Bless Unleashed is a free-to-play MMO from Round 9 Studio, and it recently landed on consoles. Since it’s free (like the recent Genshin Impact), I decided to give it a whirl. Why not, right?
But as I watched the download bar slowly advance, I was greeted with this image:
That’s so bad, right? I don’t know who decided that this should be the visual representation for this game, but I hate it. I hate it so much.
I actually don’t know why I’m so repulsed by this icon, other than the fact that this character’s face is a cross-eyed mess and the high-contrast red background looks really cheap. The font choice isn’t bad, though, nor is it positioned badly. It’s a professionally made image, for sure.
But I don’t know. It seems like there has to be better images to use for the ever-important game icon. I mean, the image I used at the top of this post (that horrifying fire creature) looks pretty awesome.
You want to know what’s even weirder about this? This is the image that was cropped to make the icon:
And that’s actually a cool image. I can see why they would have chosen it to make into an icon. The problem is that for some reason — maybe the resizing or how they chose to crop it — is just turns into an absolute garbage game icon. At some point in the process of resizing this image, they completely messed up her face. I keep looking at the character face in the full image and comparing it to the icon, and I don’t think they’re the same face at all.
I can’t bear to look at this icon for another second. Is there something wrong with me, or is there something wrong with this image? I can’t even tell anymore.
What I can say for certain is that I’m hoping Bless Unleashed scratches that MMO itch for convoluted gameplay systems and endless grinding. If it does those things well, I can try my best to ignore that icon in the future and hope it eventually gets changed. If the game experience ends up being not great, well, I’ve not really lost anything besides a little bit of my time — and, of course, the fact that I had to see that image, which I will never forgive Round 9 Studio for.
