➤ Noob - The Factionless, the review of a game out of time 🕹

The review of Noob - The Factionless, a game out of time taken from a web series that few people in Italy will know about.

To fully understand what a license means for a game and how much influence it has on the overall player experience, tuning in more or less to it depending on how the various references have been managed, one of the best experiments you can do. What you have to do is try a licensed game that you know absolutely nothing about, like we did with the review of Noob - The Factionless.

horizon

Noob - The Factionless, the review of a game out of time — Noob: The Factionless is a classic JRPG

Operation Noob - The Factionless seems strange to an international audience, despite its linearity. It's a japanese role playing game that imitates an MMORPG, based on an unknown web series in our area. It's for the simple fact that it only exists in French (with some things translated into English, but not many, given the lukewarm reception it received). The license for a French-speaking audience therefore makes sense, but here the impact is inevitably lower. The game tells the story of a couple of guys who decide to play version 4.2 of the MMORPG Horizon to become eSports champions. The goal is to get your characters to level 100, so they will be ready when version 5.0 is released which adds competitive mode. It should be noted that the story is completely original: the characters are not the same as those of the web series, which only remain in the background and serve as inspiration for the protagonists of the game.

After an initial phase in which the two of you will play alone and which will act as a tutorial, you will have the opportunity to found a real guild and form a more structured group of four characters, with which you will proceed to discover the secrets of Horizon. . Interesting is the fact that the plot It develops along two different narrative lines. The protagonists will interact with each other both within the game and in real life, represented in the same way as in the game, in this case without levels to conquer, but with presentation events to participate in, "real" characters to meet. and the community that revolves around Horizon to be discovered, all wandering through the places of a city built as if it also came out of a JRPG, that is, of many maps / places connected to each other by public transport. The idea itself would also be quite intriguing, if Noob - The Factionless wasn't too shallow in both stories.

weak identity

Thus, in Horizon we have a classic JRPG, with enemies clearly visible on the maps, both the closed ones and the game world, called Olydri, from which you can access the different places that can be visited, with turn-based combat and the various classes. that are divided by specializations linked to the mythology ofMMORPG, where magic and technology coexist in harmony. In honor of the classics of the genre, you can only save at certain points and the interactions are very limited, between chests to open and fixed dialogues with the different non-player characters. The game also tries to simulate the presence of other real players within Horizon, but the effect is not very convincing, since they are still NPCs who stand still for hours in the same places and rarely have anything meaningful to say.

Here, the greatest criticism of Noob - The Factionless is precisely in its desire to try to imitate an MMORPG with JRPG mechanics, which on the one hand makes the story within Horizon uninteresting, with the characters continually referring to their only objective, reach level 100, greatly reducing participation and transforming everything into a kind of grinding simulator, creating on the other hand paradoxical situations, such as the presence of MMORPG elements that do not really work as in MMORPGs and that create very strong frictions. For example, there are game over screens before being reborn or there are the aforementioned PCs that are actually PNGs and that, instead of populating the game world, appear to be foreign elements.

The section outside of Horizon suffers from a different problem. Obviously there is no combat nor is any MMORPG simulated, but this is where the poverty of the game emerges the most. script of Noob - The Factionless, with very generic and incisive dialogue and situations that never get to the bottom of things, barely scratches the surface of the relationship between players and MMORPG, drawing heavily on the folklore of the genre. References to the web series are obviously plentiful and we imagine that for those who have seen it they are pleasant to recognize, so a lot of the implication depends on that as well.

Generic JRPG

If you've read this far you've probably noticed that we've been very critical of the game. Actually the title of BlackPixel Studio It also has its qualities and could appeal to old-school JRPG fans looking for a light, but still very long experience. In fact, it takes the characters more than sixty hours to reach level one hundred, in which they visit literally hundreds of different locations, facing increasingly larger enemies and carrying out MMORPG missions, while following the personal stories of the protagonists. Each of the four playable characters has their own class, with the ability to vary the available skills a bit by assigning points in the appropriate trees or using different equipment. HE fight They are really simple to handle, but become more intriguing as the attack and defense options and the strength of the enemies increase. In short, the experience itself is not entirely negligible, but don't expect much more than a long sequence of generic situations that imitate classic MMORPGs, representing in some cases a parody, in others an uncritical celebration.

If we want Noob - The Factionless to have the same approach as the rest of the game also from a technical point of view, with a graphics in chibi style, very colorful and pretty, but too generic, as are most of the places you will visit throughout the adventure. The fights, however, show all the limitations of the production, due to the presence of poor animations and bland magic and skill effects. For example, a title like Chained Echoes, created by a single person, is much more successful from this point of view because, aware of its limits, it never tries to overcome them but, on the contrary, exploit them to its advantage.

Conclusions

Tested version PC with Windows digital delivery Steam, playstation store, Xbox Store, Nintendo eShop Price 29,99 € Holygamerz.com 6.0 Readers (4) 8.4 your vote

Noob - The Factionless is a very generic JRPG that imitates an MMORPG, based on a semi-unknown web series in Italy. Long, but very superficial, it never really delves into what it tells and the game structures it parodies. In some cases it even seems out of time, considering that the series in question dates back to the beginning of the last decade and that in the meantime the world of video games has changed enormously. It's only good if you're looking for a light experience with a weak metanarrative, that makes you smile a little when thinking about the MMORPGs that once were and how romantic the goal of reaching the maximum level to aim for eternal fame is. ...at least until the game servers shut down.