Nostale

Nostale is an online role-playing game with anime inspired graphics. It is very easy to play and can appeal to all ages.

It is set in a fantasy world where you can use magic as well as brute strength to defeat your foes. It's program's many features that separate this game from all the others. You can have pets, gain experience quickly and visit a wide variety of dungeons among many others.

When first entering the game, you'll have to create a character. The character creation process is quite limited. You can choose between two hair styles, hair color and, of course, the gender. And there is nothing more the customization process offers. After that you can begin playing.

Once you've entered the game world, a tutorial will greet you and show you the basics. Moving and attacking is done primarily with the mouse and you can use the keyboard for hot-keying spells and other abilities. After that the next missions are designed to further describe all the features the game has. This is an interactive way to learn how to play the game but it takes quite a long time, up to an hour.

The gameplay is pretty slow-paced. Killing enemies requires a decent amount of time, and the maps are big so it will take a really long time just to reach objectives. A nice feature is a sort of a quest helper which will guide you to the quest destination. It does this by showing an arrow above your head, pointing the direction where you should go. The combat system isn't very impressive. There are a lot of skills and abilities but you cannot synchronize them and create combos or anything like that. However, a very nice aspect about the game is that you can have pets which will fight alongside you. There are specific animals which can be tamed, and this is indicated by a small sign near the animal's portrait. To tame an animal, you need to damage it until it reaches about half its health points and then use the tame ability. The pets will gain experience individually and you can only have one active pet following you. This is, in my opinion, one of the great features the game has because there is a really large amount of animals you can tame. At first, you'll only find chickens, foxes or other small animals but later on you can tame rock golems and dragons.

The graphics are in 2D, however, it isn't the classic 2D, but rather a 2.5D. This means that the world has a lot of 3D elements combined with other 2D elements. Basically the surrounding world is 3 dimensional, while other characters and animations are in 2D. Anyway the graphics look pretty good and you can change the camera view. Fact which isn't possible in other 2D games. The sound effects are heavily anime inspired, and this creates a nice atmosphere for the game.

Nostale is ultimately a good game. The only downside is that you cannot stand out of the crowd, because of the relatively non-existing character customization. However, there is such a large amount of items that compensate in this regard. The game also has a very big player base, so there will always be somebody to join you in a dungeon or in PvP.