GRANADO ESPADA

Redownloaded for old times sake. Played this game back when it was called "Sword of the New World" on GamersFirst so many years ago. Pros: + The soundtrack. I stopped playing the game long ago but to this day I still listen to much of it's amazing music tracks. Some weird/funky tracks here and there but overall the soundtrack for the game is just amazing. + Designs of the playable characters and the armor/costumes you can buy for them are pretty well designed, many with that old victorian style, especially the ones for the Musketeers. Even the looks of the starter armors you get when you first play the game look good. + Designs and graphics of the zones. Most of them are the same old "MMO grassy plains or woods" type of zones but there are some pretty neat ones. And even when this game is so old, the graphics still look pretty good if you run it at the highest settings (not amazing mind you, but still). Cons: -Grind. Grind. GRIND UNTIL YOUR COMPUTER BLEEDS. AND THEN GRIND SOME MORE. No, seriously, I know grind is a common thing to be expected from any MMORPG, but this game takes the cake. The game even motivates you into leaving your characters afk, auto-attacking any mob that comes nearby in order to level up, or in order to farm for super rare items (some of which you need to progress in the storyline and that usually have a 0.00001% drop chance) if you have the money to pay for your pet. - Pay2Win. Perhaps not when you are just first leveling, but once you get your first characters to "cap" level (or at least the "first cap level"...) you will either enter the pay-money grounds or get out. Pay money to buy an item that lets you break the level cap on your character (1 per character!)! pay money to enter the zones that let you afk-level faster! pay money to get the items needed to recruit X characters! pay money to but the only items that sell for anything on the market so you can buy others of the same items! PAY MONEY TO BREAK THE 2ND VETERAN LEVEL CAP SO YOU CAN LEVEL UP TO EXPERT NOW!... you get the idea. - The story and its translation. The story of Granado Espada is not really the best ever but its... eh, decent? The problem is that you are more or less thrown at it before you even know who is who or what is what, not to mention a lot of it is locked behind grind walls the more you progress (ie: farm this super rare item on X zone which only has a super low drop rate). But the worst part is the translation work this game got... holy cow, is it hilariously bad. "HEY. YOU LOOK STRONG!!!!! BUT ALSO FEAR!!!! AND FEAR LEADS TO ANGER, ANGER TO HATE AND HATE TO SHOOTING LIGHTNING FROM YOUR FINGERTIPS!!!!!!" (no joke, this was more or less an actual line on the game from a main character, excess of !!!! included). TLDR: Play this only if you really have nothing better to do with your life and you are just poking around for new games to play. But even if you don't play it, please by all means DO get the soundtrack, it's amazing.

DO NOT GET/PLAY THIS GAME! I simply downloaded this game on Steam, just so I could write a Review. I'm one of the many who started this game back in mid-late 2000s well before this game was ever available on Steam, so my "hours" on Steam does not reflect the amount of time and effort I put into this game, which is a lot. Back during my tenure I really enjoyed this game, and this was due in part because of the Guild in which I was with. I happened to land in one of the Most Powerful Guilds at the time, they were active, friendly, always helpful and full of cool people that I enjoyed being with. Because of this very reason, it drove me to continue playing during that era. I had even invited numerous friends that I knew personally to join in on Granado Espada (Known as Sword of the New World in the Mid-2000s, for anyone who played during that era!), at that time, and we really enjoyed it. This however quickly changed once you reached near the end of the game, the constant grinding, trying to earn Gold, the Pay2Win methods that were being employed which eventually forced ALL of my friends whom I invited to stop playing. They were the smart ones while I continued pushing onward... You want to Earn "More Exp?" Well, Purchase their Specials to go into Ancient Areas which give out better Exp Output then Stock Maps with Real Money. Can't Afford that? Then be ready to fork over Tons of In-Game Gold in order to be able to grab yourself access to this. Want to enhance your weapons? Better be ready to buy their Game Shop Enchantments with Real Money to upgrade your weapons just to have a higher ratio of success. However if you wish to not do that...Fork Over A LOT of Gold to get the Enchantments. Pets can pick up items when you're Afking in battle however "certain" pets can pick up items faster then others. To get those little baddies you'll have to get ready to fork over Real $$ or be ready to throw down some serious In-Game Gold to grab one. The funny part is that they purposely implemented Pets to remain stationary for a second or two, before picking up items. Reasons behind this is that even with Pets, You will STILL lose out on drops in a whole. I personally had the Fastest Pet at the time (not the stock white pet btw) and when I left my game afk, and came back a few hours later, I noticed that I had a sea of items still laying on the floor. So even with the fastest available looting pet, it is still moving far too slow (2-3 second stalls on each pick up is absurd!). Worst yet were valuable drops that were being bypassed by my pet for random fodder drops. It really makes no sense as to how they never implemented something to have the pet prioritize more valuable drops. Or better yet, REMOVE the lag of the Pet in between pick ups all together, which would solve this issue entirely. All in all, you'll never make your full potential profit from pet looting because of their pick up rate. What can possibly be worse when using pets? They Require Food in order to operate, and Food cost Fesos, and Fesos which also requires real $$$. Don't want to pay Real Money? Get Ready to Spend A tremendous amount of Gold then, and when sustaining a pet, this is a Must! Even certain recruited NPCs require GameShop items in order to have them accessible to you, or before release they'll be put into RNG Boxes. No to this? Some of the heaviest Gold Drops you'll ever be having to make. Want Wings? They are 100% Mandatory in Late-Game due to the significant Stats Boost that they give. However they are only from the Game Shop, unless once again, you're willing to pay Gold for them. Do you see where all of this is going? Consider the above and really start to gauge just how much Vis (Gold) will be required in order for you to stay somewhat relevant. Sure you don't "have to use real money" however all of your resources basically points towards churning the soup of the cash cow. Because even as a Non-Paying player you're forced into relying upon Paying Players who make these purchases to sell at the market, who also in turn filters right into the games Direct Force Feeding of Pay 2 Win. Another Big Flaw that occurred was during the transferring of Accounts from the Old Server/Host to the New and Current Server/Host. In My Own Account, Along with many others that I knew whom played this game ended up losing Gears/Items when we were transferred to the new Host. Their were people that had completely Lost Everything on their characters, and even in their personal storage when this occurred. Basically making the game Completely Unplayable for them, because they had No Equipment or Resources to turn too in order to play the game! Worst of all, the Company who ran this Transfer did Little to Almost Nothing to Compensate or Return their Items. Because of this very action, the New Host (which is the Current One Right Now!) lost a great and significant portion of it's dedicated playerbase who quit! Personally, I had the Majority of my Best Weapons/Gears lost during the transfer, however like an idiot that I was, this didn't stop me from playing and I continued onward for the next few months. On the belief and hope that with enough support tickets being sent to T3Fun that my situation would eventually get resolved. Did I ever get my items back? Nope. Never. Did I ever get compensated for my losses due to their own faults with the Transfer? Nope. Never. Instead all I received with my replies were the Constant Same Statements and Responses from them stating "We're still currently looking into this matter. Please be Patient with us while we are doing our best." A week into the situation? Okay, completely understandable... "We're still currently looking into this matter. Please be Patient with us while we are doing our best." 2 weeks into the situation? Okay..but will you resolve this soon? "We're still currently looking into this matter. Please be Patient with us while we are doing our best." 2-3 months into the situation? Okay, now I know you're just full of sh*t. So finally, after all of the garbage from the people who ran T3Fun, I dropped Granado Espada permanently and left, Forever. So Ask yourself hard... Why Spend Time, Effort, And Real Money on a Game, in which even the Backers of this particular MMO can't even properly help or compensate the players? Pros of the Game - 3 NPC System, making it interesting - Beautiful Characters, Costumes and Cosmetics if you're a fan of that - Incredible Music going from Orchestra to Modern Techno - Afk Battle System allowing you to move away from your pc Cons - Pay 2 Win - Newly recruitable NPCs popping out faster then two rabbits trying to make babies. How is this a Con? Most of the time they're either in RNG Boxes, or require Cash Shop Items in order to be recruited. Lastly, because it's such a frequency they can quickly dilute the quality of the previous NPCs. Basically, you're always chasing with $$$. - Many of the Best Costumes, cosmetics etc can't even be bought regularly but only through High Priced RNG boxes which for the most part give you terrible game shop items. - Majority of Late-Game Work involves resources pertaining to Game Shop. - Long, Long Hours of Grinds - Pets which pick up items are made on purpose to stall, thus lowering your income ratio on drops. - Long, Long, Long Hours of Grinding - Posted twice for a Reason - Afk Battle System is still defective due to the fact that Melee characters will run outside their range and by doing so, will end up auto-resetting, making them no longer able to attack while afk. This is the very reason why most teams use range NPCs which limits the versatility and creativity of this system, especially when you're specifically trying to level up certain characters. - Pay 2 Win - Posted Twice for a reason. I am saying this as someone who played this game for years (2007-2014)...DO NOT GET THIS GAME!

I played this game off and on for many years, some time ago. Since then, it's changed ownership (and names) quite a few times, and in one such transition process, my original account with hundreds of hours of grinding (and more cash money spent on vanity gear than I care to admit) was lost, and to date I've gotten absolutely zero assistance regarding its recovery. I'm not about to start again, and I'm sure as hell not giving them another dime. In fact, I only redownloaded it so I could leave this negative review and warn people away, now that its infected corpse has floated downstream and lodged itself here. The game itself is your standard grindy Korean MMO affair, made only slightly more palatable by the fact you can take 3 characters out at a time, allowing for what is essentially your own raiding party. Whatever 2 characters you aren't actively controlling will follow basic AI commands, so you can adapt your play style on the fly. The visuals are okay, if a little dated, but everything else is just typical, boring MMO material. Kill 10 of these, collect 5 of these, wash, rinse, repeat. There's no real plot or storyline to speak of, and plenty of Engrish dialogue to go around -- in-game and out. They couldn't even write the game's description properly, for crying out loud. The technical aspect of the game rarely functions correctly, and frequently requires some ridiculous hedge fixes to make it function, such as updating and installing java/flash plugins for Internet Explorer, of all things. And as for actual support? Well, I think you know my opinion on that. Take it from someone who knows; there are far better ways to waste precious hours of your life. Like literally anything.

I'd really like to be able to recommend this game, but I wanted to say it's one of the greediest games I've ever seen. You can't buy content such as costumes, wings, pets, etc... the way you can in other games, rather you pay to rent them (yes rent in-game content) and pretty much anything of worth you buy disappears after 30 days. Pets require premium cash-shop pet food to function. I "get" the Free To Play market, and I've spend decent amounts of money in F2P games before (like Star Trek Online) but this game takes it to another whole level. I just cannot recommend the game in it's current form, despite some truely great ideas and the fun idea of controlling an entire party of adventurers.

First of all i played it alot when it was not on steam, had many 100+ characters and have spent alot of cash on ot , what a shame This game is rly expensive, yes you can afk 90%of your time, in fact you will need to afk a lot to level up cos to get good stats you need to level up like 30+ characters, cos every character gives your family +stats depending of his level.. and every character slot costs money or cash^^ ofc you would think - if im afk i can get a lot of money - sure a lot of money will drop but if you are afk you cannot pick it up - if you don't have pet, that needs food, that you can get only in cash shop :D :D It would be nice game if at least pets would not need cash food cos you will end up spending alot of money on it, ofc you can buy that food in market where players who cash in will sell it for gold - BUT AGAIN you are not getting money afk if you don't have pet to pick it up and you will afk believe me cos there will come time when you will afk all night and get some 5% :D All these wings you see in game – cash, they give you good stats, for example life steal, buff potions that boost your stats A LOT, don't even think about pvp if you don't have these. It's a fking shame, game looks rly nice, soundtrack is awesome but again - p2w

I played this game on the SEA server since it was in Closed Beta till the beginning of 2015, I can say this game was amazing. But I would not recommend it. Like others have mentioned, the fabulous soundtrack was a major draw for me. The Pokemon RNPC system had me sucked in, and the styling and scenery was amazing. But I would not recommend it. However much I loved the game, I would not recommend it. (The following is from the SEA publisher, I dunno about this one, but odds are it'll be similar) This is the worst pay2win game I've ever made the mistake of buying into ever. The best RNPCs are the godly premium ones hidden behind gambling style paywalls, and so are the best end game gear. You CAN have a chance of crafting the end game gear free in game, but the journey to achieving that is paved with the golden bricks laid down with souls of wallet warriors and your paychecks. There were awesome free characters, but their stances required insane effort or selling an organ, sometimes both. The best part? All that cash and effort is voided and nulled with the next patch and wave of premium characters and end game equips. A subscription game like FFXIV actually saves you way more money than playing this game. Get the soundtrack, get all the wallpapers and pretty art, and save yourself some serious money. All this is void if they've fixed the cash grabs. Go nuts. ....................../´¯/) ....................,/¯../ .................../..../ ............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸ ........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\ ........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...') .........\.................'...../ ..........\.............. _.·´ ............\..............( The pay2win.

I played this game since the original US beta under K2 and G1 games, heavily. I LOVED this game, likely have months worth of hours logged. After redbana took over the game, it's been nothing but down hill. Massively pay to win, the game's code is shoddy (the update before this would perpetually crash on my 780Ti, but worked on a 285M), and the translation might as well have been run through Google translate, 8 times, between english and Korean. I would NEVER recommend this game to ANYONE. This game and it's soul in the US died in 2012. Hell, I even tried giving this one more shot after seeing it on Steam. Side note- The listed accolated of 9.0 and 8.0, are from 7 years ago.

This game used to keep me entertained for months at a time. However, the community has slowly been dying out and now it is practically dead. When the game was in its prime it was accused of being pay to win, which wasn't necessarily wrong. I enjoyed this when I was in school because I could leave the game running and return to find my characters leveled up and maybe they had collected some cool treasures. It is unfortunate that the game has declined to this state. If you are a potentially returning player, or someone who randomly found this game I would not play it in its current state. For a massively multiplayer online game, the massively multiplayer is severely lacking to the point that I can see the game getting shut down very soon.

I'm going to tell my experience with the game: there's a TLDR at the bottom for a summary :) I started playing this game when it first came out using a VPN on its Korean server. I have a lot of great memories of making a new family, running through the first missions and recruiting my first NPC characters. At the time it was the first MMO I'd played (not really an MMO person usually) and I loved the experience. Great music, interesting characters, cool themes and design, cool setting...and the combat system (of 3 characters at once) was pretty unique. After a while the grind (typical to eastern MMOs) started to wear on my teenage brain, and I only ended up playing it for about 5 months. I think my highest level characters were about level 80, because I'd play it for maybe an hour a day and we didn't have good enough internet (or a pc) capable of handling leaving it on all the time to AFK level (although that was also a cool feature). Skip ahead about 5 years. I rediscovered the game when the American servers came online. Still entranced by the graphics, music, themes, and character system, I downloaded it again (I seem to remember patching it being a ♥♥♥♥♥ and the technical support a nightmare, but I finally got it working) and checked my account. Oh wait, that's right...I'd been playing on the Korean server...so I had to start from scratch. No problem, no problem...I remembered the AFK system and, as I'd now upgraded my pc and net speed, all good! So I'd leave it on while I went to work and come back in the evening excited to see how far my characters had leveled. I was making progress! I had maybe 12 characters at Master level 1 (131) and all of the recruitable character quests up to Byron completed. So I started researching what I would need to do to acquire my next recruitable characters (the main reason I played the game)... HOLY F*%&, I have to grind HOW MANY MILLION rare drop resources to get this character?! WTF, I need how many MILLIONS OF GOLD to get it off the market?!!! After swallowing the sinking pit in my stomach, I shook my head, cracked my knuckles, and did some research and numbers crunching over the next couple days. With the minimal minimal help of the apparently entirely non-english-speaking members of the forums, I managed to piece together that I really needed to stop trying to get NPCs for now and instead gear up for end level raids. Getting the rare raid drops was going to be the only way to get the money I needed to either buy the NPCs off the market or buy the materials to do their quests. So how to do end-game raids? Yet another thing I had to research. Apparently I needed better weapons. Some of those I couldn't access until I completed the Byron story missions. Ok, no problem... Until I ran into one questline. In it your characters go to scout out a castle area and are attacked by one of the recruitable NPCs. I wiped in like 5 seconds. And the next time. And the next time. No matter what combo of characters I brought or how carefully I used my skills or how many health potions I spammed, I wiped. I must have run that stupid mission 30 times before I realized no matter what I WISHED for, my gear wasn't enough to cut it. So here I found myself in a predicament. To get to the end game characters and content I needed better gear. But, in order to get better gear I needed to run raids. Which required...better gear. So in order to get the minimum gear I needed for those I needed to either spend a f*&@ton of cash and sell cash items on the market, or run low level raids hundreds of times and sell the drops I got. Which I did. For about a week. At which point I purchased (off the market) my very first 31AR +3AR pistols (was running an Outrage Shot dual-pistol musketeer character for DPS). YAY! I was so happy to go and try him out... He died. Oops. Need armor too. How much does armor cost? That's right...3 F*@&ING TIMES the cost of the guns :\ No way. No way was I going to sit for 2 months, grinding every day all day, just to get the loot i needed to sell to get the gear I needed JUST TO COMPLETE THE MAIN QUESTS. That's not even considering the actually worthwhile raids, which were what I would need to run to get the highest quality ingredients and weapons (which I'd then sell just to get my DAMN CHARACTERS lol). So I bit the bullet and caved and bought some cash shop items. Sold those, bought a couple (3? I think?) characters off the market...and was disgusted with myself. Did the game succeed in making me pay? Yes. Yes it did. I'm sure the devs would have considered this an astounding success story. Except that I do not believe in pay-to-win games. The only kind of cash shop I approve of in a F2P game is one that sells purely cosmetic or pure boost items. I'm not even going to get into the Lydon Box/Gambling-Box-of-Satan item (which is the only way to get some of the rare Characters)... True, the cash shop does sell some boost stuff. But that's not the problem. The problem was I needed gold (vis), and the only way to realistically amass the amount I needed in any reasonable (re: sane) amount of time was to use the cash shop. I couldn't progress in the damn game unless I did. Disgusted at myself for becoming one of those 'paytards' that I always criticized, I stopped playing. I've barely played the game in the last 5 years. I log on once every couple months to look at my characters, check market prices (just for the hell of it) and reminisce. Because that's all there is for me to do without paying. TLDR; This game has beautiful artwork, an amazing soundtrack, and an interesting theme (and storyline, if you can get past the atrocious english translation work...did they hire a 5 year old to translate this?!). It is also a shallow grind-fest, which no meaningful depth to speak of, no good crafting systems or professions, no newbie-friendly guides or help, very few players (in comparison...especially few actual english-speaking players), and end-game content locked behind a paywall. I honestly can't even say that it was ever any better, although probably some would disagree. Either way, what it is NOW is a nonsensical trainwreck. If you have any interest in the world setting, graphics, or characters, go ahead and play for a bit! I won't say it's fun or enjoyable, but hey, you can walk around and take screenshots right? That's what I did before I stopped playing. Take some screenshots for when it inevitably dies (the game runs primarily on income from pay-to-win players or moneybags (especially in its Asian incarnations). Because that's all its developers see it as: a money machine. Not a game, not a piece of art...MONEY. "We don't believe in customer service...we believe in MONEY. POOLS OF MONEY." But...if you have any interest in actual exciting combat or gameplay, well-written characters or dialogue, end-game content or raids and don't want to spent 800$ to make that happen, go play just about ANYTHING else. Please. I implore you. As a bit of reference: I checked the Market just before posting this. The newest NPC character is currently listed at: 3,500,000,000vis Yup. That's three BILLION. That character is a rare character only available from the Lyndon/Satan boxes. So realistically, you'd probably have to spend 100-200$ on buying the boxes to drop one of that character. Which I'd like to say is a direct correlation to the vis (gold) cost, but it's not. That's a ridiculous price. even a number of the older characters are in the billions. To give some context: currently, AFK farming for 24 hours (a whole day) at Castilla Ruins nets you ~14million vis. A DAY. That's MANY HUNDREDS OF DAYS of grinding to be able to afford a billion-vis character or weapon. And I'd like to say 'throw down a few bucks and it'll be faster!'. Not really. The most market-worthy cash item is the premium area passes which sell for ~120million. For 20$. :\