Tales of Elleria

Overview

Tales of Elleria has lore that revolves around the world of Elleria, which was in balance until a great fire dragon named Ignacio enraged and caused havoc across the world. The Goddess of Elleria, Elysis cast magic upon Ignacio that wounded him greatly and caused him to fall into hibernation. As the beast slept, she cast a blessing onto the last remaining city where the citizens gathered to rebuild their world. The story gives birth to their NFT collection through Ellerium, which is a crystallized blessing of Elysis, to summon great heroes and forge powerful weapons.

The citizens were in fear of being attacked by monsters; they found a pile of Ellerium and a tablet, which allowed them to summon Heroes in turn for Ellerium. The limited backstory allows the player to gain an understanding of the origin of their NFTs as well as where the creatures they battle come from. It is not known yet where this lore is headed. As one of the RPG games part of the Treasure DAO collection of games, they have access to a wide audience and interoperability with the $MAGIC ecosystem.

Gameplay

The gameplay currently is fully PVE focused and to be able to play you need to purchase one of their character NFTs from the Trove marketplace. There are several different classes you can choose from including Mages, Rangers, Assasins, Warriors, Berserkers and Machinists. Each character has a varied amount of 6 statistics, which consist of: Strength, Agility, Vitality, Endurance, Intelligence and Will. The total amount of these stats make up the rarity of your character and can make it easier or harder for you to complete quests in the game.

After acquiring your character, you load into Elleria, which is a simple 2D world that can be accessed from your browser. Upon loading in, you can see several different places that can be accessed by clicking on them. The most frequent places the player will visit are the Adventurer’s guild and the City gates. The Adventurer’s guild contains the basic shop and the assignments your character to accept. When conducting assignments, you are rewarded in $MEDALS which is their off-chain in-game currency that can be used to level up your character or to start quests which are layered into different tiers of difficulty.

Quests can be accessed through the city gates, which also give access to the world boss leaderboard and quest. The quests have different rewards and as you progress through the higher levels the rewards go from $MEDALS favoured to Elm shard, Ellerium and relics favoured. The difficulty of the quests start of easy and becoming increasingly more difficult with success not being guaranteed however as you go up character levels they gain more attempts at quests..

A further part of the gameplay is crafting, which uses Elm shards, and relics that can be used to dismantle items and to craft items such as scrolls. Scrolls can be used to increase your stats on the characters the player owns with some being soulbound improvements and others that are transferable if the character is sold. The scrolls themselves can be sold amongst relics on the Trove marketplace for $MAGIC. Each player also has a crafting level that can be worked on as they dismantle and craft items, with the first level needing 300 XP before levelling up.

A recent addition to this side of the game has been the wishing well which can be found in the Town Centre. Here a player may throw in 3 items of their choice and have a chance of acquiring a random item back, fitting in the with degen lifestyle commonly seen in the web3 world! What are the rewards for playing the game? Well, the later quests award Ellerium which can be sold and traded for $MAGIC. In addition to this, you are able to sell relics from the quests for $MAGIC which can be exchanged for stablecoins in a few marketplaces. Another reward available comes from dealing damage to the world boss every season and there is a sizeable amount of $MAGIC dedicated for this..

Review

The combat screen gives an impression of The Thing 2 mixed with Final Fantasy I and Pokemon, the graphics are of low quality except for the enemy themselves which has higher quality graphics. If you are looking for a nostalgic level of gameplay this is adequate however with the current level of games available to a player this feels underwhelming. The rest of the gameplay has 2D graphics with minimal active animations and leaves for more to be desired. The sound in the log in screen is soothing and can easily be kept on for a while.

After this screen you come to the overall map which has a soundtrack that reminds of The Bards Tale with its rhythm and can be quite pleasant, this does change with most areas you go into making for a more immersive experience. The sound is one of the more positive features of the game and leaves little to be critiqued. The playability of Tales of Elleria is pretty straightforward but so much so that you run out of things to do quite quickly. There is not much of a user interface that keeps the player locked into the game.

Another criticism of Tales of Elleria is that there is no extensive onboarding mechanism or tutorial of how to play the game or get the best out of it, including no free to play option. This leaves a new player slightly confused as what to do in the game and slows down the progression at the same time. The rate of progression in the game with a singular character can be frustrating as you are left to farm medals to level up and until such there is not much more that you can do except for reap the daily rewards and a little amount of crafting. This makes the game capital intensive if wanting to get properly involved.

Overall, the rating for this game would be a 4 due to the limited amount of actions possible per day in the game, the slow progression rate of a new player, and the underwhelming graphic quality of the game. The notable areas of Tales of Elleria are more the ecosystem and its’ sustainability when it comes to the tokens, as well as the sound within the game. However, this does not make up for the lack of entertainment of the game meaning that players are likely to spend a very limited amount of time on it.