MU Origin has one of the biggest and most vibrant communities going, thanks in part to a regular flow of significant updates. In just a few short years the game has already surpassed version 7.0. We can only imagine that …
MU Origin has one of the biggest and most vibrant communities going, thanks in part to a regular flow of significant updates. In just a few short years the game has already surpassed version 7.0.
We can only imagine that it was a daunting task to make a sequel. MU Origin 2 has some big shoes to fill. So how does it do?
In a word, pretty well, largely by not straying too far from the formula laid down by its predecessor and focusing on slick, accessible, unfussy gameplay.
In fact, the whole game has been streamlined to an unusual degree. After choosing your character type – Dark Wizard, Dark Knight, or Elf – you’re plunged straight into the story, which follows the classic “arrive, prove worth to initially skeptical NPCs, start running errands” playbook.
Once you accept a quest you navigate towards your destination automatically, and start hacking and blasting your enemies when you get there. These story quests mostly involve killing a certain number of a particular kind of enemy NPC before reporting back to the quest-giver for your reward. You know the drill.
Meanwhile non-story quests prompt you to explore features of the game as you unlock them through levelling up. These include tasks as diverse as raiding dungeons, completing quests from Guild Commanders, buying items from the Auction, and so on.
They also include simple “kill X number of Y” tasks. In keeping with MU Origin 2’s generally slick approach, these quests come in huge batches, with one enemy type being followed by another and another and so on. That means you can accept a quest and simply step away from your phone for, well, quite a long time.
The game takes quite a bit of the admin off your hands, too. When you pick up an equippable item the option to equip it appears immediately in the formed a timed button. And you get to transfer a previous item’s enhancement level to new items.
If we’re creating the impression that MU Origin 2 is the kind of game you can play on autopilot, that’s not entirely wrong. But it’s not entirely right, either. While things certainly move along in a more fluid manner than most games of this type, you’ll eventually need to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in if you want to make progress.
You’ll get to level 100 in no time. As long as you keep accepting quests and levelling-up your skills to keep pace with your character you’ll cut through your enemies like a knife through hot soup, your life bar barely moving as you leap from area to area taking down the game’s weird and wonderful menagerie of fantasy bad guys.
But at around 150 the machine starts to grind to a halt. The Zen that previously seemed inexhaustible will run out, and things get more interesting. You’ll need to prioritize the skills you want to upgrade most, and your levelling up progress will stall too, closing off story quests at higher levels and forcing you to go looking for XP.
How you do that is up to you. There are plenty of event-based single player and guild tasks to jump into, including EXP Dungeon, Arena (Battle), Guild Battlefield, and much, much more. Some of these events are timed, while others are always there waiting for you.
Or you can dive into the dungeons, of which there are many, either single player or in a party. There are Daily Dungeons, too, and an Infinite Tower.
And you can always just take the controls yourself and roam around MU Origin 2’s vast, diverse world, killing sharks, mermaids, and sundry other aquatic enemies in Atlans, yetis in Devias, and so on. Getting around is very straightforward, and there’s plenty to see.
The graphics are solid, too, with some imaginative monster designs and neat visual flourishes. The text can be difficult to make out, however – even on a reasonably large smartphone. And when you can make it out, you’re in for some patchy localization.
While MU Origin 2 doesn’t bring anything substantially new to the franchise, and hardened RPG players are liable to baulk at the degree to which you can play the game on autopilot, it’s a slick, streamlined, good-looking, and comprehensive addition to the mobile RPG genre. Grab it now for free on Google Play or the App Store.
