Asura Online: A Potential Rival to Diablo III
By Date: 11-26-2012 Views:
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Asura Online is a 2.5D action MMORPG developed by Tencent Games. The CBT is started on 26th Nov 2012. A brief introduction and review of the game based on this CBT is presented in this article.
Character Selection
Story
The background story is based on the famous Chinese classical novel “Journey to the West”, with a darker setting and minor twists. You will start the game at the Flower Fruit Mountain, where the legendary monkey king Sun Wukong once lived. One day, you received a Mark on your body which the monkey king once had too. Driven by a sense of destiny, you left your home and set out to explore the world, seeking the reason of the mark appearance and its link to the fate of the world.
The story background is indeed compelling, especially if you have read the original story of “Journey to the West”. The stories are unveiled through various cut-scenes with good voice-acting. As you travel around the world, it is not hard to note that the towns, monsters and NPCs’ do make reference to the original novel. However, as far as I know, the storyline for all 6 playable characters are the same and might cause boredom when you try to replay another new character/class.
Classes and Skills
There are a total of 6 characters released in this CBT, namely Raksa, Fox Spirit, Exiled God, Monkey, Dragonette and Goristro. Raksa is a mage class with the ability to use spells of fire, lightning, ice and wind elements. Fox spirit uses bow for long range attack and can summon animals to add him in battle. Exiled God is a melee damage dealer who is specialized in spear/lance. Monkey can fight with bare hands or staff while Dragonette wields twin- blade. Goristro which looks like demon bull is the classical tanker character. Unfortunately, all characters are gender-lock and no customization on the character physical or facial feature are allowed. Despite the lack of character customization, all the armors and weapons have unique visual appearance when equipped by players.
Players gain two type of skill point by leveling up, namely Mastery Point and Proficient Point. Mastery Points are used to learn new skills and level up the skill to improve its damage. Proficient Points, on the other hand, are added to a skill to change the nature of the skill, adding new combo to the skill or improve its effect. For example, the basic lightning spell of Raksa can only deal damage to 1 target initially; after putting 1 Proficient Point, the lightning spell will jump to another nearby target after hitting the first, dealing damage to both. Another example is, when you put 1 Proficient Point into Dragonette’s first sword skill, you will realize that the same skill will deal an additional slash after an upper cut. More Proficient Point can be invested at higher level to further power-up and improve the basic skill to generate rich skill variations, even with the same class.
