LAST YEAR'S MODEL

So I’ve been obsessively playing Zenonia 2 for iphone.  It has been my go to source of entertainment for a couple months now on the train.  So I thought I would share.  n stuff.

The game itself is pretty straight ahead.  It is a top down adventure game in the style of Legend of Zelda, Secret of Mana, or even Diablo.  Though the style is far more 16 bit throwback then it is modern adventure.  And that is why Zenonia excels.  If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it and Zenonia does a great job using a tried and true formula.  Each of the 4 character choices have different skills, active and passive, and a wide array of weapons and armor to equip.  While using new equipment does not change or basic attack and defense skills, each piece of equipment does change the appearance of your character.  While this doesn’t have a huge effect on the game, it does add to the fun of finding new stuff.

The game play is straight ahead.  Basically you embark on a mission to save the world.  The story is uninspired but you can skip through most dialogue.  Mission after mission presents nothing new, just a series of fetch quests and enemy slaying requirements, but when the fun of the game is building up your character, finding new equipment and using new skills, you don’t really need variety.  In fact, I like that they didn’t too much to mix it up cuz I was totes content just grinding.

Which is why I didn’t really care when after you beat the game the first time through you immediately are sent back in time to start the whole thing over on the level you are at and face harder enemies.  Total play time, about 20 hours.  Not bad for a hack and slash for iphone.

The game is, however, not without it’s weak points.  First off, the game is glitchy.  Random things will cause the status screen to close unprompted.  This is not a deal breaker, but I’m surprised that this has yet to be fixed in an update.  The equipment customization/building feature leaves much to be desired.  I found it hard to even find the items I needed to make the equipment I wanted to, and often, by the time I could construct an item, better versions of it were already available at the shop.  So by halfway through the game I gave up trying as my weak little mage could only carry so much anyway and just sold off all the ingredients I found and bought better equipment.  Which leads me to my other beef…there really should be a place to store items that you don’t want on you immediately but may want in the future.  This seems so obvious especially since low strength characters can carry significantly less the high strength characters and I felt that I was missing out on a fun piece of the game.

All of those items are nitpicky gripes though, and did not really keep me from enjoying the game.  At this point I have played it through with 1 character and am working on 2 more.  It’s that fun.  So buy it now at the app store!!