My objective ASDA Story Review

Instead of writing a BIG WALL of TEXT (tm) I'm just gonna list down what features that I think is cool and what I think needs improvement and what I don't like. I realize the game is still in open beta so there's a ton of promised features not in the game yet like the crafting system.

What I like about Asda Story:

• The graphics of the game is pretty and anime style which some people might like or some might not.
• The skill system is pretty customizable and allows a semi-free form of building your character. In closest term it's kinda like WoW's talent system. Each job has 3 trees that specializes in certain aspect of that job. Example: Mages can be healer type, nuker type or debuffer/buffer type. You can mix and match or focus on one tree.
• The soulmate system is pretty neat basically having a soul mate encourages you and a friend to play together and doing so has tangible benefits such as a slight boosts to your attacking power. Leveling up your soulate relationship also grants you some soulmate exclusive skill which is useful when you two are in a party together.
• A lot of quest in the game. Don't expect really great quest tho as most are just GoFer quest or Kill X get Y quests. But there's definitely a lot of them. Quest actually rewards you with significant amount of XP and some rare loot.
• Exchange marketplace, it's pretty simple, easy to use and pretty much like WoW's auction house system. There's nothing too remarkable about it but non the less it's pretty useful and a great addition to the game.
• The world is very colorful and feels like it's like something from Disneyland. No wonder they call this game Kingdom Hearts Online. I think this is a positive thing coz I don't like worlds that are too gray. Although some areas are sooo bright and yellow-ish that I had to adjust my monitor's contrast/brightness settings.
• I like the avatar's designs and clothing/costumes. Hey I am a person that likes bright shiny things :P
• The mining feature is interesting, you basically get a shovel and starts digging you can get interesting things from scrolls, soulstones, gems and a whole lot of crafting materials from digging. Upside is it could spawn a new wave of hobby called digging syndrome.

What I don't like about ASDA Story:

• The controls which is completely click to move with no option of having WASD/Directional Key movement. I think a modern 3D game pretty much need to have WASD/Direction Keys movement.
• Only 1 hot bar and you switch around different hot bar using the F1 keys. I really wish there's at least two hot bars showing at any given time at leas make it an option but I think they probably did that so the interface won't be cluttered.
• Differentiation of male and female armor. We'll that's probably just me but I don't like having to watch out if the armor I'm about to buy is for male or female only. The only sign which shows if it's male or female only is the ( M ) or ( F ) tag on the item's name. I wish there's something on the item descrption that turns red if it's not usable by your character's sex. I realize it's probably inherent in the game's initial design to separate both male and female armor.
• I have an Nvidia 9600 GT in SLi mode but sometimes the game stutters and freezes momentarily for me. I think it's probably due to the lag (it's open beta after all) or lack of game client optimization.
• The game does support widescreen but not all common widescreen resolution. I had to edit the config files to use my monitors 1360 x 768 resolution.
• From lvl 1-10 the levels are pretty easy to acquire once you hit 10 you suddenly get hit with the massive grind factor that is so prevalent in asian F2P games (I loathe to use the degatory terms "asian grinders"). Doing quests can somewhat ease this grinding.
• The game uses gameguard. I'm not sure if it's activated yet but looks like it's not yet activated for the open beta. But personally I loathe games that uses gameguard due to past negative experience where gameguard was thrashing my computer system and it took a lot of work and research to figure out how to remove this diabolical piece of software.