So it took me awhile to get my Hello Kitty Online (HKO) Closed Beta (CB) account, but I finally got a chance to try out the game. First of all, all CB players get a generic test account. When HKO goes Open Beta (sometime end of May?) I guess we’ll all get new accounts. Meanwhile, there’s plenty to do in Hello Kitty Land!

The character customization selection is sparse right now, but that’s understandable in beta, so I went with a generic character design. I’ve already seen the character design screen and it’s easily adaptable to allow for many choices.

A basic overview, your friends in Hello Kitty Land are in trouble. Someone is capturing them and locking them up. Your job is to find out who’s behind this and free your friends from their prisons using tears collected from various quests and turning them into crystals to unlock new areas. Meanwhile, there’s skills you should learn, such as fighting, farming, cooking, tailoring, building, mining, etc. Most of the items you’ll wear, eat, use later in the game are made by you. But the game does a good job of starting you off with the basics. (Although, I have to figure out where to get pants… My character has been running around for 2 days in his skivvies! Brrr!!)

You start off at the Harbor Docks, where you get introduced to how to talk to people, how to fight, how to collect items, and how to use the shops. Everything is done in mini-quests, so here’s a great tip for people starting off: RIGHT Mouse CLICK on NPCs you want to talk to. It’s a little counter-intuitive compared to most other mmos, but it’s ok once you get the hang of it. When you get a quest, a quest box will show up and you have to click on the green check mark to accept it. When you’re done with a quest, talk to the NPC again and the same quest box will show up and you have to click on the green check mark again to confirm that you want to close out the quest. (Sorry if this sounds tedious, EVERYONE gets stuck on this part.)

Anyways, moving on… the game is cute… WAY CUTE! Kids will probably love it. Adults might find it amusing, since there are plenty of ways to kill time in this game. There’s no killing. You battle cute monsters, and bop them on the head until they’re dizzy. They’ll usually drop something at that point, and you can’t attack them again until they’ve recovered. Most of them are aggressive (aggro), meaning that they will come after you if you walk near them, but they’re also relatively easy to outrun, so it’s not a big deal. The controls are simple, but the one thing I didn’t like was the inability to rotate the screen or point of view. If there is a way, I haven’t found it yet. This means that it’s sometimes difficult to target a monster that’s standing right behind you. Easily solved so far, by just moving a little to the right or left.

Right off the bat, you can have pets. That’s refreshing, since pets in most mmo’s don’t get added until later generations of the game. Monsters will drop cards too. So there card collecting as well. A special event is occurring right now for CB testers, if they collect 1 monster card from several different types of monsters, they can trade it in for a special dinosaur pet card. I’m not there yet, but a lot of people are running around with dino pets! It’s hilarious!

I mentioned the life skills right? Much like Mabinogi, you get to develop skills in tailoring, farming, cooking, crafting, mining, etc. There are no skills points to distribute, they keep it easy and just automatically level skills you use. You get recipes and blueprints from doing various quests for NPCs.

To farm, you need to buy a plot of land, seeds, fertilizer, tools. You can also purchase a home to decorate. I’m not sure if there’s any fishing yet, but it would be nice. The people on the game are very friendly and helpful. There are guilds you can build and join. And there are mini-games that you can play with others, or by yourself. Nothing is really difficult. Some just take time. You build friendship points with NPCs as you complete quests for them. And you make money by either doing quests, or selling what you’ve collected.

The cuteness factor… Okay, I like cute stuff, but sometimes the sheer level of CUTE in this game can get to be too much for me and I have to turn it off. But strangely enough, it’s not SO cute that you want to go postal and shoot up the town. Actually, I find myself drawn back to the game regularly to finish collecting this or that, find a card, or just chat. So it’s ok. It’s definitely cute, and that’s great for everyone who loves Sanrio, and every now and then you want to get up and take a break, but that’s healthy too. But the game is entertaining enough to draw you back in for FUN. Yeah, it’s weird. A game that has no pressure. There’s no sense of urgency. No level restrictions or penalties in parties. It doesn’t care if you have to shut down the window if you’re on a map full on monsters. (Btw, there doesn’t seem to be a penalty for dying in this game. You just reappear in the last town you were in, fully recovered and ready to go out again.) The world is pretty large, so no worries about that. The maps are easy to understand. The buttons and tabs aren’t labeled well, but it’ll only take you a few tries to figure out what they mean and get used to them.