Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Combat is your typical auto-attack and activating special skills or abilities. Defeated enemies drop loot that you can recover. You have a mini-map to help you locate quest locations, but viewing your normal map can get difficult as that the text can obscure points of interest. Also, NPCs that have quests only show up on your mini-map if you’re extremely close. To help find available quests, you should go to the bulletin board located at the various hub sites. There, you can find a listing of the available quests in your area and who are the NPC contacts. There are also dungeons that you can go into, but they require a party to do so. There is PvP in the game in the form of arena fights.

The graphics for Prius Online are bright, colorful, and represent a more whimsical view of fantasy. One example is a monster that you’ll fight that are flying onions…yes, you read that right…flying onions. If you don’t like the anime visual style, then stay away from this game. Every character is done in the Eastern anima style. No rugged men (except for the Lon race) to be found here, only androgynous metrosexuals. Cuteness abounds in this game.

Bringing doom to the fearsome flying onions!

Prius Online is currently in closed beta and it shows its prerelease status in several ways. First, skills and crafting are not clearly explained within the game. There are tons of grammatical errors and the voiceover dubbing on the cutscenes is way off. The lack of drag-and-drop or hotkey selling in the player market and NPC dialogue trees should be improved. Another game aspect that can use some attention is if you happen to fail a quest. If you fail a quest, you just can’t start the quest over. You have to abandon the quest completely, go back to the original source of the quest and retake it, and then begin the quest anew.

The game is definitely more Western-friendly than other Asian imports, but shows the unmistakable hallmarks of a half-localized Eastern game. It will take a lot of time (ie: grinding) to make decent improvements to your Atrium. Crafting is pretty complicated and that it will take quite a bit of grinding to master. Plus, your Anima’s mood has an impact upon the crops that you’ll be cultivating, so I assume that you’ll be interacting with her quite a bit to make sure that she’s in the proper mood for whatever you’re trying to cultivate.

Overall, I had a nice experience trying out Prius Online. It’s certainly rough around the edges as it’s still in beta and slowly being reworked for Western audiences. While there a few things that need improvement, gameplay is solid, if largely unimaginative, and the setting is visually appealing. The 3C system of character, animas, and gigas is genre adapted take on AI-controlled mercenaries / minions, but is arguably better done – since stoy is told through the squad and more fun to play with. There are some aspects of the game that minimized my enjoyment (the grindy aspects of crafting and gameplay in general), but without a cash shop its impossible to see how free-play purist-friendly the game is. If you like the anime premise of Prius Online and its squad based features, there’s no harm in checking out Prius Online when it officially launches later in 2011.

A Gigas in action.