Tales of Wind : How Does It Stack Up Against Other MMORPGs?
If you’re a fan of mobile MMORPGs, you’ve probably already had enough of cute-looking games that repeat the same old patterns as an excuse to reach for your wallet. At a glance, Tales of Wind might appear to be one such terrible release. In fact, we started playing it with exactly this bias, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes to realize that we were wrong. Hurray!
Tales of Wind is actually a decent MMORPG with plenty of new features to distinguish it from the crowd. Yes, it uses the same cute-looking, anime graphics, but the customization options and different game modes go well beyond your run-of-the-mill mobile game. Plus, you don’t instantly hit level 100 (or CP 1 million) during the first 3 minutes you spend in the game, which, if you ask us, is a big plus.
A Painfully Cute, but Serious World
The game world in Tales of Wind is filled with characters, abilities, pets, and other things that just instantly make you go “Aww!” Yet their stories are serious and, since the English translation is quite decent, they’re easy and interesting to follow. As you start out in your adventure, this world of supreme cuteness is invaded by an unknown darkness. This doesn’t just take a toll on the environment, but it also takes over certain important characters in truly heart-rending fashion.
At the end of the day, the storyline helps you feel like you’re actually working towards something in your quest. You really want to save your friends and you have to become more powerful in order to do so. But here’s the thing. In this MMORPG, it really matters how you gear your character, how you use your abilities, and whether or not you’re willing to turn off the “Auto” mode. If you don’t try your best, you can’t win the important fights, which is a rare thing to see in mobile MMORPGs these days.
Five Classes that Feel Unique
Here’s another thing that many mobile game developers don’t usually give much through. If you create a bunch of classes that all have the exact same abilities under different names, you offer no incentive for the player to create several characters and experiment with new things. Neocraft Limited understood this when they created Tales of Wind. This MMORPG puts five classes at your disposal and they are all unique in terms of game mechanics.
It’s true that the classes are fairly common ones. You have your usual tanky warrior, a squishy but devastating mage, a pretty innovative cleric that can support and a deal damage, a speedy assassin, and an AoE-focused summoner with a gorgeous cat as a pet. Not only does the summoner command a cat into battle, his or her auto-attacks are actually ethereal cats running at the target. That’s just a whole new level of cute, which is why we, of course, had to go with the summoner as our main class.
Seriously speaking, though, each of these classes prefers a specific playstyle and can perform different roles in a party. All abilities are unique, so you can really see why players might want to try out more than one class at a time.
Playful and Strategic Customization
Once you’ve selected your first class, you’re given the option to customize a few things about the way your character looks. We especially love the fact that classes are not gender-locked. Think about it: one can finally create a kickass female warrior or a mysterious male assassin. Since the game does give you the option to marry later on, it’s nice that you can choose the sex/gender you want for your character. In addition, you can customize their hear and a few basic facial features, although you can continue to make your character more distinguishable with costume items once you enter the game proper.
Even more important than this, however, is the fact that you have plenty of options in terms of strategic customization. You choose a class, but the makeup of your character does not stop here. You have to prioritize between different abilities when you use your hard-earned skill points, for example. Plus, there aren’t enough quickslots to fit all of your different abilities, so you have to choose the ones you think are best suited for particular tasks.
Other decisions you might have to make include your character’s gear, their embedded cards, as well as their guardians. But we digress. To find out more about how to improve your character, you can check out our guide to CP here. For tips on guardians and how to get more of them to join you, we’ve created a separate guide.
Plenty of Game Modes and Features
There are so many different things you can do in Tales of Wind every day. Some of these activities you will recognize from other MMORPGs. For example, most games in this genre let you battle it out with other players in the Arena or collect specific resources from all types of PvE challenges and dungeons. Tales of Wind includes these typical game modes, but the developers have also added some unique twists.
To give you just a taste, once you hit level 30, you gain access to your own plot of land, where you can build a beautiful (and totally useful) farm. You choose what features to incorporate into your farm, as well as what resources you want to prioritize in terms of its output. You can even sell the things you grow at your very own farm shop, which can be visited by both NPCs and other players. This is just one of several innovative game modes that Tales of Wind brings to the table. To us, the fact that there are multiple things to do, some of them unique to this game, is pretty exciting.
So there you have it – out take on Neocraft Limited’s Tales of Wind, a mobile MMORPG that we believe is head and shoulders above the majority of other games in this genre. We didn’t even mention the fact that the interface is super clean and that the game rarely, if ever, prompts you to spend real currency, which we absolutely respect. Overall, even if you do decide to break open the piggybank for Tales of Wind, you can rest assured that at least you’ll get a whole lot more fun out of your buck than you would with other, similar releases.
