Dungeon Fighter Online

I said in my last review that MMOs aren't my style, and I stand by that statement. Playing MMOs for me is like riding the bus. For the most part people leave you alone, but you're always on the lookout for that one jackass who's going to try to mug you. It's an entirely unpleasant endeavor trying to party up with complete strangers and try to get something done. It's not so much the grinding or any of the gameplay elements that turn me off. It's the simple fact that they are online and multiplayer games. A couple rounds of Halo on XBL should be enough to prove my point. So why would I jump straight off and review Nexon's newest MMO experiment?
When I was looking for a game, one of my friends referred me to Nexon's Combat Arms, a first-person shooter MMO, which to me seemed like another game company's attempt to edge in on the counterstrike market, and I wasn't entirely enthused about having to deal with all the screeching and general prepubescent hoopla that comes with the internet cafe crowd. I was having trouble finding something, however, so I cruised over and had a look.
I was surprised to see Maple Story, a game which got played to death a while ago. So on that endorsement I looked at Combat arms, and it seemed decent, but the ads for DFO (Dungeon Fighter Online) on the sidebar held a strange feeling of familiarity. Then I realized that I saw an ad for it at PAX this year (and it was, in fact, on the swag bags), which cinched it for me. I hit the download button before I was done reading the preview.
What came next was a thing of dark legend. I will tell of it to my children to keep them from getting out of bed at night. Have you ever been on hold for more than an hour? Two? the full game was 1.09 Gb, but it took nearly four HOURS to download. I hear the typical hardware one-upmanship beginning and the zippers coming down, so let me stop you. It was going at an average 300 kbps. First I had to download the special DFO download client, THEN the downloader. I had a nice chuckle about the irony of having to download the downloader. After Vista was done having a hissyfit about a third-party download client existing on the hard drive and very graciously gave me permission to continue, the fact that I had already sunk two hours of concerted effort into the task was the only thing keeping me from quitting. I had no idea of the trials to come. Oh, what a fool I was.
Two hours of downloading later, the setup process was what I can only describe as a black magic ritual. The strange and unnatural requirement to navigate both internet browser and install wizard left me feeling as though my computer would be demanding a lock of my hair. It requires a MCSE certification and the ownership of a penguin t-shirt to set up the program with any success. After somehow muddling my way through, the install/setup process was half-way complete, and the program crashed. I had hoped that there would be some sort of autosave function, sparing me from making that infernal contract with the wizard of install a second time, but my prayers went unanswered. Fortunately, the trail-and-error stumbling I did in my previous iteration left me with a loose semblance of guidance through that ominous wilderness. The second time, the program crashed after hitting the 99% mark. Clothes were torn, and cursing the gods, I shouted to the heavens in despair. After a cigarette, I watched with baited breath as the program finally, after 6 hours of battle, successfully launched. Then it crashed and I went to bed a broken man.
When I rose the next morning to join battle once again, I found a cooperative, perhaps even submissive program laying on my desktop like a cat who just the night before vomited on my pillow. After a somewhat lengthy, but manageable boot-up time, I found a delightful tryst to nostalgia waiting within. I was taken back to the arcade near my parents' house in California, where I spent hours and many quarters playing Street Fighter 2 and Double Dragon in plywood cabinets with sticky buttons. Such was the rush of fond memories, I instantly forgot my despise for the game or the nefarious fiends who designed it.
I am straying, however. The controls are simple and intuitive, and the gameplay is actually pretty fun. Side-scrollers have made a soft spot for themselves in my heart (or head, depending on your views), and this game doesn't fail to deliver the elements that make those games great. Unlike the six-axis, 3D extravaganzas out there, DFO holds no pretenses on what it is, and I appreciate games that don't take themselves too seriously. The dev team took what works and put it into their game. The quest dialogues and HUD look like they were ripped straight out of WOW and put through an 8-bit filter, and the inventory system is a close clone of the one from Diablo 2. Gameplay feels like a fun mix between Street Fighter 2 and Double Dragon. Character creation happens in a flash, with only the name and class being player-chosen. The lack of character customization is a double-edged sword, but we'll get into that later. Every character starts with a fun little comic-book sequence to set up his or her backstory, which ranges from being an escaped convict to wandering the post-apocalyptic ruins of New York City. The classes are simple and straight-forward with roles designed into each and various tech trees to explore.
The classes are; slayer (up-close DPS with a demonic twist), gunner (ranged DPS/crowd control with lots of fun toys), fighter (standard hot-chick-who-kicks-ass), mage (some crazy little 10-year-old anime girl in an uncomfortably erotic outfit, crowd control) and priest (enormous man in a black spandex suit with a white cross on the chest, healer). Each has it's benefits and drawbacks as in any game of the genre, but the ones that made themselves known to me were a little more ambiguous and confusing than the obvious combat party mechanics. The way the mage prances around the screen makes me wonder if there isn't someone on the dev team who should have his hard drive inspected, and it took me more than a minute to notice that the fighter wears a tank top with two watermelons shoved into the front of it and is otherwise clad in naught but white cotton panties and chaps. When the gunner runs, he inexplicably covers his face with his hand, which makes me wonder if he's trying to keep out dust (as his strange spaghetti western/ronin attire would suggest), or if he's running towards something really shocking. Either way, he has a bandana covering the lower part of his face, so the act seems out-of-place at best. The priest fights with an over sized cross with a handle attached to it, which is inordinately cool when he gets around to using it, but it stays on his back most of the time until you use one of his powers or make a combo attack. It makes me wonder why he even has the thing if he doesn't use it very often. I chalk all this up to the artists' anime stylings and don't go any further into it than that, but I'm telling you right now, if tentacles get involved at any point of the game, I'm quitting.
Which brings us full circle to the bad stuff. I mentioned earlier that there is no character customization which, when quick-starting, is all well and good until you get to the first city, which is crawling with new players who haven't earned enough in-game money to buy new outfits and therefor looks just like you. About five minutes into my adventure, I was squinting six inches from the screen, thanking God for auto-center and wondering where the hell I was. It's like that last page of a "Where's Waldo" book, when you have to find Waldo in the midst of a crowd of Waldo clones. It's a great motivator to keep playing so you can afford to customize, but until you get the money, it's just really annoying.
On a gameplay-related note, I know collision detection is an issue for any game with this sort of 3-axis platform (left, right, up down and jump), but with DFO's multiple enemy encounters, it gets very finicky on what hits and what doesn't. I was playing my gunner, Trebuchet, and I was shooting at a level 1 goblin for about thirty seconds, wondering why he wouldn't die as he slowly chipped away at my life, until I realized I was a couple of steps off on the down axis, so I readjusted and killed him quickly. It's a small complaint which goes away with practice, but the more there is going on on the screen, the more likely you are to make the mistake.
In the end, though, these are my only complaints. It's a bright, colorful, inventive world in there, with a very original concept, and I honestly had fun playing it. Even the part of MMO's I despise most, LFG, was easy and welcoming. The lack of non-arena PvP may strike some as the sign of a weak game, but I like it. We have enough stress in our lives as it is, and having to constantly look over our shoulders for the ass-hat who's going to gank us doesn't help. This is an honest, fun game, and that's really all I can ask for. I wouldn't do the set-up again if you paid me, but the reward was an imperfect game with lots of potential. With a few patches, Nexon may have something truly wonderful on their hands. Do the right thing, people. Play indie games. Save the whales.