9Dragons : Oriental Express

The graphics in 9Dragons are not very impressive. As far as I could tell, there were no resolution options and even sliding everything to the maximum settings didn't have much of an effect. What's worse than the graphics themselves is how unimaginative some of the designs are. Monster designs are reused several times in the same zone. I found myself grinding off NPC bandits with slightly different names for 10 levels. The character models and the NPCs in town look much better, especially when you're in dialogue with them, but these make up a small portion of the game.

The fact that a professional writer oversaw the game's localization does show. Almost all of the game's quest text has proper grammar which is a rarity in free MMORPGs developed in Asia. The problem is, and this is true of most games, most of the text is useless. I don't want to read an essay about why I need to kill 10 wolves. I just want to get it over with. There does seem to be a backstory to 9Dragons which is revealed throughout the game but I either missed it or skipped through it.