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Posts Tagged ‘Background’

About the Game

While Puppet Guardian has qualities that gamers often see in other online role playing games, there is no other game quite like it.

Like other role playing games, players travel through Puppet Guardian’s persistent virtual world in search of items and experiences.  They have avatars (Guardians!) which represent them.  They must defend themselves against the attacks of beasts and monsters.  And once they have items in hand, they synthesize new items which are ever more sophisticated, beautiful, and powerful. And it is these items which give the Guardians their (or your)  unique identity.

This last part is important because uniqueness is in many ways what Puppet Guardian is all about.  Creator Kentaro Ishizaka had a vision for the game in artrix_vatar3which its players develop unique and uniquely interesting personas adorned with and empowered by a spectacular set of “items”.  He has achieved this goal in two ways.  The first is simply by creating a enormous catalog of:

  1. Items to wear
  2. Items you have and use just for the sheer fun of it
  3. Pets
  4. Arms to subdue the game’s many and varied “monsters”
  5. Magical powers

There are a good deal over 500 items, each lovingly conceived, drawn, and empowered.

The second method that Ishizaka used to produce a game where the Guardians are not just unique but wildly unique was a pretty clever thing.  Puppet Guardian is the world’s  first and only game (as far as I know) that combines on-line role playing with board game play.  Players move through the towers in the game by rolling dice.  This familiar board game format, where movement depends on random dice rolls,  combined with the fact that there are seven different towers makes every player’s path through the game unique.  And it is this path that determines the items a player begins to collect and use: the weapons, the gear, the clothes and, especially, the combinations thereof.  Because every player’s path is different, because players have marked differences in preference and taste, and because there are over 500 (and growing) different items, Puppet Guardian enforces the development of a unique identity for

One Guardian

One Guardian

those players who stick with the game. This is no small achievement for a game that expects to have over a million players.

You can see a few examples of these unique characters in the slideshow tab at the top of this Blog.  These characters are the creation of actual players.

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