Have you ever wished that you could combine your interests of playing online RPGs and Hello Kitty? Or have you been playing World Of Warcraft and just found the tame violence to be a touch too much for your impressionable mind? Well you’re in luck – Aeria Games (makers of such other unknown MMOs as Last Chaos and Wolf Team) are currently putting Hello Kitty through an open beta, meaning anyone who felt so inclined could try it out. For some unknown reason, that included me. After all, if the highly-polished pay-per-month MMOs such as WoW and EVE Online couldn’t reach me, perhaps all I needed was a 6 year-old’s favourite cartoon cat to help me enjoy the world of online gaming.
After a healthy download time, I was finally presented with a character creation screen. On the face of it, it seemed fairly simplistic and dumbed down. After a bit of exploration, it turned out that the character creation was, in fact, simplistic and dumbed down. However, seeing as MMOs generally focus on the armour/clothing you get along the way, I didn’t think too much of it. An odd element of the character creation screen, however, was the option to choose which blood type your character is. It is presumably unlikely that you’ll have to have in-game blood transfusions, so I couldn’t really see any reason to have the choice.
Anyway, putting aside these slight qualms, I headed into the game proper. From what I’ve played so far, it’s essentially the same as any other free-to-play MMO out there, just with an extra level of cuteness and player accessibility placed on top. The ‘Collect X Number of Y’ quests are present, the respawning low level enemies are there, everything like that. It was very clear the game was aimed at younger players (if the name Hello Kitty adorning the title didn’t give that away) from the basic colour scheme, the way the enemies are presented as intangible objects such as ‘Starbeams’ rather than anything humanoid, and obviously the big cats and bunnies bouncing around the place. The graphics are the standard isometric Runescape-esque variant, without much in the way of whistles and bells. They do the job, and for a free MMO you can’t really expect much more. They’ll certainly keep the target audience happy anyway, as every screen is filled with vibrant colour and happy smiling faces.
The game is remarkably stable and polished for a beta, but then again this is the case with most betas nowadays – they seem less like betas and more like early-release demos. There is, indeed, a range of clothing you can obtain as you continue, including things like accessories like sunglasses and necklaces. The ‘weapons’ are called wands and can vary from your standard stick-of-wood affair to a broom or mop, each having statistics much as you would expect from any MMO. All in all, it seems like a good place to have people new to MMOs and games in general to start with. Unfortunately, I have a feeling the age group it appeals to are just under the level of understanding needed to play it, but I could be wrong. Kids are pretty canny these days. If you want to try out the open beta of Hello Kitty for yourself, you can do by heading over to the official site.
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