Thread: [News] Mystic Guardians MMORPG

Mystic Guardians is an online game where you explore the expansive world of Guardia, capture, train and battle rare guardians/monsters to battle other trainers and your friends.

Release Date: August 15, 2012
Publisher: DJArtsGames
Developer: DJArtsGames
Genre: Virtual World, Monster Training

Ever since you were little, you and your friends have wanted to become Guardian Trainers, masters of the mystical Guardians that inhabit the island on which you live. It is the night before you finally start on your adventure, and you’ve collapsed exhausted into your bed with dreams of epic guardian battles racing through your head.

Mystic Guardians seems like a new clone of Miscrits, but it failed to amuse me due to its careless design and superficial parody. It all reflects on where you are first entering the game.

For those who took a look at DJArtsGames’s Bush Whacker 2, Mystic Guardians would immediately remind you of its seemingly new game Mystic Guardians. Both games look so similar that you could hardly feel different although Mystic Guardians has added the trendy gaming mechanic monster training, which I first experienced in Pokemon, later in Miscrits, and now everywhere.

What would it be if dozens of gaming machanics are included in one single title? I guess Mystic Guardians has come to tell us: it really stinks.

You are this little boy or girl who’s always been dreaming of becoming the best guardian trainer. The game starts when your grandmother wakes you up, and then you deck up your avatar and rush to the fair to fetch your first guardian, which may specialize in fire attacks, water attacks or nature attacks, each with their own merits and disadvantages.

Remember how amazed and obsessed you were when you played the simple 2D video games back in the 90s when only tiny small figures moved up and down the screens? You probably think of that the very moment you start Mystic Guardians, which kind of causes you to wonder whether there are something really impressive and different in stock.

And you are disappointed right away. Once you’ve obtained your guardian, you are challenged by your friend. And the battle mechanics to a great extent resemble that of Dragon City and Outernauts where you trigger a fight somehow, and your pets would appear on a battlefield and start the turn-based fights, teamed up or one by one. Although your guardians are of various species, they look very similar to the dragons you get familiar with in Dragon City, which is very weird.

Mystic Guardians successfully fuses RPG elements with social elements. The endless clearing of grass, stones, bushes and other stuff has got its counterpart in this game. You have to research along your way by clicking the mushroom, bushes and other things. One thing you should be prepared for is that you won’t lose precious energy in that case. You just happen to discover coins, crystals, other collectible items or more often than not, you discover guardians and it is your choice whether to include them in your team or just defeat them.

You will encounter other guardian trainers, who would stand in your way and wouldn’t let you go until you defeat them. There are also other NPCs with exclamation marks above their heads, handing out missions once you talk with them, which can be seen in many RPGs. However, In Mystic Guardians, you often run from NPCs to NPCs and accept quests before you get to finish previous ones and it won’t take long before you are completely at lost, not knowing what to do next. That is why you will have to check the quests frequently.

Mystic Guardians is free-to-play and developers didn’t waste time in expressing their desires for money with the in-game healing system. In this game, the guardians lost their HP very fast (three or four turns might suffice) and it is often the case that you encounter a guardian trainer, accept the challenge and then have to go back to the training center, or more precisely, the clinic, to heal your guardians. Otherwise, you would only be defeated in upcoming battles.

Before long, you would find yourself traveling back and forth between the clinic and the area you are exploring. That would be far too repetitive and tedious and a healing medicine would be welcomed although it costs the premium currency. And I was a little pleased by the existence of teleportals which can transport you between the specific locations where you have unlocked the portals. However, you still have to travel the rest of the way to arrive where you were and resume your exploration.

Frankly speaking, I believe the game would be better off, however limited that is, if it were a client-based title. At the beginning, it asked for permission to restore something in the computer drive so that the game would function smoothly. But in my later experience, the scene switching always takes an incredibly long time and sometimes I just wished the game had got a client or something.

To make it worse, your guardians always enjoy unfair progressions. Since the ones who are defeated in battles won’t obtain any experience, my first guardian was still level 2 while the second one already reached level 5. So I switched the battling order. And guess what, I began to run into guardians of level 4 or above and either I was defeated without obtaining any experience or the battle ends before my level 2 guardian even gets involved, in which case it would still be the second guardian that gets the bonus. I don’t know what to do with it. After all, I wasn’t raising a pet or anything.

Everything including the exploring, researching and battling all in the familiar styles soon turn into something boring and annoying and you might even ask yourself: why did I start the game in the first place? Anyway, Mystic Guardians combines lots of independent elements and, it got screwed up.

Play Mystic Guardians