Memories of Maplestory

Maplestory as a childhood experience versus the way it is now are two entirely different games that happen to share the same name my favorite town in maplestory would have had to be between like ellinia for victoria island, ludibrium for ossyria, I liked friendstory, I liked florina beach as an alternate training ground and I miss it I think gold beach sucks in comparison.

my favorite character questline would've had to have been shade/eunwol and my favorite dungeon area questline would've been like omega sector and kerning tower pre revamps i like the music in maplestory because a lot of it is good you can tell that maplestory was a very large influence on the way i draw characters and things because i used to just draw the sprite characters for years i liked when jesters were still around as a training ground because their drop tables weren't adjusted so they'd still drop weird equipment that wasn't seen in years

I played maplestory when my cousin introduced me to it (same one with the emerald) and then I kinda lost interest because I had like a resistance mecha and then I saw like tempest artwork of luminous or angelic buster and went like "yoooo" because i had no context to what was going on but i saw this like dark mysterious guy and a magical girl and then I actively kept up with maplestory and the heroes and I had notes and stuff because it filled my young child brain with whimsy. Everyone in my family kind of hated it because I hogged the desktop. my favorite thing about maplestory was like the various mishmashes of genres where it was like you could be in a medieval mushroom town rescuing like mushroom princess peach and show up wearing a tshirt and be like a light paladin with your weapon of choice being an umbrella i kinda wish ff14 also had some silly joke weapons too while i was playing through it but like, the moogle ones are pretty good

there was a pretty big social aspect to it too like party quests and marketplaces and shout chat but these days its more of a quiet affair where most social interaction happens outside of the game usually on discord. i was more of a solo player even at the start... the level curve has been jacked so many times that I'm kind of still in shock that level 300 is the cap now. back in my day we all thought 250 was gonna be it, there was so much drama behind it, like one guy botted his way to the top, the other guy turned out to be a huge jerk behind the scenes. idk. its been years since i thought of them.

i was also in the bannedstory era where i would see like maplestory amvs and sprite fights. maple kombat ruled. the daily grind aspect of maplestory was not great because like to support a main you basically needed to have like every job at the time also leveled so you could get like "link skills" and a level legion that would benefit your main more which i thought all mmos did so when i started ff14 i made 8 alts for the 8 classes available. also like i kind of got sick of it because it was more like a job than a fun thing and having a level 200+ something doesn't really match up anymore when there's a ton of burning events created for a person to literally just speedrun the entire world of maplestory in a streamlined experience where like there was an entirely different game meant to be like explored and now every class has a flashy jump skill hop teleport thing that trivializes the exploring aspect. note: this is very funny to say. I sucked at jump quests.

No one actively played maplestory for it's story aside from like a handful of people like me and the story was all over the place because questlines were scattered and you'd get stuff from years ago still in the game and the lore kept getting like slapdash retconned like no one could tell the actual date of the heroes being unfrozen because it kept getting contradicted until revamps. The art style also got a new director which is fine and all until they're like still next to the older artwork on the select screen looking jarringly out of place.

This is also funny because like if you ever glance at maplestory design and scroll through the hairstyles or outfits the design philosophy of maplestory has always been constantly shifting.

Back in my day like there were clear buildups to a larger force of stories what with zero being like basically a god/transcendent and pantheon being a parallel dimension with the same set of rules but now there's like the cosmic laws of casualty and balance and like.... idk man, I liked the silly mushrooms more, old maplestory plot was kind of like "woah, balrog. what's the black mage planning?" and then turns out the black mage's plan is like idk make a guy to defeat me so they can defeat like the higher tier gods since there's multiple tiers of deities .

I used to like when town's had unique town exclusive storylines but most of them got removed or streamlined for the sake of making the experience just a grindfest and then it's like most NPCs just stand around endlessly with no reason to be there because their fetch quest stuff got taken out or they'd be part of a chain that no longer exists and the best you get is them being flavor text now. Like what's the point of having all these multiple classes within the story all being like parts of their own narratives and stories only to change the story during some of the later acts so that your player character is like the ultimate super guy of everything and everyone else is like secondary even the legendary heroes who helped seal the black mage away years ago unless you play as the legendary hero.

Eh, typical RPG fare to kill gods. new maple seems to have very disgruntled players especially when like the rigged stats gambling aspect showed that nexon was purposefully making the stats worse than they were actually advertised or something. i don't think i've ever seen a game that hates the audience it's gathered because korean maplestory which is the OG literally deleted their free to play server (reboot) to appease its paying gambling whale types and global maplestory (the english one that absorbed the european one as well) runs on global events and spaghetti code and like it would lose a massive chunk of its audience if reboot exploded

This is damien. He deserved better. when i stopped playing maplestory i switched over to playing other mmos like ff14 and latale latale is like tall maplestory I didn't keep up with it long enough past like the aquarium level because I got bored but I liked that I could buy fashion items in regular stores with regular currency instead of maplestory being like "you had to be at this login event like 5 years ago or something."

a lot of maplestory is kind of like in a paradoxical situation for me because the game has changed so much over the decade that i've been playing it that the gameplay loop has remained the same but the way the game plays and functions is entirely different than what i thought it would be and a lot of the new stuff regarding the anima dimension with like pantheon and darmoor and things didn't really hold my interest as much as like finally defeating the black mage and then he turned around and went "jk, there's a bigger evil guy"

kinda hate that but that's the nature of MMOs to be constantly expanding and you can't really "end a story" because then people go "well, now what" and you either go upwards or you downscale.

nexon does not like when you play or mention the elephant in the room and like most of them miss the point because they don't have like the exact maplestory i want to play, the one that's lodged in my memories but also entirely evaporated because of how they keep revamping characters in the actual game and adjusting all their things like their skills and voices and stories if they had them and the exp rate isn't the same. so really the only thing i actively keep up with maplestory now is the music and making characters in simulators to draw them.

I tried playing maplestory M since that's literally just like the entire game ported to mobile and it is an autobattler and like at that point just pull up a youtube album because that's like the same amount of value you get out of it why would i play a game that has no interest in me playing it and like sure they have automatic party quest things but everyone just uses the auto battler literally feels like a world full of bots

maplestory 2 was pretty brief though like i only logged into it a few times and then it was gone i'm pretty sure it got me into my bard nonsense for ff14 where i'd transcribe songs by ear instead of just using a midi player like everyone else ever what did i like about maplestory 2 there was fishing that was pretty good this single screenshot is the only evidence i have of playing maplestory 2 and it's just the heads of my characters

I still like maplestory deep down but if I lived in the past again I probably wouldn't have played it as much as I did when I was a child.

I'd like to link to The Story of Maple as a way to read through the story without needing to play maplestory. MapleStory Worlds just came out and they have a recreation of OSMS and in spite of all my entire thing above I just went ahead and made an account anyways, proving the mushroom game owns my soul.