it goob

cube world (beta) progression, zone-based progression (grinding levels,etc do not transfer over to other regions)
no thanks

Running around the map breaking boxes is meta, don't let anyone tell you otherwise :D

Already went in with the bias of "Oh, it's Nexon.."
Took a peek into the cash shop, yep, that's basically it. Y'all don't even try anymore, do you?

Let me stare at this load screen for ages because shadows are compiling for the 5th time in a row even changing zones I've been previously to a couple minutes before.
Surely no one playtested this game, right? With lower specs, hopefully?

Also the cheapest package for MTX in Brazil costs around 30 BRL (250 currency of whatever its called)
You can barely buy an emote with that.
The season pass costs 500 currency (Roughly 70 BRL) on its base form

A skin costs around 70 BRL. One skin.

A package thing for the "stronger version of a hero/class" costs 5.000 of said currency. Which puts at about 530 BRL (our minimum wage is 1.300 BRL btw) for ONE package. There's at least three or four of those in there, for each 'class'

Aside from MTX:
- I can't flick ADS, it has a fixed delay to it and it makes aiming inconsistent as ♥♥♥♥ (y'all can't even get the gunplay right in a looter shooter? epic)
- Enemies AI are a joke, and I can't increase the difficulty because I need to clear everything in normal first (most likely a gimmick to just pad content and playtime)
- From gunplay to heroes/classes abilities feel very underwhelming, polish is close to nowhere near a "done state"
Again, did anyone playtest this?

Truly, the AAAA (quadruple A) Destiny 2 killer. Great job, guys.

Honestly, from the announcement trailer alone I could see and feel that a lot of love was put into this and I blindly bought the Deluxe Edition. I was not disappointed at all and even though it is quite a "short" campaign you can maybe get through the game in 10h to 12h even while being thorough on levels there are still things left to do for completionists.
Also, the cat is the best character.

If you're a rhythm game enthusiast, I would highly recommend this (and honestly, it's quite a challenge even if you're an adept at them- There are a LOT of things to keep track at a times, and I guess that's why some game journalists would rate 3/5 or 4/5 on this game which I find baffling in my personal opinion) and even if you're just a fan of this kind of Action/Hack'n'Slash game and is very afraid because of the rhythm aspect of it.. Give it a go, trust me. You may like it. The game is very friendly with the difficulty settings, tutorials and there are a LOT of systems that help you visually and audibly to get your things on-beat.

There are almost no instances where the game "punishes" you for missing the beat or being off-beat, the game basically auto-plays your attacks on beat always even if you're just mashing your attacks through. You are just always rewarded for doing things on the rhythm. For example more damage, more points (your ranking system on the end of missions) and things of the such. The only instances that you get "punished" are because the platforming on the game is always on the beat of the song, so you need to pay attention to that, but you eventually get the hang of it, just like with the combat where by the time it gets more difficult, you know a bit of the rhythm of your enemies- and, this is a spoiler for the end game, so don't worry about it if you're just for the ride and don't want and additional challenge/don't want to 100% this game: You unlock a new difficulty called "Rhythm Master" where you get one-shotted by every single hit, so you better get that perfect tempo down! and I'm not entirely sure but maybe like Necrodancer's Aria character if you miss a few beats without doing anything you just insta explode? I'm not sure

No marketing/PR, no hype, no nothing until a sudden same-day launch announcement on a known livestream event. Non-$60 game with a soul, full of character and love put into every nook and cranny they could. It's a hit, a game made with love and care and not just being another product of the "triple eh" formula worked out super well. Who could've thought?

Don't let this nostalgia hit distract you of KoG's track record. And with that out of the way, a little piece of my mind before talking about the current standing of the game.

I have played this since 2006 on the Brazilian servers and it was a blast back then, game constantly updating and it was a novelty back then- Up to the point of around 2010 the game had started to age poorly with higher tech and higher polish games appearing along the way, GrandChase really didn't make much of a success as in Brazil/South America- One of the main cash cows KoG had, they chose to cut costs and started to focus their development on Elsword.
That game didn't catch as much attention as KoG wanted it to around here, our local publisher even offered to buy GrandChase's rights to keep offering service (and maybe even continue its development back then).

With Elsword's slowly decreasing population, increasing dissatisfaction of the game's system and how KoG doesn't seem to care much about F2Ps around there- with KurtzPel flopping as hard as it could and having the same issues with F2P, it's safe to have an educated opinion on how this will just be a cash grab for those who are feeling nostalgic about this poorly aged nostalgic blast from the past that people used to play while in middle school and the only other contenders really were mostly other kind of games (MMORPGs like Perfect World, Ragnarok Online, etc) especially for the folks here in Brazil.


This game is fun. It truly is, and it definitely was when I played it back then- The thing is: It has aged very, very poorly and KoG really, really does not have a good track record of listening to players and making changes that actually matter and aren't controversial. Don't get me wrong, there will always be people complaining about updates or lack thereof- But really, if they follow what they've been doing in Elsword..

As for the game standing, it has the same snapshot it had before the servers were closed- Polished for higher resolutions and minimal technical fixes, the game stands almost exactly the same as it was before. Very few things were touched/changed even from the Beta to the launch itself, a lot of the same old bugs are in the game (most of them are "harmless") while a few others are easily used to exploit fights whether in PvE or PvP. It seems to be that KoG is around trying to punish players who deliberately abuse of those (instead of fixing legacy code, which honestly is a daunting task to do without remaking the spaghetti that keeps this game together, literally ask anyone who has worked with legacy code. It's a slow and costly process and KoG would most likely not be inclined to do so)

As I really like to explain this game to anyone who asks me about it: It was the live-service sandbox to test all of the systems that worked out or didn't work out for Elsword. You can easily see all of the separate character mechanics, separate inventories, starting to ask for money for extra character slots. Pets being locked for each character, the refining system itself, the 'new' rewards system and set bonuses that will get you a huge advantage, the drop system that was changed four times on the game's history as far as I can remember so you don't even have the GP (Gold Points?) armor and weapons in the store anymore, you need to grind the hell out of it and it isn't even guaranteed for your character with the current system! Of course you have the daily/hourly challenge to eventually buy Phoenix set but who's gonna do that after they're near level 85, and want to make sure to have a +10 weapon for PvP, right?

The balancing in the game has always been and I believe will always be dubious at best, as the way the game was worked out is inheretly flawed. Systems such as the Beserk (Elesis counters to projectiles) or MP Beserk (Arme counters to projectiles) are just a way of saying "hey I've tried making projectiles less unfair for others in PvP but it didn't work much haha sorry I don't wanna change how those characters work". That would be a problem to keep as is and would be a problem to change them because people would complain, so KoG chose the former and not spend a single dime on actually balancing a bunch of stuff for PvP, really.

There are only a few handful of characters that are actually playable (and coincidentally, the most popular ones! Jhin, Azim, Ryan on his 4th class, and anyone who has better input handling than someone that's god awful at it. One good example would be trying to do anything with Lire's first class compared to those mentioned) because of the very clunky and weird action system (hell, literally play Elsword for a couple hours and try playing GrandChase again- You will notice the huge difference), there are no input buffers and you *will* need to get the timing down of combos and cancels as best as you can. This could be used as "ah, so you just need to get good, right?" Well, yes, sort of. If you really know how to play, it will easily shine through but the chances of you being mistaken for those who are macroing is very, very high because of the tight inputs you really need to do to actually do something that isn't a 3-second animation lock.
Ah, I have mentioned Lire and Arme a few times here and good luck trying to PvP with them. Their normal movement and combo kit is so piss poor that they resort to cheap skills most of times (Arme's MP1- Petrify is a good exemple) and culturally (South America/Brazil) you WILL be kicked out of the PvP lobby as soon as you switch to those characters.

Not to mention the whole refining system all over again.. KoG really loves doing this and holy hell, good luck getting your weapons up to the refining grade you want because you will need either a lot of patience or a lot of money.

PvE will eventually force you to most likely get some cash in to get extra revives if you're trying to solo content (whether that or getting some good ass gear on the rewards system plus the awesome looking pet) because I'll tell you, without the proper information on how your character works.. You will most likely be flattened down by enemies who have almost all times poorly-designed cheap tatics to kill you. One time favorite of KoG's is to spam super armor frames on almost all attacks, fill the room with those monsters and call it a day. Another one is big AoEs, anything that can stunlock you or CC you out or your mind. You better get that Mari LaGeas (4th class) going and a whole bag full of potions to clear some content if you're not geared enough for it.

KoG has taken the approach of time-gating content (especially characters and the gacha/ice-burner/rewards system), which is an easy way to pad and proxy people to come back to their game as if it was a "wow it's a launch of a new character! Meanwhile some people in the beta glitched and could create characters that weren't the first intended three, which is enough to say that they *do* have the characters in the game already, it's just really time-gated under their own 'roadmap', if it's even fair to call it that.

And with that long and emotion filled rant about this launch, I feel it's again safe to say that we all just really wished for a GrandChase 2 (Elsword's combo system but better and all the old characters and story we love) but we got none of that. Just pretty much a private server that's being oficially hosted by the developer itself- Hell, even the private servers that were around had a lot better balancing and actual care put into the damn game.

From here, there are a few outcomes:
Game stays gets minimal development after the time gating, basically to be able to say "it isn't in maintenance mode!"
Game stays in maintenance mode indefinitely after the time-gating stops, with KoG just cashing out on it and letting a few servers.
And now for the more unlikely:
Game actually starts seeing further development.
Game gets remade, GrandChase2 is real and Elsword is dead.

Edit: KoG plz
Edit2: nerfcity.