By Jeffrey Kerkdijk (Hyarume), OnRPG Journalist
Jade Dynasty Online is a free to play MMORPG created and published by Perfect World inc. Jade dynasty online is the English version of the Chinese game Zhu Xian which has been played by over 30 million people. Zu Xian was originally based on a popular novel in china.
The Story of Jade Dynasty seems to be all about immortality, five factions battle the land to the path of enlightenment. Two factions where good and three where evil. Throughout time and study they mastered the arts of several fighting techniques and learned magic. Now once again, they battle the land to find immortality. The story in Jade Dynasty is pretty bland.
There are five factions, which are more like classes, one focuses on healing others on AoE also there is Lupin which has the best combat skills. There is no balance in Jade Dynasty.
Gameplay is like most other MMORPGs, and includes a lot of grinding. Jade Dynasty offers you features like skill tiers, Espers, Alliance Wars, Auto-Navigation, (which makes the game even more boring) meditation, dreaming, marriages and so on. Let’s start with the battle system. It’s the same as in most of the other F2P’s MMORPGs, with additional features like skill tiers you would hope for it to be more fun, but it’s not now to become powerful you have to do a quest every 30 levels to progress further in the game or at least get better skills. You start the game as a novice, and you can join a faction once you have reached level 15. Once you joined a faction you will gain access to the skills that that faction offers for you. It offers you various different outlooks for playing the game, but the setup itself is nothing unique.
We’ll move on to how you level in Jade Dynasty. The answer is simple: you grind a lot and keep grinding. One time you can grind for specific quests, since all of the quests in Jade Dynasty are pretty mindless and repetitive, and the other time you just grind monsters.
Balance Disrupted
Espers are one of the most stupid things I have ever seen in an MMORPG, a pet that boost your stats and gives you some additional skills but can’t do anything itself, oh and you can upgrade an Esper too. Imagine the possibilities…
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Marriage is all about romance points, you can do quests with someone from the opposite sex and get romance points and with those you can get romance skills, you can even marry someone for a title above your head. This indicates that although some of the game’s features seem a bit hardcore, overall the game is pretty casual. With your Esper pets and your spouse, you’re closer to playing house.
An alliance war is just a fancy description for clan-versus-clan combat. At the higher levels you will be able to attack other people that are from other clans and there will be battles. These can be pretty intense if you feel like defending your clan’s name.
Now the thing I dislike the most about Jade Dynasty is that it has an in-game bot called ‘invigorate’. You can let it fight the target(s) you selected and you have several settings to choose. Why would you want to bot in a game? That makes it seem as if the developers already know how boring the game is and let you level while you aren’t around. And they had to do more; they have implanted new features like Auto-Navigation which means, you no longer have to walk or navigate anymore, you just click anywhere on the map and or select an NPC. So why bother exploring?
And then if you thought that is the only thing that throws gameplay in Jade Dynasty off balance, they implanted meditation which slowly gives you experience if you stay logged in. It looks like a bubble and the towns are filled with them. And they even give you experience while you are offline if you purchase a ‘dream scroll’, how sick is that?
Graphics and Sound
The graphics of Jade Dynasty are good, the animations look nice and the engine holds up well no matter how many things are happening. There are a lot of flashy AoEs and cool armor suits in the game. There are nice mounts, monsters look nice, and it supports a wide range of resolutions which is good for those who have big monitors. The sound is alright as well.
Conclusion
Jade Dynasty is another fancy version of perfect world that offers less and else it’s the same. Character customization is rather limited, like every other F2P MMORPG. The game itself is very fond on botting, which can be done in-game at any given time. And Overall it isn’t a very good game
Like in most Asian MMORPGs the focus is heavy on grind, and you will notice that from the start. Jade Dynasty is very much into grinding either quests or monsters. And by all means actually playing Jade Dynasty isn’t very fun. There is little community because most people bot. The only thing that is fun to do in Jade Dynasty is the alliance wars. That is because it is like the only place where you can find people that aren’t botting.
Pros:
– Graphics
– Animation
– Weapon armor design.
Cons:
– Clan balance
– Built in bot features
– Community.
