Now in the news there has been talk of World of Warcraft and it’s new expansion The Burning Crusade. 7 million people, big fights, blah, blah, blah and a monthly cost. This is the one thing that really puts me off playing MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). But last week I found Flyff (pronounced flife) which actually stands for Fly For Fun.

This a Free MMORPG that you can just download and start playing and join a lot of players straight away and get in to the world of Flyff.

The game starts you out as visitor to the realm, you must take on quests and level up to become stronger. It is classic RPG game play, kill something, get XP/item, take it to a NPC (Non-Player Character) and complete a quest. You might be thinking well want is my aim why am I doing this? Well the simple answer is I don’t know, I haven’t got a clue what the end goal is but it is a fair bit of fun playing it and trying to get to it.

This is a Korean made RPG which means it is mostly grinding (repeatedly killing creatures over and over) but when you are playing it doesn’t really ever get boring as you are constantly working towards your next level.

You start out as the character class Vagrant, everyone in the game starts as one. Then at level 15 you have the choice of getting a new job of which there is the choice of 4.

Mercenary who uses swords or axes for close combat.

Magician who uses magical attacks to kill enemies

Assist who can heal other players or give them abilities to get stronger and faster

Acrobat who has ranged attacks using bows and Yo-yos

Depending on the class that you choose to become at level 15 will change the way you play and fight a lot. But from level 15 you also have to look towards your second class as each of the 4 above splits off in to 2 more classes and everything you do levelling up your character and abilities will effect the final class you choose.

The best feature of your skills is that they doesn't level up with your character level, they level up the more you use them, so spells or skills you use all the time will become very strong where as ones that you never use will stay low level. This means that you can have a very different set of skills to another person in the same class as you.

Now to the flying, straight away you will see people zooming around over head and want to join them, but you must work for it, you can't fly till you are level 20 which is probably a fair few hours of game play. Then depending on your money situation in game you can buy a Broom or a Hoverboard, the more you pay the faster the Broom or Board will be. So get saving straight away as it's at least 3-4 times faster than walking

There are some downsides to the game, for example some of the translations aren’t very good, to the point that you won’t understand some quests. I personally got around this by going on the offical website and looked on the forums for quest guides so that I knew what I was fighting or where I was meant to go.

Another down side is the in game trade system. Players can start up their own shops to sell off items and weapons that they no longer need or can use, this often leads to people selling things far above their worth but newer players feel that they need the items to keep up with everyone else and so often they will get ripped off. If you join the game make sure you ask around about prices, check in shops to make sure that the same item isn’t easily available from a NPC shop for a much cheaper price.

Graphically this isn’t a terrible looking game, I would say it’s not really much further behind than World of Warcraft and some of the areas look fantastic. The sound unfortunately is a bit repetitive and the music
although at the start is great I turned it off after an hour or two.

Every time you increase a level you have the choice to improve only of your stats be it Dexterity, Strength, Stamina or Intelligence, this will change other things for your character such as speed, power, maximum health and maximum magic so choosing the right combination for your class will make your character better.

This game in my opinion is a good option if you want to join the MMORPG trend; it is simple and will give you a taster of what they are like. I’d suggest maybe starting out with a friend and working together to level up. There is a total of 120 character levels which will take you hundreds of hours to achieve. This is very much a game you could just play for an hour or two each day and enjoy it worth the time to download and for free you can’t really go wrong.