Royal Quest makes me nostalgic for another age, when I was in high school, when MMOs were a bit different than what they are now, when microtransactions didn't really exist - but then again, at that age, I didn't have much money to pay monthly bills for MMOs. In any case, RQ makes me nostalgic for Ragnarok Online in particular, it's not a huge coincidence since it's a complete rip-off of the old game. Even the main capital looks the same, player shops littering the way to enter town and all.
But the resemblances don't stop there, you have cards to slot into your gear, there are enemies strangely reminding me of Porings and Pupas of old, the jelly-like enemies that scatter to steal your loot - like the thief bugs in the sewers of the main city - it's pretty crazy how much the two games are alike. They streamlined some of it, the stats are now well defined and it feels like you can put points however you want - which is a good and a bad thing I suppose - and the talent system is cool. It's always fun to see things in MMOs like getting a flat number of bonus gold from kills or getting 'energy' whenever you auto-attack. I bet there's a card for life leech too.
But it's not all fun and nostalgia, because you can get a premium account that just plays better than a free one, because you have to pay to open certain chests, because the cash shop is full of items that will make your game experience better and not only cosmetic options to dress your character with. And this game features PvP so you better be able to spend as much as the next man if you want to win. Even without engaging in pvp, I feel that having to walk everywhere is terrible - no option to teleport for free - and that items that change the core balance of the game being behind a locked gate are a bad idea from the start.
The skills might be fun to use and it might be interesting to mess around with cards but you always feel that you would get more out of the game if you paid, you feel like the game was balanced to be frustrating to a point if you didn't pay. After dying to some monsters in a sewer and being warp three maps away, I decided walking around and slaying false porings wasn't for me.
