The new Promo for the Lodoss MMO has come out:
Just a map and the new Animation style for Parn, Deedlit, Asram, and Pirotess (Back to her awesome self I might add, still have Nightmares about her in Legend of Crystania)
Game is supposively going to be released worldwide.
Promo and details here:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interes … o-streamed
Most important part is that Ryo Mizuno (Lodoss’s Co-Creator) is serving as an advisor to the project.
Well that brings back memories, though I’d honestly prefer a game with an original story to it. Wonder if this is a hint at a reboot
Interesting, I wonder how an mmo for lodoss war is going to work lol.
Will wait and see, but not exactly expecting this to be a success. My two cents:
Reason #1: Lodoss War is just a glorified Japanese D&D campaign. We’ve got lots of D&D themed clones in the market (oversaturation), with the big motherhonking planetkiller we call WoW… which totally fopped in an attempt to be released in Japan. Phantasy Star Online and Ragnarok Online are the MMO bread-and-butter there.
Reason #1.5 Keeping #1 above in mind, Dragon Quest X is on the horizon. DQ is the iPad of RPG gaming in Japan… and now it’s going MMO.
Reason #2: Japan is notorious for having a massive failure rate at developing successful MMORPG’s.
Reason #3: Japan is notorious for having a massive failure rate at getting their own native gamers to join MMORPG’s.
Reason #4: Japan developers base their MMO design philosophy on pre-F2P Korean gaming, which involves a lot more unnecessary xp grinding, zero challenge hp boosted mobs, and low percentage drop rate than modern MMO’ers generally tolerate these days. See Ragnarok Online for the most extreme example.
Reason #1: But Lodoss Have Deedlit, you sure as heck can bet nude hacks for her very fast as it goes live.
Reason#1.5: I don’t understand why Dragon Quest is a success but I like dragonballz so I sorta can see why. The dbz style pleases me.
Reason #2: I agree with you completely, when I drop down 50 bucks on s4 league few years ago trying to get a perm of my favorite outfit, I failed, so I didn’t come back to s4 league ever since, I’m not a gambler.
Reason #3: MMORPGs never have bazillions of people playing their games, wow is just a sole exception to the rule.
Reason #4: I remember Ragnarok Online, Only thing that stopped me from really playing that game is becuase of how clunky the combat interface was, I mean, rush through the scrolldown menu while mobs is beating on me?! Really! I was like hmm, I don’t like the scroll down menu and never logged in back again ever since and that was like getting into lvl 10+ range as a swordman after novice. Otherwise I liked it, I could just goof off and do whatever I wanted.
Deedlit doesn’t have anything I haven’t seen before. 
Besides… she’s got a good publicist. The REAL Deedlit just wants your magic sword. Was better for Parn to kill her first, since she would rig things to get it. Deedlit was no saint until the light novel came around.
Attempts to market WoW in Japan failed in the board room phase: never had a chance. WoW sucks to the general gaming population of Japan. Japan is one of the worst markets for MMO’s in general. Korea has been trying to crack the egg for over a decade, with various degrees of success. In fact, Korean MMO out perform native Japanese MMO to such an extent, most Japanese IP holders have Koreans develop them (see Dragonball Online for one example). The successful MMO titles, tend to be those many Westerners have never heard of: Astaria comes to mind.
My personal gut feeling, is that Lodoss War will fail, because the majority of MMO’s fail in Japan… big name or not.
Dragon Quest X is probably the closest thing to being a “WoW” success for the Japanese, since the introduction of MMO’s. Dragon Quest has a generational loyalty like Star Wars or Star Trek does in the West. They can reboot that shit any which way to Hell and back: the Japanese will lap it up. The ONLY RPG series that ever sold better than DQ, are Final Fantasy and Pokemon… and those titles get a huge cut of their numbers from Western sales. The native Japanese population alone, is what kept DQ in the top three bracket.
The worst selling DQ title in Japan was Swords for the Wii… and that got more than half a million sales. Not many series would consider 500,000 copies a failure, but DQ is one of them. For comparative purposes: Tales of the Abyss has sold as many copies as Dragon Quest Swords… and ToA is widely considered one of the best Tales of all time.
We all know Pirotess is better, well at least until Legend of Crystania came out.
Truth. Pirotess is love.
What is this “Legend of Crystania” you speak off? I once heard mythical lies about an OVA series, that brought sheer terror and despair to Lodoss War fans. Yet I believe it is in the non-existence of a supposed Tsukihime anime. Lies I tell you. All pure fabrications of Satan and the anti-Christ.
I didn’t even know that. Where did that information come from?
I tried playing Japanese RPG’s back in 96. A friend of mine then, had these 80’s magazines (for the life of me I don’t remember the name of them), that had story summaries of the original Lodoss War - which was a D&D 1st edition campaign IIRC.
I believe these are the collection reprints: ??? ???
Not sure if they’re still in D&D format with the reprint. TSR’s Japanese branch (or license representative) did a lawsuit or C&D or something like that. They might have dropped the D&D reference. No idea… don’t own them… just remember reading the originals.
Just as an FYI: as I recall, the common Japanese pen-and-paper RPG’s at the time used a gaming system called Sword World, rather than the THAC0 or d20 that was common in the West. I never liked playing games with it… I always found Western systems to be far more superior. Lodoss was odd for actually using THAC0, given that so little of their stuff was translated to Japanese, and the Internet back then wasn’t anything like it is today.
In any case, there’s a revamped Sword World system called… err… Sword World 2.0. Never played it, but the official site says it still uses the 2d6 system of the first. The newest Record of the Lodoss War RPG material seem to use that now. Again, my experience with Japanese pen-and-paper RPG’s is a bad taste scenario. I like the settings for a few of their games, but I absolutely loath the rules, and I’m too lazy to bother converting them to a system I do like. In the middle of the official site front page, you can see the character sheets for the 2.0 system. They’re slightly more complex than the 1.0 version I played, so maybe the things I don’t like about it have changed. Don’t have the spare cash or time to find out though. :?
Hmm ok thanks Nargrakhan. Guess I got a nuke to drop on my friend now.
Yeah, as far as I know, Record of Lodoss War is based off of a D&D campaign that the author was in. George RR Martin has a similar thing going, actually, with the Wild Cards series; I haven’t read any of them myself, but that series got its start in a pen-and-paper RPG campaign. I think there may have been some others?
In Japan, a lot of various anime, manga, and light novels are based off pen-and-paper RPG. I’m unfortunately not very familiar with many of them, but those I do know of are Dragon Half (D&D), Scrapped Princess (D&D - the original light novel, NOT the anime reboot), and Night Wizard (a native Japanese RPG system called… err… [url=http://www.fear.co.jp/nw]Night Wizard[/url]). I’m told that the ero series Angel Core, was based on a campaign someone made using Tokyo NOVA (yet another native Japanese RPG system; this one for cyberpunk settings). Unlike the other three I’ve mentioned however, I’ve zero proof of this, outside of the hearsay. I’ve got a strong gut feeling that a lot of newer fantasy manga series I’ve been reading, are based on mechanics found in Arianrhod RPG, which itself is based on Ragnarok Online (by far the biggest MMO in Japan).
As one can probably imagine, there’s a lot of pen-and-paper RPG’s in Japan, and it’s quite a pity that few Western pen-and-paper RPG’ers are aware of this. I absolutely cringe when seeing the Spanish made Anima proclaim itself to be a “Japanese RPG” (because it’s based on Final Fantasy among other things), when there’s already a real Japanese RPG based on Final Fantasy… it’s called [url=http://www.fear.co.jp/alshard/index.htm]ALSHARD[/url].
Yeah iirc it has the same background as the Forgotten Realms D&D campaign setting and, if memory serves me correctly, Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar novels started out as a campaign setting as well.