Aura Kingdom 2 Just Launched, and.. Well, Here are my Thoughts in 2020.

So I’ve actually been looking forward to playing Aura Kingdom 2 for a while now. I’ve played quite a bit of the PC incarnation of the game over the years and at the beginning of its life it was a pretty fun game.
After returning to it years later the game is a hot mess but I went into the mobile port hoping that it would elaborate on what made Aura Kingdom a lot of fun to me.
Considering it just launched, I figured this would probably be the best opportunity to do a video on it as well. So here we are.

Just the character creation alone is incredible. Well, not the freedom you have over your character. You have barely any options for your character at all: A few faces, a few hairstyles and a couple colors to choose from.
But your character itself, although fairly basic, actually looks amazing. I never expected the character models to look as good as they do so color me impressed.
While there’s no real customization, you do have the ability to add some accessories, which is… Iunno, a thing I guess?

Before we get into the actual game though I do want to stress the fact that I opted out of notifications, but to play Aura Kindgom 2, you have to allow them to send you notifications, something that just irks me to no end.

Then we get into the game, and there are actual cutscenes. Lots and lots of cutscenes. This is great – I’m a sucker for story but the more I progressed through the story the more I felt as though it was your generic mobile game story.
I know you guys know what I’m talking about. The story that seemingly every mobile MMO uses.
Add onto that the fact that the entire game, almost, is auto-play.. honestly, it killed my excitement a little bit. I’m aware we’re not required to enable or utilize auto-play but it just made it easier to let play while I played games on my PC.
Yes, I got fairly bored with it. I made it to level 20 something by the time I’d finished recording and all it had me do were some pretty basic fetch and retrieve quests, with the odd “kill a few monsters” in there here and there.
That isn’t an issue though – most MMOs follow this same formula, but for the most part you’re forced to do it yourself, which leaves you feeling involved.
At the very least my Eidolon’s skill had to be clicked manually, so I guess that’s something I needed to do. But it didn’t do much – a small burst of damage every few minutes wasn’t enough to warrant my attention.
Boss fights required actual attention though as bosses use AoEs and telegraphed attacks that require active dodging and mitigation. Those were some of the only times I was required to play the game and if this was more prevalent, Aura Kingdom 2 would be a lot more entertaining.

Interestingly enough, where most mobile games spam you with tutorials for the entire first hour, this actually did not. At all. It just threw me in there and expected me to know what I was doing, and that was refreshing.
I prefer figuring things out myself, and I’ve played enough mobile games and MMOs both to know exactly what I was doing upon entering the game.
I was also required to manually equip my gear without an “auto-equip” button – that’s almost revolutionary for a mobile MMO!

Realistically, outside of group content like dungeons or raids, I don’t see much of a point to the “multiplayer” aspect of the game. You don’t need to group with people out in the world, much in the same way as every other mobile MMO.
And while the game looks beautiful – the characters especially, there really isn’t a whole lot that actively requires your attention.

This game looks great, it plays well but at the end of the day it’s just another pretty copy>paste mobile MMO that doesn’t bring anything new to the table.