I place the blame squarely on Yamcha.

I know when and where I was when it happened. I was sitting in the airport, waiting for my flight home. It was December 17, 2007. I was bored, and I had an internet connection, so to kill the time I decided to take a few minutes to try this game Yamcha had recommended. “Kingdom of Loathing”–what a nonsensical thing to name an online RPG, I thought. Well, I’d give it a spin anyway. I remember thinking as I logged on, hey, if I like this, I might get a couple of months’ worth of entertainment out of it!

Yeah, right.

One year to the day later I found myself sitting in the same airport, playing the same game, and a bit stunned at the year-long journey into a bizarre blend of pop-culture, gaming satire and surprisingly deep gameplay I’d undertaken–and am still undertaking!

The dreaded sabre-toothed lime, both feared enemy and loyal citrus-based familiar.

The Quick-and-Dirty

- www.kingdomofloathing.com
- It’s a browser based mostly single-player RPG with a wacky sense of humor and parody
- It’s free (donations get you limited-edition in-game swag)
- Other draws: surprisingly deep amounts of content, new content rolling out constantly, low commitment for an M?PRPG, active fanbase that maintains a comprehensive Wiki, collection of Greasemonkey scripts, and variety of botting programs/supplemental interfaces.

I hate the cliche that something only takes seconds to learn, but a lifetime to master. Kingdom of Loathing doesn’t really fit either of those–it takes about half an hour to learn the basics (thanks to the guiding influences of the punningly named Toot Oriole, the first in a long line of groaners), and it takes a couple of months to learn how to efficiently manage your daily adventuring. Veterans of RPGs, of the MMO persuasion or otherwise, will find that there’s a lot of stuff here similar to what they know–monsters drop items, you go on quests throughout the kingdom, and equipping yourself properly is half the battle.

There’s a lot that’s familiar, but tweaked enough that wizened gamers will smirk at it. Each day in KoL gives you forty adventures (turns) to play with, consuming one per adventure (fights, etc.) and one for some other select activities (such as resting at your campsite). You get more from food and booze, the latter of which comes in a variety of blush-inducing names (calling a drink a Sex on the Beach has nothing on some of KoL’s brews). Your equipment slots are fairly stock–weapon, off-hand, hat, pants (shirts are not just optional but actually unavailable until you get a skill to equip them), and accessories. Of course, considering the image of your character clad in a grass skirt and a mullet wig while wielding a balloon sword in one hand and an hors d’oeuvres tray in the other stretches the imagination (and bends it to breaking when you consider you’re probably a crudely rendered stick figure anyway). You also get a little familiar to accompany you, but again, the paradigm has undergone a proverbial shift–you journey with sabre-toothed limes, spooky pirate skeletons, and levitating potatos in tow, each with their own assistive abilities and equipment.

This sassy pirate has sassed his last frass...Whack! Bonk! Zap! Splat!

And then there’s the stuff that’s simply ridiculous. Perhaps your disbelief finally breaks down when you find yourself fighting ninja snowmen, or using ball polish and rigging shampoo to appease a pirate crew. Perhaps it’s when you’re ordered to start a war between the frat boys and the hippies–and you have to choose a side (or, if you want a challenge, mutual destruction!). Perhaps it’s fighting your way, arm in arm with fellow clannies, through the game’s multiplayer dungeon. But what kind of dungeon crawl would KoL offer if it didn’t include carving your way through a sewer system filled with malevolent, surprisingly powerful hobos?

The real complexity, and fun, comes from the game’s sort-of-circular nature. You complete the quests, hit level 13, fight the Naughty Sorceress (the final boss, sort of), free King Ralph from his imprism-ment (that’s imprisoned in a prism) and ascend to a higher plane of existence. Where, it turns out…there’s nothing to do. So, you get reincarnated, retaining one of the skills you acquired in your previous life along with all your familiars, and your possessions (safely kept in Hangk’s Ancestral Mini-Storage) and go back to a time when the Sorceress still struck terror into the hearts of adventurers everywhere and the Kingdom still needed saving.

I suppose part of the appeal comes from wanting to better yourself each time you play through, with each run allowing you to play with a twist. Hardcore restricts you from using any gear or items from previous ascensions and limits your skills to only those retained with another hardcore ascension. Teetotaler, boozetefarian, and oxygenarian acensions prohibit the drinking of booze, eating of food, and consumption of both, respectively. For the particularly masochistic, a Bad Moon ascension requires a hardcore lead-in, which has its own restrictions, but then puts you into a particularly nasty ascension where awful things happen to you and you begin with absolutely nothing–gear, familiars, and skills, hardcore or otherwise.

There are in-game holidays, yearly Christmas-like celebrations with elaborate plots for players to explore, and the development team is continually rolling out new-content and expanding old vectors. Ambitious players will find loads of optional side quests and hard-to-reach areas to aspire to. There’s a small player-versus-player element that the devteam has promised will be getting an expansion in the future, and a healthy in-game economy, driven by player-run stores in a searchable market.

Perhaps the most important aspect for me in reviewing and recommending KoL is that it’s tons easier to play now than it was a year ago. A combat bar has been introduced that allows you to map frequently used functions (attacks, items, skills) to numbers on your keyboard, and players have to click less and less with the introduction of powerful new chat macros. For those who wish to automate the playing process further, KoL has an active fan community that’s developed everything from a truly serious Wiki, Greasemonkey scripts, and even sophisticated Java-based botting programs (KoLMafia is my own pick for when I need to farm or don’t have much time to play).

Another thing about Kingdom of Loathing is that it’s free, as in beer. But to support the staff that develops KoL from concept to coding, the game offers an “Item of the Month” that can be purchased for the in-game cost of one Mr. Accessory. A Mr. A, which is a powerful item in its own right, can be bought through the Mall, for in-game currency (meat, not something boring like gold or gil), or from KoL’s parent company, Asymmetric, for a PayPal donation of $10 USD. You can get the IoTMs, which are often powerful familiars or tomes that enable summoning of useful combat items, without ever having to pay a cent, but be prepared to do a lot of farming and market speculation. I personally never thought I’d pay to play an online game, but I find myself sending these guys a bit of cash month after month, and logging in daily besides.

So, asking ourselves the question that this feature poses–will you enjoy this? Well, if you’d like a twist on the old RPG formula, laden with bizarre humor, gratuitous pop culture references and not an insignificant amount of puns, you should enjoy KoL. If you’re looking for a more classically-designed MMORPG, this probably isn’t your grail–the game’s multiplayer aspects are still in its infancy. But KoL has a special something that captured my attention, and held it fast–fifteen months and counting!

Next week for You Might Like It I plan to tackle a game that’s well known among the freeware games community, for being single-handedly made from start to finish, having tight controls and a compelling story, and introducing a brave little toaster known as Balrog…see you next friday for Cave Story!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Games, Reviews.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.