Sword of The New World:Granado Espada is a relaxing and exciting game of its own kind. It has swords n rifles n cuteys!

User Rating: 7.5 | Sword of the New World: Granado Espada PC
I started playing this game around September 2007 and been on and off ever since, mainly due to my aging laptop unable to cope with the game during raids and such. But I stick to this game up to now. The reasons?

The game has beautifully created world with intricate details and awesome atmosphere. Ranging from deep underground ruins to barren prairie to gothic era prison dungeon to frozen wasteland to cruel swamps to lush green hills, you will not get bored easily looking at the landscape. The cities are created with intricate details and life-like arrangements of buildings. Everything in the background is beautiful. The beatufilly designed and rendered areas themselves are rarely flats. Some are even multi-tiered hills and have stairs coming up and down the terrains. You can grind on the shadow of a cliff one moment and gangbanging area boss with your clan or squadmates on the cliff the next.

The game also has beautifully designed stock characters (which are male and female of fighters, scouts, musketeers, wizards/witchs, and elementalists). In addition to that, players can also acquire unique player characters obtainable true quests. You can play THREE characters of various levels and types at ONCE! This also separates this game from other MMORPGs out there.

And this is the main reason why I stick with this game: the characters can be set to automatically fight (or in case of scouts: heal) on their own. I hate the need to click every monster on the area to make my characters attack them. They should behave like the ones in this game: attack them automatically if set as such. This can reduce the tediousness of grindings that are so prevalent in majority of korean MMORPGs. This can also become a source of entertainment on itself as you watch your characters walk back and forth bashing and shooting the enemies. If you feel like it, you can unleash tons of skills available in the characters array of multiple "stances" on the enemies. Some of the skills are even beautifully designed and rendered you want to do it over and over.

But yes, the game is loaded with tedious grinding missions that I am sure can be trimmed somewhat. But this game is a Free-To-Play, so grinding is an expected flaw designed to lure people into spending their money to advance faster. But the game has ways to reduce the tediousness: the automatic attacking like I have said, the nice squadding and clan-building features where you gain XPs faster when squadding and in area where your clan rules, several hourly instanced missions, and player-generated instances. There are also statues in the areas that can give repeatable grinding missions to the players and rewards them with XP cards when missions accomplished.

All in all, the game is a good game for people who don't have much time to game like me, since I can multitask this game with other things, even when working :)