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Bellatia Action RPG Video Game Steam Review
I played through this for under an hour and I got a general gist of what this game is like. I’ve played loads of the lowest-budget RPGs you can name, but sadly this isn’t a game I’ll likely finish at all.
It is definitely true that the developers re-used assets from an MMORPG, but they did so legally because Iris Online went bankrupt and sold their assets to this company. I’ve played Iris Online a decade ago and can definitely say that they recycled assets from it.
When you look at the game design, it looks like an MMORPG that they turned into a single-player game. It looks like they tried to shoehorn in an MMORPG world into a single-player game, it’s doesn’t look like it was made naturally, it was clearly copy and pasted. They did legally purchase the assets, this is not an example of asset theft, but they didn’t use their purchased assets well.
The physics don’t match the world well either, and you pretty much can’t interact with the doors or world properly. There are unique coins you can get in the world that lets you unlock more abilities and bonuses, but the platforming in this game is not good and it’s just not fun to try to collect them.
Game budget is always an issue for some people. For example, you know of one example of a game franchise that a lot of people who play only the biggest AAA games don’t like?
They don’t like the Neptunia series, or more generally, Idea Factory. To them Idea Factory games are terrible because they recycle levels multiple times, recycle enemies, bosses extremely frequently compared to big-budget titles, and they can end up being very grindy. Just read a few forum threads and you can see how divisive those kinds of games can be.
But yet, those games still has a good dedicated fanbase albeit a small one, myself included, because the writing is not bad, the characters have really good banter, and the gameplay, although grindy, is fun and you can spend time crafting, min-maxing your characters, etc. Those games are low-budget and niche, but they still have so many positive aspects going on for them so they actually have a fanbase.
Bellatia on the other hand…it’s not fun at all. Like how someone who plays the newest AAA game would probably think Neptunia is terrible, well Bellatia makes Neptunia look like an AAA multimillion dollar franchise because that’s how broken Bellatia is.
Bellatia is too grindy, all the missions and quests are grindy such as “kill 10 of this enemy”, “kill 20 of this other enemy”.
There is storyline present that actually is a huge positive, which is presented in a visual-novel style just like Neptunia, but there’s no voices, which is alright because voices does actually cost millions of dollars with unionized actors, but the English text lines has a lot of poor translations. The story is there, but it’s not amazing. A lot of the story is rushed from the beginning due to the low budget.
I know that the game was made with a very small budget, but this is sadly one game I probably can’t finish. It still did bring back fond memories of playing MMORPGs a decade (or two decades ago, yikes, World of Warcraft came out in 2004).
One more positive is that all the NPCs actually have unique portraits and Bellatia’s main hub is somewhat similar to Rune Factory’s central hub, except poorly done and grindier.
I’ll upload a video of some gameplay soon, but overall, really not a fun game, I can’t even understand how people play it in Asia (South Korea?) where it was originally released, it’s just not fun.
Remember, I’m actually a guy whose played through what most people would consider to be the worst games ever made, such as Hunt Down the Freeman (Metacritic user score 1.7), Mysteria Occult Shadows, Devil’s Hunt (Metacritic critic score 47, user score 5.7), and even Eternity The Last Unicorn (Metacritic critic score 39, user score 5.8), and I could actually get enjoyment out of those games because I can see where the developers were trying to go and what they were trying to achieve when they were making those games.
This game is just really bland and grindy, and doesn’t really take much risk.