4/5 for its early months as KMS2, 1/5 for its start as GMS2, and likely what KMS2 turned into. It was PERFECTLY paced in the beginning, the number crunching endgame treadmill an afterthought for dedicated players, with dozens of unique and fun party quests and training grounds to explore in a delightful blocky coat of paint, ripe to replay with other characters and enjoy all over again if the endgame didn't taste well to you. Sometime after its first few months of release when my attention turned elsewhere, up to its release as GMS2, it abandoned virtually all of that variety, turning the gear treadmill into the game itself. Multiple max level characters were expected, as you got most of your levels through the story alone, and could burn through it in two, maybe even a single sitting. As stated in my Maplestory 1 review, this abject neglect of pacing is a critical flaw that far too many great Korean MMOs fall plague to as they develop over time.

Was terribly sad to see what this turned into, and hopefully it'll serve as a lesson to would-be MMO developers in the future how NOT to handle pacing.

(global) chaos moc and chaos papulatus were raw af bosses, but then they raised the level cap, the new skills on my class killed the fun for me, and the new endgame didn't feel great in comparison to what you were doing before aside from adding 4-player raids (that halted your story progress and were locked behind a layer of endgame gear score, mind you). The game also pushed you super hard to play alts with the way weekly lockouts worked, but I didn't want to do that, so I was often struggling with keeping up on money and upgrade material for my guy compared to other people in my guild. They tried really hard to make global-only updates and balance changes to improve the game over the korean version but I guess it wasn't enough, and I guess I wasn't alone with my issues seeing how they shot the game. When it was good though it was pretty solid ARPG gameplay with a kind of weak gear progression system with the whole "kill the boss until you roll the stats you need and then keep killing them to use more gear as upgrade fodder" thing but hey, it kept me gaming. I guess the other issue with a game release like this nowadays is that people had already played the korean version beforehand, so the endgame was pretty much already solved which is a big no-no nowadays with how fast information gets around. Were Nexon capable of doing simultaneous global/korea releases the game may have fared better, but only really had it also released with the more F2P-friendly changes that were implemented in global (as an example of the difference between versions, gear on the korean version had a chance of breaking whenever you tried to upgrade it, and you had the option of paying real money in order to prevent this from happening, while in the global version there was only a chance of your gear delevling after it being upgraded beyond a certain point).

Also, you could get a body pillow of a guy as a mount, so you were just running around faster than everyone else while hugging a pillow, and there was another one where you were just holding hands with a maid character from an event iirc. I also made awesome, non-copyrighted tshirts that the moderators didn't like and they deleted them from the game. They wouldn't refund me on any of the NX I put into the game either even though they were offering them once the game was shutting down. Sucks to be raw as fuck I guess.

A frankly mediocre game with an awful storyline, but a testament to how you can wrangle months of playtime out of me if you're a polished feature-complete title with a strong community-creation component. MapleStory 2 was as standard as MMOs get, I don't remember it being very well balanced, the action combat struggled to hold shape under the latency issues, it literally kills u irl when u die. Yadda yadda, I could say anything and you'd have no choice but to believe me, the game's servers have closed down permanently.

This was, however, my Massively Online Style Savvy: Trendsetters for PC. Games are terrified to let people make things for themselves, use their own images, provide customisation tools that could be exploited for devious ends - but they're pure and valuable expressions of da self! On one hand, I empathise with the walled-garden approach most games take, all content within the title being curated and poured over by the developers n publishers to assure maximum sponsor compatibility and compliance to ratings boards. MS2 was a rare and frankly exemplary occasion of a fairly major MMO publisher essentially not even caring about all of that. If you could think of it - you could make it. You could design your clothes and accessories and furniture meticulously, you could buy real estate within the world map and design every block of the house, you could buy billboard space and plaster any .png you want in story-critical questing zones. Was dumb as shit but so pure and good.

Also want to signal boost this
https://maplestory.nexon.net/ms2archive
An official site recognising the fact that the game has shut down and just made ALL of its art assets freely available for download. Wtf. Why is this so rare.