Serenia Fantasy Review
It’s been a while since I’ve played an MMORPG browser game. They tend not to be especially entertaining or challenging, but you can’t deny that they’re hugely popular. The key, of course, is that you can get access to an entire world of adventure without having to damage your download allowance or fill your hard drive. That tends to mean that there’s a generally younger population or, if that isn’t true for a specific game, non-English speakers from countries with terrible download limits. As a result, I’ve often felt quite out of the loop when it comes to browser games, surrounded by people unwilling or unable to communicate with me.
My first return to this particular corner of the genre is in the form of Serenia Fantasy. Will it end up falling into the same traps as other MMORPG browser games or is it a rare gem you’d be a fool to miss?
Starting Up
Serenia is hardly a world you’ll fall in love with straight away. Don’t expect heavy story lines or even an introduction to the world you’re entering, instead you should expect a limited number of characters (only six to choose from), 3 classes and a design style that says the developers were very stuck in the type of art they wanted to create. It’s very frustrating to enter any game where there are a limited amount of options from the get-go. Once you’ve chosen your character (it’ll take you all of about four seconds, less if you’re a particularly decisive person) you’ll be dropped into the game and then the quests will begin. From the very beginning you’re placed onto a quest path and chances are you’ll rarely stray from it. Serenia is that sort of game.
Retro Made New
Serenia is a game you’ve already played a million times before and it revels in it. The graphical style recalls the PC games of the mid-nineties (with a modern polish, of course) and the music is seemingly orchestrated as a midi file. It’s nice to see a game that knows it well enough to go for that retro look without seeming like a parody or like the developers just wanted to steal from an already successful style. With that said, it does limit what they’re doing in regards to character design and many of the characters and enemies you’ll see won’t end up sticking in the mind. The locations, similarly, are RPG archetypes and, worse, MMO archetypes, and you’ll start in a beautiful green forest and comes across other locations as you explore.
Quests Made Easy
One of the biggest advantages of playing a game in-browser is that it’s easy to get into and that you can turn it off quickly. Part of the parcel of that easy access usually comes in the form of baby-step quests that lead you along at each step of the way. There’s a gang of enemies you need to kill? Click their name and your character will journey there and then fight them automatically, using their best moves if mana allows. Someone you need to talk to or an item you need to find? So long as you’re there to click each step of the way, you can play without putting any effort in whatsoever. This is good or bad, depending on how you enjoy your MMOs. Personally I like to play browser games if I’m doing something else and being able to pay attention to just the key details of the “plot” is a nice bonus, but if you like to be completely engrossed in your gaming, this isn’t a game for you.
As a side note on quests, one of the most annoying things I’ve come across so far is that NPCs will say something – something like “I could hear crying from down the well” – without you actually talking to them. That sounds like a quest to me, so I tried to start the quest and got a generic reply from the character. It may become a quest later, but it’s annoying to have a hook and not be able to instantly follow through.
Surfing the Story
Most people completely ignore the text accompanying the quests given to them and I suppose that’s often fair enough. What’s the point in keep reading bad plot progression that does nothing to entertain and will be instantly forgotten when you’ve finally finished the quest. Serenia suffers from exactly this problem, with characters you don’t care about telling you stories that will bore you. It’s general MMORPG fare, so it’s difficult to run it down too much – you’d have to run down every game in the genre if you planned to attack Serenia based on this problem – but the problem comes when you consider spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that leave you questioning exactly what’s been put (check the accompanying pictures for an example of what I mean).
It’s also worth noting that I couldn’t for the life of me find any backstory or set-up for the game either in the game itself or on the official website. That doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t there, but I’m just not sure where they’ve hidden it.
Fighting and Skills in Serenia Fantasy
If you follow the auto-questing route, you probably won’t need to worry about fighting or skills all that much. It’s all done automatically – you’ll learn skills as part of the quests you do and item and skill usage during combat will be controlled by the computer as well. If you want to do it on your own – and unless you’re “challenging” yourself, there won’t be much point because there’s no way you could be as optimized as the computer – it’s pretty much your usual MMORPG thing. Use the row of numbers to use skills and tap the enemy to enter battle. If you follow the quest path – and there’s no other option really – you’re unlikely to come across anything that you can’t defeat, at least until the latter part of the games, and that gives an early impression that things are rather boring and slow.
Conclusion
Serenia Fantasy Review
Serenia is a game like so many others, without any real character of its own. Nothing about this game sticks out to me, nothing hooks me in and makes me desperately want to keep playing it. That being said, it’s also not a bad game, there’s nothing that puts me off playing entirely and that’s enough for some people. If you can complete the game just by clicking the auto-journey links and you can level up and gain new weapons and skills just by completing the regular story quests, it’s not going to take a huge amount of time and effort to get to the end game and by that point most people will feel like they’ve gotten their money’s worth (and given that access to the game is free, you can’t knock that one at all).
Ultimately, Serenia isn’t a game I would recommend to somebody who’s looking for a quality MMO experience, something to keep them going for months and months and with a constant flow of content.
For somebody looking for a casual thing that will get them through the work day or to play with friends who don’t neccessarily want to download heavy files, Serenia Fantasy is a good choice.
Many of the problems in Serenia are problems of the genre as a whole and it’s in not breaking free from those issues that the developers have failed, not exactly in the game itself.
Click to play Serenia Fantasy
Similar Games
Crystal Saga, Family Guy Online, 8Realms,
