Therian Saga is an interesting take on idle games. I don't mind waiting for tasks to complete, but Therian Saga takes the idea of Sandbox to a whole new level -- and this isn't necessarily a good thing.

I appreciate a good bit of freedom in games, I honestly do. The issue is, Therian Saga is 1) not translated THAT greatly and 2) impactless.

The lack of visual animations means that text is going to be your biggest helper in envisioning the world of Therian Saga. Since the game isn't translated too well, lots of things are fumbled and sometimes plot points are missed. For example, in the tutorial island it extrapolates that it's a happy, fun island full of people. When you get on the boat to leave, they suddenly make you swallow some kind of elixir to cure you from your "disease" so you can leave the "contaminated island." Huh???

The lack of direction is also a problem. You're greeted with TONS of skills and tasks (Runescape-esque) such as Masonry, stonecutting, botany, and other things. Unfortunately, you're not told what these skills can do for you as a player. There's a whole questline towards getting a pickaxe, but just learning how to mine your first few ores is going to take upwards of an hour. What's the point of it? What can you do with these ores? What is marl, and what can I do with it (other than turn it in for quests)? The way the game is set up, there needs to be more of an initial shove with players getting ideas on WHAT they want to do before they're unleashed on this big open world. There's a freaking skill for travelling for god's sake, WHAT IN THE HELL DOES LEVELLING UP TRAVELLING DO? It never tells you! There's skill checks for crafting, but you're not told what the skillchecks are until you've found the items! So I could essentially get my stonecutting up to level 99 and still have no freaking idea what the hell stonecutting does for me UNTIL I FIND SAID USE. That's awful! Even Runescape had guides which told you what you unlocked at which levels, which incentivized progressing in skill trees!

The UI is also wonky, but I'm gonna make this really short: The game defaults to windowed-fullscreen. In this mode, all the text is so uncomfortably tiny that I have to strain my eyes to read the text. In a game where reading is literally the majority of your worldbuilding, that's a fatal flaw. There's an option to not-scale the UI to your screen size, but that breaks way too many menus to use. It makes buttons go off-screen, some buttons shrink to the size of an ant, and the resolution just looks ugly at that point.

It really is unfortunate. I like the concept, but I just don't like the execution of Therian Saga. It might be more apt for players who don't mind slogging through the initial few hours, but trust me: it really is a grind to work through. I really liked the game for the first half hour, but after that I just couldn't stand it. I'd just queue up tasks for up to an hour in the future, leave and come back for 5 minutes just to get the next set of tasks queue'd. I was so confused and unguided during the whole ordeal I just said "♥♥♥♥ it," wrote this review, and decided to call it quits.

Therian Saga is a queue-and-leave idle game, with a rich array of classic MMO RPG design elements (but lacking any actual, meaningful MMO interactions). Unfortunately, a selection of poor design choices and a ratnest of minor bugs frustrated me to the point that I ended up just giving up on the game.

Therian Saga offers open world exploration, meaningful stats and use-it-to-develop-it stat growth, plenty of crafting skills to learn and places to explore, the occasional bit of active dungeon exploration, and more. There's a lot to appreciate here, as an idle-RPG gamer, if you get over the game's bugs, instability (random crashing is common), weaker design elements, poor questing presentation, the fact that dialogue interactions often perma-glitch (leaving you with tasks you paid the NPC not being completed by them, and unable to be restarted), inability to queue things past sleeping, various minor UI issues (though the graphical presentation is, as screenshots indicate, rather appealing overall), and just a wide array of little issues that quickly make the game an exasperation.

Given the age of the game (it lists a launch date of 2012), it's clear that more focus was put on expanding content than on polishing up presentation. If you end up getting into the game, this'll likely mostly be a good thing. Unfortunately, after days of play, I found the frustrations were the primary experience I ended up taking away from my game time, with the game's charms being buried underneath its issues.
Note also that the game's adherence to classic MMO RPG designs means there is- from what I saw- not a single thing new or distinct to be offered here. This is purely a game for those who want classic, by-the-book RPG gameplay that they can just load up maybe three times a day to queue up tasks to automatically develop a character for them.
Again, this is, despite its flaws, an excellent example of the style and, if that's something you've been deeply craving then, absolutely, give this a look. Unfortunately, until the developers polish it up some, I can't recommend the game to any other idle or RPG gamers (and certainly not to gamers not invested in either genre), as the abstract grind of a game like this is really only appealing when you can mindlessly relax to it, and not have to constantly babysit poor design choices and a lack of care to game fixes.

In short: If a queue-it-and-leave RPG is the absolute best thing you've ever heard of, then you'll likely want to give the game a go.
Otherwise, check back in a few more years and see if the developer has given attention to the many shortcomings in game polish and gameplay flow.

I play in my browser, therefore it shows 0 hours played.

If you are interested in trying out, here are the key points:

1) Progression is entirely based on perpetually increasing numeric skill stats. There are no overaching stories or epic pvp combat. You can pick up all skills on one character like in wurm or eve. You improve stats by doing related activities repeatedly. There exist many fetch quests. UI is mostly functional. Every panels have fixed locations and are unresizable. Text is tiny making quests even more boring.

2) It requires silverlight and thus IE 11 or lower to run because silverlight is not supported in any up-to-date browsers, not even Edge. It might expose you to unknown and never-patched security issues. Do not play if you dont have a decent anti-virus software and know how to tweak your IE security settings to safeguard your computer.

3) BOTH energy and timer are applied with extreme prejudice. For the most parts you need to perform a sleep action which takes over 2 hours to completely recove energy or spend real money. You can also spend real money to skip most timers, mobile style.

This is how bad the timers are: In runescape, you click on a tin node, your avatar does some quirky animation and you get tin within a few seconds. In Therian Saga you click on a tin node -> you wait for the client to communicate with the server (takes a few seconds) for the interaction panel to show up so you can select the amount of attempts you want to make and to authorize the action -> you wait for the client to communicate with the server (takes a few seconds) -> finally you wait exactly 13 minutes 53 seconds for each mining attempts to complete, yielding you 1-3 units of tin, animation free. And that's tin, the absolutely lowest tier resource. Eventually you'd encouter activites that take so long to complete that the developers break it down to multiple actions that build up a progress bar, so you can complete like 1-2% for every 24 hours dumped on it. You'll find players with dozens of alts because that's the only way to make it actively engaging. 99% of the times. it is Runescape with timers. Runescape is cheaper because it demands less of your time for the same deal. Play runescape instead.

4) About 1% of the times, when you happen to see the crafting interface, it becomes mildly interesting. Each activities (crafting included) has a few stat checks you must overcome such as terrain difficulty, thermal resistance, etc. Each crafting ingredients has an assortment of fancifully named stats such as lightness, density, calming, etc. Each recipes makes use of some of those stats to determine the stats of the final items so different ingredients have different strength. Generally, to reach a specific amount of stat, easier-to-obtain ingredients are more difficult to work with. Hence in crafting you must balance between the difficulty of the crafting action (limited by your avatar skill), the stat goal of item to be crafted (set by the activities it is used for) and the time needed to craft it (set by the type of ingredients you use and the time needed to collect said ingredients) If you are a budding designer or want to try something different, by all means check out. Note that they apply this golden formula to every crafting skills. There are many of them but they are essentially the same with zero varieties.

5) You might have noticed that I dont use the word "game" anywhere else in this review.

Advertised as an MMORPG when it's more of a clicker with time management and light RPG elements set in an online world. This means that waiting takes up most of the gameplay, which in itself would be fine if the timers weren't so darn long.

None of the above would be this big of an issue if the game was engaging to play, which to me it is not.

It's worth trying since it's something new...
But that's all.

Currently this game has very little "RPG elements", only skills...and the depth of the skills is nonexistant.
You extract clay at level 1, marl at 2 slate at 3...
You can skill up to ~5 levels above the requirement by just doing it...
Then you get to level 8 or so doing slate and need to do something else...so you look it up on wiki.
Then you get to level 12 and need to find something else to do to level...so you look it up on wiki.
Ad infinum.

Actual gameplay is walking across the map and clicking "extract rock" or "cut tree" or whatever button for whatever task. Some skills are secondary and require inputs from previous skills, which you're highly discouraged in getting all the skills because the game was designed on requiring multiple people for multiple trades...so you just sell your ♥♥♥♥ to an NPC and give up there.

Being basically FORCED to look up EVERYTHING on wiki to know what to do is seriously irritating, and the gameplay is "click map, queue, wait 6 hours" and is some of the most boring stuff i've ever experienced in an "RPG".

There are no random encounters at all, combat is strictly an "opt in skill" where you go click "attack" on a monster until it dies or you die and you train your "beat monster with stick" skill, and "get hit with stick" skill in the same, mundane boring ways as you do everything else in the game.

3/10-A mind numbingly boring simulation game with shallow "skills" and no character levels/attributes/classes.

This game has tons of potential. Your skills improve when you use or train them, which I love. It's strategy/making choices, not an arcade game, which I love. I truly WANT to play this game. However, the game simply won't let me. There is a timer on everything. I had to wait 10 seconds to pick up a freaking mushroom. Many of the timers are well into minutes. You can queue a bunch of actions and come back in a few hours after the game finished playing with itself. But, I want an actual interactive experience. I don't want to program a game to play for me in the background. Especially since by the time you come back, you've completely forgotten what you were doing and what you have done.

I really liked the intro part and this style of game!
Things were happening and progressing along nicely at first.
But the second you're off the starting island the tempo and quality really dips.
It takes forever to do anything, and it's more about setting up actions and just sitting around for 5 hours until things are done.
Then, you do it all again and wait another 5 hours.

'boring', 'menial', 'tedious', 'frustrating', 'overly complicated' - there's many other words similar to these that I would use to describe this game...

apparently the in-game community is helpful etc, but the game itself is certainly not friendly to anyone wanting to start/try out this game, for the most part, i get the impression the developers of this game just wanted to make players waste their time pointlessly - yes, it seems most actions were timed to be roughly the same as real-life (though travelling between locations is reduced to a percentage of the actual time required to walk the distance), but what you find out about this game is that a simple task may require as many as 20 movement trips, 15 separate timed tasks for individual components etc etc... a basic 'newbie' quest may take as long as 5-6 hours because you have to wait for the various tasks to complete... i'm not even going to bother considering how long it takes to complete the tasks & quests just after the newbie quests, there's no reason to do so...

my suggestion is that if you like incredibly time-consuming, total menial/tedious and a complete lack of reward vs the time/effort required, this game is for you... for those that aren't into that sort of punishment game, i do suggest other less tedious & menial games like tetris (which realistically, is more exciting than this game being written/reviewed at the moment...)

There is barely any "compelling storytelling", and I doubt it has "massive mathematical set of rules". It has nothing to do with MUDs, strategy games, and barely with tt RPGs.

This is a simple but broad game with an impressively large map that seems barren in reality. Its characters (at least around the beginning) were piss poor. The writing doesn't grab, and there is in fact not much of it.

To demystify how some people talk about this game:
It is a very basic idle game.

It is really just an old-school browser multiplayer game that does little to stand out. You queue up actions that raise stats, resources, and depletes energy (which you regain for 8 hours of queued up sleep), then you log off and come back next day to queue up some more.
This is alright. It's not even so bad, since you have plenty more mechanics that makes it feel like it's a bit more involved. Even a combat-system. But it's all so bland. It's as bland as all the player characters made with ridiculously worthless character creator. There are way better idle games, even multiplayer ones. There are old-school browser games that are way more engaging and don't pretend they aren't what they are.

This is worthless to me, which the insulting advertisement completely neglected to describe. It is alright, and I am sure there are plenty of people who are looking for a game designed to make you spend money to make time number go down, so their points number go up. But that's all there can be found.

I'm very disapponted in this game. In it's core it's your basic "wait for everything to complete" Facebook/mobile game. You don't want to? Oh, of course, you can just pay real money to comlete it in instantly in true p2w fashion. Sure the world, art and story are nice, however at this point it's just a pretty wraping around a shady model. Whatever skill-based or complex feeling they're trying to sell you on is instanly lost when all there is to it is queing up few hours for leveling a skill, then some time for travelling, doing a quest, healing etc.

Don't let the "free to play" tag fool you either, you're gonna have a bad time if you don't intend to spend anything.