Bless Unleashed

I told myself I wouldn't get myself caught up in another time-wasting, grindy mmo.... But here we are... once again.

A fantasy-driven mmo that ,by time I started playing, only had a little over 2 months left until the servers would be shut down (on Xbox at least). This is the only fundamental reason I started playing the game; video game preservation is dead, so why not check out a game before it gets wiped from existence? This was and still is my ideology so I decided to put a bunch of time into trying to beat the game. What a mistake.

To really get to the point, the game isn't even finished. The entire plot is of you trying to stop a evil mage named Gideon and his cult, The Faceless, from transforming the land of Telarion into a dark violent world inhabited by Shadowspawn. The story is weak, let's start there. I really tried investing myself into it, and in some elements, I did. The story was just cookie-cutter mumbo jumbo that felt lazy. The side quests were even lazier, fetch quest after another and to what? Help feed some random people in some random village that relies on powerful mages to do their dumb repetitive work? I just didn't feel it for the most part. But I must confess , what really made this game worth playing was the progression and gameplay. I actually found the world and the landscapes okay (although some areas felt copy-paste), finding the chests were always somewhat fun, and getting new equipment and mounts were serviceable. The gameplay is okay too; definitely felt like an mmo but with some slightly heightened features I wasn't used to seeing in mmos. I decided to become a mage, which I found to be probably the best class fit for me. The boss fights were crazy tbh, especially field bosses that requires multiple people to fight alongside you. Is some parts, these bosses are required to be killed to progress side missions and even sometimes the main mission. I can't say I was a big fan of this feature, as I was constantly on the in-game chats calling out for help (the community seemed pretty helpful though so that was nice). There was even one moment in the main campaign where after your battle with Gideon, you have to do a bunch of grindy stuff like gather warrior tokens and prestige tokens. I was NOT a fan... at all. After this portion of the main game, the story starts getting somewhat good again, but all of a sudden, by time you get to Beoran/Ostium, the campaign just... ends. I even tried to buy the rest of my campaign packs (yes, you have to buy campaigns with one of the most valuable currencies in the game). I mean, the campaign doesn't even try and wrap up Gideon's story or really anything; it just drops off and you're left to just travel the rest of the world doing side missions that feel so pointless. This portion of the game is where I stopped really doing much of anything except trying to get a few achievements, mostly because I was so close to unlocking them. I had about a month left of the game until it shut down and some of these achievements I just wasn't gonna have enough time to finish ( getting to character level 40 wasn't gonna happen, especially since there's nothing else to do in the game other than repetitive dungeons and farming kills!). Around mid October 2022, they started a seasonal event where you can gather 4 different kinds of currencies based on each holiday (Christmas, Halloween, Valentines Day(?), and Summer(?)) and obviously I wasn't interested in getting cosmetics because the game is going offline soon, but I did farm a couple times to see if it was possible if I could get my character to level 40 before the server shutdown. In conclusion, it just wasn't going to happen. There just isn't enough here to get me to stay interested and grind days worth of XP just so I can get an achievement. After finally getting 2 achievements I've been trying to get for awhile (obtain 30 mounts and finish 50 crusades) I took a small break from the game, but that only ended up lasting 2 days before I was back at it. Next was to recruit 100 workers for my estate, and to collect all the pages for "A Journey Home" and "Talbor Tamit Musings", which I won't lie, I used guides to look for all of them. After that was trying to max my blessing skill, but the only way I was willing to get these upgrades was through buying them in the marketplace, which is basically a in-game store where players sell and buy stuff. By time I started getting close to fully upgrading my bless skill, no one was adding more blesses to the store, so that achievement was gonna be a no go. Really, atp, the only achievement that was still possible was hiring 100 workers and that was it. I decided to finish up my side missions out in Eiodean Forest, and after getting the 100 workers achievement, I called it a wrap.

In all, I don't regret checking out this game at all. Clocking in 194 hours n this game, you can tell I was enveloped by this time consuming, but mostly fun, mmo. My character stats weren't super impressive ( lvl 35, mage lvl 22, gear score 1215) but I'm still proud of my stats. I just wish I was able to complete a few of these achievements, but because I started on this game so late in its life cycle, it was never going to happen. To all the people I met on Bless Unleashed, whether it was helping me defeat field bosses, or roaming around in a dungeon, it was a pleasure playing with y'all. I can't say I'll really really miss this game, but there is something sad and conflicting knowing all of my time spent on this game is adherently lost, and I'll never be able to mount my centaur again. RIP Bless Unlesshed.