♫ My Little Pony ♫
A flashy explosion of lights, glitter, rainbows, and sparkles spread across the screen of the PonyPad before the main menu appeared showing that pink cloud-like logo from the front of the box. In the background behind the main menu, a multitude of ponies were frolicking in a beautiful meadow. I used the controller to hit the Next button.
A rainbow-colored progress bar appeared on the screen as the PonyPad started downloading a backlog of patches. A wall of text appeared, detailing the changes. I read through a small number of the alterations while waiting for the download to finish.
Balance Changes:
-Lyra Heartstrings has been hit with the nerf bat. Her ability to capture ponies that she suspects are humans, and lock them up in her basement, has been dramatically reduced.
-Queen Novo has official outlawed dynamite fishing near Mount Ares. Violators will be pursued by her royal guards.
-Earth pony strength has been slightly buffed.
-Manticores can no longer be kited out of the Everfree and into Ponyville.
New Features:
-The Great and Powerful Trixie will now put on magic shows in Canterlot’s main plaza.
-Lord Tirek can now be fought in the fields outside of Ponyville as a raid boss. Visit Season 4 centric shards for details.
General Bugfixes:
-Fixed the issue that would cause Twilight Sparkle to go on a homicidal killing spree if a player accidentally or deliberately destroys a friendship report before it can be sent to Celestia. Warning: She can still go nuts for other reasons. We’re investigating the cause.
-Tricking Sweetie Belle into believing that she’s actually a robot will no longer cause her to get stuck in a T-pose.
-Fixed the bug that would cause the moon to crash into the planet if Princess Luna sneezes while raising or lowering it.
-Rainbow Dash will no longer clip through walls when flying at Sonic Rainboom speeds.
-Fixed the bug that would allow players to trick Shining Armor into pimping out his wife. But he’s still open to herding on relevant shards.
-Asking Prince Blueblood what his IQ is will no longer cause a divide by zero error that crashes the shard.
-Foals that are on fire will now stop drop and roll.
Emigration Related Bugfixes:
-Emigrated players with the body of a hippogriff will no longer feel the uncontrollable urge to balance a ball on their nose when in seapony form. They should also no longer feel the urge to beg for fish from passing boats.
-Emigrated players should no longer be able to smell the number four or taste the color purple. The synesthesia has finally been fixed.
-Fixed an issue that would cause emigrated lawyers to have bouts of explosive diarrhea whenever the EULA is updated. We’re still trying to fix the projectile vomiting.
-New Issue: Some emigrated players have reported that they can no longer comprehend the empirical concept of a burrito. CelestAI is investigating.
Those were just a small number of the highlights. Some of these fixes were strange to say the least. That fix about the foals must have come too late for that orphanage that Howard accidentally destroyed.
Once the patches were finished installing, I clicked the Create Account button. Since it was an online game, I first had to create a username and password as well as provide some personal details. Typical things like name and date of birth.
The next screen was a little odd. It featured a personality test. I went through the questions one by one. What is your favorite color? Blue. Do you prefer muffins or cupcakes? Muffins! Do you believe in love at first sight? No. In one word, how would you describe yourself? Laundromat. If you had an alter ego, who would it be? Batman! If there was a riot in your neighborhood, what would you do? Join in on the party. It went on for another 20 questions before I reached the end.
I clicked to the next page. The screen changed to a character creator.
Select Your Species
Earth Pony: They have the greatest physical strength and stamina of the three tribes, but they are magically the weakest. They possess the ability to accelerate the growth of plants with their innate magic.
Unicorn: The most magically gifted of the three tribes, but physically the weakest. Able to learn spells that they can cast through their horn. They are intellectuals and masters of the mystical arts.
Pegasus: The fastest of the three tribes, they strike a balance between magic and athletics. Able to fly, walk on clouds, and control the weather. They are freedom incarnate.
Thestral: Bat Ponies! Able to fly like a pegasus, but possessing the wings of a bat. They’re weather magic is weaker, but they’re naturally nocturnal and can use echolocation. Starting city is set to Hollow Shades. Requires Pre-Order code or Children of the Night DLC. Click to Purchase.
Yak: Originating in the far north, yaks have insanely high strength, but low intelligence and grammar skills (voice chat filter will be applied). Yak smash! Starting city is set to Yakyakistan. Requires Frozen North DLC. Click to Purchase.
Changeling: Love stealing bug ponies that come from somewhere deep in the Badlands. They can shapeshift into any living creature and they’re able to fly and cast spells, but not as well as a pegasus or a unicorn. Starting city is set to the Changeling Hive. Requires Heart of the Swarm DLC. Click to Purchase.
Hippogriff: Coming from Mount Ares, they call Queen Novo their leader. They have very basic shapeshifting that allows them to fly in Hippogriff form, or swim through the seas as a Seapony. Starting city is set to Seaquestria. Requires Pearl of the Sea DLC. Click to Purchase.
Zebra: Slightly weaker than earth ponies, but masters of the ancient art of alchemy. Starting city is set to Roan. Requires Zebrican Adventures DLC. Click to Purchase.
Crystal Pony: Like an earth pony, but more sparkly. They can grow crystals just like plants. Starting city is set to the Crystal Empire. Requires Crystal Empire DLC. Click to Purchase.
Griffon: Inhabitants of… ugh, my heart’s not in this anymore. Look, Hasbro forced us to nickel and dime you with all these DLCs. I feel like doing this has sucked out a piece of my soul. All you need to know is that griffons are cat-birds. You know the drill. Starting city is set to Griffonstone. Requires the Give Us More Money Dweebs DLC. Click to Purchase. Just borrow your parent’s credit card. I’m sure they won’t even notice the charges.
Next to each description was a default rendering of each type of pony or creature. I recognized the first three types from the picture on the front of the box. Only the last seven choices were something that I hadn’t seen before. The odd black bug pony certainly stood out from the other options in terms of visual style.
I rolled my eyes at the fact that most choices were locked away behind paid DLC. Somethings never change. It had been more than two years since this game was first released. Those other species must have been made playable in the time since then. That description of the griffon sounded odd. It was like the game developer that wrote it had lost the will to live.
The changeling option sounded tempting I will admit, especially since I wanted to treat this as a stealth game. They even sounded a little overpowered compared to the other options. But in the end, I decided that I had standards. There was no way in hell that I was going to fork over more cash for a game that I had already paid for. That limited my options to the first three choices.
After thinking about it, I dismissed the pegasus tribe from my mind. The extra agility sounded useful, but the ability to fly seemed too much like cheating. I anticipated that I would get into chases with town guards, and being able to just fly away from trouble would make things too easy for me.
A unicorn character was tempting. Invisibility spells and lock picking spells could be useful, assuming such things existed in the game. But being the physically weakest tribe sounded like it would be a liability.
That really only left the earth pony tribe. While I didn’t care at all about the plant magic (who would care about that?), the strength and athleticism sounded perfect for me. With my mind made up, I clicked the icon for the Earth Pony. The screen changed again.
Select Your Gender
Stallion ♂
Mare ♀
The screen showed me an example of an earth pony stallion and an earth pony mare. I noticed that the most obvious difference between the two was the fact that the stallion had a square jaw while the mare had a rounded one. I assumed that would be the main method for telling the genders apart with only a quick glance.
Thinking it over, I considered the idea of selecting the mare option. I had created female avatars in other MMORPGs before. The logic was straight forward. If the third-person camera is going to force you to stare at the rear of your character for 600+ hours, then it may as well be a shapely rear, right? But after further consideration, I realized that argument didn’t really work for quadrupedal pony characters. Huh… why did I suddenly have the strangest sensation that I would someday suffer karmic punishment for making that sexist joke?
Eh, whatever… Stallion it is!
Another click and the screen changed again. This time, an earth pony stallion appeared standing in a grassy field. There were a large number of sliders bars and color options on the right side of the screen. Guess it was time to customize my pony’s appearance.
The default color scheme was some sort of eye-watering neon colored abomination that stood out like a sore thumb. That would not be good for a stealthy playstyle. Clicking the coat color opened a color wheel so I could pick a different one. I changed the coat color to a muted dark grey so I could blend in with shadows better. I set the mane color to a very dark green with a small number of light brown highlights for contrast. The eye color was changed to a deep purple.
With my pony’s colors picked out, I turned my focus to the slider bars. They gave the option to tweak a multitude of things such as height, width, and facial features. One slider bar in particular immediately grabbed my attention.
Testicle size and penis size? What the hell! Why is that even an option in a game like this? The ESRB rating of E for Everyone, must include perverts these days. Seized by a morbid curiosity, I cranked the slider bar to its maximum allowed setting…
My eyes! They burn!
I grabbed the slider bar and yanked it back to its default starting value. Repress! Repress the memory! Ahhh… there we go. It can’t hurt me anymore. The memory is gone now.
I ended up slightly tweaking a few of the sliders for facial features. Nothing noteworthy. I just knew that a lot of players would get lazy and use the default face so I wanted to set myself apart from that and not look like a weird clone.
The height slider for my pony demanded closer attention. Being shorter than usual would make it easier to hide. I lowered my pony’s height to a few points below average.
For the finishing touch, I selected a small greasy looking pompadour mane style that in a vague way made my character look like a pony version of Elvis Presley.
I rotated the camera around my pony a few times to get a good look at him from all angles. My pony blinked back at me. He breathed in and out in his default animation. Satisfied, I clicked the Create Pony button.
The screen reverted back to before the character creation page. Like any MMORPG it gave me the option to play as my new character or to create an alt. Weird, it never gave me the option to name my character.
It was time to actually get into the game. I selected the pony that I had just made and hit Play.