Get ready to Rakion!

2004. The Year of the MMORPG. A year when every kid and his novena-praying grandmother knew the meaning of the words "mana," "NPC," and "top up." When no less than four MMORPGs laid claim over a sleep-deprived, crackers-and-cup noodles dieting, game-crazy nation. In the time it took a fifth-grader to blow his lunch money for a fifteen level spike in his character’s level, the MMORPG had become an indelible, immutable part of our pop culture lexicon, right up there with lunchtime variety shows and locally dubbed telenovelas.

Then, in 2005, a strange thing happened. As the industry braced itself for another wave of MMORPG titles, Mobius Philippines, already a major industry player with Webzen’s MU, released their follow-up game, only it didn’t look, feel or play like an MMORPG. Gone was the sacrosanct routine of grinding/partying/questing espoused by the genre. Gone, too, were the sprawling, large-scale maps, random monster spawns and scripted quests.

The game? Gunbound, a turn-based artillery game that could flippantly be described as Andy Davidson’s Worms Heads to Legoland. It featured oddball vehicles called "mobiles," projectile-firing, futuristic bumper cars that combined the kitschy appeal of Happy Meal windup toys with the outlandish aesthetics of classic 80s’ Hanna-Barbera cartoons (Yogi’s Space Race, anyone?). And like one of its mobile’s trademark salvos plummeting to the earth, Gunbound shook the ground from underneath the MMORPG status quo.

The Casual game had arrived.

Gunbound’s impact continues to reverberate to this day, with the success of Casual titles such as Level Up!’s Freestyle, e-Games’ O2Jam, and netGames’ Pangya. Mobius would like to think its newest game, Rakion, will have the same trailblazing success its Gunbound heralded for Casual games (and Ragnarok for MMORPGs before it). Only problem is, they’re not quite sure what genre Rakion will be blazing a trail for.

Numerous online gaming sites have pegged Rakion as a hybrid game fusing elements of the MMORPG and FPS genres.

If this were Scrabble, you’d score this an M-M-O-R-P-F-P-S-G. It’s easy to see why, too.

Rakion taps into the same creative wellspring of sword and sorcery that nourishes most MMORPGs. Players can select from one of five prototypical MMORPG character classes – the Mage, Assassin (or Ninja), Swordsman, Blacksmith, and Archer. Each character comes with a hefty compartment for armors, items and weapons. On the upper left corner of the playing screen, beside the ubiquitous armor and health bars, there are three spherical holding chambers, which players can use to house an exotic menagerie of "summonable" creatures to fight alongside them when needed, ranging from golems to taurens to dragons.

"Every time you play a room, your character accumulates experience points which help you level up," explains Paul Co, assistant brand manager. "Then you acquire stat points which you distribute to your character’s base stats. There’s a certain number of stats that you can add up on depending on your level. Also, you acquire gold, or buy cash, which you use to buy items. Depending on what items you have on, the look of your character changes. So, in effect, those aspects make it an RPG."

Then again, Rakion uses the patented WASD control key grid of FPS games, as well as the option to switch to the tracking camera shots that have become synonymous with the FPS genre by pressing the F4 key. It also has the standard rote of FPS game modes such as Deathmatch, Team Death Match, PvP, and Capture the Flag, with two teams of up to 10 players battling it out on one map.

In fact, even together, the MMORPG and FPS genres do not make a convincing enough case for Rakion’s genealogy (or genreology, as the case may be); Rakion feigns only passing affiliations to either. On closer inspection, outside of mini quests tacked on as bonus games, Rakion does not have the persistent player versus environment feature of MMORPGs, nor does it have the chin level, first-person point of view that, by definition, qualifies an FPS as an FPS; Rakion’s PoV is rendered entirely in the third person, a la Lara Croft.

If you had to choose, Rakion’s gameplay is much closer to hack-and-slash action adventure games like God of War and Devil May Cry, transposed to a PvP online world. Like the GoW and DMC franchises, Rakion’s characters come equipped with both ranged and melee weapons, which they can switch between using the "Q" button. Blacksmiths, for example, can swap their Astaroth-ian sized warhammers for throwing axes, while Mages can hurl arcane dynamite sticks instead of clubbing opponents with their staffs. Players can also string together special attacks in the form of chain linkers, charged combos, double dashes and canned grapples and throws by manipulating the key grid and mouse buttons. The more hits a player tallies – as registered by a hit counter at the bottom right corner of the screen – the more intricately lethal the choreographed strikes become.

The dead giveaway, however, is the presence of the "power-up" feature – a signature of hack-and-slashers which allows players to power up their character through a cumulative reward system (such as accruing a certain number of kills or items). In the case of Rakion, once a player tallies six kills, he/she can unleash his or her "Chaos" mode by pressing the "C" key, turning the Archer into a seraphic, winged avatar (ironically, very similar to a high-level Fairy Elf from MU) and sheathing the Swordsman in Guyver-esque armor, imbuing them with bonus stats and spells (think DMC’s Dante in Devil mode).

Rakion has been in closed beta since May 1, with a beta client made available through the Gunbound World Championship CD installer. The game can be accessed from either the Singaporean, Malaysian or Philippine servers. Like Gunbound, Rakion is designed as an IB (item-based) game, meaning players buy prepaid cards not for playing time but for cash to purchase premium in-game items such as armors and the aforementioned, high-level summonable creatures. Unfortunately, despite public clamor from its players, Rakion’s item shop will not be operational until the game goes commercial.

"In a game, you have both positive and negative reactions, but with Rakion we surprisingly have more positive responses and we know this because most of the players right now are already asking us to enable them to pay for the items," explains Rakion’s marketing communications manager Chae Won. "They’ve also been asking for customized local items."

"When we acquired Gunbound, we provided new avatars monthly and our players are looking forward to customized avatars as well in Rakion," says Co. "Right now, since it’s an open beta, we can’t give it to them but we’re just telling them to be patient and eventually it’s going to come out."

Mobius is banking on the same barkada-driven appeal that has fueled the popularity and longevity of games like Counterstrike and DotA, café games that thrive on its players being within spitting distance of one another, reveling in the boisterous, sometimes vulgar fraternizing that only a multiplayer computer game can provide. "It’s actually like playing a LAN game," opines Co. "It’s free, so you don’t have to pay for it, there’s no subscription, and most of the Internet cafés right now have Internet access anyway, so you can play it. It’s most fun if you have your friends beside you, playing with you throughout the game."

As Rakion nears an anticipated third quarter commercial launch, Mobius is trying to keep an even keel. The company understands that introducing a new, enigmatic game neither here nor there can threaten the equilibrium of its current titles. "We don’t want our players divided between an MMORPG or Casual game. We saw this game as something that would bring those two genres together," Co reasons. "You can enjoy playing Rakion whether you’re a hardcore MMORPG addict or a Casual gamer. You can also treat it as a ‘downtime game,’ if you’re taking a break from playing either MU or Gunbound, you can load up Rakion and swing a couple of games with your friends."

From a market perspective – where first-mover status often equals market entrenchment – Mobius knows Rakion will not have the element of novelty or surprise that carried Gunbound. Because of its perceived liaisons with the FPS genre, Rakion, fair or not, is being pitted against Level Up!’s upcoming Gunz Online from Maiet Entertainment. Gunz has been touted for its vertiginous use of the Wachowski Brothers’ "bullet time," which Matrix fans will recognize as the ability to blithely defy the laws of physics and gravity like a Hong Kong action film on methamphetamines. Like Rakion, Gunz, too, has suffered from palaverous comparisons to FPS titles because of its high-energy PvP gameplay.

"We know that a lot of people compare Gunz with Rakion but we don’t consider Gunz as our competitor because Gunz is a high-latency game, and we are very confident that we can support the infrastructure for our game," counters Co. "Ninety-five percent of the current cafés right now can run (Rakion)."

Still, the anticipated face-off between Gunz and Rakion remains one of the more intriguing subplots of the gaming industry heading down the stretch run of ’06. Whatever genre you place them in, chances are the market can only sustain one title, like two, similarly themed movies released in the same week. For the second placer, quite simply, there may be no bouncing back.

The risks involved may explain Mobius’ reaction to Gunz, which vacillates between diplomacy and disputation. There is also a twinge of irony not lost on Mobius president Jojo Anonuevo. "We actually thought Gunz was very promising. We did take a look at it for a while," he admits. "One way to look at it is, ‘Will the two games create a market that’s bigger or go after the same players?’... Our optimistic view is that it’s actually going to extend the market. We believe that Rakion is really fresh, and has more potential to be a success in opening new doors to a new batch of online gamers as well as push the boundaries of LAN gamers into giving them a game that simulates a better experience in competing with their friends online."

The pressure to deliver a hit on the heels of Gunbound’s (quite literal) earth-shattering success has less to do with external pressure from industry watchers and market analysts and more to do with the company’s self-imposed standard for excellence. "We have a content selection process that we’ve got down to a science, where we try to make sure that the gamers will find value in the game and just love playing it. Mobius wants to bring to the market more than just games, we want to provide them top-of-the-line offerings that they could be excited about and obviously give them ultimate fun," Anonuevo says.

It helps, no doubt, that Rakion allows Mobius to revisit its partnership with Softnyx Entertainment, the development house behind Gunbound. "We find the relationship with the developer as a critical part in a publisher’s success. Without that solid relationship, you’re not going to be successful even if you have good content," he says. According to Anonuevo, Mobius relationship with Softnyx has succeeded in no small part because of the latter’s willingness to have their games plied and customized to suit a specific country’s gaming audience.

"We have a very good working relationship with Softnyx. With our previous content, we were able to effectively morph and localize the game to the Filipino market, and that’s an advantage which the other guys don’t have. For Freestyle and O2Jam, to create avatars they have to send their designs to another country, which takes time and other factors. Among the key success factors in Gunbound, which we’ll take to a higher level with Rakion, is our ability to leverage talented Filipino designers," Anonuevo said.

For its commercial launch, Mobius is planning to host an international, server-based tournament pitting the Philippine server against its Malaysian and Singaporean counterparts, giving players a chance to fight for national pride instead of the usual clan or guild-based bragging rights. Plans are also afoot for a map-making contest, where players can submit their own custom map designs for the chance to be immortalized by way of Rakion’s map pool. Anonuevo reveals that Rakion may not be Mobius’ last acquisition either, with as many as three games in various stages of negotiation.

True, Rakion may not be as square-pegged as genre-leaders Ragnarok or Gunbound. MMORPG… FPS… Hack-and-Slasher… Really, at the end of the day, there’s only one thing Mobius is interested in calling it: a hit.