Vindictus

Criminally underrated. Glad my brother introduced me to the game when I was still a kid. Even if it's not the "perfect" video game, it will always have a place in my heart with the memories I made.

Vindictus is a game that gets no justice, A burden unsurprising for a character action game, which are infamous as a genre consistently failing to capture mainstream attention. People come to Vindictus expecting something it never claimed to be, and the feedback as a result is poor. These people seem to come to the game looking for a standard MMO experience (something never advertised or implied) and get upset when they do not receive it. If you want to spend hours crossing a vast wasteland full of aggressive monsters who can only hit you if they pass a random number check, do not play this game, and certainly do not review it when youre done and complain about things it never set out to do. Vindictus is an online character action game, you do not play classes, you play characters, you do not tab target, you aim, you do not use dps rotations, you adapt your attacks to the situation. If you like bayonetta, god of war, or devil may cry, do indeed try this game, but if you like WoW, Runescape, or Guild Wars, and you cannot accept a game doing something different, do not play this, and do not review this For those who do want an online character action experience, Youll find no better, often youll see people claiming the game has no variety, but an honest person could tell you that each area of the game takes up maybe an hour an hour or two of your time, before giving you a new place to play in. You do revisit older areas, but only in theme, For example, there are two areas to the ruins, one with 9 levels to complete (where you slowly progress through the ruins) and one, which comes later in the game, which has 8 levels. There is additional time you return to a similar area, but is not technically related, which holds another 9, in these cases, enemies are changed, traps are changed, new areas are added, and no boss is repeated. Even in the case of the first area of the game, when the area boss returns as a raid, he has a different moveset to freshen things up. Despite the seldom reuse of these areas in the game, people will tell you the game lacks variety, I have to wonder if those same people would spend the same three hours in another MMO's forest ruins environment, only instead of fighting new enemies in each level, they are just grinding the same things. Variety in Vindictus, like any other character action game, is less about visuals, and more about mechanics, People can complain all they want that gnolls, despite being in a war with you, show up too often at the start of the game, but only if the gnolls fail to ever shake things up, which they certainly do. Some people also claim the game is grindy, which is flat out untrue, The game is not designed for you to gain experience from killing mobs, it goes out of its way to encourage players to do quests for exp, but since again, these players are coming in expecting the typical MMO, they decide to grind instead, and dismiss the game as a result before going off to tell people who grindy it is. I have one of every single character released to date, which means Ive leveled 9 characters, so I feel its safe to trust me when I tell you that you can reach the soft level cap in a couple weeks of playing casually, level 30 (of 90) is achieved in just an hour or two for most people, and there are frequent contests with new characters to max out their level, which people complete in a matter of days. A final clarification I feel the need to make is on the idea of "pay to win", people have this reflexive (and unfounded) attitude that if any game is published by nexon, no matter what, its pay to win. This is baffling because as I recall there were only ever two games from them that had such problems, and those problems were eventually removed. In the case of vindictus, pay to win is impossible. The game is largely PvE, and only one of the 4 pvp modes could be affected by your gear, so the idea is silly to begin with. Anyone who claims the game is pay to win is simply ignorant, they do not understand how the pvp works, they do not understand how the pve works, they do not understand how stats work, and they do not understand how cash items work. Yes, you are able to buy costumes for 30 dollars a piece which will give you stats, but in addition to the stats being negligible, there are free sets for you to acquire, none of that really matters though because stats mean nothing in Vindictus and I prove that every day I play.