Great Merchant Review

Great Merchant is an odd, two-dimensional MMORPG with an emphasis on trade.  While AK Interactive launched the global service in late 2009, the game looks and feels more like it’s from a distant era.  Great Merchant suffers from many translation and gameplay issues, but for players looking for something old-school, it may be worth checking out.

Enterprising Merchants

Registering an account on the official site is similar to the procedure of other games, but after installing the client and logging in for the first time players are required to set up a pin number.  Security was apparently a large concern for the developers.  While inputting their pin, players will see three cursors on the screen.  The logic behind this is to throw off hackers who may of sneaked in key-loggers on to a player’s computer.  This system threw me off once or twice but I quickly grew accustomed to it.

Great Merchant forgoes traditional classes in favor of eight characters, four of which are male and four female.  All eight characters have the same distribution of fifteen for the four stats: Strength, Agility, Vitality, and Wisdom.  Players are given an additional ten points to allocate as they wish. Each character has their own backstory explaining how they ended up in the commerce business.  Sadly, this is the extent of the character creation process.  There is no way to adjust appearance, and as far as I could tell there are no differences between the characters.  Even so, there are three character slots per account.

Trading in The Far East

New players start their trading careers outside the city of Nanjing, known today as Beijing.  The game’s graphics are not much to look at – upon seeing them for the first time I was reminded of two other MMORPGs.  The first is Luminary: Rise of the Goonzu.  Before being re-branded with the ‘Luminary’ title, Goonzu had much cruder graphics, but the concept for the game was and still is similar to Great Merchant’s.  The game world is dotted by dozens, if not hundreds of cities which players can actually invest in by purchasing shares.  Guilds can colonize vacant cities and amass great wealth by collecting taxes from them.  WhileGoonzu had cute, anime-inspired visuals, Great Merchant has a feel more similar to Mir 2, Lineage, and other older MMORPGs.  Beyond Nanjing , players can explore all of eastern China, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula and Japan.  Much of inland China is inaccessible, but even so, the land mass that is available is quite large.  Sadly, Great Merchant has no graphic settings to tweak so players are stuck with the default 800×600 resolution.  On the bright side, there is an option to play in windowed mode.

Pen Pals

The game has no formal tutorial, but beginners will receive a series of messages which offer a series of quests.  By clicking on the flashing envelope icon towards the bottom-right of the screen, players will be able to run through the tutorial questline, which offers small rewards such as armor, food, other items.  I recommend newbies run through these quests, since Great Merchant is not an easy game to penetrate.  Eventually, players will be asked to enter town.  Players cannot actually walk around inside cities, instead they are given an overview with several buildings that can be clicked on to open menus.  Cities contain a city center and at least some of the follow buildings: a bank, clinic, tavern, training center, a war depot (store), monster trainer, and ranch.  It takes some time to grow accustomed to the concept behind Great Merchant, and it can be frustrating for beginners to see such a limited interface.  Even more confusing than the bland city features is the combat in Great Merchant.

Here Come the Gank Squads!

Outside towns, the game world of Great Merchant is absolutely flooded with NPC enemies.  The ones near the beginner area take the form of bandits and strange looking dog monsters, but don’t be fooled by their singular representation.  Once players click on them in order to attack, they’ll activate a timer which counts down from five.  Nearby enemies will run towards the player and when the counter hits zero, the player and all surrounding enemies will be teleported to a special battle screen.  This combat system is very original and I haven’t seen it in an MMORPG until now.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it was successfully implemented.  New players start with only a single character, the one they created.  The game does a poor job explaining that additional mercenaries and even monster pets must be hired in order to battle effectively.  Once a battle begins, a torrent of enemies will advance on the player and continuously attack.  In my very first fight I was up against at least twenty ‘Bandit Leader’s that mercilessly shot at me while my character frantically attacked them one by one.  I managed to kill a few before being defeated, but the whole experience left me confused.  Back at the local clink, I decided to give it another shot.

Fast, but Going Nowhere.

At least the experience rate is rapid.  Even in the battle I lost, I managed to hit level two after only killing a few enemies.  Characters will gain experience rapidly and be given additional stat points to distribute.  The Monster Trainer in town allows players to purchase monsters to fight by their side, making the stacked odds in combat a bit more even.  Eventually, if players have the patience to build up a large force of mercenaries and pets, combat can be rewarding.  The trouble is that this effort just isn’t worth it.  Great Merchant just feels like low-end product.  There is virtually no player population, which renders the huge game world and trade concept moot.  Will it ever attract a flourishing community?  No one can know for sure, but what is clear is that there are already several superior MMORPGs for players looking for trade-based gameplay.  Besides Goonzu, Voyage Century is an obvious alternative.