Phil's thoughts were no exageration.

Ah the Korean MMO RPG giant as played by "That Guy Who Does Not Play MMORPGs." Yes, a good way to find out how Lineage 2 currently shapes up to those who aren't big MMO gamers. I sat down and the first thing that came to mind is "Nice Shot." Why was that? Well, they were zoomed in all the way on this shapely dark-elf girl's chest. Good way to make a good first impression I guess, if not of the gameplay. Anyhow, zooming out I found I was playing a mighty dark elf sword dancer named Remona who fulfilled every single possible cliche of that description that you may think of, complete with the lacking pants. So, I was looking around and saw some people around me and like any good gamer I promptly clicked one. Didn't seem to do much.

Time to walk around I guess after that, so I went to try and figure out the controls. They were using standard WSAD style setups though without proper strafing the motion was a bit awkward and brushing the side of a rock face pretty much meant getting jammed there for a bit while you rotated the character slowly around and had them walk the other way. Moving introduced a new facet of their eye catching premise, that being that instead of running like a normal person, the dark elf swordswoman leaned over and lifted her rear towards the camera as she dashed forward low to the ground. As may be guessed at this point, this wasn't leaving the best impression on me as a serious game. I fiddled around with the controls and found, like many of it's genre, it had a plethora of stats and skills and little knick-nacks to keep track off, all compressed in what was a reasonably user friendly interface. About this time I started off on a mission. No, not a quest given by something but instead trying to kill something.

Some dress with at least more armor on.

It took me a good five minutes before I dove off a cliff elegantly into a swarm of monsters which I was able to whack a bit by clicking on them. I will say that the monsters were pretty nicely animated and modeled. They looked reasonably decent, of course, everything looks pretty here. Striking them, it seemed that there was little more to combat than standing and hitting, using a skill now and then, and running away rapidly. The general flexibility didn't allow for any real cleverness with motion as any attempt to run around and flank or slip in and out of attack range was pretty futile. Workable as a system, if not very impressive.

I'm told, at the time of writing this, it's been outfor over a year and so this is an impression of it at a reasonably stable state as far as MMOs go. All I can say is I hope that there is better stuff on the market, even if I suspect the focus on the rear is not unique to Lineage II.