I’ve been playing RPGs and video games as far back as I can remember. Just like I’m sure so many of you, I cut my teeth on the NES and games like Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Warrior. And yes, I now know that it was actually Dragon Quest, but back then we had Dragon Warrior. Old-school pixel RPGs take me to a very comfortable place.
So any time I see a new 8- or 16-bit inspired game, I am immediately drawn into it. At a minimum, I’m going to read up on what the game features are and what the gameplay is about. In the case of single-player games, you just need to mention Metroidvania anywhere and I’m already sold. I love and have played so many of those.
But in the MMO space, the games are fewer and harder to come by. Then last week I saw our report that Kakele Online was opening up a new hardcore PvP server. Color me extremely interested. I hadn’t heard of Kakele before, but the concept plus browsing through some screenshots of the game looked promising. Plus there’s PvP. What could go wrong?
Kakele Online features most of the gameplay you expect from an MMO and possibly even more. You’ve got combat, of course, but also gathering, pets, mounts, housing, fishing, gardening, and a bunch of classic MMO fetch quests. I will say that I didn’t get to do any crafting, but there were hammers and anvils placed around, so I imagine there’s some system for it that I might have blazed past.
Players have five classes to choose from (called Vocations in game): Warrior, Berserker, Mage, Hunter, and Alchemist. Fairly classic tropes, though usually you’d expect to see an assassin or rogue class too instead of the Alchemist. I’m not complaining about it. While you do have a bunch of options for choosing your appearance, the Alchemists all largely look like mad scientists, which is fun.
You basically have the full rainbow of colors to choose from for all of your character’s aesthetics. This isn’t a game where your equipment actually changes your visuals. Instead, you have a look that you can change at any time: Just pop open the menu and select a different hair, outfit, or whatever. There are a bunch of outfits and skins that can be purchased (and presumably some that are earned); once unlocked, they can always be set up on the fly. You can even save a look for popping back and forth between your favorites.
Combat is very fast and heavy click- and tap-driven. While you do not have a strict hotbar for your skills, you are able to assign any that you’ve unlocked onto a hotkey (at least on PC). Every class has its own set of skills, but the game refers to them all as spells, so after you’ve leveled and unlocked some spells, you can simply assign them to a key.
I played Kakele on my PC through Steam, but I’m aware that it also has mobile apps available. I was very close to downloading and going that route but haven’t turned that leaf over yet.
My final note about the features that would-be players should probably be aware of is that there is some voiceover audio in game that seemed a bit robotic. I won’t throw shade one way or another (I know the ViVa Games studio devs are based largely in Brazil, and I know localization is expensive), but it was unexpected.
The game itself runs pretty smoothly. I think I preferred its fluidity to what I saw when I played Ravendawn a couple of years ago. While the games are very different, they fall into the same category of gaming for me.
When you start out in Kakele, you’re dropped on a small island with a pet capybara, which is pretty cute to be honest. In fact, you’ll see there are a ton of capybara-themed icons and quests in the game. Your very first tutorial quest is to stop a bandit who’s capturing them. Even the little popup tutorial hints and support are all spoken by a little capybara.
Now, I think I’ll need to pull back on my shade comment just a little at least with respect to the combat. You’ll notice that you’re able to move fairly fluidly throughout the game, as in, you don’t feel like you’re walking on a grid as much as you clearly are. But when it comes to combat, things get springy! I’m in Texas, and I joined the South American server so that I could take part in the recently launched hardcore server, so that could have been a factor, but it is still very bouncy.
Monsters respond to your presence pretty quickly and will do their best to surround you. The game also employs full body blocking, so once you are surrounded, you are not going anywhere soon. On top of the rubberbanding sending you back into a spot that you only thought you’d sneaked through, the attacks aren’t actually swinging into hitboxes in a very smooth way.
Let me try to explain another way: Imagine back to playing a Zelda-style RPG. You swing the sword, and the hero has a little sword swoop-out that hits the monsters. If the monsters are outside the reach of the sword when it swipes, then they don’t get hit. It’s natural. In Kakele Online, it doesn’t work that way. If you’re in a grid adjacent to an enemy when you use a melee attack, it’ll show the attack animation, but it just has a bit of jank to it.
Which brings me to a little tangent on pixel MMOs and the level of jank they basically all seem to have: When we have real fully immersive 3-D animated heroes and even VR games where you can literally be in the midst of a barrage of attacks, I don’t understand why basically every pixel MMO combat ends up so janky! It just seems like we should be past the point that combat in a simple 2-D MMORPG would be too difficult to run smoothly. Ravendawn couldn’t do it, Warspear Online couldn’t do it, and Leafling Online couldn’t do it either. I just want smooth combat in my 2-D MMO. Perhaps that’s too much to ask. Or perhaps Drakantos will be my savior. Please make it so.
The quests are as basic as quests get. Fortunately, for the most part, you don’t actually have to turn many of the quests back into the person who requested them. A lot of them can simply be completed and turned in by pressing the complete button in the menu. It’s a nice convenience. It means you have less downtime and more playtime.
I didn’t really do any of the gathering, gardening, or other activities that likely could take up a considerable portion of your gametime. The housing appeared to be a cool implementation, though. Not for me of course, but for those who actually enjoy housing. It seems that houses are physical plots that exist where they exist and players are able to bid for each housing location. Each appeared to have a monthly rent, which I would assume keeps it off the market until you allow it lapse.
I tried the fishing game for a brief moment but wasn’t able to make much sense of it. It seems that you need to keep the lure tapped on the fish for a bit of time until the fish fully bites, and then you could pull it up and out. Playing on the PC made this a bit finicky, but I bet if I’d been on mobile for this minigame, I could just keep my finger tapped on the fish and it’d trigger the catch faster.
I’ll close up with the experience of playing on a hardcore open PvP server to say that… it wasn’t all that scary. At least not at the beginning levels. I played for several evenings and ran into and past a bunch of other players. I even tried to attack a few of them to no avail. I suppose even on this hardcore server, PvP is restricted to certain zones or at least a minimum player level. I’m not sure. I was able to get up to level 25, which didn’t take too long, but I did see players in the 200s, so I think I was still quite the baby boy.
In any case, the server was very active with players running around here and there. The open PvP of it all was not intimidating or dangerous throughout any of the areas I played through, and the game itself played fine, combat jank aside.
I don’t believe Kakele Online was really scratching that itch I’ve had for a game to play, but I could certainly see others finding it enjoyable. It’s free-to-play on Steam and even mobile right now. So if you wanted to try out a new, active 2-D MMO, then you should certainly give it a peek.
