Shadow of the Colossus it ain't.
After a while, like with all MMOs, you try talking to all the curiously static NPCs , Though relatively well-scripted and characterful for this brand of MMO, they still aren't going to provide more than a passing interest - and they're most certainly not up to the level of World of Warcraft's or EverQuest II's. Most of them can't communicate about quests unless you reach a certain "Kyu", a subsection of Dan, the game's levelling system. After much searching I found one, surely not called Grand Ornamenteer Wang, who recommended I abandon all the principles of Nintendogs and just go and "beat up on some prairie dogs".

Duly wandering out of the fortified city area, your ninja correspondent duly went and beat up on some "wolf pups" - the prairie dogs must have scarpered when they heard of my unreasoning loathing of Meer cats. Luckily the combat seemed straightforward; otherwise we would have been truly lost. Once you've gone into your inventory, equipped some suitably large weapon and hit the combat mode button (to protect you from being attacked in cities you can go non-com), you can kill most equal-level enemies in two or three blows. If you die, you can simply respawn where you died thirty seconds down the line or return to the nearest city. If injured, you can meditate for a bit and you're right as rain. It's a recipe for grinding and we ground our first level out in a couple of hours of Canine Genocide. Hmm, good name for a band.

Having ground puppy flesh for a goodly period of time, we returned to town to sell all the unusable crap we'd accumulated, take up our first quests and level up. Let's explain the character system. There are three characteristics, strength (how much you carry, your health, how hard you hit), dexterity (your defence and speed of attack) and intelligence (which governs your Chi). There's also an Internal Injury characteristic, which lowers your ability points, though the game doesn't explain how you get injured or how you heal yourself afterwards.

Catch the numbers before they escape!
As you level your Kyu, you are given points to increase your characteristics. We were too low-level to make effective use of Chi and we didn't have any books to learn new moves to use our Chi, so we poured our new found experience points into increasing our strength and dexterity, which increase very rapidly even in the first few Kyu. Like in many foreign RPGS, lower level characters in hero gold will have no chance against higher level opponents if PVP is planned.