Dungeon Fighter Online Game Review

Alternate Title: DFO
Developer: Neople
Publisher: Neople
Type: MMORPG
Model: Free-to-play
Platform: PC
PvP: Arenas
PvE: Dungeons, Instances

I’m not traditionally a fan of games like this. I’ve played a couple – MMOs like Elsword and Closers, and don’t get me wrong, Wiggy and I did play Dungeon Fighter Online.. once.. a year ago.. for like an hour.
However, when doing my recent Moonlight Blade video I came across an interesting statistic.. Dungeon Fighter Online’s popularity is absolutely ridiculous over in the East, going so far as being considered “The Worlds Most Popular MMORPG“.
I know, the game isn’t nearly as popular over here in the West as it is over there, what with MMORPGs like WoW having millions of active subscribers at any given time.
But as of 2015, the game had a recorded 600 million players worldwide, grossing over $10 billion dollars in revenue.
Yes, I’m not even kidding. 600 million players. To put that into perspective, if the game has continued to increase in popularity, then in 2018, Dungeon Fighter Online likely has more recorded players than all of Europe combined.

So.. I wanted to know why the game was still so popular, so I delved much further in, taking significantly more hours to record, I believe making it up to level 34? Maybe a little higher.

Dungeon Fighter Online boasts quite a substantial selection of characters to choose between, each with their own stats, unique fighting style and classes associated with them.
Agent, Priest, Demonic Lancer, Slayer, Gunner, Mage, Knight, Fighter, Thief, Dark Knight and Creator are the characters you’re given access to.
Several of the classes have both male and female variants. Even though they are the same base class – both genders have different stats making for quite different overall gameplay styles.

Mages are always destructively powerful, so naturally I opted to go for whatever made my life the easiest..

So the basic plot – from what I could tell from the initial cutscene was that I died, made a pact with Satan, and I now need to deliver.. by serving up as many souls to the Devil as I can.

There is also a skill system in place, having separate skill trees for each class and advanced class you choose, but not knowing exactly what I was doing and partly being lazy, I noticed an “Auto Allocate” button.. that seemed handy for a player like me. So, I let the game decide how I should play. It worked out well. It gave me basic fireball, water..ball? and whirlwind skills that served me quite well at the beginning of the game.

I learned that the game has various “maps” and each “map” has access to a variety of “dungeons” or “instances” that allow you to run through. That’s how you progress through both the game and the story.
Each “instance” results in a boss fight – like a giant angry Minotaur and you get allocated items and a ranking, ranging from “You suck!” to “You didn’t do as badly as some of the other people.” to “You’re.. okay at this, I guess.”

The instances vary quite a bit in appearance. They also have unique monsters and mechanics from what I can tell, which helps alleviate a little of the repetition.

In essence, what the entire first 15 levels of the game, or the first hour or two consisted of was going around the forest beating up women or various ethnicity.  I know, I know. I could’ve attempted to reason with them but when violence is an option, why bother? At least, that’s what my step-father used to tell me after each beating.

After playing until level 16 I was given the option to choose what class to proceed into. Elemental Bomber, Glacial Master, Blood Mage, Swift Master, or Dimension Walker.
I ended up going for Swift Master because that’s what Google told me to go with, and we all know you can’t defy the almighty Google.
Obviously I made the right choice because the absolute destructive mayhem I was able to wreak upon those poor monsters.. was nigh unparalleled. I almost felt a little bad for them.

The game has a tremendous amount of story from what I’ve experienced. Every instance seems to be interconnected with some form of story, and I can’t seem to go 5 minutes without getting some form of cutscene.
Which isn’t an issue, honestly. It’s just not something I’m used to – especially in a game of this kind.

For the next several hours, I took every single quest out of the same town. I met a lot of characters, and I sat through a metric ton of plot. I fought weird cultists, unusual dragon.. cannon things, those tentacles you often find in tentacle hentai, zombies, little one-eyed octopi.. blimps with.. teeth, um.. yeah this just got real fucking weird. I fought a lotta weird shit. And that’s alright – I’m into weird shit so this was actually a ton of fun for me.

Ultimately, I had to end my journey due to a certain issue.. I’d apparently hit my limit for today, and there was no way in hell I could afford to purchase an elixir to recover that.
Which leads me to the only problem I had with the game up until that point.. the fact that there is a stupid fucking fatigue system in place.
Who honestly thinks capping how much you can play is a good idea? It’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen and really removes any excitement I have when playing a game knowing full well there’s a time limit restricting me from playing how much I want to.
And I get it – I can remove that by recovering my stamina. But clearly not.. not at this level. Not with this much money. So I had to stop, as would anyone else playing as much as I did.

Ultimately, I had an absolutely fucking thrilling time playing Dungeon Fighter Online, the graphical style, the combat, the game itself.. it’s all so high quality and it’s ridiculous fun to play.
I’d recommend it to anyone that’s a fan of the genre and is looking for something new. Especially since there’s a newly added character as well!
Now’s the time to jump in and join the influx of new players.. unless he’s not as new as I’m thinking, in which case.. well fuck.