One of my favorite genres, as I’m sure you all know, are mechas: mecha TV, mecha games, mecha anime and even little mecha toys. But especially watching the anime shows. Honestly there’s a good chance that if you DM’d me at any point in the week I’d be currently watching one mecha show or another. The anime takes me back to my evenings (or maybe afternoons it all blurs together these days) of watching Toonami to catch up on some Gundam Wing. Some might think that I had already skipped out on some of the true, OG mecha anime, but like it or not it and Dragon Ball Z are what I cut my teeth on.
So every time I learn about a game, especially an MMO, taking part in the mecha limelight I can’t help but take note of it. Even in my Fight or Kite columns I’ve touched on several different games. From Steel Hunters and Gundam Evolution to Mecha Break and even little Super Mecha Champions BR. Now the quality of these games has been… sub-par, to put it mildly. In fact I think Mecha Break is the only one of those games that hasn’t sunset yet! Yikes. Hopefully that’s not the curse of the FoK.
This week I’m taking a look at RF Online Next. Apparently it is actually a sequel to the original RF Online released way back in the yesteryear of 2005! Well, what caught my attention was the announcement recently of 900 player PvP battles. That sounds fantastic. A quick perusal of the game’s features and screenshots makes it look fantastic. This is going to be fun, right?
RF Online Next is available on PC and mobile devices. Initially I really wanted to play the game on my PC, who doesn’t? I didn’t put that Linux box together for show after all. Although, partially I did; I’ll link to it every time I can! People should know!
The bad news was that it isn’t available on Steam, though it is in the Epic Games Store. Alternatively, it can be downloaded through the Netmarble launcher as well. Naturally I began by trying the Epic Games Store but I kept running into a strange error about closing the launcher to download. Bizarre. I tried every trick in the book I could think of but nothing worked.
Then I downloaded the Netmarble launcher and tried installing it through that method, but even then it failed. As far as I could tell it had something to do with SQL or some other function. Honestly, this isn’t the first issue I’ve ever had running games on Linux, but it is the first time in a while. I usually don’t have this issue playing your run-of-the-mill single player or even multiplayer games. It tends to happen with MMOs though. It’s got to be something about the extra launchers they often want to run to open their games. Often I’ll find that smarter gamers than me have these issues all figured out but I suppose RF Online Next hasn’t quite hit that critical mass in the US to have encouraged one of these brainiacs to solve the problem for me.
Alas, my PC hopes for RF Online Next were dashed. Fortunately I do have a fairly capable Android foldable so I was able to simply install it through the Google Play store and rock and roll from there.
RF Online Next features all the good stuff you’ve come to expect from an Eastern MMO import. The animations and graphics are really quite nice. Character creation has all the good sliders, colors, and options that you want when building a new hero.
When I’m taking a game super cereal, I’ll often spend hours just on the character creator. We all do, right? It’s one of the best parts. Sadly, I’ve found myself more and more often running out of time to really dedicate to my character. So, I tend to hit up that randomize button several handfuls of times up until I look about as pretty as I like to be. And truly, the boy is beautiful.
Tutorial-wise we begin with some basic movement controls and attacks. Combat is action oriented with some tab targeting and… wait a minute. Oh boy. Oh geez. That’s an auto button isn’t it? Let’s go ahead and tap that sucker and… yeah, we have a fully auto-play game. Wow, what a let down.
So apparently RF Online Next includes the same auto play mechanic as Raven2. Which, as soon as I saw that, I began to realize that pretty much everything gameplay-wise was almost identical to Raven2. The menu layout. The entire UI itself even. Basically everything is the same. They’ve taken Raven2 and laid a different veneer over the top but it’s actually the same three kids in a trench coat! It’s as if the developers did a simple asset swap to replace the horror and Lovecraftian theme with a mecha one.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. Both games are developed by Netmarble so it’s understandable that they’d have some of the same DNA, but what they share in this case disappoints.
So I did what any good writer and researcher would do at this point: I just let it play for me. I had to keep the game open so that it wouldn’t consider me completely idle and log me out, but otherwise I just let it sit and play itself for essentially the entire day. Luckily, have a foldable makes that very easy.
I was able to get up to level 40, which I think is getting up there in the game. At least from the menus I’m beginning to unlock most of the game’s features. The first world boss is now available for me to participate in too. They spawn on a timer from the Dungeons menu so it’s easy to see and join. It appears that battlegrounds unlock at 45, which I wasn’t quite able to level up to before this column was published. So sadly, I can’t say just how boring auto PvP battlegrounds are.
Apparently there is straight-up, open world PvP too. There’s even a leaderboard. I couldn’t tell what the point of it was though. RF Online Next has a Wanted system, wherein if you’ve initiated PvP on an unsuspecting player you’ll be flagged as much and other players will be able to attack you freely without penalty. And everything I could tell about open world PvPing would result in negatives for the player who started it. It didn’t look like players drop their loot when I killed them, so I don’t know what the point of it is at all.
Overall, I don’t know really. I come back to the same question I had when I played Raven2. Which is: what is the point of it? Is it even a game, really? If you can just put the game on auto-play and I literally don’t have to interact with it to talk to NPCs, pick up quests, move from quest to quest, or even tap any buttons to continue fighting then what are we even doing here? I suppose the theme is cool and the graphics are nice. But there’s probably a better movie to watch if that’s all I’m doing here.
RF Online Next is free-to-play. It’s on mobile so there’s not really anything stopping you from launching it. But is this actually a game to play? I don’t know.
