Gameplay

Starting as simple adventures, we are free to choose whatever path we like most, will it be a combatant or a skilled artisan.

After choosing our main profession, the general purpose of the game is to keep raising our skills and progress in the society. We can create useful items (such as weapons, clothes and tools) and sell them to other players, build structures like houses and workshops, equip armors and fight monsters in dungeons; NPCs in every place will give us quests (mostly crafting items and hand them over), which will let us discovery more about the lore of each region and the history of the world.

The gameplay is basically a “waiting simulator”, where each task needs some time to be completed (from few minutes to many hours). Up to 8 tasks can be queued, allowing us to schedule activities, especially for those that are long and repetitive (like gathering resources or crafting items in bulk). While it can be an interesting mechanics that saves us from being constantly connected (like many other F2P do), those very long waiting times shrink the way of playing to a few clicks on buttons and objects, making the game very little interactive.

Raising skills is long and irksome. At the beginning, most of recipes gives high chances of leveling up the related skill, but after a while we are forced to craft only very difficult items in order to get a few skill levels. These operations require a lot of time, high quality tools (which are demanding) and to repeat the whole process dozens of times.
The points of a skill are calculated on the 5 best elements related to that skill. This means we can’t rely only on a single powerful item or companion, but we have to choose the right mix of equipment for every purpose (meaning if we have to build a house we could have a totally different setup than forging a sword). While at first could be daunting, this system is very interesting and contribute to give more usefulness to multiple objects at once.
However, since the skill raising system is totally based on “chances”, this can mean also that fighting the strongest enemies or crafting the hardest items can be often useless for progression, unless we got bleessed by the randomness.

In cities and villages we can find companions, which have some useful skills that help us in crafting and combat. They can be recruited (or tamed if animals) after many hours and their skills can be upgraded, but can’t go over a certain level.

The inventory is quite messy, were thousands of items are stored in a gridless, confusing pouch (if you played Ultima Online you know what is like). Even with a search function that can help a bit, it’s surely the worst solution for a game with all those items to be stored.

The player market should be the most important things in the game, allowing players to trade crafted items and gathered resources to help each other growing. Sadly, as servers are always almost empty, the market always lacks offers. This can become a huge obstacle for new players who can’t get some specific items without hundreds of hours of grinding.

If we want to set aside crafting and be an adventurer, things become slightly more dynamic. The combat is a simple turn-based system, where a single mouse click decide our attack. Fighting is useful to advance in some quests and obtain a few useful loot, but it’s a kind undertone, compared to other similar games. Combat doesn’t require waiting, but if we are wounded, the only way to heal is to take a long rest.

Every other aspect of the gameplay, from brewing potions to making building, follow very tedious processes, usually revolving spending days to gather resources/materials and even months to build a simple empty house.

About the shop, as other free-to-play games, there is a premium currency (Blue Crown) that you can buy with real money. Blue Crowns can be use to complete queues, unlock more inventory slots and get some other advantages. Prices are quite low, compared to similar games, but if we don’t want to wait months for a single progress, we can fast learn how many of those premium items we need to use in order to speed up things.

🕮 Narrative

As textual game, most of the meaning of Therian Saga resides in the lore of the world, explained through quests, descriptions of locations and chitchatting with people. Every quest, character and location has a small but presennt description that gives them a reason to be.

However, as a low budget game, don’t expect to find a book-quality narrative here. Some dialogues are funny or readable, but most of the story inside of this game relies on the typical clichès of the fantasy narratives. There are also some things that don’t make sense, or lack of any good explanation.

Moreover, to enjoy the full story of the game, we need to go a lot further, meaning we have to pass hundreds of hours of waiting (yes, again), until we see a real growing of the plot.

⌬ Aesthetic

The visual appeal is surely the most notable aspect of the game. Almost every element, from the interface to characters, are hand-drawn images with proper attention to detail. However, every sprite is static and the game lacks of almost any kind of visual animations.

The overall aesthetic is colourful and cheerful, and that’s what contributes most to creating a relaxing, cosy and light-hearted feeling that makes every single click on the window a little more pleasant than a spreadsheet.

The most negative point in the aspect is the interface not scaling well with screen resolution. Most of the UI elements can look too small, being hard to read, or too big, overflowing out of their bounds, making the whole visual messy and sometimes making buttons and images disappear or hide.

♬ Sound

Together with the graphic style, the sound system also contributes to create a lovely atmosphere.

The music tracks are pleasant, a good background for all clicking actions, which can also become quite engaging in the combat moments. There is not much variety or quantity in music tracks; the game would have would have benefited from more variation. Same opinion for sounds effects of buttons, pop-ups and notifications.

⚔︎ Challenge

At the end of the day, the only thing that the game requires from you is patience, as every progress is dictated by just how much time you spend doing some actions.

From the beginning you feel free to do whatever you want, but in this case it can be a huge problem, since the game doesn’t explain enough what some resources or skills are there for. This means as new player you could waste hours and hours with an idea in mind, or focusing on a single path, realising only at the end that it was only a waste of time that bring you nowhere.

Hundreds of parameters rule the effectiveness of resources and tool, but you can’t know what they mean since the game doesn’t care at all to explain them to you.

Contrary to what you might think, the biggest obstacle is the absence of players, which makes every kind of item related action (crafting, gathering, training, etc..) more tedious than planned.

Sadly, from combat to questing, what matters most is how much time you spend crafting some items, increasing some skills or just waiting for something to be done.