In order to obtain these codes, fill out the following questions and send them to my email address (mmogrinder@live.com) and I will reply with your code, and instructions on how redeem them. These codes are for the “Searing Viper Gift Pack” so if you’ve redeemed any sort of giveaway codes from Age of Wushu before, you may not be able to use these codes. Fair Warning.

1.  Character Name in Age of Wushu
2.  Server in Age of Wushu
3.  School or intended School in Age of Wushu
4.  Are you interesting in joining the MMO Grinder guild?

While your answers to these questions will not effect whether or not I will grant you the codes, it’s really so I can be sure you are capable of paying attention to directions, as this game and the code redemption process isn’t exactly forgiving to those who aren’t. Again, to recieve your code, please send the question answers to mmogrinder@live.com and use the subject “WUSHU” so I know why you are emailing me. (This also applies to those who would, for whatever reason, get sent to my spam filter. I will reply to you with the instructions and the content of the pack, as well as the code. These codes only work ONCE so if you try mailing me for several codes on only one of your characters, you’re SOL.

Guild info for Age of Wushu is as follows:

• Server: BlackTortoise
• Guild Name: Grindstone
• Guild Leader: Xanthier (Me)

You can apply to the guild via the Guild Administrator NPC in many towns and schools. Keep in mind you might need to be a certain level before the game will let you join. Hope to see you in game! (When I get a chance to play, that is.)

Still it seems that’s not entirely good enough, so in its stead, I’ll go into a bit more depth about the game and how I feel about, this time without the backhanded compliments and snarky subtext.

Scarlet Blade is… a thing. Trust me… ask ANY MMO player who plays that game, old enough to know how sex and sexuality works and this is the answer you’re going to get. Why? Because despite all the obvious overtly shameless sexual content the game is… competent. It’s not terrible, gameplay mechanics-wise. It’s a pretty standard game that would probably hold up well enough without its obvious hook. It’s… a thing. But we’ll break it down Grinder Style:

GRAPHICS

Yep. The hook. The shiny Plasticine women. The giant jiggling breasts. The sexual innuendo and not so innuendo THAT. ARE. LITERALLY. EVERY. FUCKING. WHERE. And yet, ignoring the “sexy dance” your Arkana does to mount their oddly phallic motor-unicycle, this game is actually quite pretty. There’s a lot of interesting detail going on in the environment, and taking a look at the surroundings, not just your character’s “assets” showcases some pretty cool looking designs. Of course, like TERA a lot of them look like “cool for the sake of cool” as despite how awesome the weird flying jellyfish in the sky look, there doesn’t seem to be any explained reason why they are there. The “Elk” you fight sure don’t look like elk, but they have a really interesting design that seems rife with imagination. The observation I made about the animations wasn’t entirely a joke and the animation in combat actually looks pretty smooth. In a sea getting ever more stacked with “realistic” brown and grey worlds, Scarlet Blade is at least looking vibrant, creative and colorful… as long as you can move your character’s breasts out of the way to see them properly.

MUSIC AND SOUND

The soundtrack is pretty generic fantasy/sci-fi MMO fare, and there’s not much to focus on beyond the sound. It’s not bad music, but it’s very unremarkable. I am glad that we are at least thankfully spared from all the attacks sounding like sexual grunts, and at least sound like attack yells… despite them getting extremely repetitive. Then of course there’s that hilariously spotty voice acting. The characters sound ok, but some NPCs are so robotic in their voice… and I’m not just talking about the first voiced NPC you hear that’s literally robotic.

GAMEPLAY

Starting out, you’re asked to choose between two factions, the Royal Guards, and the Free Knights. Royal Guards serve “Mother” the being that created the Arkana without question, feeling they serve only as weapons and must remain controlled, while Free Knights believe that Arkana should be allowed to live free of “Mother”, and should not live their lives in servitude. It’s an interesting dynamic that is unfortunately completely POINTLESS. The game remains exactly the same no matter which one you choose. No, scratch that… The major difference is that anytime you would see “Free Knights” in the text with will be replaced with “Royal Guards” and vice versa when you play on the opposite faction. Best example? When you play the first few quests, a spy named “Cherry” shows up and attempts to sabotage communications. If you’re an RG, she’s an FK. If you’re an FK, she’s an RG.  Same dialogue, same quests. Same steps same fucking COSTUME, it’s NO different. I’m sure it’s for some PvP system that I’m not entirely certain even exists right now, but the opportunity for an actual story dynamic is completely squandered.

Classes are pretty simple to grasp, with the “unique ones” pretty much being alternate versions of classes you’ve already seen.  Whippers are basic AoE damage dealers. Punishers are heavy burst damage. The loli class, Sentinel is unfortunately for the nature of the game, one of the more fun classes to play, but combat among all classes boils down to “click enemy”, press skills, win. This doesn’t change later on. If the skill is available, use it. Ta-freaking-da.

Here’s where the game’s mediocrity really shines. This is pretty much every Korean Grinder you’ve ever played. You jump from quest to quest, killing enemies of various variety, and while the starting areas are pretty plentiful in content, from what I have been told, the game becomes a literally grinder later on while you wait for more quests to show up.

I say, “show up” because the game doesn’t do quests in the traditional sense of “find NPC with icon over their head”, instead, just dumping the quest right onto your interface. You press a button to accept it. You press a button to complete it.

You have a limited level of customization in the form of the skill tree you’ve seen in every MMO since WoW. It’s where you’ll unlock new skills, or tweak and buff existing ones. Nothing really out of the norm there. The only other unique feature to the game comes in the form of summoned mechs you can use in combat, but this is nothing more than a usable “rage mode” you might have seen in other games. You have a cooldown timer, and the Mech is basically summoned with an “Oh shit” button, letting you wreck enemies for a very short period of time before having to wait a long time to use it again. Pretty anti-climactic.

COMMUNITY

There are only two types of people who play this game. Those who are obsessed with the breasts and ass aspect of the game, constantly asking people for sexy items and making lewd comments in chat, and those who play the game ironically, wondering just how bad the innuendo and forced sexual content is going to get. Guess who’ll you’ll be seeing the most of. Chat is unquestionably a cesspool, with horrible comments and arguments abound, but a lot more often, it’ll quite down, leaving only your typical “trading ___ for ___” messages you see in every MMO. Alternatively, there’s always the gold spammers. ALWAYS the gold spammers. Still the audience is obvious. Dont’ believe me? Here’s a few search terms that have led to my site since posting the fake review. Many MORE than once:

• can u have sex in scarlet blade
• pics of 12 year old scarlet blade character
• scarlet blade lingerie unsealer
• scarlet blade selling sex
• scarlet blade first quest boobs out
• scarlet blade “tits”
• how to make boobs seeable in scarlet blades
• scarlet blade underwear

That’s a small taste of over 50 sexually related Scarlet Blade searches. So yeah, thanks for that…

CASH SHOP

There’s an item that lets you make your character naked. I don’t need to say anything more. You can imagine this is the most sought after item, and community chats are crawling with people wanting to buy the “Lingerie Unsealer” but being completely unwilling to pay for it. Otherwise if the in-game outfits aren’t shameless enough for you, there’s plenty more in the cash shop as well. A recent addition is literally a haphazard wrapping of pink belts covering up only the sensitive parts.

CONCLUSION

PLAY:  If you have no shame, are a 12-year-old child just finding out about “the boobies”, are interested in seeing just how horrible this whole charade can get, or want a fairly slick-looking sci-fi based grinder, and are willing to ignore the more obvious draw to this game.

PAY: Must. Make. Character. Naked.

PASS: You have any sense of dignity.

That’s really the gist of the game. It’s anti-climactic. If the “Sexy women” weren’t a focus, there’d be nothing to remark… yet it’s competent enough to play. I personally find it’s shamelessness hilarious as I do painful, making me yell out in exasperation, “This… FUCKING GAME!” every time I read some painfully obvious innuendo in an NPC conversation.

However, the shameless is enough to set a LOT of people off (Jacqueline (who helped me write a lot of this) spent most of time raging at everything about the game while I played it for footage.) This fact is most evident in many articles about the game, like this one here: Crossing the Design Line: An Indignant Review of Scarlet Blade. It’s a pretty accurate experience of how you’ll feel when you first foray into this… thing.

I was originally going to do this as an OWU, but I have far delayed this beyond being able to call this an Off-Week. However, as much as I DON’T want to reopen this can of worms, I will address a few of the most common criticisms of what I’d said.

• “You hated this game, so you were unfair to it!” 

  Oh. This WAS me being fair. Those who attended my stream, or hell, even read what I’d written on this very site a few times know just how much I really despise TERA. Regardless I could have been much MUCH harsher to this game, but I reeled back every time I felt something was unquestionably my distaste  and not being an objective representation of the game. I personally find the combat to be painfully overrated, the graphics to be “pretty for the sake of pretty”, lacking completely in immersion and substance.  I’m not just including this because of a certain commenter that seems to have at least backed off from trying to infiltrate my filters, as it was a fairly common observation. However, I can’t help but wonder… had I not openly stated my distaste for this game, would everyone still think I was being unfair, and taking every standard observation and critique as a damnation of this game? 

• “Playing an Elin doesn’t make me a pedo!” 

  I never said it did. This was probably the moment that most baffling got taken out of context. This whole part was a mere observation of the most common criticism of TERA, as well as addressing the controversy behind it. I fully understand there are players of the game, usually female players, who like the Elin because they are a “cute and girly” race that still can kick ass with giant axes and swords. It’s a fun juxtaposition, and no different from the players of WoW who wanted to play as Female Gnomes for the same reason. However, there’s another audience out there who aren’t interested in them for that. There’s a reason they’re wearing bikini bottom thongs in Korea, and despite why YOU play an Elin, there are many MANY others playing them for an entirely different reason. Those crying censorship over them being placed in (very short) shorts I can’t help but feel shouldn’t concern themselves with their avatar’s crotch, “fashion faux-pas” or not. Trust me, most of those in an uproar were NOT concerned about the “fashion choice”. Also the last sentence of the rant was meant for those people, not for people who roll Elin in general. They’re the ones trying to excuse their behavior with logic detours, like “But they’re really thousands of years old!” That does not make an avatar designed to look like an 8 year old OK to dress up in revealing clothing, and no amount of stupid arguments I have received, or have yet to receive, will convince me otherwise. I will not budge on this stance. As I said to one comment on this site mocking me for this purely opinionated observation, “I’m objective to the games. Pedos can fuck right off.” 

• “Quest translation was fun, not bad!” 

  Story time. Does anyone remember US anime publisher “ADV Films”, original rights holder to Evangelion, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, Martian Successor Nadesico, Generator Gawl and many more? Well they got a LOT of shit for “playing around” with translations, in some cases the English Dub was so far from the Subtitled track that they were almost literally two different stories. Entire SCENES would have their meaning changed. I remember specifically in Gawl when two female characters were talking about the main characters, the Japanese track was a fairly innocuous conversation about crushes, while the English Dub had them speculating if the main character was gay. This was pretty common in early ADV stuff, dropping in purely American references that wouldn’t make contextual sense in the universe of the show, or adding in lines that were never there. What ADV saw as spicing up the dialogue and “having fun”, a lot more anime fans took as being disrespectful to the original content. When you have characters in space making references to an old McDonalds slogan it not only rips you out of the universe, it completely dates it, a joke that will be killed by time. I feel EnMasse is doing this exact thing with TERA. How can you respect a story that doesn’t respect itself? This is a pretty common thing in Free-to-Plays, to be honest, especially with Korean Grinders. LUNA Online was notorious for it, but what story did it have? TERA obviously has a story, with cutscenes abound, (even if the Vekas thing is horrendously stupid) but when your game seems to not give a shit about something that’s obviously there, it comes across as being just as disrespectful as those old ADV translations. If it’s your lore, like Blizzard (notorious for references abound), fine, do whatever you want. But it’s not EnMasse’s story. It’s Bluehole’s. 

• “The game isn’t grindy at all!” 

  Again, I think this is some out of context observations being translated incorrectly, but I feel this game is a SLOG, not a grind. When I think grind, it’s when I’m out of quests and am forced to walk around killing monsters in order to reach a new level. When I think slog, it’s when the quests themselves feel like you’re grinding, and TERA has NO imagination on what it’s doing. It’s the most basic quest types in MMOs. you kill, you collect, you travel. NOTHING interesting happens during any of these moments. Other MMOs might try to break up the monotony, changing up what you do mid-quest, having an event occur while you’re playing, but TERA keeps things at the basic formula and does nothing to change it, relying solely on the combat to carry it along… when you don’t think the combat is the best thing ever, it’s NOT fun to play. With only a level 60 cap, I don’t see why people think this game has fast progression. I even crowdsourced the question to Twitter, believing maybe I was being unfair, but a lot more people felt the game just drags on. The 20-30 minute opening tutorial followed by an even longer and insultingly simple Newbie Island is NOT a good way to start out the game. I think the game would been loads better if they cut down the time of both areas, or removed one of them altogether. (Yes, I know the tutorial is skippable later, but being forced to enter it initially, only being able to skip it by logging out and in shows they really wanted people to play it.) In any case, it’s a poorly paced game and could seriously benefit from some early game streamlining.

With that I am DONE talking about TERA. Not planning on a backtrack for a LONG time, and I uninstalled it the minute the review was uploaded. If you like, cool, great, whatever. I’m not stopping you, and you certainly shouldn’t need my approval. However, you want to know how I really feel, it should be pretty obvious by now. There’s also a “secret code” of recommendation I do only on Blistered Thumbs. I wonder if anyone noticed it yet…

Sign up for League of Legends here!