While waiting to see if I will be able to keep playing the US Fiesta game or not, I decided to try out a new mmorpg. Most of them look pretty boring – a few interesting ones were not for EU players of course. Sigh. (The moment Concerto Gate gets a server that allows me to play, I will try it right away. Looks awesome.)

In the end I decided to try out Holic. Here’s a stream of thoughts and comments that came to mind during my first attempt at the game.

After installing, I find out that this game has a strange way of launching. The exe points me to their website, where I have to press a button that opens up the launcher. Huh. The launcher screen is very pretty though! Which is a good thing since I had to wait forever for all the updates to install and get ready.

Character creation. The graphics in this game are really cute, and there are more possibilities for costumizing your character from the beginning than in Fiesta. This is also where I noticed something different in this game – there are two races. You can make your character look like this:

Isn’t it adorable? Makes me think of the Moogles in FFXII.

I enter the game and realise that the NPC’s have voices here. I also realise that this game runs badly on my laptop with constant lagging – just enough for the game not to notice every other button I press, and for the music to skip around constantly. I try re-installing it on my other computer, and here it runs fine. Guess this game is a little more demanding than Fiesta is.

Don’t I look cool?

Looks like people ride around on giant birds in this game. I also hear that you can make use of a “human cannon” to travel between distant places.

As mentioned the graphics in this game are decent, but I think the mapping is a little lacking in some parts. I mean, this isn’t exactly the most exciting plain I’ve seen.

Could be better in other areas though. At least there aren’t illogical invisible walls all over the place like in Fiesta yet.

One of the other curious things in this game is that apparently your character can have two classes at the same time, and switch between them. I haven’t tried this yet though, so I don’t know how well it works.
And I really have to get used to the new controls again. At first it annoyed me that the camera couldn’t zoom out very far – until I noticed that this is something you can adjust in the game options. And I’m sure I will end up wasting many potions out of the habit of clicking “2” every time I kill a monster…

Guess this game is decent enough for me to try out for a little while longer, although it feels kind of odd so far. Hopefully I will be able to return to Fiesta at some point as well.