[Rant] Monkey King Online Isn't A Game

This is my recollection of playing Monkey King Online by R2 Games.

After logging into the game and creating my character, I got up and walked out of the room. I nuked a frozen breakfast burrito: a mixture of jalapeno, egg, and cheese. My microwave has this annoying bug where it will occasionally register the same button twice. Luckily I never forget this little problem and managed to avoid cooking the burrito for 14:45 instead of 1:45. It says 1:30 on the instructions but I have a low wattage microwave. Hold on, I have to press “complete quest” and equip some more armor. My character is around level 30 by the time the burrito finishes cooling down.

Anyway, back to the burrito. El Monterey is a great brand if you like breakfast burritos. They have a fantastic egg & bacon breakfast burrito, and are fairly priced compared to the competition. Had to press “complete quest” there, sorry. What was I saying? Oh yea, they also have egg, sausage, and cheese as well as just an egg and sausage burrito. I have a very large-chested and scantily clad combat NPC following me that is marked as my “mount.” That can’t mean what I think it does.

I’m about halfway done with my burrito as my character hits level 41. My coffee has been depleted. If you don’t mind spending money on great coffee, I highly suggest Tonx. Twelve bucks for a six ounce bag of beans sounds high, but it comes out to about 70 cents per cup and it is more than worth it since you get coffee from new places every other week. The cup I’m drinking is from the Sumatra and contains a hint of dark chocolate and graham cracker. Fantastic. They send you new shipments every two weeks, shipped and roasted the same day.

As for the burrito, it’s rather laughable that the package brags 260 calories and 9 grams of protein. Great, until you notice the 510mg of sodium and 65mg of cholesterol. That is, granted, what you expect with any egg-based meal. Is it so much to ask for a breakfast burrito that is made with egg whites? Scratch that, I already know the answer.

It’s like those Guzzlers you get from the store. Now I enjoy these far more than an adult should, but you can’t deny that the Guzzler has a lot less sugar than soda (10g per serving compared to 39g in a can of coke), and also contains real juice. The strawberry kiwi has 20% Niacin (Vitamin B3), Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Biotin, and Pantothenic Acid. Biotin can be used to help with neurological issues related to type 2 diabetes, making Guzzler quite a catch-22. They are cheap, though, at 3 for $2 at Tops.

I’m in a guild now. I don’t remember ever joining one, but I am in a guild. Anyway, it’s time to take a shower. I mentioned the word shower to my friend and he said “shower? I barely know her.” I don’t get it. My character is level 50. I couldn’t decide between The Hobbit or Hunger Games sequel to watch on Amazon, so I went ahead and picked The Hobbit because it is more interesting. Two and a half hours, though.

I got about ten minutes into the film and then had to take a pause to change the air conditioning filter in the apartment. You are supposed to change the filter once every 90 days, and since it’s been slightly over a year since we last changed the filter, it was about time to fork up the $10 and buy a new one. You’d be amazed how dirty a small apartment’s filter can get after a year. Despite the multiple inch thick layer of dust and grime caked onto the filter, I felt a bit hungry and figured I’d go to Wendy’s. My character is still level 51 and questing.

Turns out Wendy’s does not make the Ciabatta Bacon Burger anymore, which is a disappointment. I loved that burger. There isn’t anything special going on at Wendy’s right now, so I settled on a #1: Dave’s Hot’n’Juicy. There is something about the square shape of the hamburger that just makes sense. After enjoying my burger, I figured I’d head home. Make sure the game was still going. I finished The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, which is a fantastic movie with a lot of suspense and action.

As for Monkey King Online, this game is mediocrity at its finest, to the point where I’d much rather talk about my breakfast burrito and AC filter than go into the finer details on just how bad it is. Mix a horrible user interface that is full to the saturation point with shiny buttons and a constant stream of rewards to keep your attention, and big numbers very early on for the kiddies. The game throws everything but the kitchen sink at you, a barrage of tasks that are exactly the same in all but name. Main quests, side quests, daily quests, Punish the Gods, Karma quests, guild quests, event quests, forbidden quests, safeguard quests, dharma quests, etc. Login rewards, play rewards, goddesses, conquests, multiplayer, challenges, server events, new server events, beta events, power up tasks, forced in under the idea that if you just overwhelm the player all at once, they won’t realize that there really is nothing going on.

Monkey King Online falls into the lowest tier of MMOs in terms of quality. They are pumped out by the hundreds every year in China and Korea with a few making their way westward thanks to publishers like R2 Games. Isometric free to play games that are heavy on the cash shop and so self-aware of how mind numbingly boring, uncreative, and unintuitive they are, that the game revolves around mechanics that allow it to play itself. Your character will take quests, complete them, turn them in, and even buy his own flipping potions using the money picked up from mobs. I only had to lift a finger to equip new items and occasionally hit “complete quest” when the game wouldn’t turn it in automatically, and my character was raking in cash by the millions.

The whole genre is shovelware, developed by companies that make nothing but shovelware, and peddled by overseas publishers who only traffic in shovelware. Each successive game is a clone upon the last which improves absolutely nothing aside from devising more efficient ways to milk the “whales,” people with a lot of expendable cash and not a lot of good taste or sense in how to spend it. Thanks to the fact that this game cost roughly the video game equivalent of a dollar burger at Wendy’s to develop, it will coast on said whales.

Monkey King Online is mindless, it is boring, and with poorly animated characters that appear to be running on a giant green screen, it isn’t much to look at. It is unapologetic in its weight towards the cash shop, especially after level 50 when progress grinds to a halt, you run out of quests, and are forced to grind mobs to the tune of less than a hundredth of a percent of progress per kill. If you’re going to have your computer doing something while it’s idling, at least have it be something with higher odds of a productive outcome, like finding someone willing to make a second season of Firefly.

Otherwise I have no strong opinions on the matter.