MapleStory Critique Commentary Part 4 (Monster Life)
1Greetings one and all to a realm of commentated videos where I essentially critique a wide variety of games that I have enjoyed not just thoroughly, but also enable a high level of creativity in some form to make the experience special for me to talk about!
A most unusual comeback of a video here, considering I was originally going to finish after having done my trilogy of character commentary series here on MapleStory, but alas it looks like as if there's something of substance that propped up inbetween my humble starts of a second coming in mid-2013 (The first adventure being back in early 2011 once I finally got MapleStory to work correctly on my PC, this being a good year or two before the Big Bang patch that made this MMORPG not so hardcore and thus more accessible) so I figured why not give this a look and all?
Before even getting started however, it is worth pointing out the many changes in MapleStory since I last covered it with my Bowman character, including the interface of the game as a whole alongside the change up of servers where, back in the old days, you had about twenty of so 'worlds' that each had a group of servers attached to them, (Zenith, Broa and Windia being among the more popular worlds from what I recall back then) meaning you could easily go from one server to another in said world but not to another world once you set your account to it, outside of one particularly interesting form of MTX. (More on this later!)
Of course, when I came into MapleStory proper via the Big Bang patch, this was simplified into just two worlds, Kradia and Demethos. (Ended up joining the former instead of the latter) However, with this update recently, it would seem as though they've essentially just simplified the servers into regions instead, which I suppose I don't mind at all here!
But yes, behold 'Monster Life' as it were! Looking an awful lot like a certain notorious freemium game from Facebook or on the dreaded mobile gaming platform, Monster Life is essentially acts as a monster 'raising' game of sorts that you double with having the right kinds of facilities in your limited area to maximize meso gains as well as other benefits that the farmed monsters themselves can give you after reaching a certain 'happiness' level as it were!
A bunch of this I did not understand back then, (even less coming back to it to write up this description here!) however I suppose it's worth mentioning that MTX element to it by first mentioning MapleStory's long and dubious history with microtransactions and the general work culture of Nexon the publisher of this massive game, not so much Wizet the developers, programmers, artists and storywriters who made this game as beautiful as it is from a gaming perspective without the pesky business parts of running it!
Indeed, you may not believe it, however Nexon was largely responsible for being amongst the first, possibly even THE FIRST, to coin the idea of online microtransactions for gaming services in the form of something called 'gacha'. (Not the same as the newer 'gachapons' of today's MapleStory, plus it's worth mentioning their first go at MTX wasn't even when MapleStory was a thing, way back in 200 as a game called QuizQuiz, pretty much a bizarre MMO game largely in the form of.... Quizes?)
Certainly Nexon found it quite the juicy idea to make their games free of subscriptions, but instead replace the source of money via optional monetary payments of a one kind, the sorts where you'd hand over anywhere from a single dollar to about twenty at most at a time, hence the term 'micro' to gain a wide variety of cosmetics (sometimes practical, others for the looks) and such useful items that, though not directly game-breaking or overpowering, are there for convenience of the sorts.
It's a problem, I hear, plagues the end-game market of MapleStory, which I can only assume is well past Level 200 at that since I still feel relatively new to this MMORPG still, despite having racked up a good sizable amount of hours played between the three characters of mines who are now all above Level 110 at the time of making this video here! (I'd wager around 800 hours or so, roughly 270 on per character but it's hard to say for sure)
But yes, that cash shop is one I've taken a few looks inside, but never actually gotten anything out of, save for a rare 'voucher' or two to get me 'free' MTX as it were! Maybe it's that culture of eastern MMORPGs being more in favor of microtransactions than the west is, since they've never one kicked up fuss about it since the early introduction of these forms of transactions since way back in MapleStory's inception from 2003, (competing with Runescape in 2001 and World of Warcraft joining in on the scene not long afterwards in 2004 among many other smaller MMO games) but yes certainly it's an intriguing look at this game all around!
In any case, I hope you enjoyed the video and any constructive comments or criticism is appreciated!
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Lewis Wilkinson currently has 56 views spread across 4 videos for MapleStory. His channel currently has around 1 hour worth of content for MapleStory, less than 0.23% of the total video content that Lewis Wilkinson has uploaded to YouTube.