"Holy crap," my wife exclaimed "does your character have a leather wedgie!?"

Why yes, yes she does.

I was Googling for upcoming releases of games and came across a banner ad for Shaiya , by Sonov Entertainment. The cover art was hot, and frankly, that's all it takes sometimes. Now, don't get me wrong, every major MMO release has art that tries to make the characters look sexy. In fact, I almost always roll a female toon because frankly, if I'm going to be staring at my characters ass for hours on end, it may as well be a shapely one - animated or not.

But Shaiya kind of takes it to another level. Every bit of armor seems to be there to accentuate the curves, breasts and thighs of the female characters. Even the male characters look like they've all been taking steroids and walk around in leather bikini briefs. To play you need to swear on your dead family that you are over 18 (OK, you just click "yes" and enter your birthday) but it appears that this game is made for 15-year-old boys. Perfect!

The NPCs you interact with are all wearing various forms of erotic clothing. Playing the dark side, all of the vendors in my area looked like they stepped out of a BDSM fetish catalogue. I would imagine that with all of this leather and buckles the good side would be more about the lace and lingerie.

The world itself looks pretty good as well. Decent terrain, well crafted buildings, good atmosphere and lighting, but who looks at that when you can see from your characters leather bra that yes, it is indeed rather cold in the snow.

Unfortunately, that's about the end of the good stuff for this game. It is tedious to play, the text all looks like system fonts and frankly, for every quest there is a *lot* to read. Similar to anime where the little brother or sister is there to ramble on and give the dark stranger all of the backstory, and we just happen to be able to hear it, the NPCs have pages and pages of text to read through.

The premise is that there are four races, two good, two evil, and they fight each other. Each side has a physical race and a magic race. To choose the path of evil they make it sound like you must give up your soul to do so. "Are you sure?" asks the pop-up. Hell yeah I'm sure, I like leather and Cenobites. But then, of course, once gameplay starts it's all the same fluffy bunny sunshine as any other of a wide range of Korean games where everyone is overly polite and nice about the reasons why you are the only person who could to go kill low level creatures bothering the village.

I'll be playing this again - I've only gotten a few levels in, so perhaps there is an actual hook that makes it more fun, but I'm not nearly done ripping this game apart, and the hotness of the toons isn't really enough to overcome that for me. 

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