Florensia

Florensia Review

The North American and European version of Florensia was released on July 21, 2008 and it is one of the most interesting free MMORPGs now available. Florensia allows players to explore the world’s lands and seas. Each play style is unique; on land Florensia is a lot like other traditional Asian fantasy MMORPGs. But the sea aspect puts Florensia in the exclusive sailor genre along with games like Voyage Century and Tales of Pirates.

Florensia is a large game (2.5GB) and while it runs on a range of settings, its true beauty only reveals it self on a powerful PC. There are four classes in Florensia: Noble (mage), Mercenary (warrior), Saint (healer), and Explorer (ranged gunner). Players can customize their hair style, and hair & eye color. Each class starts with a different distribution of stats. The 7 stats are: Strength (physical damage), Dexterity (hit rate & dodge rate), Constitution (max hp & regen), Intelligence (magic damage), Wisdom (max MP & MP regen rate), Will (crit rate), and Luck (effects damage, crit). Each level, players earn 3 stat points to distribute. Unlike other stats, Luck cannot be raised with stat points. Florensia has a very well crafted Skill system in which players receive one skill point per level. Each class has a different skill tree in which more skills become available as the player levels up. The only annoying thing about the skill system is that players must initially ‘learn’ a skill by purchasing a skill book before they can spend points on it.

It is important to note that experience gained while hunting on land will only effect a player’s land level. In order to gain sea levels, players must hunt at sea on their ships. Similarly, skill points gained by leveling up on land cannot be used to learn ship skills and vice verse. The land based part of Florensia seems to be the more important and the more interesting. New players won’t have any trouble figuring out the simple point and click movement/combat on land but at sea, things are far more complicated. Before even leaving the dock, players must equip their ship with a canon, sails, and a crew. Ships can only shoot forward and sideways and players must manually shoot at moving targets. This means players will have to anticipate where their target will be as the cannonball barrage travels. There are many quests to be done on both land and sea but both suffer from the same major problem, the quest rewards are too low. Killing a single monster your level will yield yield nearly the same amount of experience as completing a quest your level. Because of this, it is simply not worth questing for the first 10 or so levels. Higher level quests slowly become more useful but only because leveling up slows down so significantly that every little bit helps.

Florensia has one of the worst tutorials of any recent MMORPG. All players begin the game next to their class specific NPC trainer and it is this trainer that provides the tutorial quests. Players are forced to complete several of these quests to obtain basic gear and their first skill. Like every other quest, these tutorial quests each contain a wall of text but little in the way of rewards. There are currently three islands in Florensia which players can sail between. Each island has a town, a few hunting grounds and a dungeon. The starting island should keep players busy until level 15 or so. The developers have said that there are many more islands to come. Florensia has a simple fishing and cooking system. Players can also open personal shops.

Grinding alone in Florensia is extremely tedious, especially since the quests are so worthless but luckily there are many players in the same situation as you. This makes it simple to form small hunting parties and speed up the grind. A small issue I had with Florensia was the inability to jump. Florensia is currently in open beta and suffers from several glitches though these will likely be fixed before the final release. Anyone looking for a new 3D MMORPG with lots of content should give Florensia a try.

Florensia Screenshots

Florensia Video

Florensia Guides / Resources

Official Site

Wikipedia Page