Snap Judgment – MapleStory 2

MapleStory 2 is one of those MMOs that I never would have looked at twice, except that there’s nothing else to look at right now. See previous post lamenting the pitiable dearth of MMORPGs.

The last Nexon game I played was Riders of Icarus, which I did not think much of. I even downloaded and tried it again yesterday, and I still didn’t like it. It sounds like a cool idea to have a game built around collecting mounts and such, but none of that seems to exist at the beginning of the game, which is a huge disappointment. The UI and all the “advertisements” plastered all over the screen are very off-putting as well.

So it came down to a desperation hail-mary of trying MapleStory 2. But first, I had a lot of difficulty figuring out how to even acquire the game. Early in the day, the Nexon launcher only gave me a button to “join the head start.” The web site only provided me with unhelpful links to buy Founder’s Packs. As far as I could tell, there was nothing to indicate how a normal person would acquire the game once it launched. Was it free-to-play? Was it buy-to-play? Was there a subscription? I found nothing to tell me. I can only assume that was an intentional sales gimmick to “trick” me into buying something when I didn’t need to.

Later in the day I opened up the launcher again (after I had re-tried Riders of Icarus) and beheld that the “join the head start” button had magically changed into a “play” button. It was free-to-play!

To make a long story short, it appears to be a game for children. I don’t ever remember acting like a child even when I was a child, so to find that mindset of frivolity to enjoy this game is completely beyond me. But I allowed that perhaps there could be some deeply meaningful story or complex, thought-provoking game mechanics hiding under the My Little Pony aesthetic somewhere.

Sadly, there isn’t. At least not in the first 40 minutes of gameplay, which is all I could stand. It’s an isometric camera game so I have to automatically deduct 500 points from the game’s final score. It’s also a platformer style of game, so that means deducting another 500 points from the score.

Maybe the initial story made sense to people coming from MapleStory 1 but to me it sounded like gibberish. “And the evil was vanquished by brave heroes! But it came back. Apparently. For some reason. It just does that, you know.” (At one point I have to admit I giggled at the thought of the quest dialog being performed as a Monty Python sketch with the pepperpots shrieking in falsetto-that’s how much like nonsense it sounded to me.) (Since I have just watched every episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on Netflix, my entire world is now seen through that prism.)

I experienced maybe 45 seconds of combat, but it was of the press-keys-and-things-magically-die-without-any-thought variety, so nothing to tickle the old intellect there.

I left the game before finishing what I presumed to be the tutorial zones. No matter how desperate I am for a new MMORPG, there’s just no way I can fit MapleStory 2 into that void. It’s not a game for me.