Worst MMO Ever? - Vindictus 

Despite the flaws it remains the only game to ever let me kick a gnoll in the junk, then grab it by throat and used it to beat other gnolls. It gets a special place in my memories for that.

I love the idea of escort quest where you can carry an NPC instead of dealing with their (usually broken) pathfinding.

I'm a veteran from the early days of Vindictus. The game was much harder in the beginning and was actually quite challenging for the time. Armor and weapons had more meaning and you had to really know how to use your skills and iFrames. Nexon just made it all easy-mode but it wasn't originally intended for that.

Fun fact about the changes made to the game: There used to be a jumping mechanic! Complete with jump attacks too! The reason it's not in the game anymore is because the devs were so incompetent with balancing one character's jump attack damage that they totally scrapped the mechanic and no longer allow your character to jump

"Vindictus isn't a world, it's a vehicle" - it used to be completely different 10 years ago when I started and there were only 3 chapters in total in the west release. You'd need to walk between the buildings to talk to the NPCs, and also the docks were a separate zone. Back then the power creep didn't exist yet, so avoiding damage was required. And then we saw the enhancement system, and that you could buy lootboxes that had a chance of containing maxed out gear pieces. And then the cosmetic shop hit, and it wasn't cleavage-oriented. It went past that and straight into bikinis :D

Man, I yearn for the day Josh does Maplestory.

Vindictus was amazing for its time, me and my makes laughed hysterically at "No time to explain, grab a kobold." and throwing them at eachother. I tried it again this year, but they had deleted my character (which had paid cosmetics), everything was much more ugly than I remember, the town- and missions were completely empty. Vindictus is a ship that has long since left harbour.

I keep intending to come back to Vindictus, since it's the only game to let me grab raid bosses out of their attack animations and impale them with their own weapons. When I did fire it back up after years away, it handed me a Returning Player Bundle containing a full set of armor and weapons that was far better than anything I'd been able to grind out during the couple of years I did play seriously. I've never had a gift that good feel so depressing before.

Couple things that might not have been clear just from playing the game: 1. The game used to be way, way harder, like regular enemies would hit you for 10-20% of your hp or so and traps hurt, and exactly like dark souls you needed to play well to make it to the boss in good enough shape to take it down. However they decided to make every player on each character play through the entire main story to get to end game, which means they streamlined the hell out of the game, and now it's super easy. In a party it's even easier. If you're playing solo, I'd say the 75% mark of season 1 is where new players will get their wakeup call against Ingkells. 2. The tone and gameplay used to match the harsh difficulty. Using improvised weapons was actually good, you'd kick enemies while they were down to finish them off, it was great. 3. Kael is probably the most simple, unga bunga character in the game. Almost everyone else uses both left click and right click in a sort of combo tree, which seriously carries the combat by itself. Despite playing the game on and off for years on many characters, and seeing the same goddamn levels and enemies hundreds of times, this simple system keeps the combat fun for me. When I tried Kael, I quit him pretty quick because of this. I would strongly recommend giving another character a shot to experience this, because I unironically believe Vindictus has the best combat of any MMO. My personal favorites are Lynn Lann Fiona and Lethor. 4. The game gives you full sets of enchanted armor all the way to level 100, and you get more than enough AP to max level everything that actually matters on your character. The game is pay to win, but only starting at endgame, and even then, if you suck at combat no amount of money will carry you. Skill > all in vindictus. Overall, despite the years me and this game have been through, I've never taken it seriously as an mmo. I just hop on, mess around for a bit, hop off, without ever grinding the raids or other content, then leave for months or years. But somehow that combat always pulls me back in eventually.

Ugh. It infuriates me watching this and experiencing the game now since I know what the game used to be. Crafting was introduced early on because you didn't get quest gear, you had to make it as you went and farm for it. The enemies and bosses were so hard that I saw a lot of people needing to group up to fight Decisive Battle's gnoll boss. Traps and falls used to break armor really quick lowering your defenses. Secondary weapons like the grappling hook and flash bombs were necessary to trip and stop bosses, holding them down for your party to beat on. The end of the ruins levels were a 'wall' that tested your abilities. That 'drop-down' in the ice caverns taught you to push those heavy blocks through the wood bars, but they removed them for some reason? They changed it all so you could progress faster and 'catch up' to the new story parts. Even Glas Ghillean's a joke now.

As someone who has played this game for over 7,000 hours and had a rank 3 character I can honestly say that everything in this video is pretty accurate. The only thing that changes as you progress is that the combat becomes more engaging, though the gameplay loop remains the same. It becomes incredibly repetitive, tedious and unrewarding, even for a multiplayer RPG. The combat is the only thing that holds this game together. Barely.

I remember just LOVING the hell out of this game, never saw myself quitting, then the RISE update came out and shit just got worse. Such a fun game, and i'm still looking for another MMO that lets me clash with bosses like Karok, one day someone will make one....maybe.

This game's updates history is so weird. You used to climb a boat with a funny waving animation when departing for missions. Traps used to be deadly. They legit removed the jump button and so on. What a shame. Edit : game is so easy now, you might have missed the feature that armor looks broken when each pieces gets broken down. You look battle worn if you don't repair your gear. So many cool things shutdown by....idk...laziness

Thanks for covering this game, I've played for a long time but its basically invisible to the wider world of games due to Nexon's decisions both historically and presently. I wanted to just reply to a few bits, in a probably disjointed manner. Length warning, but I will try to keep these as brief as I can. Omega tl;dr: This explains some history of Vindictus, that it wasn't always this way. A few of the things stated in the shown reviews are outdated, and aren't issues anymore. To tl;dr and oversimplify, some of those reviews are from before a big and controversial update in 2017 that Nexon called RISE. It is to blame for most of your complaints in the video actually. But what it did bring is forms of guaranteed progression without need to spend. Instead of items being permanently destroyed from enhancement, you could restore them for a bit of AP and then reforge them with materials. This lets you enhance the same item infinitely until you reach the maximum (+15). 15 looks like a big number, but 0 to 8 is trivial and 10 is not a big deal to do. Only 12, 13, 14, and 15 are a struggle. It also builds in a max amount of times you are allowed to fail, so that you can only be so unlucky. Enchantment also has alternatives, where failing an enchant gives you a tradable scrap of the scroll you tried. You can either amass or buy four scraps, and create a copy of the scroll that cannot fail. This provides a route to enchant without runes. There's also a rune you can buy off people on the ingame marketplace from the lootbox that guarantees enchant success once, but that is a whole other topic. Early game (Levels 1 to 99) was *massively* dumbed down in the RISE update. It actually had a difficulty curve and everything, but they turned it all into wet noodles to get people through early game faster. These changes are very contentious among the playerbase, with most not liking it but not agreeing on what should be done instead. A lot don't like doing the same story/the same battles over and over on 10+ chars, but don't want it completely cut either. In Hoarfrost Hollow (the icy cave) you encountered a set of weights and a wood floor bit with a hole in it. Before RISE, that hole was not there. You had to push a weight onto the wood floor to break it and drop through. The original Perilous Ruins (the first area) also did not have that pointless ledge climb or the tower, but those came a little after RISE. RISE also deleted very nearly the entire basic crafting system in the game for everything before Lv.90, which is why you never got any info about what to do with your drops. You'd have to learn an Expertise (a skill to personally make gear), which isn't part of the main story and is extremely out of the way. The level up gifts, progressing story chat from anywhere, and other things are also from RISE and post-RISE "early game QoL". All of it basically wants to bullet train you to Level 100, where the game actually starts. It's unfortunate. Many longtime players have fond memories of the bosses in the first region just absolutely decimating them and their entire team. Being specific would be major spoilers for the story, but you do engage in combat with several characters that you know well from previous story events. There are some legitimate issues with their monetization strategies. As you mentioned, in the last few years they've gone all in on cleavage. Then once that wasn't enough, they added outfits that increase your chest size to unrealistic proportions. Recently, they've gone even further beyond than that. Regarding VVIP, which you mentioned as "on sale". It looks like that, but it is not on sale. It is always that price. Nothing is on sale at a discount right now. The 1000 AP Capsule you mention being in the shop is an issue of a different kind though. At one time 1k AP might have been a lot, but nowadays it would take about 3-5 minutes to earn. It is terrible yes, but mostly because it is a total ripoff. It wasn't for sale back when it would have been notable, fortunately. The pay2win is the lootboxes. Outfits from the lootboxes can be worth dramatically more than any drop you can get ingame, and can be sold. A rare drop might be 5-90m, but a Legendary female outfit is ~500m. Regarding left click to win, each character plays differently. They all snooze through the first 99 levels, but Kael is unique in that his combos aren't split between left clicks and right clicks. Where the newest character (Dan-Ah) might have combo sequences of (left click L, right click R) that look like LR, LLR, LLRR, LLLRR, LLLRR Tab, Kael has his normals and smashes as a single series, and his right click is instead Parry. If early game wasn't nerfed, you'd have had more reliance on Parrying and countering (once unlocked), and it would have felt less one dimensional. Vindictus had amazing combat for its first 5 years or so, but the gigantic nerfs (and power creep) have made it vastly easier than it used to be. It has lost its way over the years, and rather than improving its combat it is doing literally anything else. A bad dating sim knockoff, a bad MOBA-like PVP mode, a bad copy of RS3's Player Owned Ports (I don't know what this game type is called). I still play, but I can easily understand why new players would be turned away by the frankly horrific impression that early game gives. The turbo cleavage mode is also becoming a sour point for some players of late, at least in the NA/EU region.

This is another MMO that was actually incredible on release (and honestly all the way through the first act of the story - in fact it even dramatically improved in the second half of season 1) but then sadly greatly outlasted its lifespan. By season 2 they'd swapped development directors and the game pretty much immediately started to go off the rails. A lot of the difficult combat encounters of the past were gradually replaced with gimmick bosses that barely take advantage of the game's combat system at all, lots of big sandbag bosses that really only serve as DPS checks, longer and more tedious missions for grindier rewards. They introduced an entirely new town and area, but decided for whatever reason not to continue the season 1 storyline and instead do something entirely different and almost completely unrelated. They realized this was a mistake later and tried to correct it by returning to the previous storyline and sort-of trying to connect the two, but.... it really doesn't work, the story just becomes increasingly incomprehensible and I was entirely divested from it by the middle of season 3. The combat, bosses, loot, crafting, and everything else also continued to degrade all this time, new systems are never really reconciled with old ones which is what leads to so much incoherence when you're playing the older parts of the game, which they've dumbed down into an extremely long glorified tutorial. Except, honestly, because there's NO CHALLENGE in any of the older content, you don't actually learn anything during that long pointless tutorial - so you reach the part of the game where enemies suddenly have 10x more health and do 20x more damage and you just get your ass kicked forever because the game never taught you how to fight anything the intended way. Oh, and now you need to do daily raid grinds for .01% drop rate items to improve your character, and buy cash shop items to upgrade them to the point where they're actually strong enough for content of your level unless you want to risk an extremely high chance that your equipment will fail to upgrade and break.

I think the voice acting in the opening cutscene is actually pretty great despite the weird audio mixing and spacing problems

Vindictus was always *VERY* horny, not anything recent. A lot of the dungeon gripes are "Because not everybody is a melee, and ranged classes do things very differently" from what I remember. That ice cave was quite a difficulty curve back in the day, not to mention a few areas past it. We're not talking minor, we're talking Everquest 1 "This took 50 people highly geared hours to do, until they lost players and people could just solo it years later" But the actual game play and quick "in and out" instances with so many small progressions from consumables to titles that it was a fun time killer.

This game used to feel really responsive and me and a friend had a great time with it. Overtime more concepts were added, some were forgotten, cute cat girls and cosmetics were introduced, and eventually the game just started to feel like a shell of its former self. I feel this way with a lot of games these days. A quick climb to the top and forgetting everything left behind.

Yep, I too was very heavily invested in this game around 2011 to 2014, when it was actually challenging, and took a lot of skill; you clearly could separate the good players from the bad players. Grind was a little much, but crafting your full gear set gave so much dopamine, and seeing people fully in crafted gear was something awe-inspiring; you knew that guy worked his ass off for that gear. Monsters had break-offs that you needed to have good aim with the spear to get, and usually they were components of armour. You could die from the polar bear and gnoll chieftain, they were noob killers. Then when around Episode 13(?) got released, more and more boats started requiring 13k+ attack as raids were introduced and it was around that time (Level 70?) that I quit, since getting high level gear was nearly impossible without either being stinking rich or paying in the cash shop. I recently came back to the game earlier in December, to see that it was a former shell of itself. 50 trillion different windows of shit (mostly cash shop stuff), bikinis and catgirls everywhere, everything is easy. I haven't played past the first 60ish levels, but they were a breeze, and the bosses I used to know as troublemakers for players, I easily killed with barely knowing anything about my character's playstyle. I'm sure it probably gets harder in the 100+ levels (and as others commented, just as grindy as before but just end-game now), but it was disappointing to see how dumbed down the old content was, the stuff I struggled with, grinded on, and spent so much time perfecting boss's movesets on. Just so people can get to the end-game where you can whale to get the things you need. I don't mind the catgirls-in-bikinis aesthetic, if the setting was right. That's something I expect of TERA where I want my character to be a sexy castanic barely wearing anything. But in Vindictus? It felt out of place. Most of the armour sets covered you, and kinda had a Souls vibe. Now everyone's wearing string bikinis and some weird cash shop shit. Also, speaking of TERA, my friend has constantly mentioned that while I've lamented Vindictus's downfall, I could just play TERA instead. No, TERA's combat is complete and total ass, and there has never been an active-combat game with the fluidity I had when playing a Fiona. Heavy stander cancelling, knowing the lag times of each smash and knowing when to use them in comparison to the boss's free time before attacks, knowing when to use a small shield vs. a large, knowing how to perfect counter vs using heavy stander, knowing when to dodge/unshieldable attacks (Aghlan)... the list goes on. There is no other game that has made me use my brain that much and consider my options and my character's abilities in this way. Hell, when Aghlan was new, I used to bring my small shield for the sheer fuck of it, solely for fun (which is ill-advised because Aghlan's attacks are 99.9% smash attacks). So when I countered the SINGULAR rare normal hit, it was SO DAMN SATISFYING AND REWARDING to watch this giant golem get knockdown after you suffered the entire fight with small shield for this single moment. What other game has this type of flexibility in equipment options?? I miss the olden days. I wish there was a p-server that I could play that just had the game before Han Jae Ho became the director.

When this game was released way back in the day my friends and I started in Beta and played it for years. It was easily the greatest game we had ever played and still to this day no game has come even close to the epic boss fights that require your whole team to be on point and work together. The greatness this game once was needs to be recreated today.

Circa 2010 this game was actually pretty damn amazing. Bosses were tough, combat was fluid, cash shop was a little obnoxious but tolerable. In fact I can remember the friends I played with being blown away at my work to hit the skill ceiling on tanking many of the harder bosses as a Fiona never dodging while taking 0 damage. It was incredibly fun and rewarding. By 2012 it was headed downhill and I quit. Looks like now they've entirely destroyed low level balance to get everybody to the upper levels quickly, entirely destroying the game's original appeal of always being fun to play no matter how far along you were. Disappointing, but unsurprising because Nexon. I'd recommend people stay well the hell away. This game's star burned out almost a decade ago.

I remember playing this back in beta. Had so many fun memories with the break system, when secondary weapons actually did something, and when raids actually posed a challenge (Hidden solo Season of Macha, anyone?). But now when I log in it's just an empty shell of what once was. I'd gladly play a Vindictus 2 or some other spiritual successor should it ever come to be as long as it's not handled this poorly.

It really is a shame you only had a chance to play this after the RISE update. Nearly all of the complaints you had about the hub/progression were incredibly different before the RISE update... You had to run location to location, the quests didn't automatically show you dialogue from the menu, you had to physically run to the board to do missions. The difficulty actually existed and the jump in damage from the ruins to the cave was *very* noticeable. The RISE update ended up invalidating every aspect of the game pre-max level, so a new player (and returning players) just... have nothing to keep their attention anymore. Hell, I remember using the environmental items as weapons because they usually did *significantly* more damage than most of your abilities to mobs, and depending on your class and stats, you could pick up heavier pieces of the environment to do more damage. It was so cool. Nowadays it's just not worth even trying. They shower you in gear, they made enemies hit like wet noodles, and the bosses have 90% less health than they used to. Sigh.

15:40 as a Vindictus veteran i can tell you that it was a difficult game some years back. They made the game so easy nowadays that to me is not worth playing anymore.. i think they did that in order to appeal to larger crowd. But it is ridiculous.. you could go solo to huge raid bosses and win if you knew the bosses's moves and have good reactions and tactics.. but you could also die in 1 to 3 hits depending on stats and mistakes made. kinda like dark souls. You couldn't get into tougher dungeons if your stats weren't great. People won't let you join parties and not for bad reason mostly because you couldn't win. But now it's really easy to do so as there is a solo mode now that underpowers the boss. 19:57 that is a change i did not understand at all because you had to travel to every different city for every set of dungeons. It has only 4 cities and now they made it such that there's no need to see them at all. They added some dungeons and whatever but i always hoped that they added some more towns and different activities within the dungeons other than killing a boss... they tried.. they did some here and there but it was pointless by the end. Vindictus used to be a great game at times.. but the developers killed it instead of improving it.. they added and changed stuff that wasn't needed instead of provind a more interesting world. Note: they changed the starting dungeons where you fight the wolf men.. they looked different and had different layouts.. i have no idea why.

Everyone has said it but still this game used to be sooo hard. The gnoll boss would tear you apart, hero mode of missions was super difficult. They had a hero mission of all the regular missions to make them hard and you could farm them for scrolls to enchant your weapons. I remember when they first introduced the dragons my goodness!!!! That was hard! Was in there almost the full hour before we beat it. secondary weapons also held a huge impact to give your team an opening to attack. Spearing a boss enough times to knock them down, blinding them for more openings, chaining them down to hold them from attacking to again give an opening or using a spear to stop glas from destroying your teammate after he grabs them. Now I come back and they try to rlly fast track everyone to the endgame but I hear it's super easy now. It's still rlly fun to play but not as hard as before. Kinda disappointing there, but still a real fun game to hop on and play

Seems like the difficulty was neutered at some point. Even some of those gnoll bosses required proper use of abilities and such to not die back when things were new. By the time you hit the gothic mansion area you'd get turned inside out if you don't have a firm grasp of the mechanics.

12:30 Well. That was deadly in 2011. That trap wasn't exactly like that as they decided to remodel the whole area somewhere in Season 3 (the argument being that specially the first area "Perilous Ruins" showed it's age and needed to catch the attention of new players). With some luck there are even some videos left of old environmental deaths. Most channels have been made private or deleted over the years.

I am likewise somewhat of a Vindictus veteran - I've played it on-off since 2019 and really, for the most part everything you've said in the video is accurate, just with a few discrepancies. While the early game does make you into a tanky god, later on in the game (around season 3-4) you actually begin to somewhat struggle (at least in my experience) even with an elite, maxed-out character that requires you to land a good amount of hits on an enemy, as opposed to the 2-taps frequently shown in the video. Also you don't actually have to pay for any of the stuff like enhancement runes or goddess' grace; you can either buy that with ingame currency or get them as rewards (albeit rarely). Furthermore, I have not necessarily quit playing it, but am rather in a stalemate; the current monster-boss I'm meant to defeat is 'Aes-Sidhe', some demi-god of the void. He's really cool visually and is intimidating at first sight, but even for me (with my main character being level 101 Eira), it's just way too hard. I can pull off a whole combo string that usually floors really tough bosses, but for Aes Sidhe, I just barely scratch the 1st health bar from what I think is 10 total health bars. In turn, one attack from him literally staggers me and sometimes sends me rolling away on the platform we fight. Even more disappointingly, you must REALLY grind to even get to that point in the game, which equates to actual hundreds of hours of pure progress (I have ~800 hours). Though I don't really plan on playing Vindictus much, if at all, as I feel absolutely zero need to play it, given how unoptimised and unbalanced it is, especially in the later game, where elites grind extremely difficult monsters just for material rewards to further max out monstrous elite gear - where they would realistically be just fine without armour if they still had the dodge mechanic. However, I completely agree that Nexon transitioned from a company that envisioned a unique, unrepeatable RPG experience into fabricating a money-hogging p2w elitist atmosphere, even I see it for myself whenever I visit Colhen and see max-level elites wearing strange outfits they most likely paid for, while only a small minority actually wears organic in-game gear (though this may differ aesthetically as in higher level thresholds you get awarded unique outfits that are shown over your armour). One thing you definitely missed out though - the game's OSTs. Studio EIM has arguably produced so many extremely good soundtracks for certain bosses that you could vibe to any day and are generally so enjoyable to listen to. Admittedly though, with this comes a great letdown; they only typically last around 2 minutes and are looped. While for some OSTs it would be nice to relisten to them in the heat of combat, it just feels really mediocre, compared to, for instance, Sephiroth's remastered theme "One-Winged Angel" from Final Fantasy 7 Remake which in its entirety lasts for ~10 whole minutes. Vindictus, in stark contrast, produces music that fits within the range of decent to really impressive music with varying quality that is sometimes, as aforementioned, reused for some bosses, which either indicates Nexon either did that as a consequence of an insufficient budget, or mediocrity. Overall, it's only really good to play once a while. I play it around once every 2-3 weeks and each time am surprised my guild hasn't kicked me out for inactivity (they're pretty cool people at least) and each time I'm left with the same bitter-sweet aftertaste of something between mediocrity and satisfaction. It's an extremely grind-demanding game that has unparalleled ideas and potential, just way too little care and polishing as mentioned in the video. Even so, I suppose you get to experience both the game, its combat, and its seemingly perennial eroticism.

played this game a tonne back in 2014-2016 and back then it almost felt like a completely different game. The best parts were: Doing the 'HERO' mode season 1 raids to play for higher quality stuff, measured in stars, 1-5. (basically more stats) because they were more of a challenge, more hp (not too much more but enough to need a party) the boss dealt much more damage and had faster attack animations making it feel even more like dark souls. And because of the increased difficulty, the raid's gimmicks were more important to pull off using teamwork with your party members. The season 2 'open world dungeons' where you had a massive map with various bosses to defeat and each of them dropped a specific piece of loot for different armor sets and weapons which specialized in different stats. So you could either repeat the same whichever bosses you liked depending on which loot you wanted, OR you could do all the bosses to open all the treasure chests aswell as other forms of loot on the map, with the final chest at the end potentially giving you a very powerful enchant scroll. Was always fun in a 4-man party. And again, you had to work together on boss gimmicks as each boss on the map was different. You had a choice of different armor and weapons with diferent stats to use. aswell as enchant scrolls to put on your gear depending on what stats you wanted (not too many, but a choice nonetheless) Almost all the OST's were AMAZING (still are to this day i believe) But sadly; all these things have been power crept or completely removed. HERO mode raids are pointless, the open world dungeons are gone and the game is much more streamlined now. Each new enchant scroll and piece of gear they bring out is just straight up better than the last and thers no choice anymore. Not to mention each time they bring out new content they actually go out of their way to nerf the boss loot and hp of older content, making returning players feel like shit. So the overall amount of worthwhile content in the game stays the same even with updates. ( i know powercreep exists with other games too but it feels quite extreme in vindictus.) Loved this game back then, but i just cant come back to it nowadays.

I remember playing this years ago. One specific moment stuck out to me. At the end of the ice cave zone was a giant polar bear raid boss. It required 20+ people actively working together to beat and was actually pretty difficult. After beating it a few times I continued on with the story. Every once in awhile I would come back to see if I was strong enough to solo that polar bear. Although I hadn’t experienced dark souls at the time looking back it was like fighting a dark souls boss. It was difficult and I died a few times. The feeling of satisfaction at having finally solo’d that damn polar bear was incredible. That was around 2012/2013, I don’t remember exactly. I tried the game again last year and was incredibly excited for the polar bear boss I remembered. The rest was a little disappointing but I thought it was just the difference in years. Then I got to that polar bear boss, and easily beat it first try. I was already a little disappointed, but at that point I realized that the game would never be how I remembered it and I dropped it. It truly is a shame watching a game you once loved fall from grace.

This game was much harder in the beginning 😕. I remember playing with my friend and I would have to hold down bosses with throwable chains while he attacked at an angle just to stand a chance at winning. I tried it again a few years ago and I created a new Character only to find myself clicking randomly to win a fight.

I'm excited to hear that you'll be tearing apart my all-time favorite game Mabinogi! I've played the game since 2008, and have always been deeply interested in *every* single aspect of the game; from its design & gameplay, to the community, and everything in between. I'm so obsessed that I probably qualify as the game's biggest super fan in the world. Throughout the years I've scoured the internet and collected every little piece of information I can find about every version of the game dating back to its early development. Mabinogi in its current state is a good contestant for worst game ever awards, and its publisher Nexon more than deserves every award for worst game developer/publisher. EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda and Blizzard combined pale in comparison! I'm always open to talk with anyone about the game, and I hope you rip it to pieces in your video!

This game, was like THE example of what I wanted an mmo or even a game period to be. Hits have physics and weight. Stats actually have real effects you could notice like strength letting you lift heavier objects and move faster with those objects, instead of just letting you do 26 more points of damage. The combat was also heavily skill based. I remember getting so good I would go in naked with just a shield and a sword and solo bosses designed for teams of 6. Blocking with a shield felt so good and I still say it's the best ever. The other very specific thing I love about this game, is the grappling hook tool used against enemies or bosses. It's an optional consumable item, you would buy before a run. You had to aim it, and it wasn't just an automatic effect, because the game is very physics based, you have to actually hold the chain attached to the hook and pull it or you would be dragged away by whatever you grappled to. The first boss has a pounce attack, it covers lots of range and does lots of damage against the target. You can dodge it and block it but if it was targeting someone else, you could shoot a grappling hook at its leg when it jumped and you would pull back as hard as you could and fight to pull the pouncing boss so it would fall short of its target. You would watch the boss try to reach and pull itself towards the target it missed, your character fighting to hold it back. It's the most amazing thing I have seen in a game. Then there was a giant polar fight, you needed 3 people to land grappling hooks at its 4 limbs and work together to hold the chains so the rest of the raid can pummel the bear. You could just dodge/block and beat the polar bear like any other enemy. However, the option to land 3 grappling hooks with other party members and work together, it's a feeling I haven't ever had in any game before. You actually felt like you were fighting some bigger and stronger than you. I stopped playing around the time they added crafting and the "god mode" ability was added. They even had a Team Fortress 2 crossover where the heavy came and gave you quests. Really sad the game became so terrible, I adored the combat and cool mechanics that I still crave other games to do.

I've played Vindictus almost since it's inception. It was one of those games that absolutely blew me away with the gameplay trailer. After several years of playing Vindictus off and on, I can say the combat is delectable, especially for the time it came out. However, as much as they have tried to add to the story over the years, this is just a basic dungeon crawler. Pick your archetype character and run through corridors of enemies and bosses repeatedly nigh endlessly is basically the tldr of this game. It can certainly be fun, the combat is like 90% of the fun, but over time this game just kind of fades into the background because they haven't done much with it.

Ah, yes, Vindi changed some time in 2010. The game changed from being a hard core, you're screwed if you mess up in any level, to, spam the MSQ till you get to level 95~ and then we'll talk about a challenge. Started up my Dan Ah and in 2 days, about 8-10hrs of playtime, I reached level 100 and started the switch for her to become my main over Arisha. Point is, Nexon changed the game from trying to get new players to insuring veterans of the game stay/comeback. TLDR: Vindictus is about the End game grind. Not new player friendly unfortunately.

Little fun fact : Vindictus is made in Source Engine, the same game engine Valve developed and used in several of their own titles like Half-Life 2, CS:GO, TF2 and Portal.

Yep, Honestly this game has the ability of being possibly one of the best hub-based rpg out there.... if only it wasn't owned by Nexon or if they just weren't too greedy about money. Unfortunately when it comes to combat and difficulty it is the case of "it gets better at end game". which is a shame cause most won't make it there so they end up missing probably the best part of the game through no fault of their own of course. They have spent the last 3-4 years completely nerfing the game to the ground and making end game super difficult progression wise to the point where it almost necessary for you to do a bit of whaling which is disappointing cause the progression system in this game used to be even harsher and even more broken then before, but since the gameplay was fun and you did not need to have the best in slot enhanced weapon to have fun most of us just kinda went on with it. Now they have actually somehow managed to make a bit better as your gear do not permanently brake anymore. Honestly with Vindi it feels like everytime they take one good step 5 bad decisions follows. And now it just a lust fest, we get more gachas in one year then we get any kinda of meaningful updates. At this point they don't even tried to hide it anymore that they only care about money. The moment people realises this and stop buying their gacha's the moment vindi will completely die.

I remember playing this with my buddies in 2011. I played a sword lann. The combat felt very difficult, but in a fair way. We got absolutely murdered by the bosses and it was really rewarding to improve our skills in coop and progress through the content. Eventually the repetitiveness of gameplay and how we didn't care about the story did us in, but we had great fun while we felt like our player skill was progressing.

I was shocked when I returned to Vindictus after several years. I started playing when the third character came out, Evie. Now there are 19! It was a challenging game from beginning to end back then. You could actually die to the Gnoll Chieftain as a newbie, instead of effortlessly destroying him in 10 seconds with a brand new character as you can now. If you start playing now, the first 60 levels or so will be so extremely dull from how easy they made the game to fast track you to end game, which is where the pay 2 win comes in. To compete in end game, you either have to play 60 hours a week grinding and get extremely lucky, spend real money in the cash shop, or pay real money to cheaters to get what you want. That system is what prompted me to quit when the level cap was 70. It's so sad. The game was active at every level back then. The marketplace is where you could actually find the materials for new sets and weapons or the equipment itself. Now the market is completely dead until the end game because there's no reason to worry about equipment until you're like level 50. By the time you have gathered the materials you need you're too high a level to bother using that set. It's just so stupid. So many great memories of fighting tough bosses in each of the areas and now they're so pathetic. The lvl 60 raids at the end of Season 1 used to be extremely difficult. You'd need a full team of competent players to stand a chance. When I came back I could solo them with little issue. Nexon destroyed this game after season 1. The story for that first season was actually pretty good, but it's hard to get invested when the fights are baby mode and you blaze through everything.

YOOO I remember playing this game back in 2011-2012. I remember loving the combat and the story. The story in particular had good characters imo, and I even cared when the one rookie guy got annihilated in the gothic mansion zone. It felt especially difficult playing solo or with randoms

Man, when I was younger I had a HUGE MMO binge where I played this, Maplestory, Runescape, Angels Online, Trickster Online, Endless Online, GrandChase, AdventureQuest (Non-3D), and Dofus all around the same few amount of years. God that shit was fun, and nice to look back to (Also props to anyone that actually recognizes the last 6 there, as I don't remember how popular they really were) Edit: Forgot AdventureQuest (Non-3D)

as a completely random note: the Sword-Staff. what an underutilized fantasy weapon. everyone has giant swords (the difference being WAY too short handles for the size of the blade), but the added length to the handle and inclusion of a hand guard just make it so much better overall.

Loved the combat in this game, there just wasn't too much to keep you engaged in it.

I remember playing it so many years ago I can't even remember it. I think it still had like 5-6 classes at best. I remember having a lot of fun with friends on it. The game wasn't that predatory with cash shop, outside of cosmetics, which was a nice touch at the time. Kinda sad to see it went down the drain, but thanks for the nostalgia tour.

Me and my friends played this way back and had a LOT of fun with it! I even made several videos about it way back when. It was the first game I played that made me truly feel strong because I played Karok. Karok had special abilities that allowed him to grab and throw enemies, piledrive and suplex them, and even allowed you to block bosses special moves and hold them while your friends got some free hits in before you punished the boss. My friendgroup got stuck on a raid boss and took a break. Then other games happened, and then FF14 happened. I decided earlier this year, to go back to it and was saddened by the state it was in. Nexon had ruined it so badly that it made me sad.

I used to play this game way back, before they added the castle map. Back then it had loads of players so the dungeons were more fun to do in parties, and the mobs were actually very challenging. Anyone remembers the polar bear one?

I got really into this game back when it originally launched in english. It was actually very similar to Monster Hunter. You would have to grind bosses for materials and unique drops to craft the next weapon/armor. The bosses also 1 or 2 shot you regularly. So you had to genuinely play very well to get anywhere after the ice caves. It's such a shame what it became.

Recently started watching your vids and I love your game coverage. As for Vindictus, I put well over 1k hours into it back in the day and found it funny that you pointed out the lacking vertical aspect of the game. There's actually a story behind that seemingly empty attempt at verticality in the levels. Back then, you were actually given the ability to JUMP and do various jump attacks. There were also many in-game mechanics related to jumping. However, what led to the removal of jumping was a bug that let us players fast travel with a sprint + attack + jump which would catapult your character forward. Instead of embracing the mechanic like Warframe did, Vindictus developers did the complete opposite and completely removed the ability to jump and changed any mechanics that used the jumping mechanic to a simple E action or converted jumping sections to ramps. The removal of the jump mechanic took place during the early days of Season 2 after players abused it to traverse the enormous emptiness of the Season 2 maps.

Oh... vindictus. I was sooo obsessed with this game for 2 years. I played it since it's release in eu. One of the greatest and unique games of it's time.

Nearly 5k hours I've put into this game over a decade of playing it. The combat is great and the friendships were even better. "I had a blast but why ruin that by forcing it along on life support" -Pint

Very interesting take on this game. I stumbled across your channel and was hoping to find a video on Mabinogi but came across this instead. I played this when it first launched (must have been at least a decade ago) and was excited by it as a "Mabinigi 2" we were all hoping and anticipating. Although most of the gameplay has already disappeared from my memory, I do recall the difficulty of this game being pretty steep and very rewarding. Although the early levels and bosses wete steamrolls, I distinctly remember fighting the Polar Bear boss which took the difficulty to a new level. In addition to tye new difficulty, I also recall having to throw spears into the eye of the bear in order to get it to drop certain materials used for gear upgrades. This may come off as a "The good part's coming, you just need to get to it" but I honestly remember this game as a great game for rewarding you for mastering skills and mechanics. This video did itch an old scratch which may bring me back to playing this game again.

I cannot wait for the MapleStory episode to come. I played all of the Nexon/Wizet titles growing up. I even won a gift card for giving good feedback after the Combat Arms beta. The company has always been money hungry, but in the early life of MapleStory they really concentrated on cosmetics. Many QoL items [pets, teleport rocks, skill resets, etc] ended up in the cash shop, and eventually cubes that upgrade gear.. To gear up fully in MapleStory these days, you need a lot of money. The kicker is--the Korean version of MapleStory has a cash shop that at least gives you permanent ownership. Global MapleStory always had a 90 day expiration on cash shop items. You can see where its going. When Combat Arms released, the cash shop was very p2w. Better guns, better armor, run speed bonuses, health items. That was when I'd say Nexon started to really get greedy with their monetization. It's interesting that after nearly 20 years, MapleStory does not sell level boosts. They do seem to have *some* restraint, but it depends on the game. These games were all very fun for years and years, for me at least. Some of my greatest MMO memories were in MapleStory. The communities used to be huge. I don't think their cash shops ruined the games, they just grew old in a market of new, much better games. I still go back to these games and still have fun, good mindless gameplay. For a MapleStory episode, it would be *really* interesting for Josh to play a v62 or v83 MS private server to see how the game was when it was the most fun. The current state of MapleStory [post Big Bang] is completely different than it was when most of us loved the game. It'll be interesting to see how he tackles his MapleStory review. It would be interesting to get a 2Moons/Dekaron video as well, since Nexon are keeping it online. Again the game is different than it was originally, they sell you a bot mode from the cash shop. But again it was a very fun game in the mid 2000's.

This game still makes me sad. It had the most fun brawlery combat to date. I still want someone to take this game's destruction mechanics and improvised weapons system and put it in a game that isn't Nexon.

as with so many games I can only say: sexy isn't bad. but keep it reasonable. armour can be sexy, badass and practical/functional at the same time. looks like yet another MMO that started great and had immense potential, but got exhausted to death over the years.

Josh i wish u played this game when it was at its prime. It was so much fun. Everything u say that it would make the game better, it was actually like that before. People would hook bosses legs to bring them down to help kill it because it was actually challenging back then. We would break off bosses specific parts with spears to make more gold or drop certain item to craft. It was great. I hope Vindictus 2 comes out with best that vindictus was.

Man looking at you playing through the starter level reminds me just of how mindlessly dull the arenas became after I think... The graveyard boss? Never saw a trap, never saw a puzzle, no idea what bombs are, no idea what javelins are, forgot there was climbing. Theres just you, killing enemies, then killing a bigger enemy while trying to make the last hit look kinda cool

"For eight hours I just needed to left click." Yeah they trashed the newbie experience. Made it much easier some years ago. The hero you pick also changes your experience. I've found the newer heroes simplify, especially early on, what once was easily described as the best arpg combat anywhere. They've patched and streamlined much of the soul out. Hell, picking up objects and beating monsters used to make sense when we were all much weaker in relation to the monsters. You could cause bosses to go into a down state by doing it enough. Now, why bother when you have characters that hit everything near them with every normal swing and their normal swings do more damage than what you used to do with a combo'd up smash?

A quick note on the Dark Knight transformation: It's part of the story, and is meant to give you a taste of its power before you are required to make a decision (I think around Lv.40). The transformation is definitely strong, but doesn't last forever and all your gear breaks when the transformation ends (not destroyed, just broken in battle and must be repaired in-battle to regain benefits). So there "is" a cost to using that transformation, but as far as I can remember (I played for some time last year), that cost won't really be felt until you hit the 60-70s and start facing monsters that are wildly more difficult compared to anything you previously encountered, which is kind of annoying. This is an issue that I've noticed with Vindictus, but also Dungeon Fighter Online, which I'm currently playing. The Story content is mindnumbingly easy, but suddenly you hit a threshold where the difficulty is significantly higher than previous content, and you are simply unprepared for it because the game did not do a good job to train you by gradually increasing difficulty. Worse is that because both games have a lower population, it's a lot harder to find people to help you out as well, which is a real shame. I played both of these titles when they first launched, and the game was much more difficult back then, with bosses requiring a lot more hits to kill. Meaning that one point in time, they changed their damage and health formulas to make the lower levels easier to clear. This was just a terrible decision.

The games introduction cut scene right out of the gate has incredibly disjointed and conflicting art styles. The soldiers look like they are wearing semi period accurate outfits and armor, only to fight a bog standard giant spider with 18 year old 80 pound girl in a skimpy white outfit, trying to stop them. The whole game feels like all the male characters were designed by one group of people while the female characters were designed by a completely different group of people, also these two groups never met.

This sounds like how I'd describe pretty much every new MMO I've tried in the last few years. It starts out with a dark, dramatic story intro, and then I'm bombarded with hundreds of pop-up windows encouraging me to engage with systems I don't understand using various currencies I know nothing about. I'm showered with new skills but never told how to use them, because there's always some anime girl shouting at me to save them from hordes of goblins, and because I can left-click my way through every single combat encounter I just forget what skills I have. Eventually I encounter other players, all dressed in playboy outfits surrounded by dozens of pets, and then when I realize that I need to buy premium currency from the cash shop to actually have fun, I quit.

As an 2009-present mabinogi play, I’m totally waiting for the worst MMO ep. Yes I both love and hate mabi, there is a reason why I made it to 45k level. Yes 45000 level.

The one thing i remember really liking about this game, is that if you play as the giant guy, you have a boss grapple ability that if you time correctly, you can suplex a dragon boss swopping down on the raid party, letting everyone wait on him when he lands. I loved the rush of pulling that off

This game's footage gives me serious Dynasty Warriors vibes. **and then I finish the video and you literally callout that exact series near the end. LMAO**

When it comes to combat i think this game is has one of the best in any MMO. You have played the dungeons on easy, hence why u could just spam left click. On harder difficulty the combat gets more engaging and the bosses do more stuff and actually kill you if u dont dodge and disengage. The thing that this game went downhill was the pay 2 win model. The game has so much potential.

2:07 Take a step back there, "unsecured Web page" is basically fearmongering. The only thing not secured on that page are the inputs and as long as you dont put any personal data in there, youre good to go. From what the form showed that is not necessary. You should be much more worried that it opens a page in general

Remember playing this back at the end of season 1, got the red dragon rarest drop that got me settled with equipment for the rest of time i played, and even when i came back for a little on season 2 my old equipment was still useful. It actually had a good story coupled with good gameplay, but sadly i had to play using a vpn because its region locked and got tired of dealing with that.

Omg a whole play list!!! Yay !!! Thank u so much for the awesome videos

I loved Vindictus a long time ago, I wonder what you would've thought of the fight against the bear. That was the big "this is difficult" moment for me and my friends. Felt like a raid boss

The thing I love the most about your approach to these games is that even if a game is a steaming pile on the whole, you still find small details to praise, and even if a game is overall great, you still point out the flaws that could make it better if fixed. It's just nice that even the worst games don't just get bashed for laughs, there's still something of value to be noted.

Vindictus used to be quite hard right from the start. However, as with most old MMOs, the devs massively nerfed the difficulty so that anyone could play through the first half of the game without effort. It is a sad change that I wish they did not do. A majority of the issues highlighted by Josh in this video are because of changes like this. My guess is that the devs wanted to either ease people in, or make it downright easy from the start to rush people to the endgame. Sadly, the devs still do not understand that easy = boring, especially as a new game experience. I still enjoy the game from time to time, but even for veteran players, the start of the game is mindnumbingly boring when compared to before. I simply cannot enjoy it as much when a new character releases. If you notice, most old MMOs go through this though. It is just a real shame that Josh is experiencing this game now, and not in the first few years of the game's service.

I remember I had a phase with this game in its earlier stages right about when they started season 3. It was really amazing, the difficulty curve felt solid because the bigger bosses of even the first 2 stages could kick your ass. Armor was precious, you were always happy to get a bulkier piece and scrap together something that would allow you to not get two shot. It was raw hard fun. Mostly stopped playing back then because I zoomed into a crippling league addiction. Then a couple years later I got bored and started again because why not and was absolutely shocked. Full armor set gifts every couple levels making gear drops obsolete and making the game a cakewalk, tons of "QOL" stuff like automating the hub so you dont have to walk to the npcs anymore killing some of that charme and general streamlining of the experience in all the worst ways. Almost every progression system felt shittier and every level before max level became pointless. So did the eearlier stages. I remember in S3 you could do a couple mid lvl runs like the desert run with full part breaks and make some decent bank. All obsolete. Oh yea and this might be subjective, but the new (mostly female) classes felt overbearing and featurecrept. They seemed like just straight up better more versatile versions of older classes, so playing the older classes felt like a handicap

Great video!! I really enjoy your series.

A lot of those reviews have never even looked at the marketplace. Over the years they made it far easier and accessable to enhance and enchant your gear. You can buy runes and 100% enchants from the market for gold. And the very simple dungeon style was fine because all anyone cared about the time was it's combat. It's a shame tho that they made the early game so easy that it ruins the most memorable bosses the game had to offer in it's prime. Really wish they stuck to having an easy mode instead of nerfing it all

I'm glad I got the chance to play this game when it first released in NA. Spent 4 years playing this game and had lots of great memories. Sad to see what it had become. Wish there was a way we could time travel back to season 1 version of the game.

As other comments have said, this game was really good about ten years ago. They've rampantly streamlined it since then to get people through the older content as fast as possible. If you wanted to actually learn how to play, the best thing you can do nowadays is to use your starting gear through the entirety of Season 1. The sad thing is that when you hit the current content, it caps you on just a couple runs of it per day, for your non-loot, and those runs are terribly short, thus you don't even get to enjoy the not watered-down fights for longer than a few minutes anyway. On top of that, the loot system is based on how much damage players do to the boss; rewarding skill and punishing leechers isn't a bad thing on its own, but the power difference between pay to wins and regulars is far larger than any skill difference can surmount. Which means that if you get stuck in a boat with one of these, you're not getting anything for the fight anyway. At its core, the actual gameplay is fun, but the game seems to actively resist letting you play it for any substantial amount of time; as my friends and I say "it'd be a good game if it wasn't run by Nexon."

If only you could’ve experienced Vindictus during year 1 and 2. Completely different experience. I miss it. 😔

Such a shame, it looks like some of the people really cared about their work but whoever put it all together was phoning it in. Reminds me of FF 14 1.0 but this is the darker timeline where it was never fixed.

A lot of the systems and mechanics he mentions as seeming out of place or incomplete are just remnants from the earlier days of the game. They took out jumping and heavily simplified/streamlined the majority of early-game content so that people could get characters to the end-game content quicker. I'm guessing that they stopped getting many new players and made changes to cater to the existing, dedicated player base rather than trying to make the early game keep new people playing. So the only point of early game is to level up quickly when they release a new class and the game gets a burst of activity from returning players who are already familiar with the systems. That doesn't change any of his opinions as a new player as that's the experience he's commenting on, but it's essentially a dead game at this point for people who aren't already into it.

Watching this was so incredibly painful, just like trying to revisit this game after years. This wasn't the game I played years ago.

Really late to watching this, but trust me when I say this. I used to be addicted to Vindictus, I played from when it first launched up until it had lv90 characters. It wasn't always like this. Showering players with gifts, giving them armor and weapons that scale with your level, and the bosses being so ridiculously easy to kill without effort. When Vindictus was in its prime, the bosses were much much more difficult. We didn't have transformation, nor were we showered with equipment nor did we have all those fancy UI. The bosses actually felt like bosses, and we had to grind to get material to craft our gear. The reason Vindictus has become what it is today is because it's too focused on End-game. The fun does not start until you reach around lv 70, and grind the raid bosses for rare materials which is where all the fun immersive action combat happens. That in itself became a problem because now higher level players just grinded their daily raids and had no reason to stay logged in to play Vindictus anymore. No one needed lower level materials, especially when most of the population has moved to endgame. So as the lower level population of players are moving on to higher level quests, that leaves new players unable to beat the early game bosses that are extremely challenging without a party. Especially when it came to early-game raid bosses that required minimum 6-8 players to beat, getting past them became impossible. Hardly any of the higher level players even did the lower level raids because no one needed them. If there was a reason, it was to farm the rare item or break item and sell it at expensive prices, prices that lower/new level players don't have. So Nexon had to do something to make it so lower level players can defeat bosses since the higher level population never bothered to help them, and that was to nerf all the lower level missions and give them free armor and weapons because it was impossible to grind by yourself.

I remember playing this game right around they released Kai (the one who has the bow that also turns into a long bow I think, it's been a while). What I remember was traps usually leaving you on half health, no pop-up ads, grinding gear felt like grinding special looking outfits. I definitely don't remember getting a crap load of gear for free after completing quests. This all smells like stupid decisions.

When this game was in closed beta it was absolutely spectacular, it wasn't so grinder you only had to do runs 2 or 3 times to get the mats to make your gear things didn't breK on enchanting, no bonus items for use pre-run. Then when it went public they started changing everything..... then they had a GM go rogue and delete the items from most player's accounts and mine was one of them they never made it right with anyone, terrible company that went in completely the wrong direction with the game.

I remember when I used to play back when you could only pick Lann , Evie or Fiona and to get increase in stats you had to get titles, levels had only one use, unlock higher level missions. I had a Lann and I jsut wanna Say SPIN TO WIN! DUAL SPEARS FOR THE WIN!

A few months ago I requested Florensia in this series. I am so happy to see it now on your desktop :D (25:38)

I originally played this a ton a long time ago when I was in college. When I was at home it played fine, but when I was using the campus internet, it wouldn't let me join sessions (due to how it was structured, I guess my campus internet didn't like it). I remember enjoying it, though my best friend at the time decided to end our friendship in favor of the game (long story). I recently tried this game again just for nostalgia sake. Some of the things I don't remember, like the intro story or tutorial. However, while I remembered some of the stuff, like the main town and all, it felt off to me. Could be all the changes, could be that I was remembering things incorrectly since it was such a long time ago, but it didn't really feel the same.

Josh not sure if you've ever played Dofus but I'd love to see a video from you on it. Feel like it's still really strong and quite unique for an MMO. Especially since it's been around for so long and has gone though huge reworks.

I remember having to pick up individual items to loot stuff and there was a ripping, tearing sound and it was so satisfying when I got something good. Game has been through a LOT of changes. I also remember the decisive battle being so wicked cool. ended the fight exhausted, completely destroyed armor, used like 30 spears and 50 potions, and boy was that satisfying.

I remember this game was a lot harder at early game and the story become really good later there is also a city and other place to explore other then the village hub. And season 2 and 3 had really good new zones, boss fights and instance. But it was always felt p2w too me in endgame. But you should look for the fights at s2 and s3 to see the changes.

Unfortunately, devs decided to wipe the fun out of the story/leveling process. Almost nothing you do, accomplish, explore, acquire from lvls 1-100 matter. Tons of games have a "skip to lvl 100" pill, and this game might as well start offering it also. The famed battle mechanics of which this game is famous for wont require user's skill until end-game content, aka lvl 100+ raids. Back in the day, every raid, starting from lvl 1 required the player to develop certain skill in using your character to clear the dungeons, beat the boss, and clear objectives. The beginning years of this game, players needed to start forming parties to just progress in the game. Seasoned players would remember having to make parties to beat Tyrant, Lagodessa, Blood Lord, etc. All the content below lvl 100 used to have the same difficulty as lvl 100+ raids. You might still have fun in this game, there is plenty of content, yet give it some time. At least give it until you reach lvl cap to experience the game how it shouldve always been.

I remember seeing Korean gameplay footage of this back when it was called Mabinogi Heroes. A prequel to one of my favorite F2P MMOs of all time? Yes, please! Eventually I heard the news. Mabinogi Heroes was going to come to the US and I was STOKED. So I waited and waited and waited but it never came. Eventually a game called Vindictus would pop up and while it looked interesting I didn't play it until about three years after it came out. Thanks to the Alchemist update on Mabinogi, my interest in it began to wane and eventually I would branch out to try other MMOs. So I remembered Vidictus, booted it up, and began to play it. However, things started to look familiar after a few hours of play and I realized that in all my forgetfulness that this wasn't just Vindictus. No, this was Mabinogi Heroes the game I had waited for with baited breath for years that never came and I was furious. Why would they completely change the name of it? How many people missed out on playing this when it first came out because they didn't realize that this was Mabinogi Heroes? I'm still super salty about it years later.

I played this game a ton with friends many years ago. Back then there were only like 6 classes to choose from. I recently decided to jump back in for old times sake. There are two main things i noticed that heavily changed. First of course, the sheer number of classes to choose from. I really didnt expect it and some of the new ones are really fun and distinct. Second however is the reward system. This game didnt use to shower you with rewards, presents and bonuses back then. It was a dry and grindy experience from the start. Now, there are times where i am more busy accepting rewards than actually fighting. Then again, all the sound glitches, framerate problems, the general unoptimized state of the game. It is all exactly how it used to be, nothing has been fixed. That is a bad thing of course but i just couldnt help feeling nostalgic about that. Felt like returning home after a long time. I stopped playing it after around 10 hours ingame time, after i had my fill of feeling like my teenage self again. I learned that i am not build for grindfest rpgs anymore lol

my favorite feature of this game was fishing lol, i always stole all the giant fish from other people

To this day I still don't understand why they nerfed the "Early" levels so hard, like it basically remains left click all the way to like lv70 - 80 last I checked it out with a friend.

Total biscuit introduced me to this game back when it just launched. With his WTF series. (Sadness :-( .) Absolutely loved its combat it's interesting story and just its general gameplay loop. But the intense Korean grinding, upgrade system, and the fact that finding players was a pain, I stop playing. However I kept an eye on it hoping it would improve in some way even though I doubted it. Each time it launched a new character I came back to try it out. I spent the longest time playing the game when Hurk came out, but dropped again due to the same problems as before.

im a vindi vet, started around the time when we had to use tokens for missions. the game was amazing back then for newer players. level cap was around 60 and mid to late game content was very populated, economy was great and the community was friendly( i remember the nexon devs would actually talk to players on the forums and participate in convos). i had recently re installed the game to feed my nostalgia and the game felt....stale? empty late game boats, no one in dragon raids. huge power creep( my eve had 13k m attack and now thats super weak, used to be max dmg back then) most newer players dont stick around to populate the late game content and most vets left. i miss the golden days of this game.

I remember my favorite part of this game was during the larger bossfights while using the giant character you had some really tight windows of opportunity to parry certain attacks and grapple the boss stopping a big attack, then flipping them over opening them over for the whole party to whallop on them. Like a dragon starts swooping down towards the party and you can grapple it mid swoop and suplex it into the ground, it was awesome

The early game was heavily gutted. I remember years ago when I played through the game with another friend and it was a fun challenge and we stopped because we couldn't progress as a 2man anymore. Now you just murder everything with no challenge until like season 3. They should have allowed the ability to turn up the difficulty as a new player it's just boring

Soon as you hear Nexon associated with a game you know it’s gonna be interesting hahah

10:13 That missing information was part of the fun in the old days. Players would assume certain things (as example: pushing WIL with certain armor types where they needed to sacrifice defence to break through an expected CRIT-rate barrier) and try various builds to maximize certain skills. Again, it had flaws, even back in the day, but. It helped bringing up various play-styles and offered endless discussions and speculations what viable builds could be. In the end it offered depth to those who engaged with it. On the other hand, the game was skill-based enough that you could play without armor and still claim victory. The initial design had brilliant ideas even with it's flaws back then. What you see now doesn't make any sense as every system is an abandoned one.

23:11 when Josh says "wow" it looks like its coming from the dog lmao