By, Omer Altay

Holic Online is hands down Netgame’s best looking MMORPG. Although the game doesn’t reinvent the MMORPG genre, it polishes up the already existing MMORPG elements to create a fun gaming experience. If I had to summarize Holic Online in one word, that word would be ‘polished.’

*Gasp* A Story?!
When I first created my character, a Koshare Magician, I was pleasantly surprised to be presented with an opening cutscene with that introduced the game’s story. The premise of the story is that your character got teleported to a parallel world and has to rediscover himself after losing his memory. The game’s story isn’t anything impressive, but the fact that the game has some sort of introduction is a huge plus, as I’m tired of playing games that nudge me to start grinding right away without any sort of introduction. The only real problem with the game’s introduction was the blatant spelling mistakes in it, but that’s not really a huge issue, since most of the game’s translations aren’t terrible and are surprisingly better than that of most free MMORPGs.

Core Gameplay
The core gameplay in Holic Gold is pretty generic; move with WASD keys or with the left mouse button and kill monsters and complete quests to gain XP. Start your adventure in world of Holic Gold by picking your character’s race and class; the game’s two races are Seneka and Koshare and the game’s five playable classes are Warrior, Mage, Monk, Bandit and Priest. While fighting enemies, every spell or ability you use helps fill up a combo meter, and after using 7 skills the meter will fill up and you’ll be able to perform a special combo attack which will deal bonus damage and grant additional experience. I’ve never been able to fill up my combo meter, because everything I’ve fought at the beginning of the game died well before I even filled up the combo meter half way. Apparently, the combo system is only practical for fighting higher level creatures while in a party, as every skill your party members use also add to the combo meter. The one complaint I have with Holic’s gameplay is that using with the mouse’s left click to move causes the game to chug a bit and that should hopefully be patched in the near future. I simply can’t emphasize this enough, but the single most accurate description of Holic Gold in a single word would be, ‘polished’. Spell & combat animations are great, quest descriptions are usually short and summarized the interface is solid and the animated graphics are some of the best I’ve seen.