Maestia has nice visuals, easy to use and fast combat system, quest system that does not force you to return to town every five minutes and awesome dungeon system. It will easily get you hooked as most of the features of the game are really good and once you see them you will want them in other games as well. Watch out though - the game is not perfect and you will find some common problems as you progress.
Maestia has a lot of interesting stuff going on so I felt that writing it all at once will be a little bit harsh on the reader. That is why I decided to split the review in two parts. This is the first part, it will include all there is to know about the Customization, Story, Quests, Skills and so on.
Customization: Character Creation
You start out by picking a class(Warrior, Mage, Ranger, Cleric) from one of two factions - Superion Guardians and Temple Knights. Each class/faction combination offers a couple of unique skills that will provide some Maestia gold to your character. This way a Cleric or any other class from the Superion Guardians will be slightly different from the same class character belonging to the Temple Knights and will be better suited for some game roles than others.
The factions are pretty different from what you would expect from a MMO - they are more of ideological factions rather than military or political ones. There certainly is a rivalry between them but they share the same goal within the game and even the same city. There is no faction lock once you create your first character so feel free to choose the faction that complements you best for the class you've chosen.
Maestia offers a simple yet powerful character customization tool. It is not as detailed as the ones in Aion or Perfect World but it is quite satisfying. I personally like that each character class has a unique body build and some features that will make it possible to pick all characters from a certain class out of a crowd. For example the rangers always have long hair and pointy ears while the mages have angelic wings. Still you are not stuck with the exact same body look as everyone else. You can modify both the height and the width of your character which would make his figure kind of unique while still bearing resemblance to the other characters from the same class.
Apart from the body characteristics you can also handpick the gender of your Maestia online gold, the face, the hairstyle and the color of your character's skin and hair. There are 16 different faces for each character/gender combination and 10 hairstyles per gender which are almost identical for each class. The base concept of the character customization seems outdated but it is done really good. It might not seem like it but those features really allow you to create a very distinct looking character.
