Free Realms

Two days ago, Free Realms, a MMO went live. Basically, it looks exactly like World of Warcraft if it was designed by Disney, and considering how much Warcraft rips off Disney (magic brooms), it looks a lot like a Disney game. It should, though because it’s made for kids. You’ll see lots of flying pixies, and puppy dogs, and cake. Beyond that though, is the actual gameplay. Like many MMORPGs it hinges on a job system. You have your choice of a variety of jobs that you can move between freely. Unlike Warcraft, you’re not just stuck in the one class for the rest of the game, which is infinite, and unlike other games like FF XI: you don’t have to make a three-hour trek back to your moghouse just to change jobs. You change jobs AUTOMATICALLY when you start specific job quests, and you’re also able to change any time in your scroll bar. Each job also has it’s own outfit, which you can customize, so you have as many different pre-set outfits and equipment as you have jobs.

Free Realms “free”ly rips off every other game you’ve played. Warcraft’s the most obvious from the outset, but there’s also Bejeweled, Cooking Mama, Nintendogs, Mario Kart and Yu-Gi-Oh. These mini-games crop up whenever you try and do a job quest. If you’re a Chef, for instance, you have to play a Bejeweled-style game to get ingredients to cook food in a Cooking Mama game. While it lacks in creativity for the minigames, the way they’re used in the game itself is much fresher (in a Puzzle Pirates sense) than Warcraft, where you kill X number of targets to get X number of ingredients to make X number of items. You can actually have fun while playing. As for the fighting part of the game, you can play for years without having to enter a battle. If you want to be a Chef, you don’t have to go off and kill every living thing. You can stroll from town-to-town without having to deal with constant attacks from monsters and other players. The only way you enter a fight is by selecting an attack target, then you enter a separate game space where the battle takes place. This is the only area where aggro takes place. In there, however, it becomes exactly like a Warcraft Dungeon battle.

Free Realms is actually free to play, except if you want to try certain jobs, or want your own pet, or more gold coins than quests give out, etc. Then it gets into that whole subscriber bullshit, but what you’re given for free should be enough to sate most people. If you’re curious and want more, it’s 1/4 the price of Warcraft a month. A lot of people are going to fall into the ,“OMFG I want to be a Wizard,” trap, and they’re the ones keeping the site going, so good for them.

Like I said, it’s for kids, so theoretically there shouldn’t be all that B.S. that goes on in other online games. Problem is, when it’s not 30-something dangerous shut-ins living in their parent’s basements causing all the frustration and drama you see in Guild-orientated MMOs, it’s some 12-year-old with a potty mouth. Expect heavy-censoring in Free Realms, which is actually a good thing.