I think it's a good game. It's too bad there is no way I would ever play it again.
Maplestory has delightful 2d graphics that make the game something to look at. The character animations are pretty good, the colors are bright, the backgrounds are pretty and the actual enemies and places are nice looking. The sound is nothing to scoff at either.
The game has the standard mmo setup, level up, upgrade stats, choose a class and gain devastating powers as you advance. The fact that it has a little bit of action melded into it makes the game seem just a bit more repetitive and a lot easier, but it makes it a bit more interesting than watching a 3d model whack away at a pixy for two minutes. the leveling is fairly easy, it takes about two weeks to get to the second class advance if you don't play too much. And the game runs on 5 year old computers with ease.
So the game has nothing wrong with it. Why the low score then? What is the MOS IMPORTANT ASPECT of an mmo? The community. Have you ever been playing a multiplayer game and seen someone begging for items or being a total jerk / idiot and thought "what a noob'? In this game, that's the impression you get from pretty much every player you meet. The game is an absolute noob carnival. It took TEN DAYS to meet a player worth talking to. Everyone else I know who played the game, aside from the noobs, had the same experience.
And then comes the finishing blow to this game's residence on my machine: the game was created by Wizet, but is run by Nexon. Nexon has RUN THIS GAME INTO THE GROUND. I know every company needs to make money to keep a free game like this running, but they literally sell items that let you broadcast a message to EVERYONE ON THE SERVER. You can not block these messages. And they are very cheap to buy. Mix this with a community that consists mostly of idiots and little children lying about their age and stealing from mommy's wallet and you get GAMING HELL.
Miscellaneous things about this game that bug me or creep me out to no end: there are quite a few pedophiles on this game. Every town you go to you see moronic little kids shouting "need gf, need gf!!!11!!DMKNFNBABSBBFTRAGDOR" or something of the kind, and then being quickly snapped up by desperate perverts. Watch yourself if you do play this game. There are also quite a few hackers. They float off screen and use some weird spectral vacuum to suck up enemies and items. This seems like quite the simple programming error that no one bothered to fix.
To sum this review up, if you banned every player and removed this game from the web, renamed it and fixed some bugs, and stopped it's advertising except on sites not targeting idiots, children and pedophiles, the game would be playable. If the scum at the bottom of the barrel that is the internet had a barrel in it, and then the scum at the bottom of that barrel mutated into something too horrible to describe, that abomination would be this game.