Crystal Of Atlan: Very First Impressions

There's just no consistency, is there? At one extreme there's the likes of Camelot Unchained, a "game" that was announced with a flurry of publicity, drew huge attention and then spent the next dozen or so years locked behind very closed doors, "in development", where it remains even now. And then, at the far end of the curve, you get something like this.

It seems like Crystal of Atlan popped up out of nowhere just a few days ago and then this morning I was playing it. I'd never heard of it until I saw an item on MMOBomb a couple of weeks ago, although apparently the actual reveal was back in March. Still not much of a lead-up, even then.

I didn't pay much attention until the same site followed up yesterday with the news the game had already launched. MassivelyOP, which currently seems to have a weird love-to-hate obsession with gacha mechanics (I think it must be an American thing. I don't really get what the supposed problem is but then every market town over here has about five betting shops on the high street.) also flagged up the release with a headline focusing on the overly-defensive assertion by developer NuVerse (A ByteDance subsidiary.) that CoA "is not a gacha game". Reason being?  "We do not have gacha mechanics for character or weapon pulls".

You get one free summon. Meanies.

Having just spent an hour with the game, I'd have to question that logic. There's a full gacha mechanic for both Pets and Outfits and it looks and feels exactly like every other gacha deal I've seen. I think we'll need to know a bit more about just how essential Pets are to gameplay before we can give the developers a pass on that one. Outfits, I guess, at least aren't likely to be pay-to-win but even there I can't see it's any better if your objection is to the principle of the thing.

Not that I give a damn. I have hundreds and hundreds of hours in multiple gacha games, all of which I've played with considerable enjoyment, and so far I have never needed to pay a red cent to any of them. I have an academic understanding of the problem, if that's what we're going to call it, but no emotional attachment or personal, anecdotal experience to give that understanding any of the sense of loathing or outrage that permeates most of the conversation around gacha mechanics. 

Here's my suggestion for anyone wary of playing F2P gacha games in case it ends up costing them a fortune or making them feel frustrated because they can't progress without paying: just play the damn game for free as long as its fun, then stop the moment you feel you can't do what you want without paying for pulls. In my experience, that's going to take a while.

Okay, one for each draw. Still...

And it's not like there aren't a gazillion other games to play, is it? Or like you signed some kind of contract, where you promised to finish what you started. Can't get any further without spending money and don't want to spend money? Then quit!

Oh, but I want to know how the story turns out! Watch someone playing on Twitch then or watch a play-through on YouTube. Or just read the walktrhough on the wiki. Scratch that itch and move on.

Well, that was a rant I wasn't expecting. Oh well, got it out of my system now. Let's move on...

So, first impressions. Is an hour long enough? Well, I got to Level 10 if that counts. And honestly, the game feels so familiar right from the start, it's as if I could do the First Impressions piece from the opening cut-scene.

So let's start with that, why not? It's short, slick and very pretty to look at. It's also about as generic as they come and whoever wrote it knows that as well as you do. It's like a tl:dr version of the opening of a dozen similar games I've played: there was a cataclysm, a Hero appeared and sorted it out, everything was nice for a while, something got lost, the world turned bad again, now you have to find the maguffin. Some of those parts may not be in the correct order but they were all in there, somewhere.

I'm the one with her back to the camera.

Next comes one of those completely pointless action sequences, where you charge through a "dungeon" following a glowing trail and use a whole load of abilities you have absolutely no understanding of to despatch a horde of entirely unthreatening, disposable grunts, finmishing up with a battle with a massive boss (A dragon in this case. How original!), the outcome of which is entirely out of your hands. The whole thing is made even less useful as a training excercise since the character you're playing keeps changing, although that does do a fair job of demonstrating the playstyles of the various classes, thereby preparing you for...

"Character Creation", which I put in quotes because that's what they call it even though it's patently nothing of the sort. It's just "Pick A Class". That's literally the only choice you have to make. There's one race, human, and all the classes are gender-locked. There's zero customisation of any kind. You don't even get to give yourself a name. (There turns out to be a good reason for that, though.)

Gender-locking is another super-controversial issue and one with which I have a great deal more sympathy than gachaphobia. I would have been pissed if all the classes I wanted to play had been male, for sure. But they weren't, so I'm good. 

Apparently turning her back to the camera is her thing. And, I guess, mine now, too.

All of that took maybe ten minutes and then it was into the world proper. Oh, I did have to choose a server. There were two reccomended ones in North America and third in Europe, which wasn't recommended. That seemed odd. Usually games can tell where I am and assume I want a faster ping. And I might have, too, if it hadn't been for something I saw yesterday about the publishing for the game in Europe changing hands in June. Best to avoid that, I thought, so I went with the recommendation.

Next it was into the world itself. It's very pretty. Really nice to look at. I'd have taken quite a few screenshots if I could have found a way to switch the UI off. I spent a while going through every option in setttings but if there is one, I couldn't find it. Black mark for that.

Absolutely everything that happened after that was instantly recognizable from games I'd played before. I mean all of it. Here's what I can remember, in sequence, from about an hour ago. 

Even looks like the town in Dragon Nest.

• Arrive just outside some small town
• Get met by some perky little girl in big pants, who's been expecting you
• Get taken into town to meet the person in charge, who turns out to be a bit of a jerk
• Have your authority and suitability for the job questioned but then get sent to do it anyway
• Naturally, the job involves going down a mine and killing some baddies
  
• Go down the mine, kill some baddies
• Run into some big guy having trouble with more baddies
• Rescue him
• Bring him back
• Discover he was trying to rescue his daughter
• Agree to go find her 
• And some more missing miners
• Go back down the mine and defend Big Pants Girl while she fixes some tech thing.
• Kill a lot more baddies including a couple of bosses
  
• Find a clue to the missing daughter
  
• Come back and tell her dad....

... and on it goes like that. We've all been there. Lots of times. 

And guess what? It works! I had a good time. A very disposable, meaningless good time but so is eating ice-cream and we don't trash that for lack of originality, do we? Well I don't. I love ice-cream.

There were a couple of things that stood out. Little wrinkles I don't remember seeing before and that I thought were good and that suggested this game had been put together by people with both a sense of humor and some pride in their work. 

One was the explanation for why I hadn't even been asked to name my character in "Character Creation". 

That's because the way you prove your fitness for the job to the jerk I mentioned earlier is to whip out your employment papers from the Adventurers Guild and stuff them under his nose. And in order to make the quest move on, you have to sign them at the bottom with the name you're giving your character.

I thought that was neat. Also, I really liked the way there's no actual instruction on what to do. You just have to figure it out from context. It felt very... organic.

So did the other bit I liked, which is where an advertising droid calls out to you, trying to sell you something and when you tell it you aren't interested it turns out what it was trying to sell you is  membership to the same Adventurers Guild you're already in, so it changes tack and tries to sell you on the benefits instead. It's a very clever way to slip in a bit of tutorial without it seeming too obvious and once again it felt very... organic. I'd say immersive but maybe that would be over-stating it.

This isn't bad translation. It's the writers parodying bad translation.
Made me laugh, anyway.

This might be the time to mention the translation. It's excellent. Flawless, in fact. Demotic, naturalistic English throughout, albeit with a slightly 1950s television western tinge to it in places. I think someone might have said "darn tooting" once. Or something like that.

Voice acting is minimal but fine when it occurs. I was a little taken aback when my character spoke. She didn't do it much. It certainly didn't have the impact of when that happens in Wuthering Waves but then then comparing the two games is like comparing Hanna Barbera to Studio Ghibli.

One odd thing I particularly want to mention: when I say Crystal of Atlan reminds me of lots of games I've played, that's true, but it really reminds me of one specific game - Dragon Nest. 

Firstly, CoA uses exactly the same structure as Dragon Nest. There's a hub in which all players mingle, making it an MMO of sorts, but all you do there is get missions that take you into instances. So far, so generic. There's a map showing the instances strung out in a line that you have to follow like a trail, completing each and returning to the hub for the next mission before you can move on to the next. Dragon Nest also has one of those.

Once was enough, thanks. Also, what the hell is going on with your pants?

Where I really started to get Dragon Nest vibes, though, was inside the instances. They look similar and they're set up the same way, with a linear path that goes through several stages that require zoning. In each, faceless swarms of mobs need to be dispatched before you reach a mini-boss. The mini-bosses even have the same kind of A/B/C/D difficulty ratings as they do in Dragon Nest and the fights feel very similar.

You can optionally repeat each dungeon to earn loot or xp or points or you can choose to continue to the next one. Dragon Nest had a similar mechanic. None of this is in any way conclusive, of course, but I've played a lot of these games and this one really reminded me of that one in particular.

Where's me hat?!

And then I met that guy who needed rescuing and he was a smith with a huge beard and he used to be a big deal and in Dragon Nest there's a guy who looks a lot like him and is also famous only he's a dirigible engineer. And then I had to rescue the smith's young daughter who'd gone into the mines and the guy in Dragon Nest has a young son who... You get the idea.

I think it all just comes down the developers pulling from the same set of tropes and using the same off-the-shelf mechanics but Dragon Nest was where I saw a lot of them first so that's where I know them from. I ought to play Dragon Nest again... It's a great game.

As I worked my way through the missions, I got plenty of xp and leveled up fast. I also got plenty of gear, which the game told me to equip, so I did. 

That was very disappointing. Not because the gear was no good - it was fine. It was disappointing because the little icons made it seem like it was going to look great when I put it on but absolutely none of it displayed at all.

I went from wearing what you see above to... what you see above.  At one point my paper doll said I was in full plate armor but as far as anyone could see I was still in the shirt, bustier and green jacket. As for the flying helmet with the goggles and the jaunty feather? Must be invisible.

None of that is remotely surprising in a game that claims not to have gacha mechanics for anything that matters but that does have them for Outfits. I just hope that, like Noah's Heart, there are at least some alternative ways of changing your look. I did spot one in the Pre-registration freebies, which I got even though I never pre-registered for the game. I need to be Level 15 to use it though so I haven't tried it to see how it works.

In Dragon Nest he was an airship engineer and he had a son, not a daughter,
but I swear it's the same guy...

And that pretty much covers it. I suppose I should say something about the combat but at these early levels it's one hundred per cent button-mashing as far as I'm concerned so I don't have much insight there. Button-mashing does the job though and I haven't died yet or needed to use a health potion if that tells you anything. Oh, and there's a dodge mechanic that actually works really well and feels very comfortable, so that's a big plus.

Another big plus is the option to have the mouse cursor available at all times. It's not promoted. It's buried in the settings somewhere. I only found it because I was in there looking for a way to switch off the UI. 

CoA is a very much an action-rpg  and a pretty slick one and these days I can play games like that with a surprising amount of facility, so I no longer miss my old hot bars the way I once did. It's nice to have the option all the same and I very much do like being able to click on UI elements at will, without having to hold down a key at the same time. All action games should offer that choice.

And that's about it for now, I think. Overall, my first impressions are quite positive. The game doesn't have an ounce of originality but it does have plenty of visual flair, it's well-translated and it's slick as you like. Everything works perfectly, no glitches or bugs that I saw. And most importantly, it's fun. 

If I was short of ways to fill my time, I'd be happy to fill a few hours with this. The problem, if that's what to call it, is that this kind of seemingly effortless professionalism makes the all those more interesting and original games we'd rather be playing look even worse when they flop pathetically in Early Access, unfinished, full of bugs and barely any fun at all.

Exactly why is that, I wonder? It surely can't just be money, can it?