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mysaldate · 8 months ago

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AFK Journey review by a beta tester

AFK Journey came out yesterday and I see it getting quite a lot of attention so I figured I'd at least put this out there so that people don't go into it expecting something it's not.

I have been in the testing of this game and continued to provide feedback all the way from the alpha test back in the fall of 2021 and through all the beta testing that started in April or May last year. I have also been aiding in making lore-focused streams about AFK Arena for over a year and seeing as AFK Journey is supposed to be set in the same world, this will be relevant later. I have also been contracted to make officially-backed videos about AFK journey – a deal I left for a number of reasons, not least of all the reasons I have for writing this post. Now with credentials out of the way, let's get to the actual review.

The visuals take your breath away

Let's start with something positive – this game is gorgeous. Farlight Studios have outdone themselves yet again and after the vibrant and futuristic world of Dislyte, their take on Esperia is surprisingly tame, in a good way. The colors are soft and lovely, the models look amazing, and the customization screen of the main character is awesome! The characters look great and move in a smooth fluid fashion. Ult animations, idle animations, and the overall feel of the characters as well as the skins added into the game thus far are all nice and fit into the wider world well, not to mention look wonderful and clean, a lot of effort and skill went into making them. Sadly, if we ignore the skins and ult animations, this has been the case since the alpha without any major changes.

Gameplay could be improved upon

I will be up-front about this, I don't care about gameplay all that much. However, I have to say, the game is not open-world, despite claiming to be so. If you venture off the paths, you get stuck on fences, stuck on bushes, stuck on rocks, or just prevented by an invisible wall. There is no swimming, no climbing, no gliding, or most other things we came to associate with open-world games. The vertical gameplay is a plus to be sure and you get to pick characters to follow you around without having to use them in battles which makes the exploration more fun. The overworld puzzles are creative and fun too! The real issue comes with... everything else. At the start, fights in the overworld are easy. However, they will scale up way faster than you can level and you will soon be adding an additional roadblock to the list: enemies. The combat itself is creative but requires attention as the autoplay function is usually wonky at best and outright damaging to your party at worst. AFK Journey is not living up to its AFK title either. One thing I found really annoying was the story progression not being tied to the AFK rewards. You have to grind a separate set of battles to increase the AFK rewards you receive. The AFK rewards and story also still cap each other so you won't be able to progress in one without progressing in the other.

Outside of the main story, the game offers multiple game modes. If you don't enjoy PvP, be warned that the game puts great emphasis on doing your PvP arena every day and being good at it if you want to build any good characters. The game also has a labyrinth mode which tracks your health across multiple battles and allows you to gain upgrades as you go. This mode is somewhere between AFK Arena's and Dislyte's in terms of fun. It is more varied than AFK Arena's which makes it more fun and less repetitive, however, you have a limited number of characters you can bring in which severely limits how varied your gameplay experience might be. It was also recently nerfed to the ground and now poses little to no challenge. Honor Duel is another PvP mode in which you buy upgrades and then fight randomly generated players with supposedly the same level of upgrades as you. If you can claim eight victories before three losses, you win the run. However, the factions and characters are currently so imbalanced that depending on your luck, you may not win a single battle in a run or you might breeze through all of them without any effort.

The gacha element is pretty much non-existent. If you scrounge up enough resources to pull, you likely won't get anything much. You'll be relying on hand-outs of pulls and PvP shops to build your characters. AFK Journey should not be called a gacha game. It is, at best, a game with rare gacha elements.

Co-op is a lie

While AFK Journey does have a cooperative mode, in the form of connected guild dungeons, it is not really what it advertises to be either. All your guildmates can separately whale on some enemies together and depending on how you do, you will receive rewards that are generous compared to what the rest of the game offers. You can lend your friends your characters but they'll be the ones fighting with them, not you. The most social aspect of the game is seeing other players around the map and spending your friend points to buy different animations to perform at each other. The chat function is also pretty bad, though not as terrible as it is in AFK Arena.

The guilds and friends to add also don't work cross-server. So if you have a friend on another server, you won't be able to see them or talk to them or enjoy even the limited interactions that are actually in the game.

The story is disappointing at best and nobody knows the world

You may have noticed I've been avoiding talking about the story of a story-focused game. This is where the biggest disappointment lies. Let me preface this by saying, the story didn't always use to be this way. It used to be actually really really good back in the alpha and even at the start of the beta. However, in the last three months, the game underwent five or six complete rewrites of the main story, each worse than the last. As things stand right now, there is no nuance in protagonists or villains, there is a literal diarrhea conversation (like an actual conversation, several scenes long) for no reason, most of the story could be summarized on one page and the rest is pointless bickering that makes every other character utterly unlikable. The main character is an amnesiac going by the title of "Magister Merlin" despite the fact that Merlin from Arthurian myths, whom this is clearly based on, is an existing character in the world of Esperia.

In terms of lore, AFK Journey is not even close to what it promised. It promised to be a game set in the world of AFK Arena – a world with surprisingly rich and interesting lore that has been built up over the years. Unfortunately, it is very much not that. Not only are important world events treated as nonexistent, not only does the writing erase character relationships and dynamics, but the writers couldn't have even been bothered to learn the basics of the world they're working with. Factions get swapped around randomly for no reason, and important factional politics have been flipped on their heads. An organization that is supposed to be an outcast is now the ruling class, the timeline is all over the place, and even the names of things are not only inconsistent with AFK Arena but also inconsistent with Journey's world itself. The loading screen already breaks the world by telling you magic didn't exist until the "Fall of the gods" which is supposed to have happened recently, yet the entire time you will be running around ruins of magical civilizations from ages long past.

Speaking of the gods, there are characters who straight-up don't know what a celestial is. If you know anything about Esperia's lore, you know how important religion is to its history and how jealously the gods guard their authority. The thought of someone having completely no idea of what they were is strange, to say the least. The game also invents new gods instead of using preexisting ones with the same function and even disregards events relating to the gods that changed the course of Esperian history – such as the death of Esperia's primary goddess Dura. In fact, AFK Journey doesn't even consider Dura important enough to have a model. Once again, this is the primary goddess of this world. As for the characters brought over from AFK Arena, they have been butchered beyond recognition. The warlord of an entire country who slew countless enemies is now a pacifist whose only interest lies in spicy food, a hard-working girl who, for the sake of her family, developed her skills until she was recognized by the stars and became the fulfillment of a prophecy is now an angry Mary-sue who was always perfect and didn't actually need to work for anything – and gets offended if you suggest otherwise, the list goes on.

The sound design is refreshingly good – for the most part

As a game with voices, we have to talk about those first. The voices, for the most part, are alright. None of them really stands out as particularly amazing, though I do like a few of them more than the others. I like Fay's voice quite a bit. Sadly, none of the characters from AFK Arena is voiced by the same person anymore, and in most cases, it is a massive downgrade. And that isn't talking about the worst offender of all – Valen, one of the main characters you'll have to listen to the whole time. Valen used to have a voice that fit his character – suave and kind of bold and full of life. Now he sounds like he's still going through puberty, and he's a whiny crybaby at that.

The sound design outside of the voice acting is great. Once again, this is a very strong point for the game. The music and background noises are great and even the menu sounds are not disruptive in the least. If anything, they feel natural to the world.

PC client could as well not exist at all

This is coming from second-hand knowledge as I have played AFK Journey on phone but so far the reviews I've seen appear to be as follows: Game lags when walking, freezes when trying to talk to NPCs, and is prone to crashing. Mobile devices perform better for AFK Journey than PCs do.

The mystery of translation

Back in January, the only publicly admitted localizer has been fired from the project. About a week and a half ago (around 10 days before the game's launch), the official Discord posted an application form looking for translators for the game. Apparently, the game has several translations already out at this moment, but none of them particularly good. Some are even so bad it's sort of funny. In a really... pathetic sad way. It probably doesn't help that they're still looking for translators as we speak.

In conclusion...

I wish I could recommend AFK Journey, I really do. I've been excited about this game ever since its announcement and I've been providing as much feedback as I could throughout both alpha and beta. The organization has been awful and the game suffers for it. Internal changes happened a few months back and since then, everything about the game just fell apart. Even things that were good before got ruined and now all that remains is pretty visuals and nice music with nothing else worth paying attention to. It is a major letdown when it could've been incredible. The game is nothing it was advertised as – it is not an open-world game, it is not a gacha, and it is most certainly not set in the world of AFK Arena.

I hope the people who decide to play it can still find some fun in it regardless.

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