About 3 years ago a Japanese developer Wizet developed a game called Maple Story. Maple Story featured a unique setup for the role playing folks among us. It was 2D *gasps*! Maple Story plays a lot like Mario Brothers, but instead of going through levels, you're simply leveling. This is where the big difference from a game such as Mario Brothers comes into play. In Mario Brothers there is a purpose, a goal. However; Maple Story largely lacks substance and as a result reduces itself to mindless matter only worthy of mindless gamers. Let's start out with your typical Maple Story experience. You'll wake up one day, and find yourself yearning to play another online RPG. But lately those RPG's have been tagging some nasty pay to play fees on their license with the exception of Anet's recent big seller, Guild Wars. You truck on over to the computer and after visiting GameFaqs, see that Maple Story is at the top of the list in the message board categories. You do some research, and find its an RPG. You visit www.mapleglobal.com and learn that the game is FREE! You heard me right folks, Maple Story is 100% free (or so you think). You register your name, and vitals, and hop right in after downloading and installing the game (courtesy of Wizet). You open up the game and are treated with a very nice music and colorful cartoon look. It should be noted that Maple Story is designed to run on the old beater computers still out there. After typing in your name and password you create a character, pick a unique name, and roll some dice. You're extremely limited to different hair styles, and faces you can get. In any event, your character plops in the world and away you go. Like most side scrollers you trek forward and move on through the game. While you're heading through the game, you'll encounter snails, little mushrooms and cute nature like objects. Obviously Wizet is targeting a younger crowd with this type of an enemy vs. the vampires or giant man eating brains. In any event, you'll notice you have your little experience bar, and your character levels up, etc. Well, the whole time you're going through the beginning, you're asking yourself, "what am I suppossed to be doing?" You'll be asking yourself this throughout the whole game, because quite frankly, nobody knows what you're suppossed to be doing. To further emphasize, Maple Story has no story ironically. You simply have a character, level him up, and explore new areas. Nowhere do you have a mission or objective. Now to some people, having a unique and interesting character online is a fun and enticing objective in its own. However; when the game offers 200 levels and it takes roughly 4-8 hours to level your character in the 40's, you can imagine what's going on. Leveling in this game is not an experience or a fun task, its a chore, which is certainly not acceptable in any game. Often players will say that they have to go spend some time leveling, like it's a job. This is where Maple Story becomes addictive, in a scary way. You can seriously lose time in Maple Story. People spend hours upon hours and will neglect friends, homework, their job, and family to try to level or obtain an item. This is all at your expense. So while the game is technically free, it still consumes your time, and energy, all of which is translated into money. Finally when you hit level 50 or what not, there is nothing to do but, go level again. And after you step back you truly ask yourself, "for what?" Apparently to go take on harder monsters. Wizet falls way short of having anything worth substance. Other things that keep you addicted in game are obviously your buddies (which you meet online), cute items that make your character look unique like surfboards, snowboards, etc., and the cash shop. The cash shop is a feature coming in late summer where users will be able to buy items to dress up their character (like hair dye coupons, haircuts, unique hats, etc.). This of course is where the real money comes in. If you don't want your character to look like a stiff with the standard selections you need to shell out some cash. And the true problem comes into play. People are going to pay to get those unique items, or attempt to 'power level - as many users call it' just to be better then someone else. There's no real objective. But the game consumes SO much time, that you never grow away from it. You become stuck at your screen. It's a lucrative and profitable business for Wizet. Because the leveling system takes so long to get anywhere, you'll find yourself buying 2x experience cards (offered at the cash shop) just to level faster, which does you nothing in the end. Wizet has people right where they want them. Hook them in, get them tired of slow leveling, then drop the cash shop with the experience cards and cool items to start making lots of money. Other than the addiction itself, the game offers an okay RPG experience. You have a few classes to choose from each of which have some sub classes. Only problem is cookie cutter builds. Don't allocate your stats right and people will laugh at you online telling you to remake your character. Bye bye 30-40 hours of work. So in the end, everyone that builds right has the same character anyway. Although there is a party feature nobody uses it. There is no experience bonus while in parties, and people seem to level faster on their own so its a worthless feature. Finally since this is a 2d scroller, we have CROWDED areas. People will often steal your kills (which comes at your expense of experience since all you're trying to do is level - and since it takes so long) and just ignore or curse back at you should you ask them to stop. This often provides for times where you'll yell at the screen in frustration. There is no players vs. player experience in game, so don't expect to dominate someone in an arena or dungeon. Instead you usually just play alone. The game might as well be single player, because you'll never really associate with people other than to: Trade items and gather meso (the game's currency), flaunt your items, or chat to friends briefly. Sometimes you wonder if the friends you meet online are really friends at all. When I decided to hang up my game, about 1/4 of my friends all asked, "can I have your items and mesos?" The community isn't really that hot. Most people are all angered about the crowded areas, and whine about their lack of wealth. It's obvious many younger players log on due to the misspelled words, terrible grammar, and overall lack of any formal decency or knowlege. In addition, like most online games, a lot of foul language and sexual/racist jokes are thrown around. Since Wizet went for a cartoon look, the graphics don't have to be anything out of this world, but they hold up quite nicely. It's very anime themed, as this game was developed in Japan. Cute little facial expressions are a must have for your character and you'll use them to 'kiss, smile, frown, or cry - among others.' In the end, the graphics hold up and are quite acceptable for people with lower end machines or today's modern power rigs. Sound is two faced in the game. While you'll hear the same music in the same locations over and over, its addictive (what else isn't in the game?). You'll find yourself humming the tunes while playing and laughing at the sounds a snail or mushroom makes when they die. After 200+ hours it becomes redundant but I found myself laughing quite a bit at various noises. While sound and graphics hold up, the requirements for this game are absolutely absurd. Huge amounts of time and patience are required to play the game. After a while, you will come to a realization that you're not doing anybody justice by playing. Other games such as Guild Wars or World of Warcraft do provide a story; but a character can be fully leveled in 20-100 hours, MUCH less the time required in Maple Story. My character ended at level 42 and it is quite obvious I logged over 300 hours with this game. In the end, I wasn't granted to a neat storyline or a multiplayer experience. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is designed to keep you logged on. If you've got to this point in the review you might be asking yourself, "Why did he quit the game? What caused him to pull away?" To leave you with a final though I'll run through my last final story and thus the final chapter in my Maple Story experience. ~~ Like every RPG you have your weapon. Mine was the Korean Fan and I was a bandit named Katana. I was quite proud of my little character and her Fan. However; the fan wasn't good enough, and I wanted to have everyone ooh and ahh it (all you seem to do in the end - look at my high level character with godly weapons). So I decided to try and upgrade it with weapon scrolls. Each scroll for the korean fan cost roughly 500,000 mesos. You need 7 to fully upgrade your fan. HOWEVER; those scrolls are all desiged to work 60% of the time. Therefore, you could waste all your money on scrolls and not get many to work. But wait!!! Then your fan's useless so you need to get a new one to try rescrolling. I blew my money on scrolls and 4/7 worked, which in the eyes of many players isn't THAT great. So I tried again, and more failed. Unless you have extremely high leveled characters it can take you around 1-2 hours just to get 500K. So I'd need to spend around 10-15 hours to get my money back, only to hope the new ones didn't fail. After I failed the 2nd time I hit that beautiful realization that everyone will hit eventually; "Why?" In closing, I would stay FAR away from this game. It's fun and addictive at first, but it's simply TOO addictive. You'll waste your time and life away by playing.
Maplestory can be explained in 1 word: GRINDFEST. The point in the game is to rapidly press ctrl against an enemy until it dies. Do this continuously until you lvl up. Once you lvl up, you can get new abilities,weapons, ... Read Full Review
MapleStory is a side-scrolling MMORPG game. It is not as impressive as the other popular main stream MMO's but at least it looks better then Runescape. At the beginning you start off as jobless pawn. You mainly train ... Read Full Review
--