Is MAPLESTORY Worth Playing in 2021? 2021's Best Free Anime MMORPG?

Welcome back to another episode of "Is it worth playing?" A video series where we go through every MMORPG, good and bad in search for the best, and at times the worst games in the genre.

Now today we're taking a look at one of the longest-lasting Anime MMOs - a game that has withstood the test of time: MapleStory.
MapleStory was developed by Wizet and published by Nexon in South Korea in 2003. The game launched shortly after in North America in 2005, and has been one of Nexon's leading intellectual properties since, driving various spin-offs like MapleStory 2, MapleStory M and even the MapleStory Fest.

MapleStory is an incredibly fun game with some highly addicting mechanics that you won't find elsewhere. From its combat, to its graphical style, to its narrative. This is a high quality title I would advise not overlooking.

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[MMOByte]

Welcome back to another episode of "Is it worth playing" - today we're taking a look at one of the longest-lasting Anime MMOs: MapleStory. This a very unique type of MMO, as it's one of the few side-scrolling action titles within the genre.

[Neetaku_vt]

I still weep for Maple Story 2 to this day. Talking about screwing up what could've been a long running MMO.

[redrobb]

the first MMO i ever played, back when i was told to put stats into strength as a thief...good times

[ahmedm.z]

That remind me of maple story 2 . How sad it shut down had such potential but yeah alot better is coming next year . Keep up the good work as always ❤️

[drummerLANE]

Fair review. I think the one of the biggest things that keeps old players coming back is the nostalgia factor. Honestly reminiscing of the old days in Maple grinding up from a noob to a dexless sin with party quests is one of my most nostalgic life memories. It was the backbone to my 5th-8th grade life outside of school

[Laze]

This game really shines once you're a high level and battling the end game bosses.

Several of them are super hard and require not only good gear, but an understanding of the boss mechanics.
You can't just go in and spam your attack to win unless you're heavily overgeared.

[CapturelightMusic]

Loved Maplestory as a kid and was excited when Maplestory 2 came out. I actually met some really cool friends and people from my local area from that game. Sad MS2 had to die off too soon...

[pllthetrgrrr]

The biggest mistake they made tho was taking away PQ and making it a way more individual game. When I played, playing together in a party conquering the word together, party questing wasn't only very fun and interactive. No. It was also the fastest way to level up.. Man they really hit me in the heart with that one. It's still a great game. Just became bit to linear / grindy

[juanbarron]

level 100 is not 1/3rd on the way to max level in regards to time, getting to level 100 can take someone 20 minutes but getting to 300 is gonna take atleast 6-8 years (noone has reached it yet, even in the korean version)

[DarianWade]

I miss Maplestory 2 so much. By far my favorite MMO. I enjoyed the combat, but i really loved the music community thatd gather in Queenstown

[windknight]

I played this in 08-10' back in high school. I picked this back up March of this year and my main from back then (a 116 Ranger) is what I decided to main again (currently a 247 Bowmaster). Reboot has close to no P2W aspects, I can only think of the MVP system as one being tons of buffs and exp boosts.

The game has a ton of bugs and crashing/dcing problems but you end up getting used to it sadly. The game has events that allows you to catch up to a majority of the players, those being the character burning event where you level up three times from Lv 10-200 for example. Another is event shops where you can buy items to unlock skills, best in slot equipments, exp boosts, chairs (big part of Maple is afking in a town haha), level up potions and the like. The game can take anywhere from 10 minutes a day to almost the whole day depending on how much you want to do. I honestly say that if you're looking for a chill game to jump on or back in to, MapleStory has to be one of them.

[Nightscream]

oh the feels! Maplestory was my very first introduction to MMORPG's when I was 26 (yes I started playing PC games in my 20's, I was a pure Console player until then). I remember when reaching lvl 30 took such a long time and the KPQ grind was real! Met some really awesome people in PUG groups for that party quest. And on a different, note my nephew met his now wife playing MapleStory!

[mahoufoxxo]

Fun gameplay loops:
-Leveling/Grinding: Leveling a character makes all your other characters stronger with link skills and legion stat buffs. There are 45ish classes to try, you're really rewarded for searching for your main. The grinding gameplay is really smooth and relaxing, it's nice to just turn your brain off and progress for a while/watch something/chat with friends while mass killing monsters.
-Bossing: The mechanics are okay, but they're fun as huge money bags and DPS checks, to really show off how far you've come.
-Progression Fantasy: Even assuming same level, you can become tens, or hundreds of times stronger. There is nearly endless ways to improve your character.
-Content: This game is old, and has so much side content you can get lost in it. A lot of it was reworked to be fairly rewarding and worth exploring, even if it's not super popular.

Neutral:
-P2W. There is a F2P server that's really popular, and even on regular servers you can progress fine with the constant events that are rolling out. The game is purely PvE and mostly solo progression, so you're rarely in a situation where someone else's damage affects you at all. In fact someone being stronger than you is a good thing, because they can get you free carries/loot early on.
-When you make your way to late game, the progression becomes a lot more linear. There are only 1-2 zones level appropriate to train in at any given time, and very little/no side content. You get a lot of dailies, and in a grinding sessions you might only get a fraction of a level. I'd recommend playing at least 1 other character if you still keep progressing your main.

Cons:
-Quite buggy/servers aren't super stable
-Owned by Nexon. Not as bad as other titles they own, they usually listen to the Korean playerbase.
-Some unobtainable items break the game

I'm a casual/seasonal player, but Maplestory is definitely worth trying in my opinion. It's not the same game it used to be, but it's not always a bad thing either.

[poet]

One day this man will cover Dofus and it will be majestic. Such a underrated game :(

[xcorr]

God damn maplestory. I have a decent amount of time in this game, recently, and I have to say right away to anyone who wants to try this game for the first time or maybe play again if you played it in the mid or late 2000's. This game is not player friendly. At all.

This game can be fun to play, and likely brand new players will find enjoyment, but strictly as a casual player. Let me define the term "casual player" as it pertains to maplestory. A casual player is someone who has anywhere from 30 minutes to 12 hours a day to play. You have an abundance of unique and fun classes to play, and you can easily get tons of hours of enjoyment by playing through various questlines and character classes without ever reaching the point of the game where everything sucks. For context, it's pretty easy to reach level 200 on any character and do lots of quests and explore tons and tons of places and have a good time doing so. Current level cap I think was just recently expanded to 300.

Speaking of level caps and casual vs. grind, you might think to yourself "oh if it's not too bad leveling to two thirds the level cap, most of the end game stuff is probably at level 300, it's probably not that bad." Let me stop you right there. Level 200 might technically be 2/3rds of level progression. However, the overall total amount of experience points, and overall amount of grinding, to reach level 300 from level 1. A new character going from level 1 to only level 200 is probably about 0.03% of the total experience points to reach level 300. This game gives new definition to the concept of "grind". Past level 200 you see extreme inclines in the amount of experience needed to level up which occurs in brackets, so about every ten levels or so you see longer grind times. Lets get more perspective. You might still be shocked thinking to yourself "but getting to level 200 already takes alot of time and its not even 1% of the total experience to reach 300? Does the high level areas make it easier?" Nope. High level areas definitely give exponentially more experience, but the actual exp needed to level up completely dwarfs it. I don't know the distribution of exp anymore since the level cap increases, but you'll probably have about 1% of the total exp needed to reach level 300 when you get to level 250. Very few people in the entirety of maplestory ever reach level cap, and they only do it because they have literally nothing else to do. It's literally two full time jobs to do this, like 12-16 hours a day of NOTHING but hard grinding monsters, every single day. That's only if you want to get max level in any sort of "reasonable" length of time. If you're okay with your main character never reaching max level, you can still do all of the late game content without it.

HOWEVER EVER, even if you had massive fund of money to support your daily life and could grind maplestory all day every day forever, End game content has built-in time gating in the form of limited daily quests you do for a mandatory resource in order to even interact with later content. So even if you had the time and money to grind out a max level character, the game dictates your pace already with this mechanic. So if you want to push past level 200, be prepared for that.

However ever ever, let's talk brief about actually gearing up your character past level 200 if you wanted to dip your toes in later game content. This is can either be an abysmal, atrocious sinkhole to your time, money, but most likely both. Making your equipment good comes down to two factors, actually getting your gear, either from grinding bosses or purchasing it from the player market in regular servers, and then using the gambling systems to beef it up with stats. Yes, there are multiple systems to improving your gears and all of them are gambling. Some are significantly more painful and/or more impactful than others. One of them uses the in-game currency to actually level up the item, after certain breakpoints, you start gambling your item level in that if it fails to level up, it instead levels down. At higher levels you risk destroying the item completely, in which case you need a duplicate of the item in order to transfer all of the stats from the destroyed item and effectively restore it. Second gamble is in bonus stats, which is done with special dropped item from bosses/field bosses and can be crafted in limited quantity on regular servers using other rare drop components. Third gambling is a regular server cash cow and reboot server time sink. Cubes from the cash shop give equipments entire new lines of bonus stats that are randomly rolled and leveled up. You purchase this with real money on regular servers, or spend hours a day farming in game currency for them on reboot servers. You have basically no control over the process as the cubes are essentially the same, giving you small chances to upgrade your item to a higher level of bonus stats, and every line of bonus stat is all rerolled at once every single time. Regular servers get the extra luxury of doing this twice per item, because they have two slots for bonus stats. If all this sounds bad enough, also keep in mind you'll likely have to do this entire process, to a certain extent, at least twice for half of your equipment slots. At least on normal servers if you have really deep pockets you could just purchase most of the end game boss gears from other players who already did most of the gambling for you. On reboot, the free to play server, you straight up are time gated even with the boss gears because drop rates are damn near non existent, so you instead farm boss droplets which you turn into a vendor for the gear.

ALL OF THIS ALREADY IS BAD ENOUGH. "But wait it gets worse?" Yes, yes it gets significantly worse. Just visit the maplestory subreddit basically anytime. You can easily find posts damn near every day about glitches, game bugs, updates constantly breaking shit while attempting to fix other broken shit, seasonal events going completely sideways,

fucking automated player bans I cannot even fathom how this GMS manages to still cling to life when they so heavily rely on an automated system banning players in their game. SOMETIMES this even happens completely and entirely due to broken shit they implement in their updates. You wanna talk gambling? The customer service is the biggest fucking gamble you can get with this company, and there is no shortage of player complaints about how awful it is. It's outright hilarious, EVEN THE CUSTOMER SERVICE AUTOMATES THEIR REPONSES TO THE PLAYERS. It's commonly known in the community that customer service has a copy/paste response it uses for like half of the emails that players receive. But not to worry, if you pester them enough something will get done. And that something is being banned from using customer services. If you end up getting banned by the automated system, and customer service trusts it, and you refute it too much, they ban you from contacting them. Basically a "thanks for the money now fuck off" kind of deal.

But yea if you wanna try the game casually it's still pretty unique and fun.

EDIT: also good luck competing with the botters lmao almost forgot about that part

[MapleWhale]

Maplestory used to be more of an mmo back then. Now? Not so much.
Though I can agree 100% that the grind is real in that game.
The maplestory you know now try to boost you to level 200 as fast as it can to where it started to encourage solo-play more than community-play.

I've played this game for the longest of time and had so many memories from 9 to 16 haha. ('07-'14)
It was during the time where you had to be 13 years or older in order to create an account, but who even follows that rule anyways?
I still remember the days where maplestory animations and mmvs (maplestory music videos) were the main things I looked forward to watching whenever people made them.

Hell, this youtube username is an echo to those times. LOL

I loved to hang out with my friends, explore, do side quests to collect some fun looking equipment and chairs.
The community of the game was fun such as the hang out town such as henesys market, to guilds and alliance chats which would have their own chats going on, to the megaphone chat blasting arguments throughout the world.

The real kill of the game was the pay2win gambling for upgrading stats (miracle cubes) and the lack of player-based community throughout the journey.
The crazy damage spam was also annoying to see, where the devs didn't bother to scale down the numbers.
At this point, numbers aren't really a thing that matters anymore, only the percentages matter.

All the old content below level 200 has basically became useless and left to collect dust.

Back then, I played as a thief.
For context: thieves have this skill called Dark Sight, where it would turn the user invincible from physical touch damage from monsters on the map. So you're pretty much safe unless you encounter the ones that are openly hostile such as bosses or some who can use skills. I think the new monsters these days straight up ignore the invisibility of dark sight and attack you regardless using their skills.
And man, I really utilized dark sight to it's fullest. I explored so many different maps while staying invisible to the monsters 70 levels higher than me, to find hidden portals and side quest npcs I've never known about. It really was an adventure to play this as a kid and to have your friends rescue you by escorting you out of the area/ passing over a town teleportation scroll when you were stuck in a town or safe map haha.
(Yeah that's how I spent my time as a kid, just exploring the world and not levelling up for the longest time.)

I also played MS2 during its closed beta and the first year afterwards.
The thing that killed THAT game was at the end game it was just an RNG drop from a dungeon, which you're only allowed to do so many per week. So people who were done with their alloted runs for the week are now waiting for the reset so they can have a go again. And then needing to wait even more time to go. You can tell with this system people will get bored of waiting and just stop playing entirely.
That and gambling in-game currency to upgrade the equipment ultimately made MS2 shut down.
Regular maplestory or at least in Reboot has this mandatory system to upgrade via money their equipment's calling it 'star power' or something..
Some maps specially the level 200+ maps gate keep you out by requiring you to have certain amount of star power to do damage to monsters or to even have entry.

It sucks because the aesthetics and community of MS2 were up my alley. You can even upload your own textures that'll wrap around a model AKA you can upload your own clothing a la animal crossing style. (even selling your design for the paid currency)
But gameplay wise, it didn't hold up too well..

[heyjeanwtf]

I'm loving this kind of videos and I've also noticed your narrative skills have upgraded quite a lot. Keep it up!!!

[xNARCx]

MapleStory was my first and all time favorite MMO. Haven't kept up with it much further after pirates came out.
Every time I play other MMOs it always ends up being compared to MS as the standard.
I would love a 3D action combat MMO that gives me the same feeling as MS.
Woulda killed for MS2 to be that but it fell waaay too short.

[bukimari]

Aw man, the nostalgia! And then you had to mention Gaia Online! These two games (along with FlyFF) defined my early high school days after school. I actually couldn't get into the classes having their own stories because I remember the grind as the original adventurer class and having to choose your class from there but I may give it another try. What class are you using in the video? It looks really fun.

[spacetaco]

This just goes to prove that pixel games can never age... because they're meant to have pixels...