Aura Kingdom
About the game
Aura Kingdom is a free-to-play, anime-styled MMORPG from Taiwanese studio X-Legend. It takes place in Azuria, a world on the edge of collapse, and casts you as an Envoy of Gaia — one of the chosen few the goddess lends part of her power to in order to hold back what's coming. The premise is as classic as the genre gets, but what the game does with it isn't: you don't level up alone here, you level up with company.
The Eidolons are the game
The system that gives Aura Kingdom its identity is the Eidolon: a companion spirit that fights at your side and, unlike the disposable pet most MMORPGs hand you, has its own personality, voice and dialogue. You summon them, level them, gear them and — the strangest part — they remember what the two of you did together: the bosses you took down, the zones you walked, the hours you spent side by side. That relationship pays out in mechanical bonuses, sure, but mostly in the feeling that the world isn't as empty as its population suggests. It's why players drift back years later, and it's also the system most of the monetization is built around.
Combat sits halfway between tab-target and action: you click to attack, but you can move to dodge and chain combos between your own skills and your Eidolon's. There are sixteen classes, each tied to a weapon and refined afterwards through a talent path that lets you nudge your role without rerolling. Away from the fighting, the game opens up more than you'd expect from a free-to-play of its generation: fishing, crafting, mounts, pets, housing and world events soak up as many hours as the dungeons do.
Where it stands today: alive, but small
The game is still running, though it changed hands: it left the Aeria Games/gamigo catalogue at the end of 2022, and since February 2023 X-Legend publishes and operates it directly, with its own client and a Western version in English, German, French and Spanish. Development isn't dead either: patches keep landing every two or three weeks, with fixes, seasonal events and a slow trickle of new content. One useful warning if you want to check for yourself: the news block on the official site runs on a template shared with the studio's other games, and shows entries and dates that have nothing to do with this one.
What does need saying out loud is that the Western population is low. It isn't a dead game, but you won't find a packed capital at any hour of the day: general chat moves slowly and a good chunk of the veteran community has decamped to private servers. Regionally, Taiwan and Japan are still healthy, while the mainland China servers shut down in 2022 and the Hong Kong and Macau ones in 2024. The studio also put out Aura Kingdom - Impact, a standalone relaunch on Steam that doesn't replace this game and opened with more noise than staying power.
What you pay for, and what you don't
It's pure free-to-play: no box price, no mandatory subscription, and all the monetization now runs through X-Legend's own account portal rather than Steam. The cash shop mixes the harmless with the consequential: outfits, mounts, pets and inventory expansions on one side, hard gacha on the other — boxes, a spin wheel and a premium reward table with published drop rates. The real monetized core is, once again, the Eidolons: acquiring and evolving the rare companions is a matter of months of free play or a credit card. There's also a loyalty currency you accumulate just by playing, which works as a pressure valve. The community verdict has been consistent for years and it's a fair summary: this is pay-to-win with a reachable ceiling — a free player does get to high-end gear, just far more slowly and leaning heavily on events.
Who it's for (and who it isn't)
Aura Kingdom is for anyone after a light, colourful, low-commitment MMORPG — one with characters who actually talk to you, a companion who genuinely sticks around, and plenty to do that isn't killing monsters. It's a 2013 game and it shows: the world is carved into zones, a lot of quests are fetch quests, and progression is enormously long, held together by dailies. If you're coming from a modern MMORPG, the first hour will feel dated; if what you want is a large community and a busy competitive endgame, this isn't it. But if you're after a pleasant world to spend time in, built on a companion system nobody else has quite copied, it still has something to offer — with the real price tag laid out in the open.