MapleStory might appeal to play for a while, but then you'd realize it's just a waste of time.
First off, the gameplay. The control scheme is quite nice, which is easy to adapt to and understand. There's also a special area for beginners that explains how do you do something, what do you benefit from killing monsters and everything else the newbie needs to know - and this is a feature which is quite rarely included in a common MMORPG. Once you're leaving the beginner island (to which you can't ever come back), the fun doesn't leave just yet. You can train until you meet the requirements for one of the four jobs (classes), and then you can leave for the town related to a specific job and get it. Then you go out and start training - and here comes the first weakness of the gameplay, for which the game is criticized so often. Training is very boring. And unless you don't have the skill of quick typing in order to converse with a bunch of people that hang around while fighting monsters - you'll leave the game right here. There are also players of higher levels that might "steal" your kill - whether just for the fun of annoying you, or "accidentally". While bored, you could go and try to
complete a quest - and here comes the second gameplay flaw. The quests nearly always involve activity of the "go-there-kill-that-bring-me-that" type, with an exception of a few, which are mostly maze type and are also not quite amusing.
Now, passing onto the game graphics, which haven't been praised by the players as well. In my honest opinion, the most of these players just aren't familiar too well with 2D games, which by they most utilize sprite graphics. The quality of the sprites is quite good, but perhaps was lowered down by an attempt to combine with chibi anime art (this explains the small height of the characters). Also, a very minor aspect of common MMORPGs I think the game lacks is changing weather. Perhaps MapleStory wouldn't even get criticized so bitterly if it had the feature of changing weather. On the other side, gamers playing on PCs with worse hardware may benefit from the mediocre quality of the graphics, as well as from the fact the game runs only on 800x600 resolution which may speed up the performance of computers with a slower Internet connection.
I'd like to briefly describe the audio quality the game brings. The background music is good. It's not of MIDI format, it doesn't take up a lot of space, and it's quite of a good bit rate. Also, it changes according to the area the player is located, and quite matches it. The sound effects, however, are more of cartoon proportions, and sometimes simply mismatch the areas the player is located in, mostly the dark ones, and the aforementioned background music as well.
One of MapleStory's lesser benefits is its small consumption of hard drive space. All of the resourses that are required to play the game take up (at the moment of writing this review) not more than 150 MBs.
The players in the game you'd meet by most are kind, and sometimes even may agree to help you. There's no excessive frequent utilization of "Internet dialects", such as 1337 and AOL speak. However, like in every MMORPG, the community is sometimes ruined by the presence of hackers, which WIZET, the developer of the game, doesn't eliminate too seriously. Even though the game is supposedly protected by nProtect Game Guard, a hacker might commonly pop near you, thus WIZET has mostly to depend on the players to report the hackers (as well as other rule abusers).
I would summarize MapleStory good as a platformer, but its qualities can't really delight a MMORPG gamer.