GhostX Ultimate (Part One)

As promised, I will be spending my time, over the next few articles, sharing with you about this game called GhostX Ultimate.

As far as I can tell, this game has been out in the market for quite some time now and is kind of like a hybrid between action-type mmorpgs (like Dragon Nest and Dragonica) and those hub-based/lobby types (like FairyLand 2 Online and Metal Assault).

Most of your "maintenance" activities like buying/selling of stuff, upgrading of equips, storage access and player-player interactions are all confined to a hub called the "Shopping Town".

From there, you can also enter into semi-instanced areas for exploration, leveling and questing purposes (via the "City Map" interface). Well the reason why I called them semi-instanced is because these areas aren't exactly yours and yours alone. In fact, a part of them are actually co-shared so much so that you will occasionally see people running past you, doing their own thing even though you guys aren't in a party.

And if I'm not wrong, only upon reaching close to the end where you start to engage the boss mob would they become truly instanced.

As you can see from the City Map, the areas which you can explore in are divided into three sections, which I shall conveniently name as "Dungeon Areas", "Mission Areas" and "Open Areas".

• Dungeon Areas (Top Left)
  
  
  
  The reason why I named them as such is because these areas will mostly just involve in you running around through a maze-like instance killing monsters and then ending the miserable life of some final boss mob(s) to gain some random rewards plus perhaps some title for perfect clearing it and that's that. It gives off a feel similar to those dungeon instances, in regular mmorpgs, that would need you to gather a party to clear unless your much higher in level.
  
• Mission Areas (Bottom Left)
  
  
  
  The Mission Areas are also known as your storyline questing areas. Though they do act similar to Dungeon Areas, these areas will require that you follow through some sort of plot or storyline that is related to the game. However, due to the reason that they are repeatable, it kind of kills away all the story-telling feel in my opinion, thus turning it into just another "grinding" area.
  
• Open Areas (Bottom Right)
  Open Areas are simply just areas where anyone can access once they've unlocked them. In these areas, you can leisurely hang out and slaughter monsters at your own pace without any concern for timings, points or quests whatsoever. Coincidentally, the Shopping Town is also located in this section of the map.
  

As for the fighting part in this game, it mostly just involves in the player equipping some kind of nanobot companion to fight.

By pressing "Tab", the player can toggle between arming and disarming the nanobot. Arming the nanobot would allow the player to attack and kill hostile monsters that they encounter, while disarming it would enable the nanobot to heal your character's health and mana (HP and GP) over time (but you cannot attack).

Hitting "A" would allow you to perform a default attack with repeated hittings cycling you through a series of chained motions, where the final one is usually a knockdown attack.

"S" allows you to jump, "D" is your interaction key, "QWERZXCV" your hotkeys for skills, "1234" for hotkeying consumables and the arrow keys for controlling your character's movements so there's not exactly anything new here.

Questing-wise, its just the usual go to so and so instance to meet someone, kill X amount of this monster or obtain Y amount of an item from that monster...thus there's hardly a need to explain any further than that.

However, one troublesome issue that I do have with these quests is that the location in which you may have to go to, for completing a quest, isn't exactly labelled in the quest progress window. And therefore unless you read through the quest dialogue or review it in your mission details properly, there is a good chance that you won't find the right NPC to turn in some quests as there may be multiple copies of the same NPC, but in different instances...or you just cannot find which instance the NPC is residing in.

(To overcome this issue, it may be wise for you to double click on the quest title in your quest progress window instead...as this will automatically teleport you into the correct instance without you needing to guess.)

Anyway, the overall feel that I get while playing is that GhostX Ultimate, as a whole, seems to be just a mad dash to collect ALL of the various nanobots that exists in the game world (kindda like Pokémon Catch 'Em All if you get what I mean).

The way you will fight, the HP, GP and stats that you possess plus the skills that you have available for use, all of them would depend upon the type of nanobot that you've chosen to equip at that moment. And if you take that element out, your character would be no different from the one standing next to you...apart from some minor variances that is derived from the "Character Passive Skills" (will be explained later) that you've chosen to get.

And on top of that, the regular side quests are bland, in my opinion, and there is a significant lack of connection between your starting prologue storyline to the main storyline quests...so much so that they feel disjoint, standalone and can hardly motivate you into leveling up your character.

Lastly, as far as I can foresee, most of the new maps that were opened seemed to be just more of the same old stuff and do not appear to serve up anything too interesting. What's more, the game doesn't seem to provide any form of endgame content, thus I do not think that it will be able to hold your attention for too long even if you do decide to download and give it a try.

Next: GhostX Ultimate (Part Two)

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