RPG Toram Online

Toram Online is free-to-play, 3D anime-themed MMORPG developed and published by Asobimo Inc., a well-known Japanese mobile game developer best known for their mobile MMORPGs, Avabel Online and IRUNA Online. Toram Online is the sequel to IRUNA Online and takes place in the same universe but with new characters, new maps, and a new story. Toram Online was recently released on iOS on May 14, 2015 and Android users can download the game from the official Toram Online website (not out on Google Play yet). Toram Online has been in active development over the past year and Asobimo Inc. has been translating the game from Japanese to English since late 2014. The game is still fairly unknown due to ongoing beta testing and lack of advertisement, but the game is definitely in a playable state at the moment and is worth trying out.

Character Creation:

Toram Online offers the most appearance customization choices that I have seen in any mobile MMORPG. Character Creation is divided into four steps due to its inability to fit everything into one screen. In the first step, players can choose their character’s gender, skin color (15 different options), and one of three heights (short, medium, and tall). In the second step, players can choose a face type, eye style, and eye color with many different variations. The third step features hair customization with more possibilities than I have seen in most PC MMORPGs. Players can customize different parts of their character’s hair including “Bangs,” “Back,” and “Tails,” each of which, have over 15 options, with “Bangs” and “Back” having over 30 options. There are so many different possibilities and the hair creation is extremely in-depth for a mobile game. There are also over 20 different unique hair colors with every shade of the rainbow. Male and Female characters have the same hair customization choices to choose from and each character in the game can look fairly different due to the appearance customization. Toram Online has, by far, the best appearance customization in any mobile game I have played. In the fourth step, players can choose their starting weapon.

A Non-Restricted Class System

Toram Online has no classes which gives players the freedom to build their character how they like. The game does, however, has four different weapon types with skill trees that somewhat define your class. The four weapons and their difficulties include Sword (Easy), Bow (Normal), Staff (Hard), and Knuckle (Easy). Although the game does not restrict players to one class and players can build hybrid characters if they like, in order to simplify things and explain different roles in battle, I will associate each weapon with a common class. The classes include Warrior, Archer, Mage, and Fighter respectively as named by the game’s community.

Warriors are high health, frontline fighters specialized in two-handed swords and one-handed swords with a shield. Their main attributes include Strength and Vitality and are easy to play due to their “tankiness” or attack power, depending on how players build their character. Archers are swift ranged snipers who can attack with bows and crossbows from a distance and dish out high amounts of damage before getting attacked. They depend on Dexterity for attack power. Mages are powerful spellcasters equipped with a staff and have the highest amounts of damage in the game but are fragile and the most difficult class to play. They are difficult due to how quickly they can drain their mana and getting attacked while casting a spell completely disrupts the spell and the mana is also lost. They rely on Intelligence for attack power and Dexterity for casting speed. Fighters are a unique melee class equipped with large gauntlet-type weapons known as “Knuckles.” They are an all-around class with average attack power and defense and rely on Agility for attack power. Each class has their pros and cons and a variety of different skills that can be unlocked and leveled with skill points gained from leveling up.

A Beautiful and Scenic World

The world of Toram Online is absolutely gorgeous. Only 2 years after Asobimo Inc. set the graphical MMORPG standard with their highly popular, Avabel Online, they release Toram Online which manages to top it in almost every way. Every new map, area, or boss battle begins with a cutscene panning the surroundings and it is mesmerizingly beautiful. Toram Online is, in my opinion, the best looking mobile MMORPG at the moment, although the anime graphics make it an unfair comparison to most other games, but it is definitely the best looking anime-themed game on mobile. The environments are bright, colorful, crisp, and very atmospheric. Each map looks very detailed and original, and one can tell Asobimo Inc. spent an enormous amount of time working on the backgrounds, scenery, and object placements in each map. The main town in the game is huge and has a very appealing medieval fantasy feel to it. Character and NPC models and weapons and armor are also all well-designed. The game also has amazing music that makes the already gorgeous world even more immersive and dazzling.

Combat and Gameplay

The combat in Toram Online is point-and-click in a very traditional sense. Because most gamers nowadays prefer action, hack and slash combat, Toram Online’s combat to some may feel like a step backwards, especially considering Asobimo Inc.’s Avabel Online featured action combat. Players can move their characters with a virtual joystick and target and auto-attack enemies with a button on the bottom right or by tapping on the enemies themselves. Although it is not action-oriented, the point-and-click combat works well and feels very polished. The animations are smooth, the effects are flashy, and the combat is simple enough for anyone to pick up. Although some players may find the combat boring, personally, I thought it was fine for this type of MMORPG. I believe Asobimo Inc. wanted to keep the combat similar to IRUNA Online (the prequel game) but with improvements, and the combat, although still point-and-click, is a lot better and more fluid than IRUNA Online’s stiff and lackluster combat.

Most quests (I will talk more about quests in the next section) involve defeating a boss monster which is where the grinding kicks in. Boss monsters are almost always higher level than your character and players will have to grind and level up in order to defeat bosses. Toram Online doesn’t have as much filler quests as other games so killing random monsters just to level up plays a large role in Toram Online. Leveling at lower levels doesn’t take too long but it gets more repetitive and time-consuming at higher levels. The story-based quests do make the grinding feel somewhat worth it in the end though.

A Story-based Questing Experience

Toram Online breaks out of the traditional unengaging, wall-of-text quest storylines and adds in dynamic cutscenes and realistic dialogues to its questing. Individual quests are part of larger story chapters and each quest begins with eye-pleasing cutscenes and multiple camera angles as players interact with NPCs or watch other NPCs interacting with each other. The quest dialogue is conversational, and combined with natural body movements and things happening in the background, the dialogue and story feel high quality and are something to look forward to. In addition to dialogue cutscenes, there are also many other cutscenes that involve action sequences, player movement, boss encounters, and more. Quests range from killing certain monsters to gathering items to defeating giant bosses. As mentioned before, Toram Online isn’t filled with hundreds of filler quests like most MMORPGs so players will generally be working on one quest (usually the boss killing quests) for many levels before moving on with the story. Overall, the cutscenes, story, dialogue, and questing are interesting and well-implemented in Toram Online, but I think Toram Online needs more to keep the player busy to avoid too much grinding.

Cash Shop/In-App Purchases (IAP)

In-App Purchases usually play a large part in freemium mobile games and MMORPGs by providing advantages and cosmetics for paying players. Some games have more reasonable In-App Purchases while other games are just pure pay-to-win. As of this review, Toram Online is still in Beta and Asobimo Inc. has yet to add In-App Purchases to the game. They did recently add an Orb shop with randomized treasure chests containing items such as Training Scrolls, Revive Droplets, Health Potions, and Mana Potions, each of which can also be bought with Orbs but the system is still under development and players cannot purchase Orbs yet. My guess is that the Cash Shop will be similar to Avabel Online’s which was mainly cosmetic items such as costumes, but also had randomized higher rank equipment, which gave advantages and reduced the time spent farming but was not game-breaking. None of Asobimo Inc.’s mobile MMORPGs have been pay-to-win so far so Toram Online’s In-App Purchases should be fairly reasonable.

Final Verdict – Great

Although Toram Online is already out on Apple Itunes, it is still a game largely in development but has huge potential when it finally launches. With top notch, anime graphics, a huge open world, beautiful scenery and music, and an engaging story and questing system, the traditional point-and-click combat and grinding can be overlooked by many. Toram Online is currently one of the highest quality mobile MMORPGs I have played and a game everyone should try out.

Stilland War

Stilland War HD is a popular RPG by UGamehome Technology that combines a large questing storyline with a pretty good character building system. You will start out by choosing a server to play on and then creating your character. You can choose from Assassin, Warrior or Mage and jump right into the action with the game's tutorial. Unfortunately for some there is not a lot of action to it as the game is pretty much an auto battler.  Battles are not turn based but the battles do progress through rounds with you and the opponent alternating your attacks.

he single player game is a large questing system which quickly moves you from one quest to the next by allowing you to just click your way to the next one allowing your character to go and find the next quest giver. Everything takes place on a small town map so progress is very fast. You'll read about the mission then be carried to the battlefield where you will take on the enemies associated with the quest. Quests cost a certain amount of action points which refresh over time but can also be purchased, I didn't find this to be a big issue though and was able to play about as much as I wanted.

This is squad combat so even though you start off by yourself you will quickly pick up new party members to battle along with you. These are obtained through various ways. Some you unlock through quests, others can be unlocked by gaining reputation in the PVP arena but the best ones can be purchased with premium currency which will of course give the spender a big advantage in the game.

Character development is the key to the game. When you level up your characters by questing you will also be able to enhance their weapons and armor to the same level as the character. This is where your gold will go and you will find yourself spending a lot of it improving your equipment. CE is a stat you will need to pay attention to, this is the "combat effectiveness" of your entire party as a whole.

The game tries very hard to get you to continue playing by constantly giving you small rewards for unlocking features in the game and achieving goals. It also features a guild system and lots of events to enter. Overall the game is a good time killer but I found the play to get a bit repetitious.

Legion of Heroes

Finding a great MMO game on mobile can be difficult. There isn’t exactly a shortage of MMO type games for Android, but you’d be hard pressed to find a great MMO title, one that really brings in some amazing gameplay. Up until now one of the best ones was arguably Order and Chaos Online from Gameloft, but even then it’s just a really close mobile copy of World of Warcraft. It’s a good game, but if I wanted to play to World of Warcraft I would just play World of Warcraft. Darkness Reborn from Gamevil will be a nice break away from the norm once it’s released in November, but until then what’s an MMO lover to do if they want some MMO action while on the go?

Enter Legion of Heroes, the recently released MMORPG from NEXON M Inc. The best thing about Legion of Heroes is it’s unique and fresh take on the MMO genre. The important elements are there. You have PvP battles, questing, leveling up with XP and there is tons of gear and upgrades to be had. Where it really stands out is its fresh take on the combat system. When you enter into a battle, combat is handled in a turn based strategy/tactical RPG like feel, also similar to the way JRPG’s offer up combat with a player turn and enemy turn. Instead of like the traditional MMO where combat movement is free, players and enemies are placed on a grid and attacks or defenses are executed in turns. It’s different, fun, and overall it brings something new to the world of the MMO.

Legion of Heroes as I stated above also features PvP battles, which can be as massive as putting 45 players from each opposing side up against each other. There is a huge epic fantasy world to explore, with familiar movement controls using a virtual D-Pad like you might find in other MMO games, or you can move by tapping on the screen in the direction you want to go. You can also collect heroes to aid you in your fight, which can be picked up by hiring them using hire tickets that are acquired in game from quest rewards, drops etc. Of course there’s also Dungeons, something no MMO should be without, and you can even form or join guilds for taking on higher difficulty challenges. For those who enjoy it, there’s Google Play Games services tied to the game too. There are four different character classes to choose from at this point in the game when you begin, with a warrior, a mage, a gladiator, and an archer/hunter type class. The game even has a certain level of immersive engagement and production value with epic music and what so far appears to be a pretty in depth story line, which really kind of elevates the game quite a bit. Legion of Heroes is free to play, and if you’re looking to give the game a try you can pick up the download from the Play Store link here.

Divine Might – 3D

Kabam recently made a new hire looking to add more console quality gaming experiences to its portfolio. It’s unfortunate that didn’t happen before the release of Divine Might, a fantasy dungeon crawler that is ambitious in scope and looks pretty enough but asks so little of its players it could almost be played without paying attention to it at all.

While there’s nothing wrong with a dungeon crawler being mostly a statistical exercise, the problem is that in Divine Might, that’s essentially all it is. You pick a character from one of four classes and set him or her on the path to saving the land of Laia after its near brush with a giant skeleton being that required the combined forces of several deities to defeat. But like Arnold, he promised he’d be back.

The story is actually the best part of the game, as you’ll encounter all kinds of interesting characters as both NPCs and companions, though the latter conveniently always have to be somewhere else when the fighting starts. The graphics are also impressive, save for some occasionally wonky collision detection. This game never met an unintentionally half-buried treasure chest it didn’t like.

There’s also no lack of things to do, even if some time spent playing the game is required to unlock most of them. Along with the main story quests, there are side missions aplenty, gear to craft, an arena to do battle against other players, pets to collect and train and a host of ways to improve your character. You’ll also be able to join guilds and enter dungeons once you attain a certain level.

You know what we haven’t talked about to this point, though? The combat, because as silly as it sounds in a dungeon crawler, there really isn’t any. Within each mission, you simply tap to move along a predetermined path until you run into enemies, at which point all the fighting plays out automatically. If your character and pet are powerful enough to win, they do, and if they’re not, you lose. Once you learn some skills, there’s the thought that those might require you to tap the screen to activate or something, but it’s false hope.

Even in the arena, it’s much the same way. It’s like if you distilled the dungeon crawler  experience to a spreadsheet, except with pretty 3D visuals to set the proper fantasy tone. The one good part of the gameplay being on autopilot is the button you can hold down to run directly to the next quest or NPC you need to visit, though frankly there’s very little chance you’d get lost anyway.

Divine Might is ostensibly part MMO, since there are shared common spaces and dungeons, but the lack of character customization options makes Laia a land full of clones. Players do change visually as they grow in power and attain new weapons and armor, but they all start out looking the same, and there’s not enough variety to make thins interesting at any particular point. If you’ve seen one Level 25 archer, you almost literally have seen them all.

If you enjoy the number crunching and min/max aspects of dungeon crawlers, this game is for you. Or if you ever played Diablo and thought that you’d enjoy it a lot more if it only you didn’t have to be bothered to actually push any buttons, this is probably exactly the experience you seek. Everyone else is going to wonder why there isn’t more game in the gameplay, and no amount of cute story or eye-catching graphics will be enough to make this any more interesting. Sorry about that.

Soul Taker-Face of Fatal Blow

Android is filled to the brim with games, but let’s be honest, not all of them can be flaunted around for “best in show”. At least, depending on your actual preference for graphics. There are definitely a few that are designed to put your phones or tablets to the test. Soul Taker tries to be one of them, offering players with beautifully rendered 3D graphics and over the top effects to fill up phone’s screen. And it’s an MMORPG to boot.

Like many RPGs these days, especially online ones, you will be met with your staple “go for this, kill this” tropes, and Soul Taker isn’t exactly diverging from that tradition. Depending on your patience, you might actually see all the 500 monsters and 1,000 items that developer AndromedaGames is bragging about. One thing that sets this game apart is a Pokemon-like mechanic, where, instead of totally vanquishing opponent, you get to turn them into your minions and faithful companion, by absorbing their souls no less, no matter how twisted the concept may sound.

This game is definitely one of the prettier ones in the market. That is, if over the top visuals typical of modern JRPGs are you cup of tea. What mobile RPG these days doesn’t have some sort of card system, and Soul Taker is no different. Character customization comes through classes, only two of which are currently available, the Knight and the Assassin, and skill trees. And being an online game, you can test your builds by dishing it out with other gamers worldwide in PvP.

Soul Taker-Face of Fatal Blow is available for free on Google Play Store but has in-game purchases, which isn’t exactly surprising, especially for an MMO. Price ranges from $0.99 to as much as $90, however, so do be careful when making those acquisitions. The developer notes that some items might be eligible for a refund, but better to not reach that point in the first place.

Soul Guardians: Age of Midgard

The barrier of entry and the required commitment involved to play it can make or break an MMO experience. Thankfully, Soul Guardians: Age of Midgard makes it surprisingly easy. New adventurers will be introduced to a bustling hub town where they can toil over a myriad of pursuits in order to be the Soul-iest Soul Guardian there is - and considering that it’s conducted all in 2D, navigating between tasks and ventures helps establish a seamless sense of direction.

Aside from the world map, the town also houses other landmarks integral to the gameplay. From the left, there’s the in-game store, a mission task master who assigns appropriate conditions and side-quest modifiers, a card workshop for building and enhancement (more on that later), and finally there’s the PvP arena where players can duke it out with all of they’ve got. The roles of each of these facets offer a slew of depth and palate cleansers to character growth that in-turn vindicate the insanely simple but adequately engaging fighting system that hinges on a single gimmick: cards.

Players will encounter several cards through various means like monster drops or hidden cache locations, and like your prototypical trading-card game, the variety of ranks and associated rarities to the stronger cards drive the main incentive to constant grind as you customize and experiment with every new card. Working with five slots at first before earning more, players can arrange and assign hundreds of different cards that jive better with specific classes over others, which can also be unlocked with in-game currency. Aside from the card combo attack, battling consists of standard attacks and class-specific abilities with their own respective cooldowns, offering a plethora of strategy that caters a wide range of play-styles.

Soul Guardians is fundamentally enjoyable and has plenty of potential, but it’s somewhat squandered through inconsistent pacing that cranks the introductory levels of the game from a 4 to an 11 by the time you reach the second collection of dungeons. The hike in challenge isn’t totally geared towards bullying players to reach for their credit card spending comfort of stat boosts or perks, though. Players can grind and naturally grow their characters to be able to challenge the increased adversity - it just takes a very long time to do. Recycling the same level runs and loot raids on beaten levels will become a mundane chore before you’re even half as strong as you need to be for the second world, and the same trend ensues on the next world after that.

For a free MMO with an impressively sized player base, you can’t go to wrong with Soul Guardians: Age of Midgard. Just make sure you have the time and money for it if you plan on staying for the long haul.

Pet Alliance

Despite the clamoring of its fans, Nintendo still hasn’t graced Android or iOS with a real Pokémon game. Let’s face it, fellow Pokénerds — it will probably never happen. That void causes tons of developers to take a shot at making their own twist on the series. Nobody’s ever come very close to capturing the entire magic of Pokémon, but some have captured portions of the formula with resounding success (Puzzle & Dragons comes to mind). Egame Company has recently released their take on monster collecting, Pet Alliance, for Android, iOS, and Facebook.

When you start your own adventure, you can name your character and select an avatar out of four male and four female options. There’s a bit of a narrative intro, but you’ll soon be in familiar territory selecting your starting monster. Will you choose the water crab, the grass onion (seriously), or the fire leopard/wolf thing? It doesn’t matter too much because you’ll be able to get the others pretty early in the game. Fortunately, Pet Alliance lets you name your monsters to, so Oniony and I set off on our adventures through Mololand. I was destined to become a master pet trainer.

Pet Alliance is guilty of my biggest pet peeve in the realm of free-to-play RPGs — you can’t actually do anything in combat. Instead, you’ll sit and watch your monster exchange hits with its opponent until one of them passes out. There’s no skill involved. In fact, there’s no luck involved either. Once you’ve defeated a monster, you can skip any future fights with the same type of monster, instantly claiming its experience and loot. Some of the depth of RPG combat is present: monsters level up and eventually evolve, monsters learn multiple skills that can be upgraded over time, and there’s a typing system that pulls all 11 of its types directly from the Pokémon series. A short ways into the game, battles will escalate to 3-on-3 matches. This is good so that your grass-type doesn’t lose every match against fire-types, but it makes the matches last longer when you have to wipe out all those extra enemy monsters. Picking the three monsters at the front of your party is probably the most important decision you’ll make. They’ll claim all the experience and they’ll do all the battling. You’ll want three of your strongest monsters that offer a wide type variety.

There’s no overworld to speak of. Instead, you’ll tap a map location to indicate where you want to go and then you’ll tap an icon for what you want to do there. You can participate in the ranked PvP arena, go shopping, hatch eggs, fuse monsters, or head out into the wild. In the wild, you pick a location and then one of its five monsters. Once you’ve wiped out each of these five monsters at least once, you can access the Heroic version of that area, populated with harder versions of those monsters. Defeat those and you can move on to the next area. Heroic monsters remain defeated once you best them, but the standard monsters can be fought over and over again. Thanks to your monsters healing between fights and the skip button, you can literally blow through a pile of monsters by tapping Skip, Again, Skip, Again, Skip, Again. It’s a great way to level up fast. By “great”, I mean efficient — not fun. Of course, each battle you engage in takes up one of your 15 AP, but it regenerates slowly over time.

There’s a story to follow, but the writing is weak. There were a few attempts at humor that just seemed like the writers were trying too hard. At one point, my character exclaimed “Pikachu!” from sheer excitement and then wondered aloud why he would say such a thing in the first place. It made me chuckle just a little, but only because it was so bad. The characters say some strange phrases which is certainly a problem that arose in translation. Still, I appreciated that Egame tried to have fun with it instead of making the story completely flat and serious.

The game includes a booklet item that serves the same role as a Pokédex, documenting each kind of monster that you encounter and own. Collecting is an important mechanism in monster RPGs, for some players, the fun of finding, capturing, and evolving their monsters to acquire them all is the most important part of the game. Pet Alliance has nearly 230 monsters to acquire, but there are a few problems that make the thrill of collecting fall flat. First, there is no mechanism for intentionally capturing monsters. Instead, you get monster eggs as loot after a battle or as a reward for completing a mission. You can hatch eggs easily enough, but that’s not the problem. Being able to find monsters out in the wild and capturing them directly is a lot more satisfying than grinding away at repetitive battles hoping a monster finally drops an egg. The second problem is that most of the monsters feel terribly uninspired. They just don’t look cool enough for me to want them — and that’s a huge problem in a game that revolves around its monsters. There’s a baby chicken with a bottle of milk, a blue crab, an onion, a hamster with a lollipop, and a crocodile with a lollipop. I wish I were making this up. Why would I ever want two different lollipop-wielding animals to fight for me in battle? Not all the monsters are that bad, but for every interesting monster there’s several more that are completely boring.

Pet Alliance has good production values and an okay free-to-play system, but that’s really all it has going for it. The content is deep, but the gameplay just isn’t. The best players are absolutely going to be the ones who put the most real money into the game. They’ll be the same players who can afford the rare monster eggs and the AP potions that will let them keep playing without waiting for any timers. The battle animations actually look like the monsters are doing something, but that something isn’t very exciting. Even if the combat was full of explosive particle effects and other eye candy, it’d still feel pretty hollow because I’m not actually responsible for triggering any of the attacks. The game is mindless to play, but certainly that’s what some people are looking for. Unfortunately, Pet Alliance is a mediocre free-to-play RPG at best and does practically nothing to fill the Pokémon-shaped gaps on Android, iOS, and Facebook.