adventure to
explore with first. The idea is that the generic adventuring class will
give access to skills from each of the other classes and permit the
player to choose based on which skills fit his style best. The real
classes include warrior, knight, mage, priest, jester, and craftsman.
The first four classes were standard fare, but the last two at least style="font-style: italic;">sounded different,
which drew my interest. The craftsman turned out to be a sort of
hard-hitting melee character that could blend in some spells. I went
with the jester because sounded a bit like a bard from  href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/38"
target="_blank">EverQuest.

After creating a character and picking a class, gamers must
choose
where to start. Choices include some starter cities or a tutorial camp.
The in-game screens don’t really offer any assistance with this
decision, and it seems it does matter. Cities have trainers for a
handful classes but not all of them. Of course, I learned this the hard
way. I went to the tutorial camp and did a few quests but quickly grew
bored. When I spoke to the transporter NPC to join the “real” world, I
received no advice on where I should go as a Jester.

The tutorial camp in Seal
turned out to be a waste of time for me, which stood in stark contrast
to my experience in Rohan.
I didn’t learn how to play the game even though the NPCs had some basic
quests to teach me how to move, manage inventory, and fight. The quests
gave ambiguous descriptions and I was unable to complete one quest that
asked me to gather components from crates because I couldn’t find the
crates (and the quest description gave no hint to their location). My
tutorial experience baffled me because style="font-style: italic;">Rohan held my hand
through each quest and really taught me about the gameplay. I guess it
is fair to say that my positive experience with the tutorial in style="font-style: italic;">Rohan built an
expectation that I’d get equally thorough treatment in style="font-style: italic;">Seal since it seems
to cater to younger players who are likely to need a good walkthrough
of the basics.

One mental note I made during the tutorial was that I visited
a special NPC who dispenses jobs whenever I needed a quest. style="font-style: italic;">Seal reminded me a
bit of my experiences with href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/46419" target="_blank"> style="font-style: italic;">Florensia
and  target="_blank">Sword
of the New World in that respect. That was okay
for a tutorial area, but I was disappointed to see an identical NPC in
the city once I teleported. It’s hard to feel excited about the lore of
a world and feel connected to any character (including my own) when I
constantly get quests from a lady who runs odd jobs for the whole
world. 

Parting Thoughts

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The Ten Ton
Hammer legal team would not permit us to expose helpless bystanders to
the combat sounds, so just look at this picture instead.

Ostensibly, Seal
is about the battle between two factions of gods as it is manifested in
their chosen races. One side of the battle has disappeared and no one
knows why. I didn’t play long enough to see if this real story emerges.
The quests I saw were like day labor activities. Seriously. Again, this
was different from my positive in experience in style="font-style: italic;">Rohan where the
story was very strong early in the game.

The few quests I did run sealed (oh no!) the deal and ensured
I’d not be playing Seal
Online more than once. One quest asked me to collect 30
pieces of wool from rabbits ( href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8c/EnglishAngoraRabbit.jpg/792px-EnglishAngoraRabbit.jpg"
target="_blank">wooly rabbits, okay?). I romped
through the cutesy world until I came to a field clustered with the
critters. I slaughtered one, wincing at the odd chirping noise it made
when I threw my knife at it and the even more peculiar death rattle it
issued on the last hit. The sound was annoying, but at least I— style="font-style: italic;">what the hell? It didn’t drop a
piece of wool? It was then that I figured out that killing
quest mobs did not guarantee quest drops. I killed over a hundred of
these squeaking, hopping, noise-making bunnies to get my wool for that
quest. The sound effects had driven me crazy by then, and I might have
drooled on my shirt a bit. It’s a little hazy now.

Memories I wish I could suppress aside, style="font-style: italic;">Seal has at least
one feature worth mentioning. The world is divided into zones like many
others, but the cool part is that players can see the levels of the
mobs in each zone from the world map. I imagine that is a handy feature
for anyone who does a couple more of the wooly rabbit quests, turns
into a zombie, and plays into the high levels in the game.

Finally, I should mention that the name of the world is
“Shiltz.” I avoided naming it all this time to resist the obvious
jokes, but my inner jester got the best of me in the end. style="font-style: italic;">Seal Online is a
colorful world that may appeal to some young gamers, but anyone who
plays for a couple of hours won’t give a Shiltz.