MapleStory’s original login theme is DEFINITELY the most iconic. (Rice Media, 2018)
It’s 2009. You’ve just come back from a tiring day of school, but only one concern dominates your mind. Dumping your bag on the floor, you race to the family computer and boot it up, tapping your feet in an impatient staccato as it stirs to life. Double-clicking on the little icon of an orange mushroom, you are soon greeted with the warm notes of a gentle guitar…
Of course, I’m referring to MapleStory, the 2D ‘animesque’ adventure side-scrolling (and a slew of other adjectives) Mass Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), that captured many of our adolescent hearts back in the first decade of the new millennium. If you were in school or online at all around that time, you most likely would have heard of, if not played, this game. It’s been a long, long time since then, and even though many of us only have nostalgia-tinted memories of our carefree experiences with MapleStory, the game is still trucking along to this very day. In fact, MapleStory just celebrated its 20th anniversary in December 2023, which coincides with the release of 6th Job in MapleSEA. Yes, you heard me right, there are six whole jobs (five job advancements!) for all 48 classes currently available in MapleSEA—a far cry from the majority of us who couldn’t even get past 2nd Job or 3rd Job on one of the original 10 Explorer classes.
The game’s earning power, at least, definitely hasn’t fallen off. (Gamer Empire, 2023)
Then again, if you were bitten by the nostalgia bug and decided to try playing through MapleStory now, you would find that your experience would be drastically different compared to the MapleStory of the 2000s. Sure, the towns on Victoria Island are all mostly the same, but aside from Henesys, the other towns are mostly devoid of people. Even the once-crowded sewer entrance of Kerning City, where the NPC Lakelis who would bring you into the Kerning Party Quest (KPQ), is now completely empty, Lakelis herself nowhere to be seen. The party quest itself isn’t gone, simply shifted to a new map, but practically no one plays Party Quests nowadays, a stark contrast to the stranglehold they once held on many of us.
This is why re-experiencing the MapleStory of yore is practically impossible in its modern form—the game has shifted away from that particular brand of casual, social fun to a somewhat more hardcore form of entertainment, where the evolution of gameplay has permanently altered its social aspects.
Optimisation VS Trial and Error
To be fair, this focus on gameplay did not happen instantly; different Party Quests were still booming in popularity during the early 2010s (Romeo and Juliet, for example), and partying up with random people was still very common. Now though, the answer to why no one plays Party Quests anymore is simple: it doesn’t give enough EXP, it’s not optimal, it’s not worth it. These statements bely much of MapleStory’s current direction and focus on solo grinding mobs (i.e. killing monsters) to progress.
Back in the 2000s, getting to Level 30 took months and months of killing snails, mushrooms and more in overcrowded training areas. Now though, if you know what you’re doing, you can get to Level 200 in a day or less. In fact, common consensus now is that gameplay only really takes off when your character reaches their 5th Job Advancement at Level 200, unlocking new areas, bosses, and a whole new host of flashy skills. As a consequence however, the EXP curve to Level 200 (and Level 260, now that 6th Job is out) has continually been flattened to expedite everyone’s progress to 5th Job. Coupled with the increase in the maximum level to 300, the ‘Union System’, which provides powerful stat bonuses scaling with a player’s number of invested characters, and the numerous ‘Burning’ events which triple your levelling speed up to 200, 250, or even 260, it is clear that the levelling grind is emphasised more than casual player interaction.
This focus on levelling is reflected in the gameplay as well:
Magicians back then VS Magicians now. Skill effect opacity FTW! (legend3454, 2013 / in-game screenshot)
Now, attack skills at all jobs can hit a much higher number of mobs, which challenges the maplers’ abilities to clear the map of as many mobs as possible, before they respawn every 8 seconds or so. Because the difficulty of levelling has been greatly decreased, a significantly larger percentage of the playerbase can reach 4th Job with relatively less effort, making such large-scale attacks more accessible to everyone. This continual optimisation of one’s movements and skills to maximise EXP gain—especially at higher job advancements where one can reliably clear the whole map each time—is the crux of why grinding mobs for hours on end can be quite enjoyable. As someone who has spent countless hours mobbing with many different characters, striving for mechanical mastery in grinding—with the specific set of skills and parameters that a particular character possesses—definitely has some sort of hypnotic and addictive effect.
Even if you’re free-to-play (F2P), you can quite easily obtain a x4-x5 EXP multiplier! (whackybeanz, 2024)
But what’s all this grinding for, anyway? The answer is the plethora of bosses that drop powerful equipment and upgrade materials. In the ‘Boss Content’ tab, there are currently 67 bosses for you to work your way up through—though, if you only count the bosses that can be defeated weekly (the ones worth doing), the number is reduced to 44. If you disregard the different difficulty levels of all these bosses, as defeating a weekly boss prevents you from defeating it again on the same character until the weekly reset regardless if you choose a different difficulty, there are 25 unique bosses for you to defeat per week. Of course, you’ll barely be able to solo kill half a dozen or so after a few months into the game, and the difficulty of these bosses increase very, very exponentially. Aside from keeping up with the increased health of higher-levelled mobs, defeating these bosses is one of the biggest reasons why you would want to level up your character and upgrade their equipment.
The addition of these bosses has created a very tangible and compelling goal for maplers to focus much more on levelling and upgrading characters as fast as possible, rather than aimlessly messing around in abandoned Party Quest areas or towns. You can, however, party with up to 5 other people to defeat these bosses, which provides one of the main parts of MapleStory’s social experience nowadays (aside from sitting around in Channel 1 Henesys). Still, although communicating and working together with others to take down a difficult boss is fulfilling in its own right, it’s just not the same experience as 2000s MapleStory—this isn’t a bad thing, but it drives home how the experience of playing MapleStory has fundamentally changed.
Back then, much of MapleStory’s entertainment value lay in exploration and adventure. Most maplers were left to bumble around and figure things out on their own, due to the general lack of information about the game; however, with so many areas to explore and monsters to fight, many of us would have been engrossed with MapleStory’s wondrous world regardless. Coupled with the throng of many such players mingling together, one could easily make friends to heighten and prolong one’s enjoyment of the game. Now though, things are different. Though grinding can be enjoyable, not everyone wants to sit at their computer for hours and hours playing MapleStory—it’s a surefire way to get major burnout.
You can easily teleport to any town now, so RIP to the Crimson Balrogs lol (MasteringGaming, 2013)
Moreover, while grinding in the past usually amounted to killing monsters generally around one’s level, there are now piles upon piles of guides, tools, and websites for a MapleStory newcomer’s perusal. The road to 200 and beyond is well-documented, with the most EXP-efficient areas reiterated to death in many YouTube guides, generally giving you only a few areas to choose from at any level if you want to maximise efficiency. And when you have so many characters to level, any halfway-serious MapleStory player would definitely want to minimise the time they need to spend on grinding. The lack of different maps to grind in is exacerbated post-200 / 5th Job, where new areas are unlocked every 5 levels; the fact that few maps in those areas are grind-friendly limits the selection even more, to the point where you’ll pretty much be visiting the same places over and over for each character you want to level past 200. This isn’t to say those maps are boring in and of themselves—some of them, like Lachelein and Arcana, are positively gorgeous, with amazing BGM to boot. It’s just that the grindy nature of MapleStory makes even those maps feel repetitive after you’ve spent days and weeks at the same map with the same mobs.
When levelling starts slowing down around Esfera, you’ll begin to feel the strain. (Fandom)
The shift of focus on adventure to optimisation of EXP gain isn’t just a MapleStory thing; it’s simply an unavoidable side-effect of the Internet’s evolution. Nowadays, any semi-popular game is so thoroughly documented that, if you’re not a day 1 player, pretty much everything you could ever need to know about a game can already be found online—and since it’s all just a few clicks away, what’s the point of putting in so much effort to trial-and-error your way through everything? For casual players, the thrill of adventure and joy of socialisation are mostly gone, and for hardcore players, there’s simply not enough time to try and find out everything by yourself.
Why is that, though? Why didn’t MapleStory just stay as a chill, social game to mindlessly unwind after a long day, a game where only a few dedicated players chased the highest levels and everyone else just hung around Henesys or played a bunch of PQs? Why has it become a game where pretty much everything pre-200 is abandoned, while everything past-200 is emphasised?
Well, one big reason for that, pessimistic as it sounds, is money.
What Makes The World Go Round
If you didn’t know, many Korean MMORPGs (which MapleStory is, by the way) are infamous for their monetisation strategies. Sure they might be free-to-play (F2P), but one cursory look at their cash shops will reveal the staggering amount of pay-to-win (P2W) items and enhancers on sale. These cash shops expose how these MMORPGS (and most monetised games in general) are designed to get players to spend money. Tired of grinding day by day to increase your power level inch by inch? Just drop a couple hundred of dollars on enhancement materials, and voila! Months of progress achieved in the swipe of a card, and this is especially egregious in MapleStory.
At $10.90 / 10k @Cash… that’s a LOT of cash… (in-game screenshot)
Really, I’m not being hyperbolic here. It can take a few weeks for you to play through the time-gated events that MapleStory pretty much always has going on, just to earn about 2 dozen cubes, which upgrade just one aspect of your equipment. Meanwhile, if you’re willing to spend about 100 SGD, you can get 33 Choice Cubes just like that. What’s worse is that it has an RNG factor; whether or not your equipment gains the desired attributes is entirely up to luck, which exacerbates the amount you’ll have to shell out if you really want to perfect your gears.
I’m not knocking the fact that MapleSEA can be quite generous with their events, but the reality is that you can bypass so, so much progress just by throwing more and more money at the game. You can even buy gear from other players for thousands of dollars PER GEAR to launch your character all the way to end-game pretty much instantly, levelling notwithstanding. Granted, given the fact that there are nearly 20 different kinds of equipment you can equip (like top, bottom, hat, shoes, weapon, subweapon, 4 rings, etc.), it would be a LOT of money, but the option is there—and this is the crux of the issue.
If you want to get far in MapleStory, it demands one of two things from you: your time, or your money. The more time you spend, the more likely you are to get tired of the grind and give into the temptation of expediting your progress with real-life money. The more money you spend, the bigger your dopamine rush at killing all the bosses you couldn’t before with ease, but also the more entrenched you become. After all, you’ve spent so much money on this game! How could you possibly stop playing? This choice that MapleStory forces upon prospective long-term players is by design; what better way to earn money by inventing a problem and selling the solution? Though no one can say for sure, this is pretty much the reason why MapleStory doesn’t bother with pre-200 content besides a few cursory updates. The money comes from long-term maplers who want to get to the top—the serious players who are more likely to spend, rather than the newbies who play just for fun—and all of them are chomping at the bit for higher-levelled content, so why bother with anything below Level 200 when it’ll either be ignored or effortlessly cleared?
This isn’t to say that MapleStory doesn’t have any good content before Level 200, of course. There are quite a few “themed dungeons” where maplers can play through, introducing them to a particular area with its specific storyline and quests. The issue is that very few of those “themed dungeons” give anything more than middling equipment alongside EXP rewards that may or may not be worth the time you put in to clear the dungeon in the first place, so there usually isn’t much incentive to clear those dungeons or complete their quests in the first place. Though many quests have storylines that are interesting at first glance, their payoffs aren’t really good enough to make jumping through their many RPG hoops (kill 50 of this, get 50 of that, ad infinitum) worthwhile.
Of course, the point of MapleStory isn’t really about the “Story”, shocking as it may be. Just as it is with any business, pretty much all aspects of MapleStory are there to funnel a player into spending money. You have a character, with so many different ways to improve them, and you can invest real life money to either power up your character or facilitate the powering up of your character. The aforementioned cubes are one of the former ways; special pets that can pick up loot in a huge radius around them are one of the latter ways (“affectionately” called “vac pets”). This isn’t even mentioning the plethora of cosmetic equipment that you can buy for a character. In the end, the more fun you have with your character, the more invested you are, and the more likely you will invest money in them.
FashionStory’s alive and well, at least… (u/dewyviv, 2020)
This is another reason why MapleStory can’t return to its roots—the game’s purpose as a money-making machine has been refined and solidified over the 2 decades it has been active for that its colourful skin has eroded, plainly exposing the corporate greed flowing through its veins. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the truth, especially in MapleSEA.
The Mushroom Game Conclusion
Nowadays, the only people who play MapleStory are those who have both played it before AND are somewhat experienced at MMORPGs. That excludes a large portion of casual gamers, who would’ve made up the majority of MapleStory’s player base back in the day. Nonetheless, if you were to log into MapleSEA right now, you’d be hard-pressed to call it dead. New jobs are getting released, older jobs are getting reworked, and there’s always some sort of big event going on. The /all chat is bustling with maplers megaphoning their messages for this and that, and if you were to chat up any random idling mapler, there’s a chance you could have a fun conversation.
There’s no denying that MapleStory is a product made to earn money, but it’s not like you HAVE to spend money on it. If you have time to burn, you could join a guild, join their Discord, and just chat with your fellow maplers all day. Who knows? You might be able to plumb the depths of the Kerning PQ Sewers with a few buddies, just like the old days. It won’t be exactly the same, but no one can turn back the clock. For better or for worse, the current MapleStory, with all its expensive, money-hungry bells and whistles, is here to stay.
Sources:
Rice Media: https://www.ricemedia.co/culture-life-maplestory-mobile-has-arrived-but-it-wont-bring-back-your-childhood/
Gamer Empire: https://gamerempire.net/maplestory-crosses-4-billion-in-lifetime-revenue-in-2022/
legend3454: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Yu6rqjbbI
whackybeanz: https://whackybeanz.com/calc/everything-exp
MasteringGaming: maxresdefault.jpg (1280×720) (ytimg.com)
Fandom: https://maplestory.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Arcane_River
u/dewyviv: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmausg0b79df61.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D591622cd9d1713d85760d559cd886d9f2882da34