A pretty good game with pretty glaring flaws
Well, at least that is how it works when you play as Assassin. Paladin and Warrior is generally slower-moving and also have slightly different attack patterns.
Zenonia's levelling system is also very good. For each level you get one point to your strength, agility, constitution and spirit plus three points to use however you please on those stats. You also get one skill point that you can use either to gain special abilities (that are used set to quick slots and then used by pressing L + A, Y, B or X) or gain passive skills like better evasion, better chance of critical hit or extra power to physical attacks. It is very helpful that you can buy special items that resets your stat points or skill points in case you regret something. Those items are appropriately expensive, so you can't keep changing your mind all the time.
The story in Zenonia is told through text, but you also have pictures that show the mood of the character who is speaking. Those pictures use a lot of the tricks in the Japanese Animation handbook. For instance when a character is mad, its eyes become large and triangular while the pupils get small or possibly disappear and the face gets shadowy. The story itself is pretty good. Many characters are given names after their characteristics (like Vague, Virulent, Tender or Lady Charity) and the main character is named Regret. Regret has a lot of inner conflict and a lot of emotion, and there is something different about him, which is the driving force of the story. Alright, there may be some stuff that is obvious to the player long before it is to the characters in the story, but all in all I really liked it. I will say though, that I think the story could have benefitted from voice acting and facial animations that actually move.
So what are those glaring flaws that I mentioned? Well, the most obvious one is how heavily this game relies on grinding. Enemies respawn not that long after you kill them and the game expects you to kill them very many times to get enough EXP to move on. The game only really have five dungeons and yet it took me 18 hours to beat on the first playthrough. One of the reasons are illustrated by the fact that when I entered the fourth dungeon the first type of enemy I met was ten levels higher than me. Even with the special item that let's you earn 50 percent more EXP for two days (in the in-game time system) it still takes ridiculously long to reach an appropriate level.
Even with the 18 hours I did put into it I could easily have used much more. You see in the final dungeon I decided to stop caring about the enemies and try to just run past as many of them as I could. I did so and managed to beat the final boss when I was on level 74. However I had killed enemies that dropped level 94 weapons, so it would seem the developers thought I might actually want to grind long enough to reach that level, which is insane.
Speaking of my cowardly run through the dungeon, the death system is a bit broken. When you die you can either pay a special item or 3000 gold or lose ten percent of your Exp and lower the items' durability. As you progress in the game, the creatures will drop more and more gold, so eventually it doesn't feel like dying matters at all. At least not when you have to grind so much you end up with 200 000 gold.
I'm not a big fan of the cIass system in this game, because it makes me take a choice at the beginning to limit me to one specific playing styIe. While the weapons and the skill tables are as well, it is not enough to make me play through the game three times. I would much prefer if you could wield all three types of weapons and if you could put points into whichever skill table you wanted. With the items that reset points this could mean that you could practically change cIass whenever you wanted throughout the game, and I think it would have been a good improvement.
In the end it is a good game. I fell in love with the music in the start of the game, although with very little variation that didn't last. The design is good, the gameplay is pretty good, the dungeons have some good puzzles and I really like the story, but I still hate all the grinding that makes me put unnecessarily many hours into the game and which makes it boring and I really don't like how the cIass system limits my freedom. So I'd say it is not quite a great game, but if you like grinding and are the kind of gamer who loves to play to reach the next level and buy the next piece of equipment, and then the next after that and the next after that then you're going to enjoy this game.