No, not that kind of fiesta, kooky! This kind of Fiesta!
Yup, I’ve been playing another F2P MMO on the side these days (aside from the aside of DDO), called Fiesta! Check me out, I'm partying like it's 1999 at my groovy player housing.
What to say about Fiesta. Hmmm. So far (I've only been casually playing this now for about 3 weeks) Fiesta is this kind of assault on cuteness that’s, let’s just say it, a watered-down WoW Clone with a nod to Lineage II and some heavy heavy anime art stylings going on. That's about as best as I can describe it with my MMO knowledge.
Fiesta found me through an article in Beckett’s MMO Magazine where, aside from an article describing the fun community in Fiesta, they offered up a free piñata mount for 15 days. Oh heck YA, I was all over that!
I can’t tell you how heartbroken I am now that my little Fiesta mount is gone. T.T
Truth be known my wife teased me about him relentlessly, but then again, she teases me about my alternative mount (and pretty much every aspect of this game) anyway.
Yes, that is a hobby horse right there . . . I TOLD YOU THIS GAME IS AN ASSAULT ON CUTENESS! Case in point, here’s a battery of the monsters I’ve been up against so far: Slimes(with smiles), imps, mushrooms, wooden puppet men (and women), turtles, floating kitty things, pixies, and pirates. That’s just insane! I mean look at this fashion pirate here:
Ok, ok . . . there's also been ratmen, boarmen, lizardmen, crabs, and KING crabs for mean looking value, but I'd say I've been assaulting more cuteness than meanness. I love it though. I’m thinking back to my first 16 levels of Everquest back in the day and it was like rats, bats, orcs, and skeletons. BORING! This is where’s it’s at, yo!
Still, my wife does make fun of me for playing this. That's a big mental challenge there. I hate to be made fun of by the boss. When I play, sometimes she'll psychically summon up castanets out of the air and dance behind me with a clicking rhythm. It's a huge taunt. Thanks wife. Thanks for ruining the mood here. ;-)
So, hi, I'm stingite and this is my guy:
He's a mage. He rocks the big damage. Whereas the other classes might hack away at something, This mage here kills stuff in 2-4 spells. The only other class I've really played is a cleric and maybe just dabbled a bit with the fighter and archer. That's it though. There's only four classes. I imagine that the goal here is to one day look as cool as this guy, and I'm good with that:
Ok, so what do I really know know about this game so far (not much):
- Pro-Tip 1: Turn that music OFF! It immediately made my ears angry. Some of the funkier music in the later areas has been “ok,” but it did nothing for my immersion into the game.
- Pro-Tip 2: use the Home key to go into your home after every fight until your skills regenerate. I probably look pretty stupid to some popping into my house after every fight concludes, but it’s saved me on potions and stones. Word. I’m in no rush. And, in case you don't know, your home is a little mushroom hut that's an amazing assault on cuteness, yup.
- Pro-Tip 3: If you're a mage, pull with your ice spell. I chose a mage obviously. The ice spell snares the mob a touch, so it takes them just *that* much longer to get to me.
- Pro-Tip 4: quests don’t always neatly stack your scrolls into nice organized piles. You’ll want to look into your bags and click those scrolls and drop them into a nice pile every once in a while.
- Pro-Tip 5: Did I say scrolls? I did! There’s scrolls that will help you get back to town. It’s a time saver. There are also scrolls to boost your hitpoints and mana that you can get from quests. These can be incredibly helpful at early levels to have these “buffs” on you. Everybody does better when they’re fighting with buffs on. It’ll definitely help you survive when you have to fight higher level monsters.
- Pro-Tip 6: leave a finger over the potion button and the health stone. You can use these together if needed, just remember that the health potions you can gulp quickly in succession, but the stones take a couple seconds to regenerate.
- Pro-Tip 7: If you learn a new skill, be sure to dump the old skill from your quick slot bar and drag the new skill on to the bar. They made it so you can have varying power levels of spells at your fingertips for the truly anal player, but I’m just going to guess that most of us aren’t that anal. You don’t want to be casting a lower power spell when you really are thinking you have a new power spell inherently. It just doesn’t work like that.
- Pro-Tip 8: Power up your weapons! There’s this really kind of odd mechanic in game where you can power up your weapons through runes and badges. In a way you can create a completely customizable weapon. From everything the game seems to be telling me, you can’t really destroy a weapon with runes at early levels, so go crazy. But at later levels you could destroy your uber weapon by trying to “rune it up” with power too much. The badges are like customizing the weapon to be more deadly to certain types of mobs. This seems perfect for grinding runs. If you know you’re going to kill a bajillion pirates, you might as well make your weapon into a pirate killer by using a pirate badge.
- Pro-Tip 9: if you're riding a hobby horse, you make them go faster by buying floatation stones, which is an expendable power source that makes your horse go. You can buy it at the same place you bought your horse.
-Pro-Tip 10: There are raids for lower level characters!
OH MY GOODNESS, YES THERE IS! There's a King Slime quest you can go on. I have only managed to join in on one of these with my cleric so far, and it was . . . awesome. Pretty much all I did was sit back and heal people . . . a lot. The tanks were up front and that's where they should be. I took one hit during the raid, and i died. Somehow I managed to be rezzed or something, and I continued on. At the end of the lowbie raid there, I got a snazzy tuxedo for my efforts. This apparently only lasts 30 days. I'll take it! It just equips in a little appearance slot off to the side, and I don't have to worry about stitching it to clothing or anything.
And that’s about all I got on this game at this point. I’m only level 18 so far on my mage and level 8 on my cleric, so I’m very much a noob considering there are at least 100 levels to earn, but you’ll also be happy to know that I have yet to spend a dime (or a nickle or a penny) on this game! So far, it’s been absolutely free! That REALLY appeals to the 1/16 Scotch blood in me.
What concerns me though is that there was a review I read somewhere on the net (man I wish I could find this review to link you to it) where they cautioned many many many things about this game and pretty much thrashed it as hard as an MMO could be thrashed. It seemed jaded. I hate when people are like that, but from that review apparently Fiesta can get pretty addicting, and in the later levels the cash shop (where Outspark makes their money) almost becomes a necessity to survive. They actually made it sound like you could end up paying 1,000’s of dollars in cash shop items for this hobby. Hmm. I truly hope it isn’t like that, but I probably won't even make it that far in this game.
Stingite just wants to have a little Fiesta! That's all.
