Well as far as being a breakthrough MMO, it's not. But, it does offer enough substance to keep you playing for hours. The first thing you will notice os the graphics. It's definitely not up to par with todays MMO standards. Especially with games like WOW out there. As far as 2D games go though, it's preety to look at. It will remind you mostly of the hand-drawn look reminicent of the Secret of Mana games. Characters are pretty much what you'd expect from an 2D MMO though. Not much for detail or animation. However, once you start playing, you begin to forget about the graphics and just focus on trying to level. You're fairly limited on customization at the begining of the game. You only have a handful of desicions to make as far as your hairstyle, hair color, and clothes. When you're character starts to get stronger and you have picked a class, this all changes. From this point you are given plenty of choices making it possible to set yourself apart from everyone else. Once you get past level 10 you given the opportunity to choose one of four classes: Warrior, Wizard, Theif or Archer. Each are fairly well-balanced for what they do, and all obviously play their roles in the imaginary world. The only problem with the classes is knowing where to allot your skill-points after you level. For instance, if you are a Warrior you would want to put your skill into strength. That's a given. What the game doesn't tell you though is that you almost want to put all of your skill points here, and avoid the other skills altogether. There are no such things as characters with even points down the board here. This is what creates the dynamic between the characters in the game. Obviously the Warrior can deal a lot of damage, but with low dexterity he also takes a lot of damage too. Battle is fairly simple, what with it being 2D and all. The enemies don't have a whole lot of tricks up their sleeves either. They pretty much just walk or bounce back and forth. On occasion you will run into an enemy that actually fires a projectile, but these are few and far between. As you can imagine battle gets pretty dull after a while. The only thing driving you after the first few hours or so is trying to fit into that new armour so you can impress the other players. The commuinity is large, but consists mostly of middle school aged kids. Every once in a while you'll run into someone with an education past the eighth grade level, but you're more likely to run into more projectile throwing enemies. Overall it's not a bad little game to waste a few hours on, but it's not going to sustain much longer than that. It is free though, and you can't ask for more than that.
Maplestory can be explained in 1 word: GRINDFEST. The point in the game is to rapidly press ctrl against an enemy until it dies. Do this continuously until you lvl up. Once you lvl up, you can get new abilities,weapons, ... Read Full Review
MapleStory is a side-scrolling MMORPG game. It is not as impressive as the other popular main stream MMO's but at least it looks better then Runescape. At the beginning you start off as jobless pawn. You mainly train ... Read Full Review
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