Year: 2004 (Tantra Online) 2008 (Global)
Developer: HanbitSoft
Publisher: Game Networks
Game Genre: MMORPG
Narrative Genre: Oriental / Fantasy
Tantra Global was released in late 2004 in Indonesia and it had a monthly subscription fee. Then it became free of cost to play, and started relying entirely in the sale of premium content.
I think MMORPG players should not waste their time in the poor attempt at creating a massive CRPG Tantra is. That said, I also recommend real tantra practitioners and Hindu persons in general to keep away from this game, as it is blasphemous towards Hindu Dharma from its very sources. At first I fell lured but essentially offended by its “Shiva kills Brahma” hook, from the background that is to be found here. But recognizing from the first time I’ve read it, and taking it for what it was: downright heresy against the Vedic and tantric (and other branches of Hindu) creeds.
Then when I was reading the background story and the other background narrative “War of Eight Kings” I started to feel sick of how bad and full of orthographic and grammar errors the story was. Very discomfited by this, by phrases of the sort of “But when an army of Mara threatened to swamped Tantra, the tribe witnessed a birth of a miracle, a child that they all knew to be designed for greater things.” For other things that now I’ll expose I think that this MMORPG is a waste of time, I will review it by both a western materialistic and a Hindu (with a tantric slant) viewpoints.
The background in a nutshell is this: a tantric world called Trimurti, where humans envy the Gods (non-aspirant nature), who are Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva living as one in the Shambala castle. As a consequence of the non-aspirant nature of the humans the gods flee the Shambala castle and form eight tribes. Then, as the age changes and seemingly without any explained reason, Shiva slits Brahma’s throat provoking a cosmic paradox that ends in the retirement of support from the gods to the humans. Mara (a demon of Buddhist lore) appears out of the blue and the eight tribes unite to ensnare him and they succeed, vanishing him from the universe.
Then Mara seeds Trimurti (from the void?) with his spawn and that’s where the playing characters come into the story. The basic objective of the game is fighting the spawn of Mara to loot from them and to skill and level up, what enables the PC to access new scenarios (that are locked for PCs with less level) and this leveling also lets the PC reach the PvP area where she/he can attack the PCs of other ashrams.
The ashrams are the alignments that differentiate the players in the PvP zone. It’s chosen when choosing a God. After a God is chosen, the PCs are in the Brahma, Vishnu or Siva ashram.
If I, from my Hindu viewpoint, I am told of a game like this, it surely awakens some curiosity in me. But the delusions with Tantra Global, in my personal case, were a lot and from the beginning. They started from the character creation process, because I expected too much from something that is obviously a business and non-serious entertainment, and not something made with the sobriety like a theme as tantra deserves.
If I would be asked “Of the tantric universe, which race you want to be.” I’d come up with something like a Carana (a panegyrist of heaven) or with some race eldritch and inconceivable as a Pitri (an ancestor), or with something more traditional, like a mere human. But no. The MMORPG lets one choose only among Naga, Garuda, Deva, Asura, Yaksa, Raksasa, Kimnara and Gandharva. Half of these races in real-life, Vedic culture are considered demonic, but none of them is depicted as such in the game. Bear this in mind.
My story with this MMORPG begun when browsing a free MMORPG list, it called my attention because being Hindu I always dreamt of games with Vedic or tantric themes and content.
For getting the client I suffered first trying to find the few couple of places from where to download it, and then it was a slow download that had to be restarted many times to complete, because of persistent network errors. Then, I have had all type of problems with the installer. Specially with incomprehensible complaints from the loader when, after installing it for the first time, started to download updates and patches (for more than an hour) and then suddenly crashed with errors like “Internal Program Error”… this happened many times.
Soon after beginning my excitement started to wane. When taking up a MMORPG I don’t like to take it lightly. They aren’t casual games. If you are sinking a lot of time in it, then it follows that you want to know things like who produced it, who made it, how is its community and other particularities of the world. Then I felt kind of cheated when I saw it, and wen I started learning on the web who was behind the game. Were some Koreans, who are atheists, Buddhists and Christians. And they were supporting the country with most Muslims of the world (Indonesia) and a country with 80% of the population being Christians (Phillipines).
Why a game like Tantra Global supports these countries and has servers on them instead of hosting its gaming servers in India? I don’t know.
I suffered the worst deception, when I saw how blatantly unpolished the game was on its graphical aspects (think of square shoes and hands), not only on its desecration of Hindu Dharma and Vedic and tantric traditions.
But I played to it because I wanted to know how far the abuse from nations lacking in tantric roots could go. I realized that any expectation of my part towards the game, as funny while being original and conforming to a minimum of tantric logic, was hopeless.
But I don’t think it as original nor cool anymore after having played 145 hours to it. I think the most important disservice this game makes to humanity at large and MMORPG gamers in particular, is that it rewrites the Hindu scriptures in a very blasphemous way. Shambala is the hometown of Lord Kalki in Hindu end-times stories. As such it should be considered something sacred and ultimately unfit for inclusion in a game where non-Hindus are conducting themselves violently with intelligent beings and beast alike, beyond of if they are Mara’s spawn or not.
I hated, in the first levels of the grinding process, to be killing little beasts as needed quests to advance my character. I disliked the inconsistency of, when talking with NPC mobs around Mandara Village at the beginning, I was told that in that village they worshiped Lord Vishnu, but the self-styled and impersonalism influenced, deity in Mandara’s temple looked more reminiscent of Lord Shiva as The Lord of The Beasts, instead.
I think that a game about tantra can benefit from tantric and Vedic touches with a more serious approach. Like instead of doing only a fort (without temples) for each one of the three gods, doing also temples where rookies in or even total outsiders of the Vedic and tantric traditions could become acquainted with factual RL peculiarities of these traditions.
But no. I haven’t seen a single deity of Lord Vishnu, nor a single Shiv Ling in the whole game. No banyan trees. No forest shrines. That is somewhat stupid, when Temples and Shrines are an intrinsic facet of these two philosophical, religious and cultural traditions.
The design is very limited. The quests sounded to me more filler than anything else. Very simple quests, purportedly “episodes” of the PC’s sojourn in Tantra Global, of getting an item from a mob and then deliver it to the quest-giver NPC. I must add that these quests are nothing memorable that one must know to make any sense of Tantra Global’s universe. Besides, this characteristic is very undesirable and dated: having everyone doing the same quests and keeping the grinding process totally disconnected from a gaming experience that integrates the leveling up of PCs with a certain in-game continuity and more socially oriented gameplay.
What else? Oh yes, the combat system also sucked. It is point and click and while fighting one can’t move around. Basically because the control interface of Tantra Global is so limited. There aren’t attacks that rely in a stylish way of controlling one’s PC.
To attack one must click on the mob and then the PC approaches the mob and starts executing its (monotonous) default attack. The only way of putting some style in this extremely bored combat system is with the help of special attacks and spells that are unlocked from a skill tree that is based in prana points. These prana points increase with each hit from the PC against a mob. When the player gets 100 percent of prana points she/he advances a level.
As other annoying defects I must point:
The loading times when traveling from a realm to another. One must wait watching a load screen showing some concept art of the game. Funny that in one of these loading screens a stray human hair found its place.
The lack of freedom to travel by the game’s realms at will. One has to walk by the predetermined paths. One can’t skip these climbing and going over hills and such.
The typos and grammatical errors in the hud and in the quests’ texts.
The incapacity of changing one’s password in the “My Account” section of Tantra Global’s web site. The only way to do it is filling a GM (game master) complaint and waiting, waiting and then waiting even a little more.
I let the worst part for the ending of this review: did you know that HanbitSoft (Tantra Global’s developer) was the Korean distributor for the PC RTS StarCraft?
A great idea for a MMORPG down the drain.
