The Pet taming system, the item upping system, and most notably the Customer Support system blow.

User Rating: 7.5 | Rappelz PC
I played the game for about a year and a half, prior to writing this review. The graphics are acceptable, and can be played on an old-school computer system (I played it on a 1.6ghz processor) without too much trouble (though the graphics had to be dumbed-down a bit). The game has a very solid group of players and a thriving community. The "Cash Shop" availability for improved items is also a big plus. If you wind up in a good guild, with a good group of core folks, you will enjoy yourself...if you can get past some rather fundamental flaws.

1) You cannot play the game effectively without having a pet. The good news is that basic pets are fairly simple to obtain and raise...the bad news is, after about level 40, you will want something much better than Tortoise, Poultry, Pantera. The even worse news is that to obtain one, prepare for one of the games biggest problems. First, you have to go and get a pet card (drops about 1 in 4000 kills or so for the next up-step in pets). Next you will have to successfully tame the pet (about a 20% chance of success...failure means loss of card, and back to the drawing board for another 4000 kills). You could always "pay" someone to tame one for you...but chances are they are going to fail as well. There are cards which increase the chances of a successful tame, but the margin of increase is so slight, it just really doesn't matter. It's easier to just buy an already tamed pet (for about 25 million rupees....and as a new player, it's gonna take you quite some time to raise that).

2) Problem 2 is that armor and skills can be "upped" by combining them with various things...to Up armor and weapons, you combine them with "defense" and "strike" cubes. The bad news here is, that each increase has a chance of failure, leading to permanent (near permanent) damage to your item. I say near permanent because you can ALWAYS buy something from the Cash Shop with real money to fix it....for about $30 US. (go figure). When you combine skill cards though, IF it is successful, CONGRATULATIONS!!!! but chances are you DIDN'T spend the $25 US to buy a cube which increases your success rate of combines by 30%....so you DIDN'T succeed at all...and guess what, you LOST both cards you were trying to combine....ick...
to make a plus 2 card, you much combine 2 plus 1 cards...to make a plus 3 card, you must combine 2 plus 2 cards, to make a plus 4, you need 2 plus 3s (do the math, that's 8 plus 1 cards)....


There's a plenty of fun to be had, for sure, but also a lot of frustration along the way. It's a good game, for the right price, and worthy of a month of your time to see if it's right for you.