My memories in the Tera

All good things must come to an end, including my run of Choose My Adventure. There have been high points and Tera Gold low points, good parts and bad, but there's only so much time to cover the game. And so i leave TERA, confident that while I may have missed points, at least I have a broad sense of the game. That's certainly less... straightforward than previous installments of this column have been for me.

My impressions of TERA have really been all over the map. There are things I absolutely love about the game, but a lot of them are minor touches. There's one part that i think is absolutely brilliant, and a lot that's absolutely juvenile. The game has a lot of systems that are essentially filling space without adding anything. And as a result, it's really hard to classify the whole game as being good or bad or neutral.

Let's start with the most apropos part of the game, the one that I've been sent into three weeks in a row: dungeons. I finally took Rielene into the dungeon, and it still wasn't any different. It was a lot of familiar elements in a game that doesn't need them, a lot of imports from the classic holy trinity design when the game is almost screaming to do better. It's the same stuff I spent two weeks talking about, and repeating it for a third week feels more or less pointless.

The dungeons are functional, definitely. They're not broken; they're just lacking in anything that would give them a unique touch. It's the same problem that the game's questing has, a sense of just going Tera Online through the motions for content, providing the required parts before throwing you into combat.