Zenonia

A lot of people have reviewed Zenonia by saying how Zelda-like it is. While you can certainly see those influences in the game, the way it looks and plays is much more like Sword of Mana. The strongest comparison is not to some beloved RPG of the 16-bit era but to World of Warcraft. This comes from the many side-quests and how they are delivered, the familiar range of orange, grey and blue exclamation or question marks. The strongest feeling is that you're playing WoW with 16-bit graphics, apart from the fact that Zenonia costs less than half the price of a month of WoW. Indeed, immediately after tapping 'New Game', you're invited to choose a class: Paladin, Warrior or Assassin. Very Blizzardy.

Value aside, what sort of story and writing do you get in Zenonia? You play as Regret, who's Father dies at the hands of a demon in the opening cut-scene. The villagers somehow blame him for his Father’s death, leading to ever worsening treatment of Regret. A few innocent mistakes later he has to make his way into the larger world. The game doesn't stay with this sombre mood though. Quite the opposite. The writing can seem clumsy, but it feels like a loving throwback to games like Sword of Mana and Chrono Trigger, and it does a great job of transitioning from tense boss fight dialogue to let's-all-pick-on-Regret comic relief. The writing is even deft enough to handle aping of the mediocre translation and sloppy exposition of the 16-bit era, but still in the most loving way.

The visuals are very cannily done too. More than just a beautiful ode to nostalgia, not being 3D helps you get more time to play than a more technically impressive title. The iPhone/iPod touch may be snapping up some of the DS market-share, but compete on battery life it can’t.

Using a static on-screen d-pad and action button seems a little lazy at first, but five minutes of Zenonia will prove it was the right way to go. It feels responsive and allows for the kind of control required for the occasional block-pushing mazes. The in-game menus are also navigated with the d-pad and again instinct proves wrong. You would think that just tapping the options directly would be the quicker option, but the speed at which you can move around the menus with the current system tends to be a lot quicker than you could move your finger. Not only that, but the buttons would be too small for fingers, so voluminous are the options here.

Coming back to the MMO-like structure of the game, the comparison is actually quite unfair in one regard ... unfair to Zenonia, that is: The obligatory stretching out of core mechanics ad nauseam isn’t present here, because blissfully this isn’t an MMO. It walks the line between classic RPG and modern MMO, as if being asked to prove it hasn’t had too much to drink.

Sure, Zenonia might at first give the impression it has some bad habits carried over from Gamevil having developed for other mobile phones. Ultimately though, Zenonia rises above it to become the best most fully featured game the iPhone has to offer, but more than that it’s a better portable RPG than can be had on the current Sony or Nintendo systems. More than that there’s literally nothing you would, or even could, change to make the game better and it’s hard to imagine a better RPG being released for the portable gaming market in the foreseeable future.