Heroic Challengers - Hyper Burning Character Progression
SadBoyfriend - This is my Ark I'm still Hyper Burning to 260. I gave him that name because Ark's lore is about him being betrayed by his best friend in the High Flora army and Maplestory fans joke about them dating lol. He also has a cool Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing going on with the way he's able to turn into an edgy Specter monster. Bossing with him has been a little tricky because you need to learn how to do the skill animation canceling or else he flies across the map because of how mobile his moveset is.
ArcherSloane - I'm reading a book right now called Stoner, so I named him after one of the characters in it. His lore (from the Kain intro questline) is very tragic as well since he's a mercenary whose memories were repeatedly wiped. The company in charge of him exploited him for his power and practically forced him to betray his sister. His backstory is one of the saddest in Maplestory, but he's been fun to play as well.
TempleRuns - Ok this character's name is a joke because he's basically an artifact hunter and it reminded me of the mobile game, Temple Run. Pathfinder as a class also has one of the most aesthetic skills because of how well they mix the purples and blues. It's a fairly simple archer class that I enjoyed getting to 200, but I think I might prefer classes that involve more key input and combo-ing.
GenieDiva - This is the newest class in the game, Sia Astelle. I haven't played much of her, but I like her constellation aesthetic and her lore as a wish granter.
I haven't chosen a main yet, but I think I'll keep working on leveling characters to 200 to build my Legion set. I think I might be the type of person that enjoys the leveling aspect of Maplestory more than the end-game. I'm also on the lookout for better outfits for my characters lol, but I still haven't gotten the urge to buy any of the perm NX sets in the cash shop.
Looking back at some of my old Maplestory characters
Ahh I've missed Maplestory. Here are some of the characters I had in the interactive servers before Heroic/Reboot was a thing. My main was Helloemogirl and I remember I named him that because I saw a penguin with that name in Club Penguin and thought it was funny lol. The rest of the characters' names are also corny, but cut me some slack because I made most of them in middle school!
This server, Aurora, used to be Windia before they merged it and changed the name.
Elysium Characters
These 2 photos are of my characters on Elysium, which was the result of another server merge. I even have the Jett I made before they deleted the class haha. I made characters on tons of different servers just to try out the classes before realizing that it was more efficient to have every character on the same server for link skills and Legion. I'd like to say the character names on this server are better, but only marginally so.
Old Equips
The hat that ChickenAttk is wearing in particular is this Talking Witch Hat from an old Halloween event. I love weird old Maplestory equips like that. There were even democrat and republican balloons for the 2012 presidential election.
It came out around the same time as this video of Spieglemann explaining the electoral college:
It was an interesting time in Maplestory. Part of me wishes they would still have events like this, but I'm not sure if they'd get away with this in the current political climate.
Nostalgia
It's surreal thinking about how I've had this Maplestory account for so long. Growing up, I usually had cheaper laptops that could barely handle the game, but I would always try to download Maplestory on them and cause the computers to overheat. Good times lol.
Back in the day, Party Quests (PQs) were the best way of leveling up. PQs involved joining groups with random players to do some mini games or puzzles and then defeat a boss together at the end. Romeo and Juliet was one of the biggest ones and there was usually a decent amount of downtime to chat with other players. It was fun making friends with random players in-game that way.
On the Maplestory fan forums like r/Maplestory, a lot of people discuss whether or not they miss old Maplestory or their childhood. It's hard to distinguish nostalgia for the actual game vs nostalgia from those carefree days as a kid where it was easy to spend hours gaming. I think it's a little bit of both. The general consensus seems to be that current Maplestory is a better RPG with its streamlined progression, while old Maplestory had better social aspects since the game required you to group up with people for most content.
Nowadays, the game is geared more towards solo play, a pattern that most MMORPGs have been heading towards for a while. While I do enjoy some aspects of solo play, part of me misses the "forced" socialization that was done through grinding together in MMORPGs.
Old Maplestory was a product of its time. Social media was in its infancy, so MMORPGs like Maplestory served as glorified chatrooms for meeting people.
There are still social aspects and party bossing in current Maplestory, but it's dedicated primarily for end-game bosses. You’re expected to do most of the progression by yourself. In-game chat has become more of a rarity since people use Discord to communicate. I started recently getting into the Challenger World event server with one of my friends, but we were struggling thinking of things to do together in the game because he was approaching end-game and I was still in the beginning stages. We could have tried leveling together if he made a new character, but we realized it wouldn't have been as efficient or enjoyable as it was in older versions of Maplestory. So now he's just waiting for me to catch up so we can do bossing together, yet at this point, it may just be easier for us to play another game together.
Still, I've been enjoying going through the solo progression myself. Although it's a different experience, modern Maplestory still has a lot to offer. In particular, I've been enjoying the lore of the newer Grandis classes and practicing bossing. But it's always fun to go down memory lane with this game. It still has that satisfying mindless grind type of play style.
And on the bright side, they just announced that they started testing out a Classic World server for Maplestory that will emulate old Maplestory gameplay.
We’re excited to announce that we have officially invited our first group of Global MapleStory Classic World play testers to experience all
“Originally I was supposed to be on top of a shipping barge, but in the references that I pulled for that, I pulled the Diana reference,” SZA explained during a chat with HOT 97. “I just loved how isolated she felt and that’s what I wanted to convey the most.”
She told Billboard that she struggled to meet album rollout commitments while she was also taking care of her grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s: “I have an album to turn in at the end of the month, but will that actually matter by the time I get back to New Jersey and my grandma doesn’t remember me? I don’t know,” she said.
Source:
The singer was moved by how "isolated" the Princess of Wales looked in the striking 1997 reference photo. How Princess Diana Inspired SZA’s
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