When the Hello Kitty Online beta first came around, I jumped at the chance to play in a pastel world, making a goofy hello kitty movie pleading for me to be chosen. I guess I wasn’t a pretty enough princess, because I never did get in at the first go, though through another site’s sign up, I was finally able to wrangle my way in to give it a shot.
Sometimes you can only play against so many orcs ,elves, dragons, and whatnot before you want a change of pace, and HKO is certainly that, for better or for worse.
When I first tried the beta, I found it an incredibly long grind full of saccharine sweet characters and places. I probably would have slogged my way through the grind had it not been for a bug that ended up getting me stuck in between the blackness and a doorway, sealing my poor character’s fate. When she got stuck and I couldn’t get a GM to unstick her for days, I uninstalled and went my merry way, leaving the poor girl in a pixelated abyss.
Now, I don’t remember when the Founder’s Beta came up, but I vaguely remember signing up for it on a whim. If you manage to do something-something, it meant you got your name cemented somewhere in the world as a testament to your love for Sanrio and friends. Now, I didn’t end up doing much during my short stay (seeing as by the time I got around to installing it there were only three days till the beta went down), but here’s a smallish review of my time spent playing for the day-ish.
All right, so since it was a new Beta, I’m assuming the reason I couldn’t pick my ole’ character’s name was because it was wiped and someone else snagged it first, or that the poor thing was still stuck in the same doorway to nowhere I left her at. Not much had changed in that first section, you get to see a super cute intro about how Hello Kitty needs your help to wake up her and her friends who’ve somehow developed cute narcolepsy and have fallen asleep all over the place.
After the intro, you get to create your character, which left a lot to the imagination. You’ve got the usual random number of skin tones, but a dismally small choice for hair styles and color. You could count the choices on your hand. Now, of course, the game’s unfinished, it’s a beta after all, so I am hoping they do add more to it later, or at least add the usual Sanrio character who’s really a beautician that can add more style to your toon. Sure, you get an assortment of accessories and decorations, but until you get into the game and acquire the fashion assortment, there isn’t much of a difference between you and the other girl that got sucked into Hello Kitty’s world.
Speaking of graphics, everything looks like its made of marshmallow fluff and icing. It really is that pastel and poofy. The world itself is very simplified and colorful, but there’s something about the world map that made it look great as a kid’s table mat and not much else. The area map is helpful enough, seeing as you can turn on NPC position markers, and even player markers as you watch them running around, but as simplified as it was, I found it strange that the player itself isn’t marked out as clearly as everything else.
The UI is also as balloony and shiny colorful as the world, and pretty easy on the eyes. I can’t remember if there were hover-over text to help figure out which bubble was what, but I found myself clicking on things constantly to figure out what they were. Some of them were simple enough to recognize, but in the case of shortcuts, I’m used to ‘I’ bringing up the inventory and it wasn’t the case here. Sorry kids, memorize those keys, because it didn’t look like you could change shortcuts (by the way, F11 to take screenshots).
Now, the first change I happened into is that they added a sort of seperate area before you’re actually plonked into HK world. It’s a tutorial house where the HK residents are willing to help you learn bits and pieces of what to do in the world. Luckily, you can skip the tutorial (you really don’t learn much other than the obvious if you’re a regular mmo gamer), but for the kiddies who’s first foray it is into MMOs (and their parentals), it’s a small stepping stone of instructions about how to move around and interact with non-player characters and such.
Now, at the time, I couldn’t help but realize that there still was a lot in the text and translation left to be desired. Unfortunately, I never did get any screenshots of the mish mash grammar spotted here and there, but they definitely still need to straighten that stuff out.
I know some of you are rolling your eyes as you read this thinking I’m some sort of grammar police narc, but when you think about it, apart from catering to the HK crazed person, this game is supposed to entice the kiddies as well. I remember reading somewhere that a study shows a kid’s reading levels can get a boost from playing games with lots of text in them, and if that’s the case, wouldn’t it be for the benefit of the kid if he wasn’t reading engrish while playing?
Anyhoo, back to the game. Past the tutorial level, you’re finally tossed onto a port city at the edge of the HK world. Now, when I first played, I remember a lot of NPCs milling around with quests to do and mobs to fight. They whittled the place down of both NPCs and mobs, with those remaining asking you to do various things for them after you’re done with the first set of chores or decisions for you to make. The quests are the standard fare of delivering things to this pal or gathering so-and-so things for investigation or whatnot.
In the first beta I played, they really made you grind for some of the objects from mobs or plantlife. 50 times over. And it’s not just the sheer amount of stuff for one quest you had to gather, but for the harvesting bits, it took at least a minute or two to get a single object. It took willpower to gather 50 of anything back then.
They’ve decided to cut kids some slack and a lot of the gather quests have been dropped to 30 or less items, with the time it takes to gather the items shortened, but the game still manages to suck away at time while you’re doing it. How? By making other items drop or become harvested instead of just the quest item. This means you have a 50/50 chance of getting that quest item you need or some other random item that claws away at your soul as time goes by. So let’s say it takes a minute to get this particular leaf. Instead of taking 30 minutes, you could be spending an hour raking at plants because you’re not getting the quest item, you’re getting something else. It grates on your nerves when you just want to get the quest over with, and this is just the beginning of the game!
The plants can be harvested at first go with just your hands, but later you’ll need axes to get at the rest of the trees in the next area. Word of advice, when you see the axe, buy it. It saves you a trip back when you accidentally find you need it for a quest that doesn’t mention you’ve got to have one.
So, after weeding out most of the landscape, you’re eventually asked to retrieve items from the critters roaming the area. The first few stars and snails you encounter are pretty easy pickings, but strangely, the crabs at level four were totally kicking my butt when I was level five. It got to the point where it was taking me a long while to get the gathering done when I had to sit every two mobs (and sitting seemed to do nothing in replenishing health any faster).
If I had had money for food items, it wouldn’t have been so bad or taken so long, but you don’t get much in the way of pocket change at the start of the game. Shoot, although you get an average chunk of inventory space, they decided to tease and torment you by showing you the space you could have, but locking it away (whether it takes simply playing further and questing to unlock, or needing to buy using cash shop, I’ve no idea). Whatever you collect you tend to keep since a quest down the line eventually has you gathering 30 of it and you want to make sure you have them to save your sanity from another hour of critter beating.
Speaking of quests, it was strange, but I think after I had done all there was in the starter port town and its surrounding area, I never got a quest telling me to move on (which I’ve gotten used to in other games). It doesn’t detract much from the game, but if a kid keeps milling around confused at why the other characters aren’t asking him/her for help, it’s definitely something that might confuse a new gamer that needs their hand held during those first stages.
Now, there’s a ton of other things to do in the game other than grinding, thankfully, but because there weren’t many days left when I started the founder’s beta, and I was getting frustrated with the harvesting and mob stunning (you don’t kill the cuties, you just beat them senseless), I never did get to reach what may have been the more fun aspects of the game.
If you had the willpower, you could look forward to creating your own home and gardening around it, making clothes to wear, cooking foods, collecting cards, pets, and traveling a pastel colored world of cute characters you can help. Oh, and making friends, which feels to be a big aspect of the game seeing as there are plenty of features that help you link friends to your HK blogs, videos, and stuff.
Maybe I’m not as big of a fan of the pink cat as I thought (I was always more of a My Melody gal myself anyways), but if you can get past the first initial grinds and level past the first area, you have a better chance of enjoying the game more and seeing some of the better aspects of the game I never got to review.
Also, I don’t think of it so much as the usual mmo game but as a more interactive virtual chat box to show off the latest spangly duds you’ve created. Kind of like Phantasy Star Online, but more like being stuck in a bigger, pinker version of the lobby.
It definitely feels like the Sanrio fan club can mingle happily in the game, reveling and being surrounded by the characters they’ve come to adore over the years of growing up. Parents who’ve grown up surrounded by Kitty and Co. can find this a small (safe?) haven to share with the young ones (with the merchandising soon to overcome the wee ones brains after realizing these cartoon characters can be bought in all sorts of clothes, toys, and whatnot…).
Still, for me, till the final goes out, I don’t think I’ll mind taking a break from such a sugary sweet world. Although, thanks to a sentimental gift of a hello kitty mouse (ironic) and an insatiable curiosity, I’m sure I’ll be back, eventually, to see if the world of Hello Kitty Online has grown cuddlier than it was before.
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