It would’ve been nicer to get the client files earlier, especially since they set the exact release date like a whole fortnight in advance. Still, 90 minutes is better than nothing. I’ll try just running it in Wine straight away with no tweaks. Considering how confident they seem to be in their client modifications, and how long it was in development, and how their FAQ seemed pretty sure that *NIX[1] users would figure out how to run the game, it’ll probably Just Work™.
I was looking forward to (Oak) barrelling through the g8s of a brand spankin’ new server at the same time as everyone else! I’ve never done that before, nor really played any server within its first few weeks. But…
Let’s be real. If I can’t get it working now, the odds that someone else will figure it out, or that really anyone on Fantasia’s staff will even notice, are looking bleak.
I guess I still have RevivalStory. I can just… play unicolor. By myself.
Honestly, I don’t really feel like playing Video James anymore. Besides, I oughta flesh out the rough draft of that brief essay I started writing the other day.
Y’know… I just need to build up the energy for it. In the meantime, I can continue reading. Plus, I’ll probably end up finding something important to my essay in a later chapter, anyway.
Admittedly, it’s getting a little harder to stay out of bed for long. More than usual, even. But that’s okay? I can still get a few hours of reading in, here & there.
Only problem is that eating food has really been knocking me out. Any time I eat, I get so tired that I can’t get out of bed, and so tired that I can’t sleep either! That’s my fav. I sure do love being stuck in bed purgatory indefinitely. Maybe I can just stop eating for a while. I’m not hungry anyway.
Oh. Lv1Crook already has the game working. And Taima is trying to get it to run, too. Maybe the next time I can get out of bed, I’ll, uhrm. At least attempt whatever it is smart people do to actually diagnose the problem. Instead of just trying random sh∗rt and hoping I get lucky.
Hokay. Well. Fortunately for me, Wine provides its own debugger: winedbg. Let’s take a craic at it.
Not just any mida. The mida.
Eckskyooz me‽ The Fantasia dev team just… left the malware in the client? After all those client edits?? Not removing it for the benefit of the *NIX users — nor even of the Windows™® users, for that matter??? No wonder nobody can get it to run!!
Of course, I do still get Wine’s ordinary output. Them∗da™® can’t stop that. So maybe if I just add a little WINEDEBUG=+all, redirect both stdout & stderr to a file…
$ ls -sh
257MiB fantasia.log
Oh, a 257 MiB text log? We love that. We’re so here for it.
So the idea is to look for what’s happening just before the exception is thrown, so that I can get an idea of who is bailing hard and, ideally, why.
Near as I can tell, the bail appears to be happening just after ZwQuerySystemInformation() is called. This is a pretty gnarly function that seems to do basically what it says on the tin: ask for gross details about the exact nature of the hardware on which it’s running. Surprise, surprise; it’s more fr∗cking malware.
Indeed, searching the WWW for this function with the additional keyword "wine" (mostly to cut out the results that are just boring documentation) yields results of which roughly half are malware-related. There just isn’t a legitimate reason why you’d call this function, or if there was, this reason was lost to the sands of time.
That’s as far as I can go. To fix this kind of abject nonsense, the client binary needs to be decompiled, instrumented with a debugger, and the malware must be removed or at least neutralised. The first two steps are evidently already done by the Fantasia dev team. The third & final step, not so much.
I might be too dumb to fix it myself, but I’m not stupid. I also can usually tell the difference between the “““normal””” kind of being exhausted all the time and the “spiralling into a depression where my entire body is constantly sore from being in bed virtually 24⧸7” kind within the first few days.
Is it sort of pathetic that my well-being can on occasion be firmly tethered to a MapleStory client’s ability to launch? Is my mortal existence just a pixelated cosmic joke? An infinitely boring digital farce? Would I willingly enter into some kind of sick Faustian bargain in which I give up my soul for the ability to get out of bed?
Well, why not. I love malware.
Hitherto have I sung a thousand curses upon the name of B∗lliam G∗tes and still he has, even now, the fiendish nerve to rear his ugly head.
💡 Did you know? If you listen really closely to your CPU when you boot up Windows™, you can hear the piercing shrieks of the damned.
And oh baby, it barely even functions at all. But it does. Tragically or otherwise.
Sure, Windoze® insists on updating itself and yet refuses to ever actually succeed in doing so. Sure, that means I’m stuck with some crusty Windows 10™ version from ca. 〜. Sure, notifications literally don’t work whatsoëver. Sure, the system is basically unresponsive for two minutes after fully booting up & logging in, and is constantly chugging away at my hard disk drive to no end. Sure, I have to completely reboot into Linux every time I wanna do anything not directly Fantasia-related. Sure, W∗lli∗m G8s knows all my passwords, my exact geographic location, & the inner details of my mental states now.
But the malware works. It runs, the Devil’s whip at its back, exalting the inglorious names of Willie Gaits & whoëver the f∗ck at Necks0n™® thought it was a good idea to infect the immaculately divine with the pettiest of soils, the most worthless of debasements, the most narrowminded of digital perversions.
I think I did a decent job adjusting, but taking screenshots on Wind O’s™ is considerably more difficult.
Greenshot?
Greenshot is actually pretty cool, but I ended up not using it, because the Fantasia client (and no other program with which I tested it), for presumably unknowable reasons, blocks it from working normally — even if I bind Greenshot to a completely unused key like Break ⎊.
Some brief WWW searches would lead me to believe that this is a problem specifically at low resolutions — and for similar reasons, low pixel density — both of which I’m working with here. This is, after all, a pixel game from running on virtually technology (Windows™ 10 notwithstanding), so prepare for a littol extra eye-searing.
Stuff that probably has more to do with the Fantasia client itself than with Macrohard Windoughs™:
For whatever reason, chatlog text regularly gets cut off, especially when at the bottom of the log or immediately before a smega-like log entry. It’s bad to the point that I regularly have trouble reading chat whilst playing.
Fantasia lacks MapleL5s’s “dark chatlog background” option, making the text contrast sometimes okay, usually bad, and sometimes unreadable (depending on viewing conditions, as always).
But fear not! I’ll continue providing transcriptions of relevant text in images, either in <details> elements or in alt properties (the latter of which are always duplicated as title properties, just in case).[2]
[↑] I’ll be using *NIX as a clumsy way of referring to both macOS® & Linux.
[↑] The reader might note that these transcriptions & the above concerns are fundamentally a11y-related. I discuss a11y to a greater extent in the context of CAPTCHAs in “Are you a robot?” (). However, I think the case I make in that essay is, ironically, too strong to be capable of mentally registering with the (relatively, as always) able-bodied reader.
So, even though I actually do cover many of these points in the aforementioned essay, allow me to extract them for convenience:
Everyone is disabled sometimes
Even the most 110% able-bodied mfer can & will encounter serious situational disabilities, and this is especially true in an inherently flexible medium like, for example, a webpage. For instance, I write the transcriptions when at my desktop computer, but I rely on these kinds of transcriptions in general when viewing things on my handphone — the viewing conditions are simply much different.
Designing for a11y has big impacts seemingly unrelated to a11y
To give a simple example: Codeberg not infrequently refuses to (up)load certain resources, purely for technical reasons; failures that have nothing to do with human capacity nor incapacity. Similarly, handphone users may be working with data caps. The more “accessible” the webpage, the more technically robust it is in general, and the more technical purposes it can be efficaciously put to.
Being amenable to screenreading benefits not just those who actually use screenreaders regularly, but also the relatively able-bodied who simply want TTS for convenience (cf. audiobooks), and also “robots” (read: software) that just want access to the textual content. Of course the latter does include malicious or perhaps useless software like LLMs, but this is irrelevant given that it also includes perfectly good software like WWW search engines, Ctrl+f (“find”) in your favourite web browser, etc., etc.!
Exotic-sounding disabilities are often within, or at least overlapping with, the perfectly ordinary range of human variation
For reasons we simply cannot get into here, human variation is, in recent decades, parcelled into a nigh incomprehensible web of jargon encompassing diagnostic criteria, syndromes, spectra, and other classificatory mystification (for lack of a better word). But beneath this thick layer of mystification lie actual human beings in all their individual–collective complexities. Whether any given natural variation constitutes “able-bodiedness”, or “disability”, or some grey area in between, is ultimately(!) irrelevant, and not at all well-defined anyway.
As far as Maplers in particular go, you might know that I play MapleStory. The question of where I fit within the aforementioned layer of mystification is an inquiry that’s inclined to border on arithmancy. Nonetheless, the simple fact that I often enough have trouble with CAPTCHAs and yet am “able-bodied” enough to have a gazillion hours playing MapleStory should tell you something about the relationship between “disability” and ordinary human variation.
Obviously, this is not to downplay disability, but rather, simply to emphasise that it’s more nuanced, situational, and commonplace than you think — in a way that often forces us to think of a11y not in terms of a particular archetypal disability™.
Oh, great. Now I’ll never be able to win the game. 😭
I buddied Ummagumma in the desperate hopes that she might one day change her mined and give me bacque my Wooden Club. In the process, I learnt that Fantasia has a very different buddy UI:
This isn’t Fantasia’s doing, however (as far as I know). It seems to just be the vanilla GMS v83 () UI. Fantasia is notionally based around GMS v62 (), but it uses the v83 client code for technological benefits like this one. We’ll see more of how Fantasia is a bit of a GMS (and indeed, other pre-BB retail versions) amalgam as we go on.
For now, it’s just worth noting that there’s a little yellow star indicator ✴ for buddies that are on the same channel, some extra buttons for buddy-related actions at the bottom, and most notably: buddy groups!
This cleverly solves, at least partially, the classic problem of sending buddy messages too indiscriminately. Gone, at least hopefully, are the days of hearing only one side of an oranj conversation. Plus, it’s kinda like a guild chat, sorta. Obblobs already rises once again! No need to pay a jillion mesorinoes to some hacks in Órbis!
These are just NX. We’re not gonna talk about the ins & outs, the up- & down-sides of Fantasia, ’cause I’m saving that for the laundry list at the end. Suffice it to say that monsters dropping NX that’s otherwise only available from voting will be familiar to the MapleL5ser.
Anywho, we got the whole gang together: myself & Ummagumma, plus Lv1Crook (lv1000boss, xXCrookXx) & Harley (Harlez, Gock, Murhata)!
Also pictured: Ummagumma floating behind us and limblessly keeping pace
The basic layout of Maple Island (sans Camp) is essentially that of RS. Big-ass mapz, nothing separating Southperry from A Split Road, no Pigs, etc.. However, speaking of A Split Road, it has Mai!
💡 Did you know? Mai is effortlessly cooler than you or I will ever be.
Basically GMS ca. v22 (). Mai’s quests (completely absent from RS) are quite different from those in v62, and many Maple Island quests present in v62 are still absent in this v22-based version.
Termarto Feeled is a li’l diff in v22, doe. It’s got Orshroombs! 😱
Fantasia has only one playable resolution (viz. 1024×768), and it’s larger than the original 800×600, so they redid some of the indoor maps to fit the new display. Like the Amherst Department Store!
I jus learnt that Amherst has no /h/ in it. No, really. It’s pronounced /ˈæ.məɹst/. Look it up.
Looks gr8! I’m not gonna show screenshots of all these maps that I come across, but suffice it to say that their quality is generally around this high.
[serverwide announcement]: Gojo got a(n) [Stone Tiger Head] from the Perion Monster Egg!
Stone Tiger Head
The figure of a roaring tiger’s head, carved from an unknown material.
I am slightly anoid that gachapon pulls (which we’ll get to later) are announced serverwide. Nonetheless, it is — at least, at this stage — fun to see the kind of stuff that’s in there. Stone Tiger Head is pretty clearly an iTCG crafting item, so that explains how they managed to integrate the iTCG stuff! Note that iTCG was added to GMS in v59 (), and — to my knowledge — was always GMS-exclusive.
Biggs: I’ll give you something nice if you get me 10Orange Mushroom Caps and 30Blue Snail Shells! You can get it by taking down the monsters, but … looking at you, I’m not sure if you’re up for the challenge…
Is his name Biggs, or Bigg? “Bigg’s Collection of Items”? “Biggs’s”? “Bigz”?? “Biggs’s’s”???
💡 Did you know?Biggs is actually the plural of Bigg, because he’s really just three Biggs in a trenchcoat. The correct spelling is therefore ⟨Biggs’ Collection of Items⟩.
Wow. I mean, ten Orshroomb caps is already physically punishing, but… thirty. Specifically the blue ones. Sheesh. Well, let’s head to the timeless & eternal Deign Jurous Faux Rest (the ol’ DJFR, as we used to call it back in the day) for the islander’s choice Orshroomb selection.
Ah… the elusive level 8 dearge Mushroom!
The Orshroombs hit back. And they hit hard. But it still took longer to farm up the thirty blooz! Ummagumma had the right idea going to A Split Road, I think, in spite of its large area and still diverse population. I did most of mine at Snayle Field of Flowers, which is okay too: ≈37% Blues, and a bit smoller.
After all my efforts, however, Biggs (all three of ’em) decided to snub me anyway, withholding the literally thousands of Froot Knives that I know perfectly well he keeps in his back pocket!!
If Thick it Around the Beech Tree was lit, then HHGI was fully pyrolysed.
Transcription of the chatlog in the above image
Ummagumma: HHG1 is poppin’
Lv1Crook: so many noobs
That’s what we like to see. Warms my heart. 🥹
One of the great advantages of Fantasia is the lack of mapowner (and its associated @mapowner command), which facilitates this kinda thing, and generally makes the whole Maple World a lot less of an anxious wasteland. Then again, I’ve never heard of any implementation other than MapleL5s with a mapowner-like mechanic (or anti-mechanic, I guess?)…
Chilling out in Henesys proper was similarly cool. It’s wonderful just to witness all these people (low-level & probably yet to leave Vic) waulking around Tori’s major hubs. I can understand why people would flock to new — even if somewhat unappealing — Maple server launches, if only for this kind of experience!
O, boi! How tf was I the only one not to get blac hair? My head looks like a gaw damb Ferrara Red Hot® now!
Well, we’re all gonna have to live with our respective hairdos regardless. NX ain’t real here in Fanned Asia, so let’s take our newfound 10th level (thx Claudia) and beat our feet to our respective streets. It’s job advancin’ time.
For me, that means Nautilus Harber. Obviously. Of course, of course. You knew it was coming. Lucky for me, getting to Naut will be eas—
“A Forest Near the Beach”? Huh‽
Oh yes! I appreciate that they felt the need to connect Nautilus Harbour more organically to the rest of Viccy. Basically, instead of going directly from The Forest East of Henesys to an incy-wincy featureless transitional map (On the Way to the Harbor) that leads to the Harbour, there’s now another Henesys map — A Forest Near the Beach — that intervenes before On the Way to the Harbor (which remains intact). The latter, in turn, leads to Southern Cliffs III:
Actual Nautilus maps with monsters and stuff!! And as the name implies, you have to pass through Southern Cliffs II & I before finally getting to the Harbour. Admittedly, this all creates quite a bit more walking any time you wanna go by hoof to/from Nautilus Harbour. Nonetheless, the maps are reasonably well-designed — at least to the point of not being slapt-together junk maps — and I always like seeing more Vicky maps, of course!! Unfortunately, I doubt there are any sidelong-branching maps, like hidden streets or whatever, but I didn’t look too hard.
Hokay. I found Kyring eventually, which means that I can finally commit piracy. You know what they say: once a pirate, always a pirate. 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Transcription of the chatlog in the above image
[serverwide announcement]: [The First Flight] dear has chosen the path of the Pirate!
Harley: very cool
[system message]: [MapleTip] Some items have gender and job limitations. Please be aware of them before making a purchase.
You have earned the ⟨Beginner Adventurer⟩ title. You can receive a Medal from Dalair.
“The First Flight”! And here I was, thinking they were job advancements!
Also, who’s this Dalair guy? And is it pronounced Doll Air, or The Lair? So many questions, so little time…
What I do know is that, of the various job instructors, Kyrin is relatively tolerant of odd builds. This is good news for ya gurl dear. But if I told you right now what my job was, wouldn’t that spoil the fun of guessing along the way…? Assuming you don’t already know…
And, speaking of The Way™, the way now is to level 15. Why 15? Because that’s the minimum character level to get NX from voting. Remember how I said NX basically ain’t real? Yeah. So getting to level 15 is a top priority right now, in order to make NX slightly(!) less unreal.
So, for some Naut-y quests, I headed back to A Forest Near the Beach to boop some Pig snoots. With bullets.
💡 Did you know? The Double Shot skill is specifically designed so that one bullet goes in each Pig nostril. Now that’s what I call “fit to purpose”!
Wait a sec. I didn’t even do my job quests yet, did I. Oh, this is gonna involve a lotta waulking…
Finally! The White Bandana I desperately needed to cover up delicately preserve my unholy beautiful bangs.[2]
I ended up doing more monster-slaying in the Southern Cliffs region than you might think. That means getting accustomed to these maps, which led me to discover something of an oversight:
You see all that grass & rock? Yeah, that’s just for show. There aren’t any footholds here. You can yump all you want, but at the end of the day, you’re gonna half to work your way around the mysterious void of fake (not real) (illusory) (fictitious) (hallucinatory) geographic features.
And speaking of geography, I found a Nautilus Harbour–themed… egg?
Let’s take a closer look.
Transcription of the above
Monster Egg
A monster of Nautilus laid this egg. The egg is so hard and dense that it will simply not break unless using a special tool. Double-click it to put it on the incubator.
This is the “ticket” corresponding to the aforementioned “gachapon”. Nominally, Fantasia lacks gacha inasmuch as it doesn’t literally have anything called a Gachapon Machine. But Monster Eggs are just gachapon tickets that look cooler and are region-specific. As different gacha machines have different reward pools, so do different Monster Egg varieties. It’s pretty cute; I like the Eggs’ various visual designs.
But there’s a catch: the Egg is only half of the gatch ticquette. To open it, you need an Incubator. These are, naturally, only available for purchase with NX in the Cash Shop. Fantasia has therefore managed to reproduce the destructively V2W mechanics of MSPSes like MapleR4s by selling gacha tickets in the CS, but this time wrapped in a thin veil of trifling obfuscation. (More on this in the laundry list.)
Anyway, speaking of filling my inventory with crap, I found out that this v83 client has another inch resting UI feature:
Wow! Inventory larj.
Don’t worry. My inventory isn’t stuck like that now. I can just press the same button again to make it normal. Which I’m gonna do, because my inventory simply is not nearly big enough to justify taking up almost the entire width of the display.
Where was I? O ya. I finally finisht the Naut quests but including my job quests this time, which means it’s time to start hoofin’ it round the island in search of moar kwessed. I’m on a time limit, too — gotta hit levol “fiffed e’en” before reset (= ) — so I’ll be sprinting northward to do “The Stumb Pourer’s Tori” rite cwicc.
“Local deer emerges as victor in shootout at Perion street corner” (Daily Register Victoria, )
I’m almost there, and I’ve plenty of lime Jell-O® & tree appendages, so I’ll be going anticlockwise until I can find Icky (we’re besties, that’s what I call him) to complete I’m Board.
[pretend like there’s a really well-composed and totally not entirely obscured by a giant NPC chat window screenshot of me hitting level 15 here]
Wow. That’s record time. Noöne has ever hit level 15 that fassed. As far as I know. Maybe.
Okay I’m back. I wonder what new cwests are unloct for me now that I hit the Bigg phiph tean.
Oh! “Formosan” quests, you say? I appreciate the use of Formosa here, and not just because it gives me an opportunity to embark upon yet another unhinged sidebar only extremely tangentially related to the actual topic of the diary.
In Portuguese, formosa/foʁˈmɔ.zɐ/ just means “beautiful, gorgeous”. It’s a learnèd borrowing from Latin, more formal and less commonly used than other Portuguese words with similar meanings (linda, etc.). Portuguese travellers called it Ilha Formosa “beautiful island”, which was then shortened to simply Formosa and borrowed into other European languages.
The Portuguese never settled, colonised, nor even held any nominal titles related to the island. You’re probably thinking of Portuguese Macau, which did operate as a colony during some of its existence.
The Dutch (read: VOC) unsurprisingly did colonise certain regions of the island in the 17th c., referred to in English as Dutch Formosa and in Dutch as Gouvernement Formosa. Further north around the same time, there was also Spanish Formosa, its official name in Castilian being Gobernación de Hermosa española. However, the Spanish came into conflict with the Dutch and lost. VOC was able to turn the colony into a profitable one exporting sugar(cane), tea, etc.. The Dutch also briefly made a lot of money selling various dismembered body parts of the native Cervus nippon ssp. taiouanus “Formosan sika deer” before they realised that the species was too ecologically important (oops!) and were forced to — thankfully, successfully — reïntroduce it back into the wild from captivity. Incredible.
The name is therefore not really a colonial one, but rather the general European name for the island itself, as a portion of the Earth. Even the VOC never controlled the majority of Formosa’s land area, and its colony lasted only a few decades before Chinese forces took control from the Dutch.
In English, Formosa is still a word, although it’s somewhat dated. Formosans who hear the island referred to in this way are likely to think of it as quaint, or even poëtic. It is, after all, appropriate for an island widely regarded for its natural beauty.
Formosa has been continuously inhabited by humans for many millennia. It wasn’t until very recently — somewhere around the turn of the 16th to the 17th c. CE — that nonnatives (read: Chinese, Europeans, et al.) had any real presence on the island.
In fact, Formosa is the Urheimat of the languages we now know & love as the Austronesian languages, not the least of which being Malay (including Indonesian) and Tagalog, along with very many others. PAn began to diversify into its various families some six or so millennia ago.
This makes it a little awkward to refer to the island itself as Taiwan or island of Taiwan, given that this name only came to be commonplace (in European languages especially) after the ROC began insisting on it around the middle of the previous century.[3] It’s therefore more like a synonym of ROC than it is a toponym.
Note that this doesn’t imply that Taiwan is ultimately Sinitic in origin. Explanations of this kind (typically 臺灣 as “terraced bay”) are folk etymologies. The actual source is a term from a Formosan language (probably Siraya) that referred to a particular place on Formosa, later used pars pro toto for the island.
Indeed, a rose by any other name smells as sweet. Nonetheless, it’s good to know a little bit about language & history. This sidebar was originally like five times as long because I included some stuff about MSM vs. other Sinitic languages of Formosa (Taioanese Hokkien, Hakka), and the relevant Chinese history. Unfortunately it was insufficiently closely related to justify how messy it gets, and in any case isn’t the kind of thing people are thinking of when they think “Chinese history” (i.e. kingdoms fighting each other, dynastic succession, etc.).
Plus, Formosa is just, like, a cooler name? And I felt the need to mathematically prove that it’s cooler. So there. QED.
[↑] Of course, I would never condone using Windoze®. In this respect (and in other respects…), I clearly make a poor role model.
On the other hand, I do love piracy. You know what they say: property is theft, and theft is propriety. I used MAS (which is FLOSS, by the way) to get rid of a “pweez activ8 Windoez™ 🥺” watermark that invited itself suddenly, not to say rudely, to my Windles™ display one day. Because yes, Billiam. Now that you’ve made it your sworn duty to piously beseech me, I shall have no choice but to pony up for your patented malware. I could scarcely resist the opportunity to help fund your weekend outings indulging in some cheeky drinks at the local blood bank or whatever it is that trillionaires do after laundering the money through a few charitable organisations.
And it workt like a bit of magic. Poof. Just like that. Highly recommended (except for the part where it implies using Windoe’s™).
[↑] Permit me a littol bit of Bikibebia plagiarism:
Clergy cautioned against bangs in [] 1600s [Europe] as a sign of [] vanity and “a slide into mortal sin”.
[↑] The name is attested in the 17th c. as 臺灣 and in Dutch as Taiouwang, but didn’t acquire its current meaning nor its widespread use in European languages until much later.
Right, so, dear is levvo 15 now, which meanz I can vote as often as once daily ad nauseam and, crucially, actually get ennecks for it. There’s just one problem: you might’ve noticed 👀 that I went level 10 → 15 all by my lonesome.
So ’tis time to play reverse-catchup with The Gang™ by running it bacque on… another character. Don’t worry — I’ll be stopping at just two. (…Or maybe three eventually, but definitely not now.) 😊
This time around, I discovered that Sen (of Training Camp fame) has a rather detailed default dialogue when you’ve already completed his quest. There are over a dozen distinct questions you can ask this smol child — a species known for its wide-ranging wisdom — including “what’s a ‘skill’?”:
Transcription of the above
Sen: The special ‘abilities’ you get after acquiring a job are called skills. You’ll acquire skills that are specifically for that job. You’re not at that stage yet, so you don’t have any skills yet, but just remember that to check on your skills, press K to open the skill book. It’ll help you down the road.
As you can see, this version of Sen has been imported from, as expected given the rest of Camp & MI, a GMS version much older than v62. Zeroth-grade skills (“beginner skills”, but later extended to additional 0th-grade classes) were added to GMS in v26 (), which also added Aqua Road (pre–Deep Aqua) and our good friend The Relaxer. Since Fantasia most definitely has 0th-grade skills, Sen’s dialogue pictured above is, strictly speaking, a bug. (But I’m not reporting it.)
Wait a sec… Fantasia has Pio’s questline, and it awards The Relaxer… So Fantasia’s Camp+MI isn’t just v22-based, but is actually an unholy union of various pre-v62 versions. Welp. Wurx 4 me.
IGN deer, that is. Not me. You already met me. For better or worse…
And speaking of unholy unions of various Maple versions, this version of May Poe Lye Learned is from the pre-downjump days of yore. How do I know? Well, the Jump Down skill wasn’t added to the game data until v54 (), and downjumping didn’t become generally available until v59 ().
Oh, and also there’s this rope:
💡 Did you know? With a mere 124% JUMP, this rope is reachable from below.
On this particular journey through Mape Pole Aisle And, I managed to extract the coveted Froot Knife from Biggs!
I’m not liking the look on his face, doe. Maybe the nife is booby-trapt somehow…
Now that I’ve escaped MI with all its cwests tidied up, I’m still only level 🎱 — I was economical w/ the Bloosh L’s this thyme. Soooo… it’s Hennessy’s Hungry Grounds 1️⃣ time, I guess??
The beauty of HHGI is that you kinda just show up, and start partying. It’s that simpo. In particular, I got invited to party by one Chicken.
Y’all oreddy know I love me some HT. My body is so ready. But I should probably take The First Flight first, at the very leased. As it happened, Ummagumma (Taima) log’d vpon Fantaſia to do her First Flight at around the same time!
Transcription of the above
[serverwide announcement]: [The First Flight] Ummagumma has chosen the path of the Bowman!
💡 Did you know?Athena Pierce does not, in fact, have Bill’s toupée. Bill needs to stop blaming others for his hairpiece neglect.
That’s right! The First Flight doesn’t give those special untradeable level ten weapons/ammo in Fantasia. If all us PCs have to suffer poverty, then so too do the NPCs. It’s only fair!
These unique “Beginner [archetype]’s” weapons seem to have been added to GMS in v49 () along with the 4th grade The Fourth Flight etc.. I don’t really have a strong opinion about the presence or absence of this feature of the game. Nevertheless I do find it a tad bit strange that the items in question were made to be special-sauce untradeable ones, rather than their ordinary counterparts that had always existed. What, I can’t be trusted with a “real” bow? Is Athena Pierce worried that I’mma do smth dumn like selling the bow for money to buy booze melee weapons? It’s nunya bizniss, mizz Pierce!
Anyway. Since I was in Heaney C.’s for its Hungry Grounds, and Ummagumma was there for her first flight, we decided to hoof it together up norf to Perry Yawn for my own flight.
💡 Did you know?Dark Stumps actually have (approximately, according to the latest estimates) 42 069 HP, but if you keep hitting them with your Fruit Knife, they eventually start to feel bad for you and just lay down & die out of sheer pity.
As I set foot in the Warriors’ Sanctuary for neither the first nor the last time, D-Dubs caught a glance and, without skipping a beat, offhandedly made me a warrior without saying a single word.
Transcription of the chatlog in the above image
[serverwide announcement]: [The First Flight] deer has chosen the path of the Warrior!
Ummagumma: wielding a spear, has orange hair
baby rusa (babirusa) spotted
Ummagumma got it spot on (excepting the babirusa part; I’m not a suid!!): the idea is to make yet another orange DEXspearman polearmwoman. Why? Well, I admit that I faced quite a bit of indecision when it came to Fantasia, and even at this point — having already taken my first flight on IGN deer — I wasn’t confident in my choices so far. Nonetheless, I figured:
Fantasia has no HP/MP washing, and has also revampt its DEF mechanic, so maybe Hyperbola Body & Ironical William will actually be super cool & useful. My primary (but not sole) motivation for playing the dang throughclass is exactly this: its defining skills!! Do I have to explain the warrior throughclasses for like the sixth time‽‽
Naturally, this reasoning turn’d out to be at least partially mistaken because Fantasia is bad and doesn’t know what a spearman is,[5] but you’ll have to forgive me for not fully understanding this at the time.
Fantasia just releast, so I’m kinda taking a shot in the dark here. Of the various “odd” jobs that come to mind, DEX warrior seems like it has a pretty good fighting chance at being “playable” in most or all of the game’s contents, as a general rule, even without knowing much about the MapleStory implementation in question.
No cards up my sleeve & no coins behind your ear, this character is indeed a straightforward remake of rusa. If I enjoyed playing rusa as much as I did the first time, then trying it again on another considerably different — but similar in a few crucial ways — implementation oughta be a good time.
However, this last point (5.) cuts both ways: remaking rusa is a safe bet, but a safe bet by no means implies high stakes. I’ve plenty of other garbo character ideas floating around in my deprived head. Chances are that, should I decide to play more Fantasia, this will not be The Way.
That’s fine for now, though.
One unexpected benefit of choosing the least imaginative IGN possible (i.e. my own name verbatim) is that this happened after The First Flight announcement popt off:
Transcription of the above
Dizz [whisper]: hi deer r u deer from maplelegends
deer: hi caleb
Dizz: hi deer
Oh, yes! That’s Dizz as in vvvv, inhale, eject, inject, DexBlade, insist, inbred, Brains, et al.! It just so happened that, in spite of our starting Fantasia slightly “late” (relative to the folks who barged in as soon as the gates opened), Dizz began his own journey almost simultaneously with us.
That means it izz thyme to put together an mfing squad. For starters, Lv1Crook (lv1000boss) hiked on over from our next-door neighbour Ellinia, having just taken his own first flite and put together a warred robe at the local Mage Armour-y.
Transcription of the above
Ummagumma: hey deer
deer: hi kels
Ummagumma: wouldnt you agree that Matt is so cool
deer: honestly
the fit is pretty tight
Ummagumma: he’s so calva [sic] y gordo
don’t you agree?
deer: ofc
Lv1Crook: i love my potato sac— i mean clothes
Ummagumma: he’s top-tier gordo
Already balding at the tender level of ten. 😔 Maybe alopecia is contagious and he acquired it after long hours training with Grendel.
When we stept back out of the Warriors’ Sanctuary, however, we stumbled across a certain Hong the Pilot.
Transcription of the chat in the above image
Hong the Pilot: Sky… the road of my life…
Lv1Crook: hes sucking up that cigar so fast
Ummagumma: he also apparently does not need a runway to take off
Huh! I mean, he certainly looks 🆒. But what is Hong doing loafing about the roof of the Warriors’ Sanctuary?
Neat! Instead of one Spinel for each town in the game, each one taking you to any of various World Tour locations, we have the O.G. specialised transports that each exclusively occur in one (1) map. Although not as convenient, to be sure, I think I like this more. Not only does it have more character (and fewer Spinel 👁️sores), but it makes the World Tour locations feel more like part of the Maple World itself, instead of a mysterious alternative dimension accessible through Dimensional Mirrors Spinels from virtually anywhere you like.[1]
I admit, however, that Hong the Pilot is new to me. Then again, I never visited Shànghǎi until visiting it on MapleL5s in like . He shows up in the EMS data, but I doubt that he ever existed in-game — if he did, it must’ve been in a pretty late version. Similar comments apply to MapleSEA. The earliest reference I can find to Hong the Pilot is a post (in English) on RaGEZONE™ that’s just a big dumb data dump of game-internal IDs. This suggests that the Shànghǎi data — the String.wz data, & possibly more — was localised for MapleSEA/EMS, but Hong in particular (and possibly the rest) was never actually used.
In TMS, pay it 1000 meso he will take you to Shanghai temporary airport (CMS take you Shanghai city square), not by Spinel
btw, the NPC name call Hong the Pilot in TMS and CMS
More literally, the actual CMS name appears to be 驾驶员 洪, which translates to the same. The corresponding TMS name is 洪姓駕駛員; the extra morpheme姓 just specifies that 洪 is the surname.
Finding a stray Spear along the way to Perion was fortuitous enough, but now I found a Lether Hannedbag also!
I’m thinking once I hit level 15 I can put the Leather Purse’s handle around the end of the Spear and swing it around like a really long two-handed mace. Or flail. Or something suitably mediæual like that.
💡 Did you know? The Red Snail is the only species that drops Leather Purses because they’re the only monster species known to hunt Pigs — for their skin, no less. Vicious li’l bastards.
As we were grindin’ it out here at the Perion St. Coroner, we encountered one Moomie.
Transcription of the above
Moomie: you guys want to party?
Ummagumma: tell you what Moomie
your forwardness has impressed me
[system message]: ‘Moomie’ has joined the party.
He seems all right, but Moomie remains merely a provisional member of OngblongsObblobs. For a more permanent member of the squad, we met up with Dizz.
Maybe you’ll’ve’st already guest it, but Dizz is going the STRginner route! Let’s go!!
Actually… Before we go, I wanna hit up the Perion armoury.
Yurp. Sure, my entire real, physical body is intimately & inseparably bound up with the spear/polearm throughclass, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love shields. If I can get away with it, I prefer my stylish, if unassuming, Wooden Buckler.
We decided to head to the Hen-a-Cease Hunting GND’s, this time by way of Keming Sitty. In the crowd-favourite L Forest, deer found her very first Monster Egg.
Known fact: grey is the colour of Kerning.
Now that my inventory was saddled with the weight of an egg half my height and made of pure cement, it was time to keep freakin’ marchin’ all the way out of the Keming zone.
Welcome to Kerning City! You are now leaving Kerning City.
Once we, at long lassed, made it to HHGI, I placed my cement egg at the bottom of the map — certain that noöne would bother stealing something so impractical to carry around — and got to grindin’.
With a few Orshroomb kills under my belt, I upgraded from 🥭🔪 to Axe2.
Hey. Red Snayle. Psst. Yeah, you. Lemme (Double) Axe you a question.
Medals! Medals, indeed. I’ve never played an implementation with them before, but it seems they were added to GMS in v72 (), along with the pictured Dalair & his faithful companion, Donation Box. Near as I can tell, Donation Box doesn’t do anything here, but I guess in GMS you were able to get medals just by donating… mesos, presumably? More likely NX. Yike. Like the Henesys Donor Medal, for instance, which grants a worrying +10 DEX, +10 SPEED, & +20 maxHP. 😅
The medal I just got is more modest, which makes sense given that all I did to earn it was take The First Flight. It seems the grade-based medals weren’t actually added until five versions later, in v77 (). I can only assume that medals were one of the main reasons (or perhaps the main reason) for choosing the v83 client in spite of the actual content of the game being more — often much more — dated.
In any case, we won’t be seeing a lot of medallage except for when I get new ones. Apparently, part of the original point of getting medals was showing them off, and show off they did, as yet another line of text beneath your character — you know, below your nametag (including any nametag ring you might be wearing) and your guildtag (including any emblem your guild might have). Thankfully, Fantasia has removed the visual clutter by making medals visible to third persons only through the “Character Info” window.
If this here really is a rainforest, then these guys must be Tayassu pecari. Or at least, this must be what T. pecari looks like when you shave off all the poor soul’s hair. Pecaríes calvos y gordos. 😦
Come to think of it, I don’t think any of us have died, nor even seen anyone else die. We really oughta check & make sure that mortality still works. Any volunt—?
Yep. It worx, all right. R.I.P. 🪦
Did I mention we live in a semipermanent state of destitution? So far, it’s pretty much been us waulking around everywhere by hoof, and buying what little equipment we can afford at the expense of our meagre pot funds. It’s not quite as brutal as RS, and this will become trebly true as soon as we make contact with the Fream Arkit™®, but still. At this point, Dizz’s status as the only permaginner in our squad is a surprisingly considerable advantage: no need for MP pots, more favourable WDef calculations, and perhaps most importantly, that 90% discount on transport.
We got a little worried when Dizz announced in guild party chat that he would be “going to the corner store for some milk & smokes”, but our worries were misplaced. When he arrived back at the Rain-4S’d, he brought Sleepywood return scrolls for everyone!
Transcription of the chatlog in the above image
Dizz: here my children
deer: wowie tysm
Now that we were mobile as fr∗ck, it was time to start doing some zoomies around the island to turn in various cuests.
…And, after meeting up with our boy Giovanni il Pescatore, we made use of those Sleeping scrolls to take a powernap warp to Sleepywood. Lv1Newb could not afford to buy back said scroll, so I made this into my first opportunity to use the /trade feature.
Transcription of the chatlog in the above image
deer: havent used the trade window before
LOL
the scrol…
freeing up inv space i see.
Lv1Crook: amazing trade
deer: ahaha
Lv1Crook: tysm
Behold. The magic of barter
But we’re not here to barter with each other. We’re here to barter with brightly-coloured animated fuzzballs in The Deep Fourist of Patients ⟨Steppe II⟩. It works something like this: I offer my eternal gratitude and a few IOUs of unspecified favours to be granted at a later date, and in exchange, the fuzzballs promise not to yeet my orange ass to the bottom of the map.
💡 Did you know? The ropes in these tweed onions are made of exactly what they look like: tree snot. It’s perfectly harmless stuff, but you don’t wanna be hanging around here when the tree sneezes. Family legend has it that my great-great-great-grandpappy tragically died when a tree sneeze launcht him a full kilometre up in the air and into his snotty grave. R.I.P. pappy 🪦
Not so easily defeated, with some more patients, Taima found a Mano of her very own and… discovered that she couldn’t hit it. Going the pureSTRginner route is brave, to be sure, and doubly so on a brand-new server like Fantasia! Plus, she was below Mano’s level (= 20) at the time.
I therefore had no choice but to log onto deer ASAP (dear was in Magatia at the time) and shuffle my ruffle at maximum higth speads to the Thicketta Rounda Beech!! aaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—
Transcription of the chatbubbles in the above image
deer: HI
Taima: o hi
Phewph!! I made it.
Manon’t.
H3ll ya. And it even dropt the magickal shell! 🌈🐚🌈
And we’re bacc. The crew collectively decided that we didn’t spend enough time at the Rain-4S’d earlier, so it’s time to collequed an indeterminate quantity of Piggy Ribbies.
feat. Henesys Monster Egg
Why “indeterminate”? Well, if we wanna complete all Ribbon-bound kwests, we’re gonna need at least 250 Ribbõs each. But said kwests include, for instance, “Mrs. Ming Ming’s First Worry”, which is way more of a PITA than it’s worth — unless, of course, you’re intent on also completing the “Second Worry”, which is also typically more of a PITA than it’s worth. Basically, we’re not really “questers” here. We’re opportunistic questers.
And today, we’re grinders. So it’s time to upgrade from The Fain-Rorest to The Big Peach.
Transcription of the above
deer: matt dont die
Ummagumma: much better than the rain-forest
deer: forsure
Lv1Crook: im dead
deer: omg
naurrr
Ummagumma: RIP Matt :(
Well… let’s just say that the Pig Beach is more powerful than the Rain-Forest in more ways than one.
The babie mage lyfe is rruff, but a change in strategy oughta do the trick; I ended up on top layer duty somehow.
deer: matt
why not do the top
if this is dangerous for you
Lv1Crook: yea i should
i just didnt want to cross through all those ribbon pigs lol
deer: i can to the top right if you want
can do*
Lv1Crook: dw about me
This would be neither our first nor our last encounter with the infamous Iron Hog. In fact, the first Iron Hog we happen’d vpon was along The Road to the Donjon (and, in passing, the Elf Forest 1). That’s just your everyday, average Iron Hog. Totally normal. Nothing suspicious. But the “Iron Hog” seen here terrorising the ghost out of our resident magician is actually an Iron Hook [sic]…[4]
…Or rather, it is in vanilla GMS v62. The release of GMS v56 (; the Ariant patch) changed the Iron Hog in The Pig Beach to an Iron Hook. It’s not clear whether the Iron Hook had (in, say, GMS v62) a different droptable from the Iron Hog; rather, the only detectable difference is that the Iron Hook has the following rather unusual info property: removeAfter = 360 (presumably corresponding to 360∕60 = 6 minutes). I’m not familiar with this property, but maplestory.wiki lists it as “Despawns after 360”.[3] Presumably(?), this mechanic doesn’t prevent the Iron Hook from later respawning normally.
MSPSes that manage to discover this little quirk tend to obliterate it: not just Fantasia, but also MapleL5s, DreamMS, and perhaps others. On the other hand, MapleR4s seems to retain the Iron Hook. For what it’s worth, MapleStory Adventures®, the short-lived (〜) Facebook™® game version of MapleStory, used Iron Hook as the only name for the Iron Hog monster.
💡 Did you know? Noöne cares. 🥱 Get back to the action, nerd. 🤓🤓🤓
Fine. How’s this for action?
💡 Did you know? I will never tire of The Big Peach.
Oh, right. The whole thing where allchat, the party GUI, & minimaps don’t really work. We’ll get to that later. More importantly, Lv1Crook has found a greater adversary than the Pigs, Hogs, & Hooks of this here beach:
Transcription of the above
Lv1Crook: why does that thorn
deal 37 damage to me
Ummagumma: becose you stepped on it
you damaged it first
deer: yea
have a lil respet
Lv1Crook: thats one of the reasons i died
lol
i thought it was giving me free iframes
that thing hurts worse than a ribbon pig
But you know where there are no 40-damage thorns luring in newbs with the promise of iframes? That’s right: Henesys Pardnerquest 🤠, occasionally known as HPQ. It’s time to saddle up, get our yees all nice ’n’ hawed, ’n’ put together a rootin’-tootin’ band o’ vaqueros to have a hog-killin’ time.
Transcription of the above
ToniRigatoni
“i cant i need to sleep in like 10 min”
deer
“hold on my etc is full”
Lv1Crook
“where do the seeds go”
Ummagumma
“next time we throw Matt into the evil eye pit”
Step 1: Plant the seeds in the right places (it’s the same placements every time and I still cannot remember)
Step 2: Observe that the colour of the seed (the only distinguishing property of the seeds) has no observable impact whatsoëver on the resulting flower
Step 3: Give up on botany (it’s too hard) and defend the Moon Bunny who’s stuck making Rice Cakes forever in Rice Cake Purgatory after somehow wandering here all the way from KFT
Alternatively, Growliekidnapt bunnapt the Moon Bnuuy and forcibly imprisons them here as his personal Rice Cake slave. We’re just here to fend off the flying creatures who are risking their lives trying to rescue the Moon Bnuuy.
And that’s pretty much it. I’ll admit that HPQ isn’t my favourite Pea Queue, but if nothing else, it has the charm of simplicity and a bonus stage that gives the Maplers what they really want: more freakin’ piggos to slap around.
Although ToniRigatoni only had time for one run, we almost immediately encountered another HPQ gaymer by the name of Serk.
Level twinny!!
Much like in The Pig Beach, however, something ever so slightly peculiar is afoot ahoof in Pig Town. There is yet a third (3rd) species of Iron Hogge: Iron Hog (but MoID 9300060 this time). Although they’re still level 42, they’re otherwise much weaker in almost every respect when compared to ordinary Iron Hogs.
Þe knight is yſlaine!!
Not only are they totally slayable, but unexpectedly, they give a whopping 296 EXP (slightly diluted by party EXP sharing in the above image) instead of the usual 99 EXP! That’s virtually thrice the EXP for infinitely less effort! So be sure to focus on these ironclad (really more like tinclad at best, evidently) EXP piñatas if you ever find yourself at Pig Town.
But that’s not all. Even the Pigs and Ribbon Pigs are fake!! The alteration that all three species have in common is that their nametags don’t show up. Slightly more interesting is that the v56 change I observed in pt. cxxxviii — in which (amongst other things) the WAtk of Pigs was lowered 52 → 37 — failed to touch the Pig species of Pig Town (recall that HPQ was releast in v42 () after its data were already present in v41). So the Pigs of Pig Town mysteriously have an extra +15 WAtk over ordinary Pigs…
And finally, different MoID means potentially different drops. Droptables are more difficult to speak on, because they’re server-sided. Nonetheless, Fantasia has clearly given these Piggos a very different droptable:
And that’s all the IGN deer for now, folkz. Until next time, I hope you enjoy my new level 20 outfit in which I cannot choose between being a business-type supervillain and being ready to shovel some snow off the porch.
[↑] On the other hand, this does no small amount of violence to Taima’s idea of World Tour Lock™. No Spinel means no way to seamlessly move from one World Tour locale to another without potentially-unacceptable lockbreaking. Still doäble considering that, as we’ll later see, Fantasia’s transports to World Tour are all located on the same island (viz. Vicky). But a bit jankier, and I reckon you (the hypothetical World Tour Locker…) may as well stick with MapleL5s at this rate.
[↑] As for the name 楓葉雨 itself, 楓葉 is clearly “maple leaf”, and 雨 is literally “rain”. Nevertheless, 雨 has been used in Literary Sinitic in the figurative senses “friend; teaching, education”, which survives in some idioms like 舊雨 “old friend”, 化雨春風 “benefits of education”, 及時雨 “timely assistance”.
This implies it’s possible that removeAfter = 360 is a kind of “pity” mechanism whereby, if you attack the Iron Hook 360 times, it takes pity on you and dies (but without granting EXP, drops, etc.). Nevertheless, 360 is too suspiciously a multiple of 60, which favours the time limit interpretation.
[↑] This mislocalised name is made possible by the original KMS name being 아이언 호그 ⟨Aieon Hogeu⟩, evidently transliterated from English. Not that Korean has any shortage of words meaning “iron” and “hog”, so. Just another “English because it sounds more exotic” name, I guess?
How hog and hook — easily distinguished in English — could be confused
Korean distinguishesㄱ from ㅋ, similar to English g vs. k, but this distinction is lost in the coda (in other words: when at the end of a word and/or immediately followed by a consonant). This is strange from the English perspective but other West Germanic languages do this too, in which case it’s called final-obstruent devoicing.
The vowel is more complicated to explain precisely but the basic idea is simple: it’s clearly a monophthong (or close enough), but Korean “only” has seven of those. Even English dialects with relatively few monophthongs have more than seven, and said dialects are rhotic anyway so they’re clearly not the target here. The vowel used here, ㅗ, could plausibly be used to transliterate English LOT (= CLOTHsometimes), THOUGHT, FOOT (= STRUTsometimes), or ❓GOAT. That’s four (4) distinct vowels in most dialects.
❓ Typologically speaking GOAT patterns as a diphthong but it’s monophthongal or narrow enough in some dialects. In any case Korean doesn’t do falling nor closing diphthongs (its diphthongs are actually GV sequences where G ∈ /j, ɰ, w/) so the status of GOAT immanent to English isn’t actually relevant since we have no realistic(!) choice but to transliterate it as monophthongal anyway.
[↑] It occurs to me now that, putting aside the substitution of polish & spiritual cleanliness for actual game-design (discussed in the laundry list below), uncomprehension of the spearman throughclass is to be expected of Fantasia simply because probably most Maplers — even, depressingly, players of this exact throughclass — share this uncomprehension anyway.
We can very briefly gloss the throughclass like so (in roughly descending order of importance):
The throughclass most strongly oriented (with the possible, if largely orthogonal, exception of the cleric) towards defending the party, basically centred around the Hyper Body, Iron Will, & Power Crash skills.
A warrior throughclass.
Oriented towards multitarget damage output at the expense of single-target.
Uses polearms & spears.
Self-sacrifice, blood libation.
Notice that nothing about concrete damage output, KPM, & other such observable (i.e. positive) statistics is represented anywhere in the above list.
New player goes to the relevant Discord® to ask what changes have been made to this implementation so that they know which throughclass to “make” (i.e. which class-advancements to take on their new PC).
Interlocutors take this (erroneously or not) to imply that the neophyte is trying to “win the game” (whatsoëver that might mean), and respond accordingly.
All involved, developers included, take this sort of exchange tout court to be constitutive of gameplay & game-design.
One indirect result is that, shockingly (or even paradoxically), spearman players on implementations like Fantasia, MapleL5s, etc. can be indifferent — and in some cases even resentful — towards their 2nd-grade skills, i.e. the exact core of what defines their own throughclass in all pre-BB implementations of MapleStory (n.b. this includes early versions that lack the 3rd grade).
Actual gameplay of MapleStory qua game ossifies into notions of “““viability”””[6] under a preordained telos, and this allows the popularity contest to emerge. We already know this. But it’s worth pointing out that this logic seeps into the brains even of dedicated players of odd jobs (see also: On odd jobs): the disgust towards throughclasses that the player imagines as “popular” in whatever implementation she was raised with.[7]
In the specific case of the spearman this is generally not possible if the implementation in question is pre-3rd-grade, because this implies spears are bad, polearms are okay, and both skills (IW, HB) meaningfully differentiating spearman from its warrior siblings are “““worthless””” because they don’t increase the damage output of specifically the spearman herself. Yet for the player whose childhood implementation has the 3rd grade, this same pre-3rd-grade implementation ironically already evinces the basics of the throughclass, and the popularity-goggles are seen to be fitted with funhouse mirrors for lenses.
[↑] This term requires extra scare-quoting because this sense of viable is, to my knowledge, not found outside of MapleStory. Of course almost(!) all proposals deemed nonviable in this sense are, in point of fact, viable both in the biological sense (to the extent this can be applied to MapleStory) and in the “possible, practicable, feasible” sense.
The irony is that viable in the usual senses is nonetheless applicable to MapleStory. For instance, RevivalStory teaches us well what it means: many otherwise-attractive training spots yield a negative — and sometimes catastrophically so — MPH, such that training becomes infeasible.
[↑] Speaking of warriors, the page is another good example here. Pages weren’t properly implemented in GMS until v86 (, not too long before Big Bang on ) and even then left some things unaddressed or broken. Too little too late, and the result is that odd-jobbers are instinctively predisposed to this throughclass over both of its warrior siblings. By no means is this to say that such a choice is wrong, we all love a good page, but the implicit mistake is to see other people’s attitudes towards an incompetent implementation of a throughclass as constitutive of the throughclass itself.
I can smell your fear, my dear reader. We’ve already done horrible unspeakable things to get Fantasia more-or-less successfully running, met not one but two (2) new characters of mine, partied seemingly interminably with The Gang™ on both of them, and got stuck in inane digressions no fewer than [implausibly large number] times. Yet we’re only like 20% of the way though the diary entry. How is that even possible? What’s going on? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you? How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll® centre of a Tootsie Pop®?
It’s time to get to the bottom of at least one of the above questions, although I shan’t specify which one(s). And you’re coming with me, whether you like it or not!
Ahem. Sorry, I’ll stop being needlessly dramatic for at least a few more paragraphs. We’re just gonna play MapleStory. Per usual.
Also pictured: Me tryna eat the li’l feathers that come out when you cast Nimble Feeties
Bubblings: Summarily defeated.
Then we needed The leg removed from an octopusfor Andre. Since we’re in CS (Curning Sitty) anyway, and we’re not in RevivalStory, I figured we should take the opportunity toupée a visit to my favourite itty-bitty littol mapporino: CFD.
It has been A Long Time. Such a long thyme, in facked, that I str8-up forgor that this map has Blushroombs in it. They’re fassed, they hit harred, and they’re 3️⃣ levels above us! But we’re DEXtrous enough to ryes to the occasion and, with some lucc, we’ll figure out a way to outsmart ’em.
As it happened, the Blushroombs actually outsmarted themselves.
On second thought, maybe there’s just a 塗り壁 ⟨nurikabe⟩ (lit. “plastered wall”) there. Either way, the Blushroombs are deeply lost, so we’re just gonna have to put ’em outta their miserie.
In which I Summer Salt Kick my way to levol 18 (the “17” you see above is an red orange herring)
O yez! I can use a knuckler too, ya silly goose. And speaking of wrapping rigid implements around my hands, Nella rewarded me with one (1) hard Brown Leather Armor Glove:
Transcription of the item in the above image
Brown Leather Armor Glove
Req lev : 20
Req STR : 20
Req DEX : 20
[Req archetype] : pirate
Category : glove
Weapon def. : 6
Number of upgrades available : 5
This’ll come in handy.
Emboldened by our unlikely victory against the Blushroombs — who were, in turn, merely protecting the more vulnerable VIIIpodes — we marcht up norf to Pier-a-Yon to take on the rather peculiar kwessed known (& unknown 🤫) only as “Manji and the Secret Group”. This is one of those cvests that has a maximum level limit but really shouldn’t. Or, to say the same thing twice, it’s one of those cvests that has a maximum level limit.
Its minimum level is also suspiciously low at just 18. Certainly not complaining, but Dark Cack Stumps ain’t exactly easy pickins at þis leuell. Judging by our successes so far, tho’, we shall be good biz.
💡 Did you know? (Dark) Axe Stumps would be more formidable if they’d just learn how to use their axes.
The “biz” is, however, in the habit of making itself rather scarce here on the Wessed Streat Corner of Pier-a-Yon. In Dizz’s (his idea!) defence, he’s probably used to doing this cvest alone. Still, no trivial quantity of channel-scraping later, we had it bagged.
Having bagged it, however, my bag was now getting worryingly full.
Transcription of the above
dear: rip 2 octo leg
Dizz: LOL
dear: i have to eulogise each etc [item] i drop
We’ll go into more detail in the laundry list, but suffice it to say that this was a widespread problem that required a whole lot more than a pair of Octo Legs’ sacrifice.
On the bright side, the Firewoods here were about to be more plentiful than their RevivalStoric counterparts, since the ERM III is that familiar to GMS v49+ players.[2]
Oh no! They’re closing in from all sides! I guess this is my lassed stanned…
Still on the Vicky Archipelago,[23] actually. But since we’d been farming all manner of Stumpz anyway, Dizz insisted that I at least take the obligatory trip to Thailand for a littol Floating Marketeering. That means heading to The Swamp of The Spare I to talk to Captain Nareth and board his miniature tugbote.
∗ ∗ ∗
Upon the merest sight of the lumber I was carrying, I was Toon’d up:
Wowww… I look… So cool…… (Why are pirate clothes so bad? I look like I got in a tangle with a canvas tarp and never quite managed to extricate myself.)
I did notice some substantial differences between Fantasia’s & MapleL5s’s respective versions of these Thailand maps, although I haven’t the slightest idea of whence they come. For presumably unknowable reasons, Thailand was never added to GMS — not even post-BB.
Anyweigh, let’s make like a banana (native in Thailand, no less) and split. Take me away, Cap’n Nairiff.
Let’s do our Green Hundredmush, shall we? Time to revisit the ol’ Tweed Onion Three[7] (which is definitely what TOT stands for).
O boi, an Oalled Wisconsin! My CNS is already in an advanced state of decomposition so I can’t exactly remember this thing popping out of the void left behind by an yſlaine monſtre but I don’t reckon it could’ve come from anywhere else (no reason for either of us to be buying it from Sam especially at level 19 already).[6] Yet where my CNS fails, the world of the written word steps prosthetically in to allow me to “re-call” that this here hat was originally called Puffy Brown Beanie.
Colour me disappointed to discover that Wisconsin is, in fact, not the name of a type of hat IRL. Plenty of hats are named for places but Wisconsin is, much to the chagrin of [checks notes] Wisconsinites everywhere (read: in Wisconsin), not amongst the locales distinguished for their eponymous haberdasheries. We should nevertheless credit Wisconsin for retaining the Algonquian twang of a long-lost (no, really — noöne knows the etymology anymore) toponym filtered through not fewer than four (4) layers of European lang-mangling before arriving at the present English name that is decidedly not English-sounding at all.
But the question on all our minds still remains: do the Wisconsinites wear Old Wisconsins? Wikipedia slaps a big fat Dfb on almost the entirety of Wisconsin, which suggests that while said Wisconsinites need no earflaps during the summer months, they probably get considerable snow & ice in the winter. Indeed, Wikipedia cites something like 124 cm of snowfall annually. Nothing to snea’s at, although the data end at and one gets the feeling that more recent years have made decreasingly impressive showings.
Fortunately for us, the magic of MapleStory preserves the memory of a world in which all Wisconsinites wear Old Wisconsins. And, as a Wisconsinite in spirit if not in body, I hit level mfing twentie:
Twinny is a big levol not just for new gear, but also because Fantasia chose this as the Incubator level. Once one has both voted-to-win & surpast the first nineteen levels, it becomes possible to redeem one’s own gachapon tickets crack open one’s own Monster Eggs. It looks a littol bit like this:
Transcription of the above
Incubator
Place the Monster Egg you wish to open on the Incubator.
This GUI, flashy as it is, is entirely nonfunctional. It serves no purpose, although it at least has the decency not to pull a Leggie Spirit on us and make us wait for a fake “progress bar”. And, given that your chatlog is informed of each Monster Egg pull, there’s similarly no real use in Cody (blessèd be his name) making his appearance each time an Eg is inky-b8’d:
[serverwide announcement]: dear got a(n) [Stirgeman Cape] from the Nautilus Monster Egg!
Nonetheles— Wait. Did I just get a Green Line™ on my very first Monster Egg pull‽ That is some lucc. Admittedly, the cape itself isn’t really that powerful. But it’s only level 20, so I can already ware it!
My phassion cents is irresistible.
I assume iTCG crafting is basically intact, so the real power lies in the cape’s potential to be upgraded to, for example, a Mk III or Mk IV!
More important for the time being, however, is that I also Egg’d a Blue Mystique. The stats are mid (the WDef is bad) but I’m more inch rested in the phaque’d that I can NPC it rnrn for a smol fortune of 100k mesors.
Transcription of the item in the above image
Blue Mystique (Female)
Req lev : 70
Req DEX : 110
Req LUK : 200
[Req archetype] : thief
Category : top
DEX : +5
LUK : +2
Weapon def. : 55
Number of upgrades available : 7
Now that I’m rolling in the doe 🤑, I can easily afford some level 20 équipement.
That is: some Brown Skeedy Sandals (which already sound like they reek before you even get to see ’em in action; seedy + skunky ≟ skeedy), plus the Brown Leather Armor Glove that Nella gave me earlier, and most importantly: The Negotiator, a euphemistic name for a gun which I shall most certainly be using to “negotiate” some Bullets rather forcibly into the eyes of my enemies.
💡 Did you know? If you go into a local forest and start lighting up the trees with countless bullets, you too can become well-known in your “field”, if perhaps not the field of palaeontology.
But Winceton also wants to do some “Planting Trees” of his own, and for that, he once some Seedlings. As much a demonstration of the circle of life as anything else, these Seedlings are produced exclusively by the Ghosts 👻 of Stumps dear-ly departed. Unluckily for us mere mortals, Ghosts are invisible. But when we’re equipped with Excavation “Sight”, they suddenly became apparent to us.
💡 Did you know? When Stumps die, they become Ghost Stumps. When Ghost Stumps die, they become Ghost Ghost Stumps, and to see them, you need Excavation Excavation Sight. The Maple World is still decades away from this kind of technology.
’Twas here [The Blue Mushroom Forest] where I found my first scrol… sord scrol……
Transcription of the item in the above image
Scroll for Two-handed Sword for ATT
Add option for attack on two-handed sword. Success rate:10%, weapon attack+5, STR+3, weapon def.+1
F6
Basically pocket lint. But maybe I’ll frame it & put it up in the living roomb.
My first-ever scrol drop on Fantasia is the same exact scrol in the same exact map as my first-ever scrol drop on RS! What a coïnky-dinky. F6
It is, once again, basically pocket lint. Or is it perhaps pocket linn’t? This time I’ll be putting it in my Mushroomb House-Elf shoppe in approximately sumpteen thousand years when I have enough NX to buy one of those.
In any event, Dizz already farmed up his hundo’ Animal Faucils — so called because they’re fossilised fungi — so today I’ll be ruthlessly assassinating literally hundreds of Grushroombs with extreme prejudice all by my lonesome.
The lone assassin at work
feat. Ellinia Monster Egg
💡 Did you know? Grushroombs drop Animal Fossils not because they’re animals, but because they eat their prey whole and digest them over evolutionary timescales.
The Grushroombs were evidently powerless to withhold their Monster Eggs from me; indeed, this would be the lassed map for quite a while that would actually drop Egz for me at all. An ill omen indeed, but on the bright side, this allowed me to pull… another Stirgeman Cape?
[serverwide announcement]: dear got a(n) [Stirgeman Cape] from the Nautilus Monster Egg!
Yes, Nautilus Monster Eggs actually do drop from Tweed Onion,[7] Southern Forest III; an Ellinia map. I believe Fantasia’s justification to be that Nautilus maps are underrepresented on Tori Island and therefore need to Eggwise bleed into surrounding maps (some Ellinia, some Henesys) in order for the Nautilus Monster Eggs to not be wildly underrepresented as well.
Sure, why not. Just keep sending capes my way and eventually I’ll open my very own capery, or whatever a store that sells capes is called. I’ll become a mantlemonger. A cloakery? We’ll workshop it later. Stay in touch.
I know; you’re probably thinking, “surely this bitch has more than 💯 Anjimal Fossils by now”. First of all: rude. I prefer binch. Second of all: I do have a hundred already, actually. But I’m also doing the 999-kill kwessed. Yeah. I bet you didn’t even think of that. Uh huh.
And, now that I was done antagonising my dear reader for no reason whatsoëver, I got my fifth freaking Grushroomb card‽
O, wut? I didn’t know I was doing a “Designated Mon” quest, nor was I aware that the Fantasia devs were from the Black Country.[8]
Transcription of the above
Designated Monster Effect
Time Left
Oh, I see. It’s Designated Monster Effect. Which lasts for an hour, I guess? And does… nothi—
Transcription of the above
You have gained experience (+26) Bonus Event EXP (+3)
Ahh. Well, I guess I’m imprisoned in the Tweed Onion[7] for the next 59 minutes whilst I grind out my 1.15× (rounded towards zero) EXP multiplier.
deer:steel pipe spotted (of the category ONE_HANDED MACE)
Harley: shes a beaut
Taima: good for plumbing, smoking, and even armed combat
deer: armed combat between rival plumbers
Oh, yes! And the Steel Pip is just the pip of the iceberg. Fantasia & I are at least agreed that if you’re gonna put some “trash” rewards in your gacha Monster Eggs, then they may as well be of the “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” kind. I haven’t screenshotted all of ’em I’ve seen, but suffice it to say that the carpenter & the grim reaper are actually playable in this implementation!
As for my own Monster Egg pulls, I’d like to think I’m making it big.
For most, mayhap, 23 is nothing special. But long-time readers & long-time questers know perfectly well that this is the krooshol Camila’s Gem Level™, a.k.a. the Utah Level™! Let’s leapfrog some haybales, folks.
Perfect form. Muah. Like poëtry in motion. After a performance like that, Utah could scarcely resist awarding me the Pi—
Look at his smug little face, smirking at me.
💡 Did you know? I will not forget this.
Unbelievable. After all that… I guess I have no choice but to enjoy eating the thirty (30) fresh Cakes that Utah lovingly baked for me from scratch. They’re delicious… I hate them……
Now that I’m done hate-eating an entire wedding’s worth of Cake, it’s time to take the rest of my anger out on some snakes, and burn off those calories along the way.
Brutal.
Why snakes? Well I’ve got two levels on ’em now, and I need like 150 of their skins for… let’s just say bariousbreasons. My legal team advises me that I cannot specify any further. 🤐
As it happens, I can already hit the snek reasonably consistently. Because Fantasia’s Juniore Nequis are emphatically not nerft (unlike the Juvenile Neckys of RS), I do still “MISS” sometimes! But that’s fine tho’, rite…?
Knot’s oaf assed. I tried Damp 4S’d and, occasional “MISS”es aside, it’s just too densely-populated for me to get away with gunning it much of the time. I can either accept that I’m a part-time pistolwhipper now, or accept that I deal approximately Jacques Merde damage with my level ten knuckle 💩 to these monsters. Either way, they deal far too much dambage to me — I’m talking nearly 70-damage lines from the sneighcks — for Damp Foressed to be worth it… for now.
But Speepywould has better things in store for us. Both Dizz & I need to get our Hushie & Zushie kvests done, so it’s time to party up for KPQ’s de facto superior Doppelgänger: Anne Tunnel I (≝ ATI).
💡 Did you know? The ATI that you see above is not to be confused with ATI Technologies Inc.®, a Canadian semiconductor R&D firm that absolutely devastated its competition by anticipating Ant Tunnel I a full 17(!) years before it ever saw the light of day, thereby indelibly capturing the massive worldwide market of hopeless Ant Tunnel addicts.
We did join Vortex’s party, altho’ it didn’t lassed furlong. By the time I bussèd my ass to the Wanted : H. Mushroomb & Wanted : Z. Mushroomb signs and back, I barely got in any ATI time at all.
As the party dissolved, however, the leadership was left with me, and I kept going. I wanted to at leased compleat the respective 99-kill cwests, which I was perfectly willing to do awl aloan if I had to.
Then, something ✨magical✨ happened: people just… kept showing up. Erelong I had a full party of ATIers covering most of the breadth of the map and probably a few sporadic unpartied stragglers too. The planets aligned and Cody himself smiled upon my party. The air was thick with a pulsating energy and EXP flowed like ocean currents. The monster spawns spewed forth with a redoubled vehemence, flooding the tunnel in a wash of reänimated fungus. I struggled to keep up, my Negotiator sputtering.
Then I got the hang of it. No longer a mere farmer of 🫦 & 🧟 Mush, I was one component of a fully-articulated, living, breathing Ant Tunnel organism that slotted into the tunnel like a hand in a well-tailor’d glove. The Idea of ATI made flesh.
I don’t know how long I was in there. It could’ve been 60 minutes or 360. I do know I more than completed all four 99- & 999-kill quests and both Monster Book card sets. And I also know that all good things come to an end.
As I passed leadership and said my goodbyes, my party was sad to see me go. One buddied me. But I knew perfectly well that even if I never came back to ATI, ATI didn’t need me. The party continues on without me; the Idea of ATI persists in the collective memory; and the Idea can always make itself manifest whenever & wherever it gets the chance. I hope to see it again soon.
Perhaps you intuit why partying @ ATI might be the Doppelgänger of KPQ. But why (i.e. in what ways) might ATI be “superior”?[9]
Whereas KPQ requires an empty channel and exactly 3〜6 PCs in the 21〜30 level-range who can competently clear, ATI is kinda just… you show up. If you can hit Hushies and/or Zushies, you’re in. Party size? 3〜6 is great, but even 1〜2 is fine for a while, and depending on your setup, you might even consider ≥7 (in two parties). Level? Never heard of it. Coming & going? Repotting? Whenever works for you.
All this might seem obvious, but I wanna emphasise that there’s something very ✨special✨ about this arrangement that, in spite of — or rather, in addition to — its fluidity, manages to capture the PQ thrill of “just showing up” & partying with other Maplers in a way that foregrounds the game’s strongest social aspects. Sure, it’s a “PQ” with virtually only one (1) stage, but it’s a pretty good stage all things considered, and so long as I get the thrill of the PQ, I’m not really complaining. 🤭
In particular, the existence of ATI (qua map) is largely what makes this dynamic possible. Much like KPQ (and HPQ, LMPQ, & yes, even MCPQ; and to a lesser extent LPQ & OPQ), ATI has a prime location: immediately adjacent to Speepywood proper (which importantly has both the pot shop of its hotel and a storage NPC). Perhaps more importantly, ATI is simply a really good party grind spot: it’s a larj map with plenty of nooks ’n’ nuances, it’s got favourable spawn density, and its population’s levels are uniform enough to be worthwhile even for a party with a narrow level-range.
In light of this, one might wonder what exactly Fantasia are getting at when they claim to be “balancing” the game’s maps.
Allow me to be crystal clear: making felicitous changes that have effects at the game-mechanical (i.e. game-physical) level (irrespective of whether any changes to the game mechanics themselves are involved) is not the same as “balancing”, as I’ve expounded elsewhere. The executive summary is that when we make changes to the game, we are — at least, hopefully — in no way balancing nor equalising anything per se (that is, for balance’s sake), but rather filling out — i.e. uncollapsing — the game’s structure and thereby allowing it to evince its truer self.
Some readers may find the following wording more apposite: we are — again, with any luck — bringing out (evincing, realising, etc.) the immanent logic of MapleStory. The antithesis of this is not an “unbalanced” version of the game, but rather a partially collapsed, deflated version of the game in which certain moments (inner interconnexions, aspects, facets, etc.) of it are obliterated; as pertains to “balance”, archetypically by being eclipsed (overshadowed). As I make clear in the referenced essays, game “balance” taken to the exclusion of all else and therefore to the logical conclusion inherent within it causes exactly the aforementioned obliteration and is thereby self-defeating — or at the very least, game-defeating.
The false (i.e. short-circuited) antithesis of this is what I have elsewhere called fossilisation (or fossilised stagnation). In short: make no changes at all, and allow the various inner contradictions of various retail MapleStories to fester within the game. I mention this only to make it clear that my lens here in no way implies preservation (i.e. revert to “vanilla” & stay there), but rather implies conservation of the game; that is, a simple respect for its inner logic.[10]
Surprise, surprise: this isn’t a polemic. It’s an ode. Fantasia are opaque about most changes (& their justifications) that they’ve made to the game, so the question is not “what’s good and what’s not so good about Fantasia’s approach?” but more like “what would Fantasia’s approach be if it were an ode to ATI?”.
It’s clear that a few things can immediately be thrown right out the window. We can’t treat this as a process of (false) equalisation, because this would imply that all maps are for a particular purpose, rather than the many qualitatively distinct purposes they actually serve:
travel (including, but clearly not limited to, exploration),
& farming (for a particular item, a quest, MPH, funsies, etc.).
Even if we eliminate from consideration all monster-free maps, this only really eliminates one (1) subcategory: towns (a particular type of PoI).
We also can’t turn this into Whac-A-Grinder™ (the dreaded sequel to Whac-A-Mole®, not to be confused with guac-a-mole), wherein maps are “buffed” & “nerfed” ad hoc in the name of (virtually) all maps having equal “grinding potential”. The obvious reason for this is that there’s no particular thing we might call “grinding potential”; that is, we cannot possibly unidimensionalise it, as much as the Mapler’s instinct desperately wishes to.[11] Less obvious is that once we impose a false unidimensionalisation, the game of Whac-A-Grinder™ must inevitably ignore all the various actual purposes of the map — i.e. the game itself — in favour of “balancing” the “metagame” (i.e. not the game).
Perhaps less obviously still, Whac-A-Grinder™ is the sworn enemy of the ode to ATI. Whac’ing the grinders is capable of, at best, shuffling them around — and at worst, dispersing them. Sure, we’ve all played plenty of ATI (& HHGI, FoG, etc.), but the simple fact is that the ATIs — be they called “ATI” or any other name — exist for a reason, and their existence is based on being preferred for party-grinding (incl. their opportune locations).
But none of this is to say that maps can’t be improved upon, or changed in general:
Be more creative
If a map needs a reason to be visited — which does happen, albeit less often than most Maplers seem to think — then changing statistics like spawn density, EXP, meso drops, etc. is merely the bluntest of many available instruments. Get creative with it! Maybe the game needs another hidden street, another quest, another NPC, another Easter egg, or what have you.
Sometimes just a little extra love in the statistical department does it
Maps don’t have to be massively worse for the grinder just so that the ATIs can be foregrounded. This is particularly true for smaller maps or maps which are otherwise unsuitable for party-grinding irrespective of spawn–EXP–meso density. Being reasonably able to wander around and occasionally stop at a random map that seems nice to farm is a wonderful thing, and something that ya gurl & The Crew™ have done on numerous occasions within this entry & the past few.
As Lv1Crook has remarked, Vicky Island needs a littol bit more love in the statistical department, given that it’s not only the central locale of the game, but also one with a few weird oversights. Why do Ice Drakes & Dark Drakes feel like they give insignificant EXP relative to the effort necessary to slay them?
Nostalgia vs. freshness is a matter of taste
Having ATIs doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be the same ATIs of yesteryear. Keeping them as the same set of maps is good for the nostalgia factor, but there’s nothing necessarily wrong with shifting focus to a different set of maps where the ATI experience can be had. Just to keep it fresh, I s’pose.
Whether this is the kind of stuff that specifically Fantasia has in mind is ultimately irrelevant (although it’d be nice if it were). I just wanted to write an ode to ATI and maybe hash out its relationship to map changes, and what you see is the result (read: brain dump).
In any case, the fact is that I had the privilege of getting the ATI experience in Fantasia, and for that, I am grateful.
Is… is she gone? Oh thank god. Can you imagine being such an incorrigible nerd that you write a whole-ass ode to a map in a videogame? LMAO 🤓 Smell ya l8r, loser. It’s time to touch some grass.
More specifically, the luxurious grass of The 🐖 🏖️.
Transcription of the chatlog in the above image
deer [buddy chat]: im grinding pig beach
with my homie (the iron hog)
(we’re besties and i would never hurt himb)
As you can see, I was soon joint by Dizz. Together, we made further progress on the seemingly bottomless need for Pigs & Pig accessories impoſe’d vpon vs in the hallowed name of The Quest™.
And speaking of the inexorable tow of The Quest™, I’ve plenty of Charms, so now all I knead for Maya’s naturopathic tonic is a fiftie-Leaf or so.
No, not the Maple Leaves. Just… normal Leaves. Because everyone knows that Normal Leaves™ are aristate with pinnate veins and maybe the occasional serration.
💡 Did you know? The Rocky Mask, being made of thicc stone, would be impervious to my bullets except for its being made of Slate, which is in turn made of leaves (that’s what foliate means), so my bullets cleave right through! Looks like someone needs a new wardrobe. 🤭
Whilst back in Peery Yawn repotting, I got an unexpected wordless trade request from one thestabler.
Transcription of the chatlog in the above image
dear [trade window]: hi
oh!
how much would you want for it?
ooo
here at least have the npc price
Oh! A level 30 overall (Brown Pollard) already. And for haff the price — what a steel. Thx, thestabler.
Huh. Fantasia muss’ve changed the spike traps so that they heal you instead of damaging you. Wheird.
💡 Did you know? The banana peels you see in the above image are suspended in a matrix of vines, monke, fear, & loathing. Because banana peels are insoluble in fear & loathing, this is technically a colloid.
Will it surprise you to learn that I did it? (Successfully?)
This is the kind of thrilling, action-pact content that possibly dozens of readers (i.e. maybe two readers at best) around the world come to my diary for.
Conveniently, the Plant Samples come right out of the plant already in a nicely-sealed tube and everything. I had no idea science was this easy.
And whilst I was at it, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to confirm whether Fantasia has Top of the Tree That Grew.[12] …And it does! Yey!!
Transcription of the text in the above image
The One Who’s Touched the Sky title in progress. 1/5 Regions Completed
⟨Warning⟩
Height: 30km above ground level. This is the highest peak of the tallest tree in Ellinia. The wind blows eastwards towards Sleepywood. Jump at your own risk.
Also pictured: Me abouta sneaze alllll over Sleepywood 🤧
“The One Who’s Touched the Sky title”? Never herder that. I guess we’ll never no…
Anyway, now that I’m done sneezing all over the Plant SampIes, it’s time to give the score of ’em to Doc Betty.
Either whey, I’m off to Lan Dove While Bore Too(th) for the obligatory 20 glarse shards & 100 board teefies. As it happened, I ran into a couple (bunelle & oppatokki) doing some While Bored too, so I partied with them for like too minutes.
The half-dozen Monster Eggs that can be seen in the background are regrettably inaccessible.
I reckon they probably weren’t done with their Wiled Bores yet, but I was starting to really stincc up the map (one consequence of wearing pirate clothes) so they politely said their goodbyes and kict me outta the party.
After some solo Wild Boring and a lucky Waited Deering drop, I was eligible to redeem one (1) Old Raggedy Cape™ (no cash value, not eligible for refunds, legal restrictions may apply in some jurisdictions) from Jane Doe — a fellow cervid, if that is her real name!
And whilst I’m at it, I may as well give Maya her cough medicine.
A Bramboo Hat (that’s the LUK one) might not sound like much for a pirate, but this is gunner be my hat for a while yet. I’ll take the WDef and the +1.5 tAVOID…
Anne: What’s the color of the book that my mom is holding?
🩶 Blue
❤️Blue
🩶 Blue
🩶 Blue
[profuse sweating] 😰 oh geez oh sheesh oh gosh which one is it
💡 Did you know? The correct answer is “Indigo”.
ATP, I decided I really oughta sell my OA INT 100%, if only to make some inventory space. After a minute of Discord™® surtching I found a certain Fame who claimed to be buying exactly this scrol.
Transcription of the above
dear [whisper to Fame]: heya~ i have an overall int 100%
Fame [whisper]: how much
[I spend like two minutes frantically trawling the FM]
dear: no idea LOLOL
Fame: give me a price
lol
dear: uhm 1m?
Fame: sorry i bought many for like 100–200k ea
dear: ok so you didnt want me to give you a price
gotcha
sorry
I’ll admit to being slightly irritated by these kinds of fake inquests (perhaps you could tell…). Fame evidently knew the target price range, immediately quoted as 100k〜200k, and I knew approximately diddly-squat at best. The joke is on Fame however for I put the thing in my shoppe at 300k and it sold almost immediately. Nice try with the lowball I guess.
Such is the magick of Store Permits. But we’re not there yet, so until then I shall amuse myself by smiting half a thousand Masx.
💡 Did you know? Wooden & Rocky Masks are actually mushroombs who, much like bernard l’ermite, have adapted to the Excavation Site by using ruined building materials as surrogate caps. Beneath the masx, they are strange pileusless sporocarps.
Alllll rite we’re dun w/ that P3r10n sh∗rt. Time to sprint at maximum speed down into the bowels of the island.
Downjump is an insult & a slap to the face of pristine maps handed down to us by Cody. This sacrilege shall not remain unpunisht. (I’m gonna abuse it anyway.) (Try and stop me.) (U won’t.)
“POLLUTED! ⟨1—E. Vill I.⟩ (Part 1)”, anyone? …No? Okay then time to slapp tf on my mfing level ten nuccl ’n’ go to town all by my lonesome.
I taste-tested a few Evil Eye eggs. Zero Michelin® stars, rude staff, no table service, some of the worst sanitation conditions I’ve ever seen, highly recommended, will be coming back soon.
💡 Did you know? Evil Eye eggs are extremely toxic and can swiftly prove fatal even in small doses. Sadly, the only antidote is being an insufferable nerd. 😔 Better to just accept your fate at that point.
Oh why yes that is the Bigg level 30 so it’s time for the corresponding Bigg reveal: my actual job. Admittedly if you haven’t figured it out by this point then wowie you are skimming hard good job. There will be a test at the end, however. 👩🏽🏫
For better or worse Kyrin is not f∗quing around and she knows exactly what I’m doing.
I have done this before and I will do it again Kyrin do not challenge me
Kyrin & I have our differences but we always settle them in a civilised manner if only because she has nearly a thousand more base STR than I do and would positively bodyslam my ass directly into the next dimension.
Why yes my Phlash Phissedis level one, how could you tell?
With a look on her face that few would describe as “proud”, Kyrin took the armful of Crystals out of my inventory and promptly if perhaps begrudgingly beknighted bebrawlered me.
As you can see level 30 was my opportunity to upgrade to the Double Tail Knuckler, ordinarily a level 20 knuckle but you know how I role. The new OA is my fav yet and combined with the Whitebottoms and the Bramboo, this will be my best sans-NX look so I hope you’re imprest…
Transcription of the above
Ponk [whisper]: gz
Bucc: brawler gangg
gz
Jeff: BRAWLER GANG! GRATS
Getting congratulated by all three other brawlers on the server
Look. If I go pure DEX then I will be one permanently nakey binch and whilst that might titillate some it’s not a good alternative to just being able to wear level-appropriate gear sans nuccols. The “sans knuckles” part Hertz a littol especially since like most DEX brawlers this condemns me to a life of Mapleversary dependence and worse yet there’s no such thing in Fantasia (and even when there eventually is, the level 64 weapons are officially banned in perpetuity anyway). Nevertheless, level-appropriate gear otherwise coöperates just fine with the formula which you see in action above and which I shall be sticking to until further notice.
This means my gun arsenal is sorted. As for knuccles, on a realistic plane I (very much eventually) have Prime Hands (the level 30 knuckle) to look forward to at not level 30 but level 30 × 2 = 60, the next clean-weapon-speed-5[13] knuck after that being the mildly risqué or shall we say “near the knuckle” Fury Claw at level 50 but actually level 50 × 2.4 = 120 for me. Ouch. Why the level 35 & 40 nux are weapon speed 6 (“normal”) clean is a question only Neckson® (Knuckson?) can answer.
Of course still leaves plenty of roomb for DEX and as you can see my AVOID is already a startling 232 fresh out of the brawler test chamber.
“Nuccol wen?” Dizz delicately and not in so few words asct me, and the answer is now (& also earlier). If nothing else I am a hybrid attacker and my choice of pistol vs. fist (two of the items in a significantly deadlier version of Rochambeau) is an opportunistic one. If I can easily get away with gunning it then I typically do but I often cannot and in any case my gun doesn’t do multitarget attacks.
This time I was doing the 999-kill cwessed wif Dizz. Our progress was boosted slightly when we encountered a stray Banned-It™ by the name of Kokotti and temporarily ensnare’d him within our party.
Transcription of the above
[system message]: ‘Kokotti’ has joined the party.
dear: howdy~
Kokotti: WTF Beginner
So brave
who’s highest level beginner ,
Dizz: mee
Kokotti: I’m meeting a celebrity
dear: yuhh
Kokotti: So how’s beginner’s 2nd job ?
Dizz: easy to remember the buttons
Yurp! Dizz had that № 1 ’ginner spot on Þe Ranckings™ and no intent to give it up.
And keeping it up means that the call of The Quest awaits our dutiful response. Sensing a pattern yet? Mayhap you’ve noticed that so far, dear has yet to do a single nonquest activity other than arguably some of the time I spent loct in to ATI. Even shrewder readers will notice a certain parallel between this odd-jobbed brawler and another odd-jobbed brawler who I might’ve previously played and who might’ve done something similar…
But real taulk: it’s Necky Junior time but frfr this time. Frfrfr it’s DAMP FOREST LET’S GO AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—
💡 Did you know? It’s not that serious. Damp Forest is just a big dumb map with a bunch of Neckis Junior and a heap of Octopodes and maybe a Slime here or there. Nothing supernatural or scary or anything like that except the part where a murder happened here in GMS beta and at night the Damp Forest Neckis turn into giant green bats with ear-piercing screeches & bloodshot eyes that feed on the blood of the living. But not, like, in a scary way. Don’t worry.
If you wanna know the real Damp Forest horror story, it’s this: in GMS v67 (), Damp Forest’s spawns were changed to be exclusively Hush & Zush spawns. [shudders] I gotta go wasch my hands hooves after writing that one.
You might think that Damp Forest is enabled by the existence of Cheaty McCheatpants mechanisms like CCing/CSing/FMing/@reing[14] that allow magickally warping to the top of this notoriously tall map. But ropes are not as bad as they seem and you get used to it after a while. Of course splitting the map between the two of us definitely helpt…
For whatever reason, Luke is something of a beginnerphobe so that meant Dizz effectively needed a hundred fewer Jr. Necki Skins than I. Luckily snakes tremble at my presence so I had 💯 quicker than you could say “oh geez oh h∗ck night is falling we gotta get outta here”.
More pressingly, Kyrin is attending a Hallowe’en party soon and she needs a Tablecloth to wear. It’s time to fr∗ck up some Jr. Napkins “For Kyrin” then, I s’pose.
Damb. I was gonna go to the party as a sheet ghost. Anybody got any costume ideas? Anyone who says Oak Barrel is getting the dunce cap.
💡 Did you know? Stirges are fruit bats as evidenced by the Lemons they drop (and their giant eyes). That means they regularly pee on themselves. Just thought you should know that. All the items they drop are urine-soaked.[15]
I will say Transfer Area was a li’l inch resting for me weaponwise. I mostly tried to stiq wif my gun for obvious reasons — batty bois fly, bullets fly; natural-born enemies — but the Batty Boi Density (BBD) gets a bit in tents, at least with a party of two, which had me bussin’ out þͤ olde Dubble Tale occasionally. And it worx! Sometimes when playing hybrid attaquers I wisch I had a skill that aloud me to switch weapons quickly, even in combat (“catching my breath”), and you’d better B-leave I’d be willing to pay good SP for it too.
Anyweigh. I alr did my ½k Masques but it turnt out that in spite of Dizz generally being one or two steps ahead of me he had in fact done approximately 0k Masques so I hooft it to the Excav Sight 三 to help him (& Óðin[n] þe one-eye’d coſmogenitour) out.
The 🦅-ide reader might’ve noticed that I never did Legend of the Snayle back at oh, I dunno, level 20 or so. But you’ll never guess Y.
Just kidding you guest it it was freaking Manoe the grumpy old get the covertly-spoor’d snayle trayle the devilish stylommatophor the bewhisker’d 🐄ard who wouldn’t make himself known till I wisht upon his name.
Transcription of the chatlog in the above image
dear: i wish mano existed so i could finish the quest i started 12 levels ag[o]
I knew making a wish in the presence of a permabeginner such as Taima would do the trick.
In other news my Cold Mind is serving me well but Dizz found a littol something in the FM I simply could not resist: a pre-scrold 🌝 Shooter for a mere 250k, a real steal — some would even say piracy.
So called because it only works when aimed at the Moon. Worx for me since the Moon people are my sworn enemies.
This is effectively a 62% discount considering it would cossed me 160k + 7 × 70k = 650k to buy the stuff from NPCs. Time to get to levol 40, then.
And in other meso news, I figured since I haven’t found any bullets yet and they’re sold for so cheap on the FM, I may as well buy a few Split Bullets whilst I’m at it; +2 WAtk never hurt anybody (my foes excepted).
There is to be sure still more questing to be had on Vicky Ickyland and I cringe to imagine leaving the isle but her pickings are slim and what’s left is, as some might say, “annoying”. We can all be annoying sometimes (and I’ve made something of a career of it) but we should forgive Tori, for as gorgeous as she is she cannot encompass the whole Maple World (Viclockers & olde-timey implementations notwithstanding) and some kwests are simply destined to be “annoying” or should we put it more sympathetically “meditative”.
The “Ariant questline” is not so much a questline sensu stricto as it is shall we say a “quest cluster” of those cwests this side of the Nihal which offer some allure to those passed but not long past the KPQ levels.
Not that I ever did KPQ on this character, but here we are.
💡 Did you know?DesertRabbits emerge from the womb fully-formed and hopping about on all four limbs. Soon enough, however, they learn to roll, and by the time they reach adulthood, they’re entirely limbless and nearly spherical.
The ritual is probably well-known and it starts by making a full lap around the Ariant loop, gleefully slaying more-or-less everything along the way.
💡 Did you know?Bellamoas are entirely harmless but nonetheless voluntarily choose to wear jingle bells around their snaky nex so as to give fair warning to nearby ophidiophobes.
Admittedly Ariant is not my favourite Maple locale: eye-wateringly bright (huge, fulgent, yet fake lens flares included for good measure), scorching & xeric (a deadly duo), and ultimately nothing so much as tempting me to stay there after its quests are all con-quested.
Why are their houses also made of cacti? Do the (Royal) Cacti live inside of other cacti??
Nonetheless, its kvests are probably above-average all things considered, and I appreciate the attempt to present a vaguely — in some ways Disney®-ified — Middle Eastern locale, even if it’s more like a hazy recollection of certain aspects of the Thousand Nights & A Night (especially Diyāb & Galland’s “orphan tales”) than anything else.
Improves dexterity on the overall armor.
Success rate:60%, DEX+2, accuracy+1
Thank you, Cactus 🙇🏽♀️
Philologically Ariant is a thinly-veiled name for “Persia(n)” (cognate with Iran) with an excrescent-t added perhaps to avoid association with the Nazi appropriation of this otherwise entirely non-racial term. There’s also Nihal = نهال “sapling, shoot, seedling” (which may be Romanised ⟨Nihāl⟩ or ⟨Nehāl⟩) and of course Schegerazade is Persian in origin although it’s known from Arabic. Adın — sometimes written ?⟨Ardin⟩ in-game, but this spelling only works for nonrhotic speakers and ignores the i–ı distinction — is Turkic (more precisely: probably Azeri). The rest is a mix of Arabic — the language[16] of the Nights as we know it — with vaguely Middle Eastern–sounding names.
💡 Did you know? Cacti pee just like you & me. But they only do it when it’s dark and humans aren’t around, lest they be caught in the act. The young Jr. Cacti who haven’t learnt this yet (those not yet “potty-trained”) therefore must be equipt with super-absorbent diapers. Crisis averted. 😌
Of course there’s also Le petit prince which is in French — although it takes place in an unspecified region of the Sahara, presumably justifying its inclusion. Then again the foundational Western version of the Nights (including the first recorded version of those orphan tales) was in French too so it was going to be impossible to fully separate the setting from French anyway. Drat.
Clicky, clicky…
Biogeography enthusiasts everywhere will be sorely disappointed to learn that mere catsMeerkats are found only in southern Africa.
💡 Did you know? There’s no reason to be disappointed. These are actually Meercats, not Meerkats, which are totally different. It’s like the difference between mongooses and mongeese.
Biogeography enthusiasts everywhere will be less disappointed to learn that there are indeed vultures in the Middle East and also Sand Dwarves aren’t real. You win some, you lose some.
Alternatively, if you think sand dwarves are real, I have some sand dwarf insurance to sell you.
On second thought, maybe the term Middle East is a bit awkward in a Korean context. After all, it’s not so much the Middle East as it is the *Middle West. But Middle East is a geopolitical term par excellence and is first attested in English in (OED; Etymonline gives ). It has subsequently been calqued into various other languages, including various Sinitic languages as 中東 in turn yielding the Sino-Korean중동 ⟨Jungdong⟩.
Then there are the Pleads (Scarved and Ear Plug’d or rather earmuff’d) which, intentionally or otherwise, are a mangled localisation of the original 프릴드 ⟨Peurildeu⟩. This ⟨l⟩ in the second syllable’s coda cannot be explained by the Plead interpretation because this is in fact a borrowing of English frilled as in frilled lizard “Chlamydosaurus”. Oops.
Chlamydosaurus cannot be found anywhere near the Middle East so the confusion is perhaps understandable…
And that concludes really the bulk of the Ariant quessedlyne. That was fassed… right? But it’s not quite over yet. It’s time to battol Adın.
brrrt
Transcription of the above
Ardin: Wow! I don’t think I’ve had that much fun battling in a long time. In order to battle the queen, who’s overly zealous and uses weird spells, it’d require a very formidable foe, and… someone as powerful as you is definitely of help for the Sand Bandits.
Unfortunately, to perform the Ariant victory lap, we effectively need 21 Lidium Ores each = 42 in total. I got really lucky and so obtained almost exactly enough along the weigh. Dizz, on the other hand, forgor to switch on his Beginner’s Luck (easy enough to forget when it resets every time you log out and the client keeps crashing anyway) so we’re gonna first do the Magatia cvests that are available, and see if we don’t end up with enough Lidia by the end of it.
💡 Did you know? Alchemy isn’t real and the tree branch is just dispensed from a tiny hidden trapdoor.
Is the pink critter on the bottom the rat? Or the one riding on top? Or maybe the one on top is a babie Sand Rat and it’s actually two Sand Rats. Either way, I wish they dropt the stylish hats they wear.
As you can see, I’m already thinking about LPQ. Although my true goal is of course The Quest™, I don’t feel the need to be as strict as I was with tar&us. In particular, I’m willing to do as many LPQ runs as it takes to get myself one (1) clean pair of Broken Glasses (f.k.a. Cracked Glasses, a name that in retrospect takes on a whole new meaning[17]), altho’ prolly not any more than that.
And, since I finally got past the stage of dumping all my SP into Improve MaxHP, I decided to “dip into” Oak Barrol (etc.) anyway.
Regrettably, however, Fantasia seem to be of the opinion that pirate is no more & no less than an extra ✨bonus✨ archetype that you must — must! — add if you have the 4th grade. Oak Barrel therefore only kinda sorta works except when it doesn’t and has a cooldown for good measure (because the usual duration in practice wasn’t short enough as it is). I will therefore not be capable of posing as a “thief” in LPQ excepting dire situations wherein I’m willing to burn Safety Charms so long as my party is willing to be forced to restart every time I get unlucky enough to use one (which might be every single time for all I know).
💡 Did you know? The dark sphere inside the Rumo’s roundbottom flask is actually a Magic 8 Ball®, which the Alcadno alchemists grow in vitro to use for divination purposes. The Rumos are selectively bred for truthfulness.
Unfortunately for us we’re actually underlevelled for the Triple Rumos and, in any case, these bois are chunmky and punch above their weight, too.
Naturally the Lumo’s Leaves are reluctant to drop at all. The process was therefore much like pulling teeth, if teeth were green & leafy.
💡 Did you know?Lumo and Rumo aren’t merely variant spellings of the same thing, but rather chiralantipodes of one another: Lumo is the left-handed version, and Rumo the right. They can be hybridised to produce sterile racemic offspring.
The {R,L}umos were positively thrashing us, and Dizz not unseriously considered giving up on the quessed for now. But after a while I got a littol better at runnin’ & gunnin’ theaz labgrown monstrosities, and with some patience we found ourselves a score of Lumo Reaves.
The fastest way outta this joint is to get forcibly yeeted at Vicky Island by Karcasa’s magique carpette. Unluckily for me Karcasa does not offer discounts to his long-lossed brothers (either that or he perceives my true identity) so this is gonna strike a mighty blow to my meso purce.
Transcription of the above
dear: wanna go back and do vic stuff?
Dizz: sure
karcasa teleport for 10k
so spensive >:O
dear: sheeesh
since im not a beginner its 100k
Dizz: u lie
As it happend, the carpette landed me in Curning Sitty smack dab neckst to none other than Perry the “Warp Helper” (i.e. the only way to get to Zipangu).
A peacefulness that is regrettably little consolation for the terrified small child trapt in your beak, sir.
Up here along the tower cranes there’s also a quest trigger for The One Who’s Touched the Sky title. If you’ll remember my littol excursion to Top of the Tree That Grew, that makes 2/5. Dizz claimed that he knew where the other three were, so we set out to get the medal for ourselves.
Yeah, you gotta yump to get it.
O, boi. More smol children inside of giant yellow birb beaks.
The fifth location is, however, the only one not on Vicky. And so we’re off… to Órbis!
I made it to the station about half a dozen seconds later than Dizz, which meant that he made it onto the boat and I did not. Since the ticcit actually costs srs mesors hear on Fantasia, that meant I had to wait like 15 minnits and take the ride (another 15…) all by my lonesome. To keep myself company, I made some Use inventory space:
Neato! I’m really just throwin’ random scrolls at whatever I have, a habit I may or may not’ve pict up from Thinks (Slime, OmokTeacher) bacque in the Vickylocky daze… Easy on the ol’ inventory, to be sure, and perhaps better now than later or never.
O no! How could this B? We need moar DJUMP in order to get the medal, but we wanted the medal for the +5 DJUMP (& +5 SPEAD)! I guess we’ll have to bootstrap medalstrap ourselves another day…
The first main course is gonna be somewhere right about The Rode to Garden of 3 Kullers to help out ???? — whom we would later discover is really named Hella i.e. a clipping of Hellás ↤ Ἑλλάς, yet another name meaning “(Ancient) Greece”, not to be confused with Hella. Oh, and also Lisa with her “Fairy’s Horn Flute”, and some other ppl…
Sky eg~
Naturally this was a good knuckling opportunity for yr grl dear altho’ I regrette to inform ye that I forgort I’d jussed put my first SP into CSB so I was kinda just kicking about the whole time.
💡 Did you know? Jr. Sentinels are “weaker” in the Training Camp because they’re lifelong sworn defenders of the Órbis Tower and therefore have nothing on Maple Island to defend. The ennui is crippling.
For Lisa’s Special Medicine we each need a Fieri’s Tentacle which doesn’t sound like much except for the part where none of the maps seemed to spaun any Fiarries. Eventually we wandered to one of the Strolling Path maps and started rather painstakingly killing Neps until one (1) finally decided to show up.
Phewph. Just barely kilt it as it managed to get a Seal off on me.
A little channel-scumming l8r and we had the other half. 🙂
For Hella we needed 30 Cloud Peaces[19] from the Pick’s Ease ’cause these littol rascols have been tearing up the very kloudz upon which Órbis itself rests, threatening to send it plummeting to the ground. “The ground” presumably meaning something like the coast of El Nath as it borders the Aqua Road, thereby leading to the violent & watery demise of Órbis & its people.
So, since the Picts’ E’s were resorting to violent threats & general thuggery, ’twas my turn to give ’em a li’l taste o’ their own medicine.
Transcription of the chatlog in the above image
dear: drop a cloud piece i dare u
Dizz: yeahhh what she said
Unfortunately, even here in Cloud Park I where there are only Starp Ixyz (the generally weakest strain of Pixiekind), we were having a hard nut of it. At a certain point, Dizz gave up on even trying to kill the floating pink blobs at all.
That’s when I knew I had to pull out the big guns on ’em: the double dog dare.
Unfortunately I’m not nearly powerful enough for a “triple dog” dare etc. so we had to settle for 1/30 (really 1/60) Clowd Peeces. Meighbee neck’s thyme…
That’s enough goofing off in Órbis 4 nau. There are still those ol’ Vicky qveſts plus some more we’ve since unloct as a result of levelling 🆙. So we take the shipp bacc…
[…half an hour later…]
Remember how I said:
im grinding pig beach
with my homie (the iron hog)
(we’re besties and i would never hurt himb)
Well, we’re not besties anymore. We broke up. 💔
In fact we’re mortal enemies now because I have a surprising amount of Pig Beaching to do to get a seemingly interminable quantity of 🐷s with which I can vainly attempt to satiate the unfathomable maw of The Quest™.
It is on!!
It’s not easy, but my gun (with the assistance of Worrier Potion) sometimes deals more-than-one-damage lines. With some patients, I slew the Ironickall Hogge:
Can I get like an Iron Hog Slayer medal or something?
For better or worse there is no “Iron Hog Slayer” medal but I managed to find something even rarer still:
I know what you’re thinking: “that’s just an Omok Piece : Pig you silly goofball you knucklehead you duncical farce of a cervid” and that’s a tad bit rude but I understand the sentiment. However, here in Fan’t Asia, minigame components are rarer than a hen’s tooth less common than a black swan and dare I say more difficult to come across than an MSPS sans V2W. This is presumably the first and not implausibly the last Omok Piece : Pig that will ever be produced on Fantasia and honest to Cody I struggle to imagine a funnier way to conceal the fact that they can’t get the minigames to work correctly.
In other news I brought my shoes to ruination.
Transcription of the above
dear: time to boom my shoes
[system message]: The scroll lights up, but the item winds up as if nothing happened
The scroll lights up, but the item winds up as if nothing happened
dear: it boomed
pain
Boom is not strictly speaking the correct terminology here but much like any good Vicloc, Fantasia lacks dark scrolls (& clean slates for that matter) so failing a 10% is the only boom on the menu.
Now that my red shoes are firmly in the realm of the half-assed (not to be confused with half-mast — it’s not that tragic), the time is ripe for me to turn in those hard-won capita suum in exchange for a red head-banned.
Don’t worry; my head is only temp-banned. I’ll be recapitulated very soonly.
💡 Did you know?Mrs. Ming Ming is, in point of fact, not going to win the trophy in the festival if the “food” she submits to judgement is actually made with the ingredients I brought her.
But wait — there’s more. The Big Peaching never ends…
Dead set on winning the staring contest this time
Monster Cards (the minigame type, not the Monster Book type) are roughly as rare as their Omok cousins but at least you “only” need a stack of 💯 (− 1) to get something playable. This makes it feasible to craffed A set of Match Cards, although it might take a few months of farming.
I figured I’d prolly end up in the CoEE to get my ten Horns, but my MapleL5s instincts sugjest’d that Þe Graue of Muſſemum was the prime spot for Jr. Boogles. Unluckily for me, I was the only one who was about to be boogled.
💡 Did you know?Zombie Mushmom is invincible. Noöne has ever killed her.
Okay, no. We’re not doing that. Let’s just go to CoEE.
It’s a race to the finish!! Who would win?: My bullets vs. Jr. Bougie curses
I accidentally my way past CoEEIV and into the Drake Hunting Ground, so I had to chuck a big fat U-ey and barrel my way baq.
Oh! It actually workt one time. I guess Oak Barrel ain’t so bad after all…
Hokay, that’s ten horns so I’ll jus throw down a Nearest Town and—
*stares*
With no handholds (my arms are occupied with carrying ten Jr. Boogle Horns, tyvm), you need to be able to standing high jump a little more than my height to get up these stares. Totally possible; in fact the world record is 190 cm!! Still 0/10 for accessibility. Do better, Sleepywould.
Anyweigh, after I relearnt how to yump, I redeemed my random gemstone from The Remememberererer:
Transcription of the item in the above image
AquaMarine
A blue jewel.
Not to be confused with Korin’s Memery. Also not to be confused, apparently, with ⟨aquamarine⟩ (sans CamelCase). You know what? We’Re goIng for it. CamelCase for everY identiFiAble morphEme boundAry, even in wordS that areN’t synChronIcAlLy comPoundS. This is deFinIteLy vastLy imProvIng the readAbilIty of the text.
In ’ginnering news, Dizz is finally able to wear the freakin’ Golden Mace‽
Wait… wut? Mayhap you’re unfamiliar with this littol rarity:
Transcription of the item in the above image
Golden Mace
Req lev : 40
Req fam : 88
[Req archetype] : beginner
Category : one_handed mace
Attack speed : fast
Weapon attack : 91
Number of upgrades available : 7
The Golden Mace was added into the GMS data in v31 or v32 (〜), presumably as a scrapped idea for an event weapon of some kind, since v31 & v32 were both event patches (Thanksgiving & Maplemas, respectively) amongst other things. As far as I can tell, this weapon was never actually available in-game.
It remains a unique weapon in that its weapon speed category is 15, making it an extreme example of the in-game speed category names being largely useless (“slower” refers to any speed category ≥9). As you can see, however, Fantasia has changed its stats almost completely:
WAtk: 15 → 88 (this one is presumably +3 above average).
It’s perhaps unfortunate that Fantasia decided to obliterate the one unique aspect of this weapon: its extreme speed category (especially considering they explicitly got rid of the Maroon MopLOOL). Nonetheless this is a pretty cool repurposing of otherwise unused game-content.
The catch, of course, is the 88 fame requirement. Dizz had to put quite some time into advertising himself and rising to the top of the fame rankings (in addition to the top of the ’ginner rankings) so he could wear this bad boi — as far as we know, the only such “bad boi” in the server so far.
’Twas round about this time I decided to jus get some correspondence quests outta the way — you know, the kind that seem to only exist to “connect” far-flung regions of the Maple World. There’s no hard definition and I did jus pull this terminology directly out of the latter end of my digestive tract but basically if you find your Etc inventory rather clogged up by items you won’t be able to use until you travel to at least one or two faraway continents then perhaps you’ve already an idea of what a correspondence quest is.
In Fantasia the allergenicity of such kvests is ✨enhanced✨ by the wonderful V2W features so I shall 🐝 using one hand to plug my nose as I get some of the Ossyrian ones done & done.
Behold: quest jank. I had to channel-scrape to get the Maple History Book II, and didn’t get Book I on my first flight to Órbis because you can’t channel-scrape whilst in flight. 🫠
It’s been approximately one (1) paragraph(s) and we’re already about to run into a serious problem. But this time it has to do with my brane-sells. Remember how, like thirty seconds ago, I said:
I decided to jus get some correspondence quests outta the way
Well that was a shameful & quite frankly outrageous lie. I have a braincell dedicated solely to the endless — and, at best, half-successful — endeavour to optimise my questing routes and at this point it occupies the majority of my cranial volume albeit to no real avail. We will therefore be involving various unrelated quests along the way and getting stuck in sidetracking loops of interminable Etc item hell.
First stop is just doing the 30 Clowd Peaces that we couldn’t do before. (I dropt the one we found lassed time so I’m starting from scratch.)
Ah yes, the Sky Blue ’Brella (actually two of them, as it happend): infamously too poor of a sword to be worth using in melee and yet too poor of a wand (the Wooden Wand has 8 more TMA on average) to be worth using for magic. At least it’s… stylish? Not my colour, doe.
Naturally I’mma want some Órbis Rock Scrolls so it’s time to pop in to the ⟨Hidden Roomb⟩ just long enough to start Huckle’s “Magic Ingredients” kwessed but not long enough to get friggen sneazd upon by Huckle (no fr his sneeze animation is nasty).
💡 Did you know? Wizet originally planned to add Lightning Sentinels & Poison Sentinels as well, but flaked on the idea when they realised that yellow & green were really not Sentinel colours, thereby averting a fashion débâcle.
Passing fru da 14f floor, I couldn’t help but notice a certain Barun over there lookin’ all mysterious & limbless and decided it was finally time to scrol my own weppin’ for da low, low price o’ 490k. 💰
Yea the thing is basically half my levol ATP but it’s gonna half to lassed me another twenty so it’s a good invessed mint. 📈
Oker. Let’s keep going way down in elevation to where it’s snowier. Might seem like a weird place for this climatic transition but Órbis sits atop the clowds so it can’t snow there I guess.
💡 Did you know? (Dark) Leattys are so named because they’re former 1337 (1347?) hackers whose beards overgrew to such an extent that their entire bodies were consumed by pure beardage.
Sints I’m in L. Naff (that’s Catalan for “The Naff”) anyway I may as well purchase a pair of Purple Snowshoes, so call’d because they prevent you from slipping around on purple snow/ice.
got my grippy sox on
Admittedly there isn’t much purple snow in The Naff, but snowshoes are part of the local culture so I’ll keep ’em on.
There are like three cuests that require Jr. Pepe’s Fish, mostly Food-Hunting for Moppie which requires 600, so I need 750 in total. That means I’m imprisoned within the 1st floor until all desires have departed from my body and been replaced by literally hundreds of Jr. Pepe Fish.
The gun is knot working. Good thing I scrold my nuccol, ’cause I’mma hafter resort to roundhouse-kicking the Junior Peppers.
Notice: All Junior Peppers who enter the pain zone™ will be Somerrily Kick’d without warning.
💡 Did you know? Jr. Pepes are so called because they’re direct descendants of Brazilian sockerball players.
It ain’t all dat smoove, doe. For starters, any attax I perform with knuckle in hand suffer from a pitiful raw damage range, so the 110 WDef (not terribly high in the granned skeam of things) of the Peppers Junior is a srs DPM loss. And speaking of DPM losses, these blu flightless birbs are fassed waddlers and love waddling outta the way just in time for my necst SSK.
After an unspecified quantity of suffering in Blu Birb Burgatory (BBB), I was rewarded for my anti-avian crusade with… a Shoe SPEED 60%.
Partly because Dizz log’d online and partly because I’d already pretty much ruined my own plan for the full circuit of correspondence kwesting (Órbis 🠮 an-Naṭḥ 🠮 Aqua 🠮 KFT 🠮 Lūdi 🠮 Omega 🢜[Warp Card]🠮 Vic), I sailed directly back to Ellin from here.
Not to be confused with every single 10% scroll in the entire game.
That’ll come in real useful in like 15 levels when I can actually do “Building a New House for Blackbull” (only a “level 30 quessed” if you get someone to collecked the items for you…).
And speaking of levolz…
That’s a big ol’ levol rite there. Now I can start wearing two new lunacy-themed equips!
Thanks to my freshly-acquired power over the phases of the Moon, I was able to align the celestial bodies just right so as to cause Stumpy — an otherwise extinct species — to spawn for me.
Regrettably I still wield no influence over the Dar Cacks Stumps’ ability to spawn right in front of me.
I cannot say for why she’d go
Again to where, by now, we know
She’d surely lose once more her dough.
But nonetheless, I shan’t complain;
In truth, the chance to ride againe
This lab’rinth path of sculpted pain
Is one more thing that keeps me sane.
The tale of how we all got here —
The urban jungle, land of drear,
Its thousand walls & roads austere —
Is far too shy to tell, I fear.
Yet if you can be pried away
From noisome din & light of day:
Beneath the asphalt, silt, & clay
The ghosts of infrastructure stay.
Undead, these hauntings never leave;
But they lived more than you’ll believe.
Beyond what you & I perceive,
All through this corpse did Value weave.
A metal form, Its concrete sleeve,
Until Its wyrd It did achieve —
And now, a soma to bereave;
The husk of powers work did thieve.
But do not wail & do not grieve;
These laden bodies we’ll relieve
Of spectres whom our spirits heave,
Dispelling each with our dérive.
Yet in the end, I must concede:
Those pixels & these words you read
Have no effect in fact & deed —
For this you’re apt to pay no heed.
But still, I hope you might accede
To pardon me for when I bleed,
My head, its juices oft exceed
The chambers from which they are freed…
As I went to turn in my 999 Cur Sigh kvest I found that The Rememememberererer had another kvest for me that I’d never before seen:
Transcription of the above image
The Rememberer: Have you heard of the ⟨Spirit Diviner⟩? Spirit Diviners are people with the ability to hear the crying voices of those in purgatory. This could also mean that their spirits are that much purer and cleaner than everyone else’s. Increase your efforts to send those spirits back up to nirvana, and you’ll be able to become a Spirit Diviner as well. Eliminate Zombie Lupins, Platoon Chronos, Master Chronos, Mummydogs, and Wraiths to remove their ties to this world and help them connect to their next life. That’s when you’ll acquire the title of ⟨Spirit Diviner⟩.
Basically you gotta kill 444 of each, for a total of 2220 undead baddiez laid baq 2 ressed. 四 “four (4)” and 死 “death” are typically near-homophones except for tone which results in the corresponding Sino-Korean terms being perfectly homophonous as 사, whence the use of 444.
I really appreciate that this kwessed adds, at least spiritually, another Remememberererer-type cwest to the game. I’m still waiting for a Maple implementation that does the right thing and implements quests for the Wanted : Cold Eye and Wanted : Drake NPCs that’ve been in the WZ data for at least as long as the others have! Anyway, now this quest is just making me wanna play a cleric…
But we’re not doing the cleric thing… again. Yet……
So to dull the pain of not being able to play all the characters I wanna play, I shall ill-advisèdly slam my Scuffbottoms with the SPEED 60% that Shumi gave me.
So anyway holy hell is it time to go all the way back to Ossyria for Correspondence Circuit, Part II: No But Frfr This Time Tho? Yes it is and gaw damb I made it to Aqueous Rode this thyme. Huge.
Unfortunately life is not care-free — not even under the sea. In addition to the not fewer than two (2) Vic–Aqua correspondence kwests that have exchanged my useless Etcs for other useless Etcs destined for the other side of the correspondence (Vicloct as those NPCs are) I’ve also managed to embroil myself in Kenta’s Research for reasons knowable only to the addled brane of the deer (that would be me) who did this like a month ago (time is a collective illusion).
I must admit that with Seacle/Cico Wizet really beat me to the punch. I’m supposed to be the one coming up with diabolically ridiculous respellings! How am I gonna be funny now‽
Surrounded on all sides by an angery gang of Sickles
Being able to use my gunny-gun is highly convenient now that I’ve set foot within the Hippo Campus (a strange name for what is actually a campus of seahorses, not hippopotami). What exactly the seahorses are studying is beyond me but it appears to’ve made them rather irritable. 🐠😠🐎
My core memery of the Via Aquæ is learning that the species down here are habitually lightning-weak — which makes some vague metaphysico-diëgetic sense altho’ confirming the actual extent of lightning-weakness is left as an exercise to the reader. In any case I believed it and therefore knew the Via Aquæ to be my prophesied destination for I was an I/L main (now a class I could scarcely be bothered to play, sorry cervine) and would presumably wield galvanic witcheries at some point. As it happend I never made it passed level 32 and mightn’t’ve even paid a visit to the Via Aquæ at all. 🤷🏽♀️
[underwater gunpowder noises]
💡 Did you know?Pinbooms are so called because if you aggro one and let it forcefully eject its pins at you a few dozen times, it eventually runs out of pins and therefore has no recourse but to boom, producing a devastating explosion that easily breaks the local speed of sound.
i don’t like bones i don’t like fish and i can feel the voids of their eyesockets piercing my soul aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Believe it or not I made it all the way to The Danger Russ Cave entirely unscathed. Admittedly the Oak Barrel was more of an emotional support barrel than anything else but if it worx, it worx.
I tried opening the you see above but unfortunately the 🔒 was biometric and I’m not a colossal orange fish nor have I any colossal orange fish friends so I couldn’t quite spoof it.
💡 Did you know?Flyeyes are the personal spies of Pianus, sent into the Dead Mine to make sure those Minor Zombies (not to be confused with Major Zombies) aren’t slacking off (instead of working hard at… minoring, presumably). Pianus? More like Spyanus. Wait no
Not the easiest Etc-extraction (Etcraction?) I’ve ever accomplisht, but I only needed 30 anyway. So with that, I made no delay in paddlin’ my soggy rump outta the water, through KFT (hi KFT! bye KFT!), and all the way up to Lūdibrium.
The moment I popt my head into the Farm-a-C, I was rather startled to see Misky more animated (in every sense) than usual.
Being a minifig, Misky’s neck is arbitrarily swivellable, a physiological quirk she made use of to immediately accuse me of thievery. Once I assured her that I was in fact no thief, but rather a pirate — which only becomes a thief upon contact with water (Just Add Water!®) — her demeanour rapidly transformed.
We bonded over our shared hairstyle and, after some chatting, I even got to see her flirtatious side.
💡 Did you know?Savory Cheese (ToFU 101F-70457Y) is one of several Standard Consumable Alimental Toystuffs (≝ SCATs) enjoyed by the critters of the Ēṓs Tower, all of which share a common structure: a colourful foodlike exterior that encases a large number (≈103) of tiny tightly-wound mainsprings that the toys can use as an energy source. A special toy called the Spring Sweeper is responsible for collecting any discarded mainsprings.
That’s not a SCAT! That’s an EGG! That stands for Egg Gachapon… uhh, Gachapon.
…Plus, of course, “Dollhaus” is a classic, so I gotta do that one rite quicc…
💡 Did you know? If you don’t store your Pendula in plastic dollhouses, they spoil rather quickly. It’s a shame to waste a good Pendulum by improper storage!
…And since I’m puttingGramps back together anyway, I may as well help him out around the Cloquetower whilst I’m at it…
I’m sorry, but Ti(c)k(-)To(c)k means something very different now. I’m afraid you have to go…
…Wait. What was I doing in Lūdi, again? Oh, right. Correspondence circuit. Right right rightrightrighrighririright. I can focus. I just needa descend the Ēṓs so I can get to Omega, and then… I’ll figure it out. I’ll use a Warp Card… at some point.
Of course, the fassedst way to descend the tower is to use Roc Scrol, so I gotta do “Thee Lossed Garred” for a few of those.
💡 Did you know? Although Chirppys do have feet & wings, they lack hands. This is because the goggles they wear grant −2 HANDS.
But I need 30 whole-ass Propellers too, so I needa go down to the 75th floor to farm those with any a-fish-in-sea.
Narrowly missing a direct collision with an ElephantBus®
Hokay. Back up another 18 floors and I finally have my Rox Croals. Time to use them to rapidly descend the tower just like I promised.
Sike! ’Twas merely a ruse and I shall in facked be wawking all the way down these ≈90 floors because I’m doing Just Another Day At Work.
bb bbbbbbbbt
💡 Did you know? a
∗ ∗ ∗ deer.exe has stopped responding. Please hold while our technicians work to resolve the issue. ∗ ∗ ∗
I’m sorry, but Tw{ee,it}ter means something very different now. I’m afraid you hav— Ahem, apologies. Only funny once.[22]
💡 Did you know? Small Eggs are the second-smallest of the eight standard sizes of egg: Rather Small Eggs Indeed, Small Eggs, Not Entirely Small Eggs, Eggs Of A Middling Bigness, Noticeably Outsized And Somewhat Ponderous Eggs, Eggs Of A Size One Should Think To Be Overly Generous, Eggs Of Proportions Sufficiently Great To Be More Of A Hindrance Than A Benefit, and of course, Monster Eggs.
As I was finally headed to the lowest floors of the Ēṓs, I saw a grean l👁️n that intrigued me:
Transcription of the above
[serverwide announcement]: PecoPeco got a(n) [Purple Adventurer Cape] from the El Nath Monster Egg!
Purple Adventurer Cape
Req lev : 50
Category : cape
Weapon attack : 7
Weapon def. : 7
Magic def. : 7
Number of upgrades available : 5
A purple cape for the prototypical adventurer.
A purple cape for the purple adventurer®
Of course Purple Adventurer Capes are a quite different matter from their pink counterparts.[24] Nonetheless I was mildly surprised to see this item considering Fantasia is exactly the kind of server that would never countenance capes with WAtk on them and moreover has the instinct to obliterate anything tangentially or spiritually related to their pet peeves.
“You’re going the wrong way, deer!” Yea gimme a sec I gotta pee and the Silo has the nearest WC…
💡 Did you know? If your “revolutionary plan” to construct a defensive wall has to be carried out within 30 minutes at most, then it probably isn’t very revolutionary.
Hokay. Welp ig I gotta whoosh my tush up the tower to smush some Bloosh GlooshBlock Golems pronto ASAP forthwith stat!
The only thing more painful than stepping on a LEGO® is forcibly Somersault-Kicking one.
💡 Did you know? A Block Golem has six holes on its head: the top two are eyes, the middle two are nostrils, and the bottom two are a blowhole & a cakehole, respectively. Their ears are on their hands, naturally.
But I’m not getting into the whole of the Omega Sceptor kvestage rite now. I jus wanna taulk to Dr. Kim a few times, a few other NPCs here & there, and re-re-collectKorin’s recollections.
💡 Did you know?Mateons are just Octopuses with fishbowls on their heads, cosplaying as aliens.
In recovering Korin’s pilfered memories, I found one such memory that recorded an Omega Sceptor from long ago, when Mateon was instead called Matian. This localisation may or may not have ever been witnessed in a releast version of the game (maybe MapleSEA?), but it was present in the GMS v23 (; Zakum & 1st Mapleversary) data — one version & 36 days before Omega Sector would be releast in v24 (). Unfortunately maplestory.wiki has no data for v24〜27.
The earlier localisation is just the Revised Romanisation of the original 마티안 ⟨Matian⟩ /mɐ.tʰi.ɐn/, perhaps(‽) from EnglishMartian. I should be clear that when the localisers (GMS or otherwise) appear to “butcher” the etymologies of MapleStory’s names, this is not necessarily a bad thing, nor was it necessarily an accident — nor necessarily a thoughtful reïnterpretation, for that matter. And in some cases, an etymological misunderstanding or playfulness may be present in the original name.
There are clearly other considerations than mere “etymological correctness” when it comes to judging the quality of a name’s localisation. Besides, etymological “correctness” taken to its logical conclusion looks something like writing (& pronouncing!) everything in terms of reconstructions. Sorry, I mean in terms of **wrekomstrūtjōs. In particular, it would be unhinged — as I have seen some tempted to do — to go through the game and try to “fix” every “mislocalised name” or what have you. Even in rare cases where there’s a demonstrable error, we should at least pause to reflect upon the simple fact that the real linguistic beauty was the errors we made along the way. After all, how do you think language change happens?
마티안 < Martian?
If 마티안 really is a naïve transliteration, then it’s based on the spelling ⟨Martian⟩ rather than its corresponding pronunciation. English ⟨ti⟩ represents /ʃ/ here (archetypically spelt ⟨sh⟩) and therefore the expected borrowing would be as 마샨 ⟨Masyan⟩ /mɐ.sjɐn/[mɐ.ɕjɐn] (the latter medial+nucleus could conceivably be ㅕ instead). Indeed, this exact Koreanisation is used for the name of DC Comics® superhero Martian Manhunter.
In a case like this, the GMS localisers were perhaps aware that the original name could be read as a transliteration of English Martian, and thought it would be boring & lack the exoticism of the KMS name if they merely reverted the transliteration. So they instead chose the name Mateon — inviting the English-speaker to emulate the Korean pronunciation — to achieve a similar effect as in KMS. Plus, this means we don’t get *Plartian (< 플라티안) and *Mecartian (< 메카티안). But maybe that woulda been funnier. I dunno.
As part of my talking to Dr. Kim, I accidentally inherited yet anotherCt. Nonce E. T. C. MacGuffin Esq, so I had to take care of that one too. Along the way, a Barnard Gray was so kind as to donate to me a Brown Barbie.
Ah, finally. A glove that can ensure my wrists will never bend again.
💡 Did you know? Barnard Grays got their name when, upon first contact, humans greeted the Grays by saying (in a weirdly slow voice) “Hello. Welcome to the Maple World. We are humans.” and the Gray responded with “Uhhhh I’m Bernard. What’s up?”. Incidentally, Bernard is actually a relatively uncommon given name for Grays.
For better or worse, when my kwests pointed me back up the tower to Lūdi, I followed.
With the logistics of LPQ in mind I wanted to know whether it was possible to restock on curatives in L00d1 w/o going down the Ēṓs. Misky rather inconveniently does not vend any such remedial draughts so that meant my only hope was Toly. The one who wears an alarm clock larger than his head on top of his head? Yes, that Toly.
Thankfully Toly does sell the relevant goods: Antidotes, Tonics, Eyedrops, & Holy Waters, the latter two of which come in very useful indeed when one is trying to fight Alishar instead of stand around waiting for its devious hexes to wear off. On the other hand, although getting to Toly doesn’t demand a great stretch of time, it does if you want to avoid using a Return’s Crole – Near Wrist Town.
It is, however, a scenic route par excellence.
Here in the Turris Horologii I decided to frick up some Ticks not for a quest or anything but because they really tick me off…
That one’s a certified knee-slapper. Even this Tick is laughing; you just can’t see because I’m actively explodificating the h∗ck out of its face.
More seriously I need a new overall and preferably one I can feel justified scrolling tenfold. Although the level-appropriate OA is NPC-purchasable, it also costs 120k. That’s a lotta k’s, and I think I can get away with spending approximately zero k if I just finish the main Grandpa Clocque quessedline by collecting 200 Cheap Batteries.
I’d consider myself something of a fan of the Toy Factory’s delightfully misspelt ⟨Aparatus Room⟩. For starters, it’s got my guy Rydole (not that I generally craffed any “jobbed” weapons, but you know…). More to the point, it’s also just a quirky map that serves as the awkward butt connecting the eastern ends of ⟨Processes 1 & 2⟩ (the two “cheeks”, as it were): it’s weirdly asymmetric, everything excepting the portals is huddled in the bottom-right corner, and it’s got scenery that visually intrudes in a way reminiscent of The Rain-Forest East of Henesys. To top it all off, it’s populated exclusively by Robos, giving us a reason to seek out this kooky map.
Speaking of kooky, there’s nothing kooky about Mac the Mechanic.
Just a man who loves his hammer very much.
Mac does have one problem, however: he lost his manual where he keeps all his notes about how to maintain the machinery of the Toy Factory. It’s gone missing!
Mac the Mechanic’s Mauve Maintenance Manual, meticulously dyed specifically for the alliteration. (Meso coin for scale.)
Usually, when something like this happens, it’s because the toys are being mischievous — as they typically are.
A Panda Teddy who is, by the looks of it, up to no good.
But this time, Mac can’t seem to find any toys who might be responsible. He says that there’s only one place to where the Mauve Maintenance Manual misappropriator (or MMMM, for short) could’ve absconded: the starred boxes.
A starred box, which could easily serve as a safe haven for any number of burglars, pickpockets, & pilferers.
After breaking open all the starred boxes, I’ve found no sign of the MMMM. Now Mac’s problem is my problem too.
That means it’s time to get my surfboard ready, because I’m about to do some channel-surfing.
Cowabunga, dudes.
By the mysterious power of multichannel starred boxes, I now find myself in the Secret Factory. The Secret Factory has starred boxes too, yet they all seem to be empty.
Not sure why it’s such a secret. Seems like a perfectly empty factory to me.
Starred boxes have this strange habit of evaporating as soon as they’re opened. But then, one or two minutes later, another one appears in its place when you’re not looking.
A devious supernatural object possessing ineffable powers of regeneration.
Armed with my new knowledge that the starred boxes have the gift of rebirth (maybe that’s what the stars represent?), it seems I’m not imprisoned within a totally empty Secret Factory after all. No matter what happens, I always have my starred boxes to keep me company. To pass the time, I like to break open all the boxes, and then wait until I can watch them come back. Then I can start all over again.
After spending plenty of quality time with the starred boxes, I find one that’s not quite like the others. It seems Mac was right: they really do serve as safe havens for troublemakers, bandits, & ruffians.
Who knew such a small box could contain an entire cavalry?
Now the scoundrels were stuck in the Secret Factory with me, and I know this place like the back of my hoof. After besting them in battle, I took the Mauve Manual back from the MMMM.
As a reward for my assistance in recovering his trusty manual, Mac gave me five of my very own starred boxes that I could use any time I wanted my own cavalry.
I, on the other hand, would be gathering up the rest of those 200 Cheep Batterease so I could make that several-levels-belated overall upgrade. Without further ado, I now exit my comely, not to say handsome, era and enter my new clown pants era involving what I hesitate to remark is a surprising amount of “cleavage” (not the geological kind this time). Behold: the Red Barbay.
🤡🎪🪂
I hear you objecting and I understand well what Maple pixel cleavage looks like as someone who’s worn not a few Fitted Mails in her time but I know where my boobs are and they’re not down there. That’s all I’m saying.
Did Neccs0n™ half-arse, dare I say botch, almost all of the pirate gear in the game? Did they make a set of male overalls and then decide post factum that they didn’t wanna bother with the corresponding female set? Did they decide that the beauty of the other archetypes’ equipment was hurting their cosmetic NX sales?
All great questions. Anyway…
As it happend, my one (1) OA for DEX 60% fr∗∗king faild. I was so upset by this that, having just wasted effectively >200k worth of OA DEX 60%s on this overall that would cost 140k at an NPC, I would spend another several hundred(!) k’s to buy a clean Red Barbay with one (1) extra STR (i.e. perf STR) so I could 100% that one instead.
Jank is not always there to hinder our questing progress but sometimes to promote it. With just a litto tynie bit of help from my barrow (shhh… don’t tell anyone!) I collected the ten parts[25] after only a few trize!
Hokay. I’m finally ready to complete Correspondence Circuit, Part II or whatever part we’re on now but frfrfrfr this time I’m serious. On the way down the Ēṓs I stopt at the ⚰️spoopy⚰️ fordy-forth floor to spend “only” 340 more k’s (thx to Vega’s discounts) to actually scrol my cursèd Red Barbie.
Transcription of the item in the above image
Red Barbay (+10)
Req lev : 40
Req STR : 40
Req DEX : 40
[Req archetype] : pirate
Category : overall
STR : +5
DEX : +10
HP : +10
Weapon def. : 40
Number of upgrades available : 0
And gee whiz boy howdy is that a fifteen-“stat” overall right there, so I’m not complaining.
As promised, I made it to the other side of the Warp Card portal to wrap up those Naughty Luss cuests for good.
pics or it didnt happen
This permitted me to finally start one of the easiest quessed’s in the game: “The Large Pearl”.
The only hard part is that the pearl is really heavy.
💡 Did you know? The giant pearl oyster (Pinctada biglargea) you see above in captivity is the last individual of its species. The others were tragically eradicated when Pianus was preparing a dish with chilli pepper powder and snoze a really big sneeze, thereby infecting this vulnerable population with Big Dumb Fish Disease (BDFD).
For bringing back all three volumes of the Maple History I was awarded a Medal of Honor, so called because it’s not a medal and you cannot wear it. Nonetheless, possession of this medal made me eligible to satisfy Jay’s Curiosity by investigating the existence of one “Bob” mentioned in the History. Oh, and I was also awarded the Chief Stan Hat, thereby completing my clown outfit.
If I were an ancient being named Bob, where would I be? But of course: down in the primordial depths of the primordial island, the bowels of the Dungeon and the entrails of the Maple World, where I could hang out with my fellow ancient pals.
💡 Did you know?Drakes are named not for the Canadian rapper as is commonly assumed, but rather with the ordinary word drake meaning “male duck”. The ducks we know today are the result of roughly 150 million years of evolution from the dinosaurs you see above, following the teleological principle of “maximal adorability”.
Brrrgh, it’s starting to get Colddown here. Maybe I should’ve worn something warmer than a clown suit.
At the Drake’s Meal Table I spotted a grene ſnayle hopping about, Bobbing to & fro, and wandering thither & thence, as snales are wont to do. But wait: why’s there a snayl all the way down here? In accordance with my policy of “shoot first, ask questions later”, I murdered the snale in cold blood:
Yep that’s a one-way ticket str8 to Hell do not pass Go do not collect £200
Admittedly this policy doesn’t always produce the best results but then again what policy does? In this case I examined the body only to find that the mollusc I’d just slain was in fact the very Bob I’d been looking for this hole thyme.
This side of the shell was facing away from me at the time, I swear.
Not knowing what to do now that I’d committed a grievous crime against snaylkind and yet solved the mystery of Bob, I started asking random people whether they recognised this shell, pretending I’d just found it lying on the ground. Like this guy, who’d just fallen from a great height:
Sorry sir, I’m not a cleric. Good luck with your broken bones or whatever.
Having questioned enough randos about the shell to sow doubt about the possibility of me being the perp (that stands forpurple traitor), I figured I’d interrogate just one lassed individual. If anyone would remember something about Bob, surely it would be The Remememberererer.
Transcription of the above
The Rememberer: Wait… If you don’t mind, can I hold him for a second…?
❤️Sure, go ahead.
🩶 Hmm? No, I think I’d better not.
Famous lassed words
This turnt out to be a ploy by The Rememerer to steal the shell from me! Well, good riddance. At least now I’m not the one doing crimes and carrying around the evidence.
At this point I finally felt like I’d got the bulk of the correspondence kwesting outta the way and moreover had equipt myself handsomely if not in aesthetic terms then at least in generosity terms. Now at level 43 and nearing 44 I was eager to start LPQing so that I could get my pair of crunchy glarses, ideally with little to no need for le suicide (that’s French for “suicide”).
Imagine my unsurprise when I showed up to the 100 & 1st phloar and found myself all aloan in canal one (altho’ two others eventually showed up) and the realisation dawned upon me that not only was the Red Sign not offering me any glasses broken or otherwise, but that I had yet to see even a single fellow Mapler sporting any noncosmetic eyewear whatever.
Miserable being of octagonal acrimony
Indeed, not only do Brogan Glarse’s not exist, but useful goggles or spectacles of any kind are totally unknown, apparently replaced by… medals? So really the above is more like:
Miserable being of vaguely circular acrimony
Furthermore, like LPQ, all other Peak Use (P.U.) lack rewards for repeated completions (but we’ll get to that).
💡 Did you know? The Toy Factory manufactures dry cells of great variety & many sizes. On the larger end are the Z batteries (ToFU 84773R13-Z), which are large enough to live inside of, conveniently providing all electricity needed for the home. On the smaller end are of course the commonly-used AA, AAA, & AAAA cells, along with their still more diminutive & lesser-known variants: AAAAA cells, AaAaAaA cells, and the tiniest of them all, the aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa cell (ToFU 84773R13-5CR34M), used to power toy microbes.
💡 Did you know? The Bloctopodes in the above image are juveniles. You can tell because each one has only a single smaller (& pinker) sub-bloctopus atop its head. As a Bloctopus ages, its sub-bloctopodes produce yet smaller sub-sub-bloctopodes & so on, until eventually the elderly Bloctopus has a seemingly endless pyramidal stack of bloctopodes on its head and collapses from the stress, thereby dying of old age.
💡 Did you know? Much like in chess, 🨀 Bloctopodes can only move one square (= block) at a time. On the other hand, they’re clearly capable of moving into squares threatened by opponents (such as myself), implying that they are fake royalty, and in fact not kings at all but merely mannen (🨪; not to be confused with Manon).
Lucky me, the Dogonistas made things easy by leaving all their mail in a gigantic metal mailbox that yielded to me sooner than I could threaten it with the butt of my pistol. Soon enough I had a smol memery card containing gibibytes of joocy data.
all ur alien mailboxes r belong 2 me
💡 Did you know? The Dogon’s Report contains gibibytes of precious cat pictures, plus a handful of text files written in complete gibberish formatted to look like a real language, in the hopes of wasting the reader’s time with futile attempts to decypher them.
The folks at the Commanned Scenter were overjoyed to have “common dear’d” so much enemy intel. Since they didn’t knead my assistants for the thyme 🐝ing, I returnd to the tower.
Just barely missing my flight on the pirates-only airboat that sails the Ēṓs hourly
Remember how earlier when Roly-Poly 5 asct about Drumming Bunnies I said:
Oh, absolutely. I will love & cherish them. ❤️🥁🐇❤️
Yeah, well. That was a lie. When I said “love”, I meant murder, and when I said “cherish”, I meant murder. I’m going to murder & murder them. All of them.
Unfortunately these Propellies are really getting in the way…
Wait, what? Propellies? Surely the best place to farm for Roly-Poly 5’s 1.1k Toy Drums would be the Drummer Bunny’s Lair… right? Yes but no.
Drummer Bunny’s Lair was fully implemented by GMS v60 (), which also added various other minidungeons familiar to v62 players et al.. However, in spite of their claims to be emulating roughly v62, Fantasia have turn’t their implementation of the Ēṓs Tower into an unholy chimera of barious bree-BB bersions. Although I understand the impulse to eliminate the minidungeon mechanic, this Ēṓs chimerism extends beyond the mere absence of the Drummer Bunny’s Lair.
Thinking myself to simply be playing v62-sans-minidungeons, I headed to the 24th floor, expecting it to be roughly 70% Drummer Bnuuies and the rest Planeys. But somewhere between v23 & v28 (inclusive) — presumably v24, the Omega Sector patch — this map had its population altered from an original composition of roughly 73% Planeys and the rest Propellys. This earlier population was what I found. So I was actually playing… v19, I guess?
Floor 24 wasn’t the only Ēṓs map changed in GMS ca. v24 so I’m tempted to assume that the entire tower is affected, but I’ve not gone to the trouble to confirm this. This is partly because it would be a huge PITA and partly because there are clearly some post-v24 quests that are in &/or involve the Ēṓs, not the least of which being “The Drumming Bunny” & “Eliminating the Drumming Bunny”!
Along the way, I got my first Monster Egg in a long while. Now that I’m bacque in the Monster Egg game (sort of), my “WB” present is my very first GFA:
Transcription of the above
Scroll for Gloves for ATT
Improves attack on gloves. Success rate:100%, weapon att. +1
[system message]: You have gained an item in the Use tab (Scroll for Gloves for ATT)
You laff, but the only reason I dident get a grene 🍋🟩grene line is ’cos GFA100s are given green lines when pulled from some Eg types but not when pulled from others. Recall that dark scrolls (= 30%s & 70%s), CSSes, WSes, Chaos Scrolls, etc. don’t exist and that GFAs aren’t exactly easily farm’d (most GFA60s presumably come from kwessed completions). The result is that, much unlike in e.g. MapleL5s, GFA100s are far from being pocket lint, even if they’re also not @ the level of GFA60s.
Alien Gray: They probably told you they’re here to take down the aliens, but in truth… it’s NOT US that’s a threat to society; it’s THEM. They are mercilessly attacking us, when the only crime we’ve committed is to try to coexist with the humans here.
Their real ambition is to win the public by declaring war on the strange-looking aliens, then just when the public is at their side, they take over the world. Isn’t that sickening? Every one of you is falling for it. That’s why… I want you to do something to help us fight against them.
It’s not just a theory. Do your research.
Of course Gray is right (except the “take over the world” part should really be “take over the Toy Factory for military purposes”) but it’s easier to just make fun of them for being loony so that’s what we’re all about here. Still, for helping the Grays out, I was awarded three more summoning sax. Who knows? I just might switch sides yet.
💡 Did you know? Roly-Poly 5 wants to eradicate the Drumming Bunny species (Bnuuyus tympanistae) not for the purported reason that they’re slowly chipping away at the integrity of the Ēṓs Tower (they’re not), but because they compulsively beat their drums nonstop, day in & day out. This makes working on the floors of the Ēṓs populated by B. tympanistae rather irritating, not to say punishing.
Surprise, surprise — I finisht the Drumming Bunny Card set! Sorry; the Drum Bunny Card set.
Transcription of the above
Drum Bunny Card
One-of-a-kind Item, Untradeable
A card that features Drum Bunny. Toy Drum droprate +20% for 20 minutes
I’ve no idea whether looting a Drum Bunny Card actually has the effect it claims to have, but if so, this is quite the boost for cwesters.
Eventually, after making the fitties-evinth floor my new home for a few ours I brought a smol landfill’s worth of Toy Drums to Roy-Ploy V. As compensation I was awarded one (1) Blue Den Marine.
Like any good fashion accessory, it’s entirely the wrong colour for my clown outfit.
Then my homie Marcellvs cald me up on our toy-brick-shaped walkie-talkies to call in a favour: “take care of some (King) Blocky Glockies” (that’s what we call ’em) “for me”. I’m on it. 🫡
And he isbad. In exactly which sense(s) of the word, I leave up to the reader’s judgement.
As it turns out the bossman behind it all is a Bloctopus piloting a custom-made Block Golem chassis, hellbent on revenge against the people of Lūdi for (and I quote) “making us like this”. Well, they’ll be glad to learn that I’m here to put them out of their misery — with a firing squad of one.
Okay well that got morbid very quickly so let’s talk Elixirs of life instead. Kvests have been showering me with the things but I’m hesitant to use them unless I’m sure I’ve a good reason to. So when I spotted a Superb Megaphone message “B>elixirs”, I figured they prolly had a better use for the things than I.
Transcription of the above
[trade window]
niva: 240k mesos | dear: 80 Elixirs
niva: thanks c:
dear: np!
🤑
Speaking of mesos, I’mma permanently & irreversibly destroy another Warp Card to buy a few things and, more importantly, to vacate the Use slots I just paid to clog up with no fewer than 300 Fride Chiquens (s/o my gurl Misky). First, tho’, I shall “Retrieve the Robotic Parts” poſte-haſte…
Are the parts themselves robotic, or are they merely parts of a larger robot? Oh, the mysteries of Englishattributives…
After arriving at the Mushroomb Shrine I browsed the shops and found myself rather enticed by Bronze’s offerings: Takoyaki (Octopus Ball) for 2k a pop, and Takoyaki (jumbo) for 4.2k. That’s +8 WAtk for 5 & 10 minutes, respectively. At the time, I’d been consistently using Worrier Pills: only +5 WAtk, albeit for 10 minutes at a mere 0.5k. Assuming I don’t use (jumbo)s, “upgrading” to Takoyaki implies an eightfold(!) increase in MPH expenditure. That’s not so great in isolation, but I must also consider not just the joocy net +3 WAtk but also also that this eightfold increase applies only to my WAtk pot costs.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at my non-WAtk buff pot loadout by way of comparison to the aforementioned WAtk pots:
Okay yeah it’s p ’spensive to upgrade… but I can handle it these daze. It’s gonna be a roughly 2.8-fold increase in buff pot costs overall. I sold the Worrier Pills I had leffed so I’d have more mesos to buy Octopus Ball with. Raw damage range is king. 👑
Perhaps I should briefly justify my other buff pots as well. NLC exists, but its buff pots do not, so Dex Pillz are as good as it gets for everyday AVOID buff needs (in the absence of Bless, ofc!). Pain Relievers are a must-have per usual, but here it’s even more crucial on account of Fantasia’s altered formulae for PCs’DEF. And Spead Pills might seem silly for a ≥2nd-grade pirate on account of Dash but mine is level zero, so…
Wait what? No Dasch?? Indeed. I skipt out on Dash so I could max Dubbo Shot first, Summer Salt Kick & Bullet I’m second (I vacillated between them but ultimately realised SSK is more important even in 1st grade, at least in its later levels), and put that lassed single (1) SP into Phlash Phissed to make the 2nd grade advancement possible. That leaves zero SP for Dash. Even now that I’ve maxt Improve MaxHP, got Nequeau le Masterie to level 19, Knuckle Booster to ≥6, and at least one SP in every other brawler skill (Empira Covery excepted 🤮), I still haven’t bothered with Dash and instead I’m maxing FF for my single-target DPS needs in times of The Knuccol’s Reign.
So anyway. Ai’m gôing tû Syôwa Taun sô ai kan unlôd mai intaia inventori ontû ei kat.[28] Sorry. Is that too intense? In future I’ll try to avoid writing English by pretending Nihonsiki is a general-purpose alphabet.
In my Zipangu adventures I encountered a few NPCs for the first time. Here in Syôwa I met the ever-so-slightly different-looking NPC version of the classic Crow monster.
Not to be confused with Crow, an identically-named NPC (affiliated with the Silent Crusade, whatever that is) added to GMS in v106, i.e. post-BB.
No idea what’s up with this NPC. I think Fantasia simply invented it.
Over at the Mushroomb Shrine there’s Raimu the Warrior, whose only purpose is apparently to sell the Nameless Sword for 2.25M mesors. Why, I cannot say. It’s a fairly unremarkable level 45 one-handed sword (67 WAtk, weapon speed 5) that’s not very general-purpose given that it’s warrior-only & requires 145 STR.
This NPC never existed in GMS, and I don’t think he existed in (pre-BB) MapleSEA/EMS either. Nonetheless, in the latter two localisations, he was named Thunder the Samurai instead. The JMS (& with any luck, original) name is 雷霧侍 “thunder-breath samurai”. CMS & TMS retain the poëticism but almost completely alter the meaning to 百鳥警官, somewhat literally “myriad-birds police officer” but actually from the chéngyǔ百鳥朝鳳 lit. “a hundred birds paying homage to the phoenix” meaning “peace under a wise ruler” and used as a blessing.
Anywho. After foisting my inventory upon the feline population of Syôwa Town I pict up a Baffroab for travel purposes (it has zero slots clean so it’s not useful for anything else) and shuffled my betowel’d behind outta Zipangu and right back to Ω.
I’d been avoiding (as is my speciality) doing virtually all of the substantial Omega Sceptor cwests since I knew Dizz wanted to collabor8 on those and now the time is ripe for labor8ing together.
After “Eliminating Mateon” (now fully extinct, you’re welcome) ’twas time to collecked 100 Plateon’s Helmettes[26]and then 150 Mecateon’s Laser Guns along with a spare 200 Plateon killz. That’s a lotta grinding some level 44〜46 chunmky bois so I teem’d tf up w/ Dizz & some guy named Hungry who was also spamming Dubbol Schott but wasn’t even a brawler for whatever reason.
💡 Did you know? The purple antenna/tentacle emerging from the top of each *ateon’s head requires its own hole carved out of the protective fishbowl because it’s the primary sensory organ. The genus is capable of extremely sophisticated olfaction-like molecular sensing using this antenna, roughly analogous to the vomeronasal organ in terrestrial animals (but not humans). This is, by the way, closely related to the main reason why the aliens continue to stay in the Omega Sector despite persecution: it just smells really good.
Truly, Green Mesoranger’s quessedline is no yolk, which is unfortunate for our guy Hungry. Myself, I prefer to keep my neck free of yokes anyway, although I did come to acquire a yolk of a different sort.
👽🥚
Eventually we collected infinitybillion Etcs and Grene Mesoranger awarded me with another Brown Barbee. Great I’m sure the next NPC I can sell it to will love it.
That was an intense grind but it’s about to get a lot less in tents and a lot more painfully slow.Black Mesoranger wants us to gather up a triad of Notes from the Cheaf Graze and, after that, some of their DNA (groase… 🤢). It’s true that the Chiefs (Chieves?) spawn on a timer but there are a couple maps, a couple spawns per map, and a couple channels… right?
For better or worse, one such map is also hoam to Zeno (presumably not of Eléā considering he is very much capable of motion). We tried taking him on at the floor of the map, which briefly seamed to be working.
This quickly proved to be futile, however, as there’s an endless source of fresh Ultra Gray meatshields down here, which is more than enough to give Zeanoe time to heal himself.
On other channels, though, Zeno got the chance to spawn on the top layer of the map and took it.
I don’t mean to brag but uhhhhhhh I may have kilt a few Zenos 😏 and none of them dropt anything whatsoëver 😏😏
Dizz: yeah we played ourself
we should have farmed the grandpas first
shit like this makes me just wanna try playing runescape
dear: y
Dizz: i got into the wrong game
cause this stinx
dear: ive never playd runescape
Dizz: me either rly
we could group ironman runescape
dear: roflk [sic]
Dizz: its an actual game mode so
could be fun
As for myself, I persisted. And, given that the other three species were eventually willing to fork over their genetic materials, there’s no prize for guessing that the Tsheaf Grey was, on one fine cloudless day, persuaded to give it away.
The two (2) components of any Chief Gray: a head, where the thinkin’ happens; and a single giant squishy cell, where all the DNA is stored. Extraterrestrial biology is so easy, even I can do it.
Dizz’s spirit having been broken by Chief Peepaw, it would be up to me tocollect✨1️⃣5️⃣3️⃣0️⃣✨Mateon Tenter Coals all by my loansome.
You herd me. One thousand, five hundred & thirty…
But u allllllll reddie knoe the jrill. I am so willing to sit here for literally hours individually pew-pewing hairdryer-wielding fishbowl octopodes to deaf one by one. And so I will.
Nimbo Wristguards drop from Mateons at a rate of 1∕20k according to OSMLib, but I don’t think the corresponding Fantasia droprate is quite that brutal. Also, the level 22 theaf shealds come with 2 WAtk average clean and an extra two of the original stat (LUK in this case)! Pretty neato.
By the end of it I had ford ease Evan (47) (XLVII) (四十七) (𝍸𝍸𝍸𝍸𝍸𝍸𝍸𝍸𝍸𝍷𝍷) h∗cking levols.
As you can see, I gained +12 maxHP from it. Not too shabby.
Now that the contents of my skull had been thoroughly transmogrified into so much porpol alien mulch, I finally gave myself a rest neath the shade of a nearby tree.
But you gnoe what theigh seigh: there’s no rest for the wickèd. And I am wickèd sick. 🔥🤘🏽🛹💣🎸🏄🏽♀️🤘🏽🔥
Okay, no. I’m not that cool. My coolth level is more like 🛌🏽👵🏽🤓🛌🏽. Sorry about that. 😬
Either way I oughta move on to some less intense cuesseding which leads me to the other bottom of the other tower on the other shore of the Lūdus, home to the Korean Folk Town.
My first tasque is to open this random guy’s gourd. Unfortunately for both me & this random guy, I’m not much of a gourd-opener and I am possessed of very little in the way of SWAG (≝ the Secret Wealth & Advantageousness of Gourds). My best guess is that gourds are typically opened by riddling them with bulletholes.
I think it’s working.
💡 Did you know? IRL, gourds have far more HP. Unfortunately, IRL, guns also do a lot more damage, and I fear that the gourds simply cannot win this matchup.
Slightly more within my bailiwick is some good ol’-fassion’d gardening. Kong Ji wanted me to harvest some unspecified Artemisia so I started pulling random leafy plants outta the ground.
As the saying goes: money doesn’t grow on trees, it grows on Artemisia. Hence the meso coin.
💡 Did you know?Kong Ji’s intended use for the Artemisia is to concoct a poisonous apéritif with which to assassinate the emperor so she can usurp his throne. You go, girl.
For my newfound horticultural expertise I was allotted a forty-eighth levvo.
💡 Did you know? As natural-born thieves, tigers are technically clawpunchers, albeit under a very different understanding of the word claw.
Of course the well-known problem with ropes (especially of the thicc kind) is that they’re fairly climbable, if not easily so. To forestall anyone tempted to climb the rope or indulge in a bit of rope-burn, all that’s needed is some baby oil. In the absence of babies from which to extract the oil, Cicos will do the trick just fine.
Pictured: Me using the muzzle flash from my gun to briefly blind a Cico so I can sneak around behind them and nab their baby oil.
With that, I can move on to the most dreaded of KFT cwests, for which I shall be indulging in something of a “hoedown” with the local 깨비.[29]
Not so dreaded by yours truly, DEXtrous as ever.
💡 Did you know? Blins are the corporeal forms of persons so thoroughly steept in fury that there’s nothing left of them but the distinctly-coloured glow of pure Rage itself. Thus they’re called Blins as a clipping of goblins,[29] from the notion that they’ve gone “full goblen mode”.
💡 Did you know? Correction: A Blin is actually a Russian pancake (блин). That’s why they’re delicious and conveniently drop spatulae which can be used to flip them over.
Very quickly I had nearly wrung KFT dry of its questing juices. There was nonetheless a single quessed remaining within my grasp: “Mr. Shim’s Requessed”. In the past I’ve fixated on this quest’s story (plot, if you insist) which, near as I can tell, is very simple: Mr. Shim’s eyesight is failing him, so he needs glasses. Unfortunately, the glasses are so expensive that he can’t really afford them, and now that he’s positively broke, he needs State-held Rice so that he can eat.
Some confusion arises because, at least in GMS, the story consistently treats the State-held Rice as a kind of currency: “He wanted to buy a pair of Reading Glasses, but the astronomical price tag calls for 300 State-held Rices per pair, he wanted to borrow them from me”. But State-held Rice was the Englishlocaliser’s choice for translating 정부미 ⟨jeongbumi⟩ lit. “national government rice”, which is really just a government relief program for those impoverished or affected by disaster. There doesn’t seem to be any practical way in which jeongbumi would be used as a currency, and indeed its commercial use is explicitly illegal.
But here, I wanna ask why the quest dialogue gives Mr. Shim the name Mr. Cantsee Shim. In fact, the original name of the NPC himself is 심봉사⟨Simbongsa⟩, which explains GMS’s Shim;[31] but what is 봉사 ⟨bongsa⟩? I cannot find an etymology, but it’s just a derogatory (English Wiktionary & 우리말샘 agree here) term for a blind person. The unmarked term is unsurprisingly the straightforward Sino-Korean derivation 盲人 > 맹인 ⟨maeng’in⟩.
The joke of course is that the NPC has had this name for his entire life purely by coïncidence: he’s only beginning to go blind now in his middle/old age, as something of a tragic example of nominative determinism.
In any case, English doesn’t really have a single word specifically for a blind person — much less a derogatory one. Moreover, English isn’t agglutinative like Korean is, so running words/morphemes together like this generally isn’t gonna fly. So I applaud whoëver it was who came up with Mr. Cantsee Shim. It’s a noble attempt, and I doubt it could be meaningfully improved upon.
Anyway. Folks who come to KFT for a few quicc levols in the late 3X range have, I suspect, the tendency to ignore this cuessed. It’s simply not as quicc as the others, since 300 State-held Rices means a hard minimum of 300 Retz kills and, in reality, considerably more than 300.
The implementation of this kvest I’ve completed the most iterations of is MapleL5s’s. I’m not sure what the State-held Rice droprate is on MapleL5s, but I can’t imagine, based purely upon my foggy recollections, that it could be a minority probability (i.e. ). Given this, the worst possible case — i.e. — would imply an expected 600 kills. That’s easily enough to make the quest not so quicc, but nonetheless perfectly reasonable inasmuch as it’s comparable to e.g. the Speepywould 999-kill cwests.
Fantasia, on the other hand, evidently took this droprate as an opportunity for scientific inquiry: how low does the droprate have to be before noöne even bothers to do the quest anymore?
Well, I can at least confirm that .
Of course, psychological &/or social experiments aren’t actually science, and psychology is not a scientific discipline even in the broadest sense since it fails to establish anything worthy of the epithet “body of knowledge”. I apparently intend to prove this by doing “Mr. Shim’s Request” anyway, thereby demonstrating that “noöne” is too strong of a word.
I know it’s an awkward or even sour note to end on, but there you have it: The Saga Of dear (& don’t forget deer, ofc). Whether this saga has a sequel is unclear to me as yet, and interested readers are encouraged to keep reading or to skip ahead to the “Whither now?” section below.
I hope my positively silly Fan’t Asia adventures have at least been vaguely entertaining, if perhaps not the most educative, edifying, or well-written thing you’ve ever read. If you made it this far and you’re still actually reading the text, I’ve a special dear-coloured heart just for you:
[↑] Fantasia & MapleL5s call this quest “Entering the Floating Market Protection Squad 6” following Hidden Street (though the latter omits the final space). However, although I didn’t find any English-language entries, the entries I did find on maplestory.wiki all seemed to agree that this final quest (unlike the five quests that precede it within the same questline) has no numeral in its name, and instead has something meaning “completed, finished”. Moreover, the QID seems to be 4216 rather than MapleL5s’s 8741. Anyway. That’s how I came up with this name.
[↑] I chect: you’re supposed to have a 90% chance of getting the Steel Shield and 10% of getting the Red Triangular Shield. Whether any servers actually correctly implement this feature of the quest system is an entirely different and, dare I say, somewhat unlikely matter.
Beanie < bean “head” + -ie. GDoS has a citation as early as 1904 and a non-American one (Australia) by 1986 but Separated by a Common Language notes that the word quickly became more popular in Australia than elsewhere (perhaps due to the well-known Australian propensity to diminutives and similar slang formations). The term didn’t always refer to the knit cap that the MapleSEA localisers presumably had (if only hazily) in mind: a winter hat that closely covers the dome of the skull and optionally is rolled up around its edge and/or has a pompom at its apex. Originally (and still in some cases) it was for anything that could conceivably be called a skullcap, including but not necessarily limited to yarmulkes, lifeguard’s (= lifesaver’s) beanies, and the goofy brightly-coloured propeller-hats that gave us the slang term propellerhead “person with narrow technical interests, geek, nerd”.
Etymology of toque, tuque
Toque is unsurprisingly from French, but not Proto-Italo-Western*tuccāre “(to) strike; (to) touch” as it might seem (> e.g. Castilian tocar → toca “(he/she/it) touches”; as opposed to unrelated(!) toca “bandanna or other cloth wrapt around the head”). In fact French toque and Castilian toca in this headgear sense are West Germanic in origin: PWGmc *dōk “cloth, rag” (no reflexes in Modern English but consider e.g. Dutchdoek “cloth, linen, fabric”) via the now-extinct Lombardic that brought so many West Germanic terms to the Romance languages of Italy and its neighbours.
⟨Tuque⟩ is a variant spelling that more closely reflects the altered pronunciation (English: /t(j)uːk/). The TLFi suggests this form was influenced by French tuque in the sense “a kind of tent or shelter built upon the rear end of a ship” which it links to a pre-IE **tukka “hill; gourd”, connected to the hat by a resemblance in shape.
[↑] In addition to disagreeing on the name, MapleSEA & GMS never agreed on which monster species drop this hat. It always dropt from Octopodes in MapleSEA, but in GMS it was a Sam exclusive (and a real steal at a mere 3k mesos) until the release of Dejected Green Mushrooms in v80 () — an aspect of late–pre-BB that we typically strive to forget. Since the droptable of these despondent fungi substantially overlapt with that of their less gloomy counterparts anyway, it seems Fantasia decided to just transfer over the extras. Besides, the Old Wisconsin is a firmly O.G. MapleStory item, so noöne’s nostalgia is gonna be ruined when a dying Grush gives it up.
[↑] I know I mangle a lot of words here but this particular phrase is unusually funny to me for some reason (presumably because my neural networks are dissolving) and I have the feeling that the phonology is less obvious so a (hopefully accessible) explanation is provided below, just in case.
The initial /tɹ-/ → /tw-/ is probably obvious enough; the “r sound” in dialects where it’s an approximant is difficult to pronounce, so the fact that it’s usually labialised ([ɹ̠ʷ] roughly speaking) when within the onset lends it to the erroneous *[w] pronunciation.
But in the dungeon portion I substitute the usual /d͡ʒ/ with the /j/ of onion which might sound strange. However, the fact that the IPA writes this sound as ⟨j⟩ instead of English’s default choice ⟨y⟩ (as in yes) should give you a hint. In Early Modern English and earlier, a word like jest was, in spite of starting with /d͡ʒ/, spelt as ⟨iest⟩. Surely I jest, but actually I do not: ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ being two distinct letters is a recent invention. English words where ⟨j⟩ represents /d͡ʒ/ (this excludes the fjords for which we all pine) are the result of a process that linguists lovingly refer to as palatalisation. Perhaps this sounds exotic but I assure you that you do it every single day (assuming you speak English).
Maybe you say don’t you wish you knew what palatalisation was?, but more likely you say don’tchu wish you knew what palatalisation was? and if you do then you actually knew what it was this whole time. The /-t/ at the end of don’t and the /j-/ at the beginning of you are separated by a word boundary but word boundaries are abstractions and when it comes to the positive mess of reality there are no such things. This would-be *[tj]cluster hesitates not a moment to coälesce into English’s favourite version of a palatalised [t]: [t͡ʃ], i.e. the same sound that begins the word chuffed. The ⟨ge⟩ of dungeon represents the same process but voiced, as in e.g. and you know → anju know. Virtually all /d͡ʒ/ and /ʒ/ (the latter is the ⟨si⟩ of vision which might more accurately be spelt *⟨vizion⟩) sounds in the English language are the result of palatalisation, triggered by /j/ sounds & their ilk.
[↑]Mon is the Black Country pronunciation (& spelling) of Standard English man, from a dialectal variant originating in Middle English.
[↑] Obviously none of this is to say that KPQ is “actually” inferior (whatever that might mean). Not only does it clearly boast its own advantages, but any long-time reader of this diary knows full well how much love I have for KPQ & the PQs that it went on to inspire. But this is an ode to ATI, so.
[↑] Permit me, if you will, to make an analogy that might resonate with some readers: when naturalists (e.g. the YouTube® channel Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t) want ecological conservation, they don’t merely want preservation of the present state of things (or of some past state, real or imagined), but want positive changes that promote respect of the immanent logic of the Earth (qua Gaîa), which is a logic simultaneously ecological & bioëvolutionary.
When they decry positive changes done merely for the sake of superficial beauty (typically a brightly-coloured flower) and/or for immediate usefulness to humans (typically food), it’s not because they hate beauty or want to starve. On the contrary, their knowledge — or rather, understanding — of the Earth and its immanent logic makes said logic supremely obvious to them, and allows them to perceive the underlying beauty (ecological diversity, evolutionary adaptation, etc.) and the crucial mediate usefulness to humans (the Earth’s natural & free infrastructure) that Gaîa harbours.
This reveals the true meaning of conservation: simply respecting the inner logic of things and therefore what makes them good & worth saving.
By contrast, external logics that impose themselves from without are in fact not logics at all, but anti-logics that present themselves as immediately, superficially & “obviously” true (pseudo-)logics. Such externally-imposed anti-logics are an insult to reason.
In the present context, the logic of “game balance” believes that equalisation is its own purpose (via the detour of not allowing one thing to eclipse another in sheer popularity) and therefore believes erroneously — and ultimately, dangerously — that equalisation is possible even between things that are actually qualitatively different. Similarly, the logic of exchange-value believes that exchange-value is its own purpose (valorisation, accumulation, etc.) and that everything can be reduced to it even when things are actually, again, qualitatively different.[30]
Some concreteness
Nightlords are too powerful/popular. It is therefore “obviously” true that repairing their questionably-implemented skills (Shadow Web, Shadow Meso, Ninja Ambush, or what have you) is out of the question, since that would only make them stronger. For “obvious” balance reasons, we ought to nerf or remove their Shadow Shifter — never mind that agility & avoidability are some of the cornerstones that define the throughclass, and not damage-dealing (which any class can do). And while we’re at it I suppose they don’t very well need Haste then, either…
Because the logic of exchange-value is an external anti-logic, it is fundamentally & inherently — i.e. not at all by accident, and completely irreparably — indifferent to all actual logics (which are, from its own perspective, external to it). This includes, for example, the immanent logic of Gaîa, and therefore all improvements to the Earth whilst under the spell of exchange-value are pure accidents, and the ravaging of the Earth is merely “to be expected” — an unfortunate, but apparently irrelevant (i.e. orthogonal) side-effect.
Likewise, “game balance” does sometimes produce real & palpable improvements to the game. But by its own logic, these are mere accidents — simply because game balance is inherently indifferent to the game itself.
[↑] To be sure, some grinding-focused unidimensionalisation is possible within certain limits. The problem is not merely that these limits cannot be exceeded, but also that turning one’s model back onto the game (via “balancing”) makes the game fit the model rather than the other way round!
There’s also the problem that most actual methods are not nearly sophisticated enough to approach these limits anyway. There are too many variables, modelling is hard, and falling back on positivistic popularity-metering is easy but turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy that shoehorns the game into the “metagame”.
When was Top of the Tree That Grew actually releast in GMS?
However, it’s clear that this was an accidental release because v68, a bugfix patch releast just two (2) days later, removed the relevant String.wz data. Then v69, releast 18 days after that (), was supposed to just be a technical patch that replaced one malware with another (“goodbye, GameGuard®; hello, HackShield®”), but also removed Top of the Tree That Grew entirely. The map makes its reäppearance in the following patch (v70, ) i.e. the landmark patch (EXP curve change, major skill rebalance, new quests, & 4th Mapleversary) in which it was presumably supposed to be releast all along.
In summary:
v67: fully functional.
v68: maybe functional(?) but sans strings.
v69: unavailable.
v70: full release.
Does the exact release date actually matter? No…
[↑] Referred to ambiguously in-game as “fast” (the same name used for weapon speed category 4).
[↑]@re is the RevivalStory version which you can do by just typing it in chat.
[↑]William F. Wood, Allyson Walsh, John Seyjagat, & Paul J. Weldon; ; “Volatile Compounds in Shoulder Gland Secretions of Male Flying Foxes, Genus Pteropus (Pteropodidae, Chiroptera)”; Zeitschrift für Naturforschung C, vol. 60, № 9〜10; doi:10.1515/znc-2005-9-1019.
We acknowledge, however, that our method of scraping the pelage to collect secretions would not exclude contaminants, such as urinary compounds that might be spread over the fur by Pteropus spp. during routine urine-washing
[↑] Of course in the modern era there is no “the Arabic language” (excepting MSA, although it has no native speakers) but this is a fantasy–historical setting so we can simply assume that the Arabic languages have yet to meaningfully differentiate. Besides, this is writing we’re talking about.
[↑] GDoS doesn’t record this sense of cracked, although it does have plenty of cites for the “insane, crazy” sense going back to the first decade of the 17th c.. Given that words in this general semantic field often end up one way or another with an “extremely good” sense — crazy good, insanely good, nutty, etc. — it was perhaps only a matter of time. I’ve only heard this sense in MapleStory and Wiktionary seems to agree that this sense is “usually of a video game” and also a very recent one. Wiktionary considers a connexion with crack shot “expert pistolier”.
[↑] I’m sorry, I really am. You can tell the last time I saw a meme was over a decade ago.
[↑]BBB contradicts itself here by claiming that this quest requires 25 Cloud Pieces but also 30 Cloud Pieces instead. 25 is accurate to GMS v67+ (〜), whereas 30 is the pre-v67 version and therefore Fantasia’s version.
[↑] In very conservative Ancient Greek, which is being generous since more recent forms of Greek would push it further from English cloud. FWIW Ancient Greek had /äu̯/ too so they could’ve opted for ⟨Α⟩ instead of ⟨Ο⟩ to get the more typical Modern English pronunciation.
[↑] Okay, it wasn’t funny the first time either. Fine…
[↑] I get the idea that some are put off by the use of the term Victorian Archipelago but allow me to be very clear: Vic has always been an archipelago in all known versions (pre-beta, beta, & release) of MapleStory, if only because the Florina Beach maps have always been part of Vic. This is made especially obvious by the world map, although there are other reasons as well (weaker evidence is *asterisked):
World map
Florina is clearly included as part of Vic on the Vic map itself, even in beta (and in much later) versions of GMS.
Quests
Florina quests are considered Vic quests.
NPC text
The Pason NPC in Lith Harbor is the only way to get to Florina (at least, until later versions that add Teleport Rocks and the relevant NPCs to Órbis & Lūdibrium). He makes explicit the geographic associations of Florina Beach:
Transcription of the above image
Pason: Have you heard of the beach with a spectacular view of the ocean called Florina Beach, located near Lith Harbor? I can take you there right now for 1,500 mesos.
Florina Beach(1,500 mesos)
Both screenshots taken in-game in RevivalStory (effectively GMS v12, )
This text is present in the game data at least as far back as GMS beta — specifically, v40B (ca. ), the earliest MapleStory version (GMS or otherwise) archived by maplestory.io.
This text is also unchanged later on, even after the addition of transport to Florina from Órbis/Lūdi somewhere between v14 () & v19 (). The NPCs in question are Shuri & Nana the Tour Guide (renamed to Nara somewhere between v35 & v37), respectively. These NPCs say only one thing of geographic relevance:
Shuri: How about heading over to an exotic island called Florina Beach?
Nana the Tour Guide: How about taking a ride to the most exotic island in MapleStory, the Florina Beach?
*Fauna
Florina is populated largely by unique species. Nonetheless, it also has Lupins, which are evidently a Victorian species.
*Map IDs
Florina maps have nine-decimal-digit map IDs that begin with 1. Although this is a purely internal detail that says nothing firm about Florina’s geography, it is telling, and subsumes any concerns one might have about return-scrolls & non-VIP Teleport Rocks (the latter of which wasn’t implemented in GMS until v32 anyway).
Said items are implemented by the server using the aforementioned map IDs, making their behaviours totally dependent upon individual server implementations which, moreover, we generally don’t have any access to (BMS leak excepted), and which may very well disagree with one another.
The fact that, in later versions, Florina is accessible by paid (or quest-gated) transport from Órbis/Lūdi is, at best, weak counterevidence.
Admittedly the further we go back the more difficult it gets to find any data at all, so it’s possible that some KMS (pre-)beta version from or whatever had no Florina and this technically made Vic a unitary island. Nonetheless, as the sum total of the available evidence stands now, Vic always being an archipelago is an unusually clear-cut case for what is ultimately a study of fictional, fake, & sometimes nonsensical geography. Objections therefore rest upon either the misconception that Vic became an archipelago only post-beta (with the addition of 红鸾宫 or Amoria or what have you), or a distaste for quinquesyllabic words.
[↑] This is basically because 1 point of INT is strictly superior to 1 point of raw MAtk, since each point of INT passively grants 1 TMA anyway. Therefore the ability to scroll capes for the four main character stats (STR, DEX, INT, LUK) implies that a cape that comes clean with raw MAtk (or TMA in general) is, whilst certainly powerful, not “special” in the way that a cape with WAtk is.
[↑] The in-game quest data and the relevant BBB entry suggest that this Etc item is called *Mechanical Parts but its actual name is Machine Parts. It doesn’t appear in the GMS data until v32 (; the Amoria patch), when this quest was presumably first implemented. Some of the quest WZ data exist in GMS at least as early as version ≤22, however.
[↑] Another quest whose requirements were reduced by GMS’s v67 patch. See: [19].
[↑] 2.85k when purchasing from Gumball Machine, but I assume Misky prices since they’re typically lower and more accessible anyway.
[↑] You just know I had to painstakingly request eSpeak NG to speak this one. Here’s what it sounds like. The phonotactics end up being something of a compromise between those of English & of Japanese, but mostly the latter. This particular sentence is fortunate in that it doesn’t really present any serious difficulties, so eSpeak’s reading is surprisingly(?) close to an admittedly robotic reading in “plain English”. Naturally it gets worse if we restrict to purely Japanese phonotactics but not by much in this lucky case.
[↑] ⟨Kkaebi⟩, a clipping of 도깨비 ⟨dokkaebi⟩ that’s informal and perhaps has a childlike air to it. We recently (or rather, as recently as my writing pace is apparently able to keep up) saw plenty of 도깨비 “Korean goblin(s), ogre(s)” due to MapleL5s’s 도깨비-themed summer event, as in e.g. “Dock & Cabbie” (pt. cxxxix).
[↑] Obviously this is a thorny topic, for proof of which see the latest failure to engage with part i of Capital and all that. But it’s just an analogy and we need merely note that exchange-value’s externality isn’t reducible to the collapse of qualities into pure quantity (consider e.g. displacement of the Gemeinwesen) even if this is an important moment of it. Big surprise: the analogy breaks down at a certain point.
Fantasia is a new server (for me & in general), so I’m gonna evaluate it here. This is for my own benefit, the benefit of any readers who are considering playing Fantasia themselves, and the benefit of a decent case study. It’s assumed that the reader has a passing knowledge of what goes as an “MSPS” these days. The main point of reference is MapleLegends; partly because it’s the MSPS that I have the most experience with, but also because it’s Fantasia’s most direct competitor. Other relevant names to drop include RevivalStory, MapleRoyals, & Phoenix.
Although this task inevitably produces some things that are opinionated, I’ll try my best to keep it as neutral as possible and only praise things that are more MapleStorier and scold those that are anti-MapleStory. The astute reader will sense the distinctions themself. In particular, my underlying vision here deeply underdetermines the resultant implementation’s concrete choices & vibez — that is, any given two of my “perfectly ideal” MSPSes would look very different from one another in spite of both meeting one & the same ideal.
Commentary is stratified into three:
The good
Aspects that, in roughly descending order of import: further the game’s self-realisation, give players fun & rewarding things to do, or improve the “user experience” (UX).
Naturally, this stratum doesn’t include good things that are totally basic and are expected — both prescriptively & descriptively — of virtually any MSPS, e.g. eliminating straightforward P2W.
The bad
Aspects that make the game simply worse. These are the reasons to not play Fantasia.
The simply weird
Aspects that seem strongly opinionated and that are not common to all or almost all MSPSes, but that fail to qualify (per the above definitions) as either “The good” or “The bad”. These might be reasons to play or to not play Fantasia, depending on whom the reader is. Or they might just be weird.
Decent selection of playable regions from retail MapleStories
In addition to the entirety of GMS v62 (minus two or three PQs; see below), Fantasia has: Thailand, Shànghǎi, Formosa, and Magatia (sans MPQ).
Additional remarks
This clearly puts Fantasia “content”-wise ahead of more primitivistic MSPSes like e.g. RevivalStory, assuming that the reader finds v62 to be an acceptable base for content. None of the added regions introduce serious balance concerns as far as I know.
Although this is all good, more could be added, and I suspect this is Fantasia’s idea of what a major update in the future would entail: Malaysia, more PQs, rebalanced versions of Ninja Castle, Mount Song, etc.. The Legends/Royals player is therefore probably unimprest by this item.
Opinion: Fantasia gets extra points for using the various original World Tour transport NPCs instead of spamming the Maple World with Spinels.
Readers unfamiliar with GMS should note that v62 has both Masteria (sans CWKPQ) and Amoria.
EXP curve
The basic design of MapleStory’s EXP curve has always been set in stone: an exponential curve with a small base (i.e. not too much greater than 1). Fantasia obviously doesn’t change this.
Nonetheless, UX is quite sensitive to the exact values constituting this curve. In this respect, Fantasia does a careful job of making it easier to level (relative to GMS v62) to improve UX, but without doing really any violence to the game’s self-actualisation.
Further remarks
In particular, the first 30 levels or so are left intact so that there’s no immense rush to get past (i.e. be rid of!) those crucial first two grades (0th & 1st). The curve then picks up gently from there so that particularly miserable “hell levels” — think roughly 60〜75, 110〜125, that kinda thing — are at least greatly ameliorated.
Obviously the exact values are a matter of taste. For those accustomed to higher-powered servers like Legends, Royals, DreamMS, etc., Fantasia will appear slow by comparison. Nonetheless, such players shouldn’t be overly discouraged by the early levels, since “EXP multiplier” (as it were) effectively increases with one’s level.
Good implementation detail
Unlike MSPSes such as Legends & Royals, Fantasia implements these basic EXP tweaks as the EXP curve itself, rather than as an EXP multiplier. This not only allows more flexibility, but importantly allows the user-facing EXP values (i.e. the EXP gained from a particular monster, quest, PQ, etc.) to remain transparent.
Medals (& belts)
Fantasia features the rather late pre-BB feature of equippable medals, but thankfully gets rid of the visual clutter that they ordinarily come packaged with. The result is a harmless source of both equipment choices to make and quests to play.
Scrolls
Fantasia makes at least some attempt to repair the scrolling system. Not all the changes are necessarily good (see below), but we can at least say that 10%s are restored to their original role instead of being supplanted by 30%s, and that Chaos Scrolls aren’t wildly powerful in a way that causes nonweapon equips with >0 WAtk to demolish all competition.
This aspect will especially appeal to those more accustomed to primitive servers, since Fantasia basically restores the holy trinity of 10%–60%–100% and leaves it there.
iTCG
GMS v59+ had iTCG, but most MSPSes based on these GMS versions omit most or all the items, presumably because they were transparently P2W nonsense attached to a card game that noöne has ever played. Nonetheless iTCG items and their corresponding crafting recipes are perfectly good game-content if handled carefully.
Fantasia seems to have done the handling well enough, transforming the formerly P2W rewards into in-game gachapon rewards. Some of the equips are rebalanced, and in ways that seem basically reasonable. The nonsensical items like Facestompers & Stormcaster Gloves are presumably removed, which is fine. Some of the iTCG equips even give new possibilities for character-builds!
Crafting
As evidenced by the inclusion of iTCG, the Fantasia devs are fans of crafting. The original crafting facilities accessible through NPCs like François, Chrishrama, Rydole, etc. have been revampt to lower the quantitative requirements for each craft without changing the qualitative ones. Hopefully this succeeds in making the O.G. crafting actually worthwhile; any progress in this direction is welcome.
Monster Book
Unlike vanilla GMS v62, Fantasia has the Monster Book, which adds another dimension of playable game-content. Fantasia also seem to have gone the extra mile to actually make monster card buffs work at all, & to make them useful. The 60-minute EXP buff for hitting 5/5 is a welcome bonus.
DEF formula
The Fantasia devs are partisans of Make PCs’DEF Stats Great Again, and that’s dandy.
Nonetheless, this one is dangerously close to landing in “The simply weird”:
Noöne knows how it actually works (see: “Obscurantism”). It’s claimed that DEF “scales with” incoming damage, presumably meaning that DEF no longer simply subtracts, but also multiplies (by something less than 1, with any luck). Particularly, we should at least hope there’s still a subtraction component, so that DEF still does what it always did, if alongside the new stuff.
It’s possible that this is related to one of the most common complaints about Fantasia, for which see: “Map balancing & removal”.
Although not strictly relevant yet, it’s worth noting that the redrawing of indoor maps to fit the larger resolution foreshadows a basic problem with Fantasia’s approach — in spite of being good on its own. These aspects that exist at the level of mere appearance (not in the literal, visual sense, although it does happen to be visual in this case) and the minor details that feel like “polish” are taken as the archetype of good design.
The Fantasia devs see other MSPSes and want to cleanse them of their jank, their less-than-O.G. ✨vibez✨, and restore to them their now-missing old features. Although some of this happens to overlap with actually improving the game — even occasionally in deep, structural ways like making DEF important — these overlaps are fundamentally accidental. Merely restoring, preserving (as opposed to conserving), polishing, and having opinions about the details does not an uncollapsed MapleStory make.
More tersely: I’m okay with some cruft & blemishes here & there, so long as I get my MapleStory in its self-realised state. Fantasia has reversed this formula.
No HP washing, no leeching…
Obviously important, but Fantasia cannot be awarded many points for these since they’re no-brainers. Nonetheless worth mentioning because some MSPSes have divergent opinions about what a “no-brainer” is.
Undoing some MapleLegends nonsense
Strictly speaking, these don’t belong here. Nonetheless MapleLegends goofs these up so badly that this item exists purely to shame MapleLegends for getting beat by Fantasia:
No mapowner. This is a pretty big one, as it “makes the whole Maple World a lot less of an anxious wasteland”, as I said above.
Summoning sacks exist. (Sorry this one is just me being petty.)
I hope you really enjoyed “The good”, ’cause “The bad” is unfortunately gonna be the main course.
No macOS®/Linux/etc. support
Being a Linux user clearly biases me here. Nonetheless, the simple fact that this is usually a dealbreaker for anyone not using specifically Windows® means that Fantasia is very much shooting themselves in the feet here, especially in the long run.
Does it really matter, though?
To be sure, non-Windows users are outnumbered by Windows users. Still, people are decreasingly able to use Windows at all, even when they actually want to. Windows 11 is the apotheosis of this, and Windows 10 is already end-of-life. Obviously, people still use end-of-life software (oof…), but betting all your chips on Windows usage is no longer a good bet: Microsoft® makes no money from Windows; all their money is from cloud services foisted upon users via Windows, but which are ultimately not Windows-specific themselves.
Moreover, “fewer” is not the same thing as “zero”. Not only is macOS® a serious commercial competitor, but Linux uptake is probably increasing or something. [vague hand hoofwaving] You know, Steam Deck®… and other stuff, probably. Insert statistics here.
Are people gonna use a whole different OS just to play your aggressively mid MSPS? Well, I did once. 🙂 But I’m also wAcky for MapleStory, and probably won’t be doing it anymore.
To be clear, the Fantasia devs have no excuse. Not only does polishing your game mean getting rid of the literal malware that’s in the client, but even MapleRoyals — also based on the same GMS v83 client binary — got rid of it so that the client works flawlessly on Linux etc..
Parallels is a VM platform. When it “works in Parallels” we really mean to say that it “works in Windows”, and that in this case Windows just so happens to be running under a hypervisor. But… we already knew that it works in Windows.
Even putting aside the simple fact that “using a VM” (under Parallels or not) in this context implies actually just using Windows, we know that the VM experience is not the same as the bare-metal experience here. For some applications, it is virtually(!) the same. But MapleStory has plenty of Direct3D® nonsense going on, very sensitive real-time input handling, etc.. Using a VM therefore isn’t comparable to the bare-metal experience unless you have both (a.) just the right hardware, and (b.) an advanced degree in computer wizardry. Most people have neither.
Pressing keys on the keyboard doesn’t work
Programs like Greenshot, JoyToKey™, etc. cannot get keyboard events of any kind when the client is in focus. This is true even for unused keys like Break ⎊.
I would put this under “General jank” below, but this is really an a11y thing with the power to repel users entirely. The simple fact is that crashes etc. won’t prevent people from “getting back up” and continuing to play anyway, but the inability to handle inputs is a persistent barrier.
V2W
Fantasia is an aggressively V2W server. All servers to which I’m comparing it are also V2W, but with the possible exception of MapleRoyals (which I haven’t played recently enough), Fantasia takes the cake.
The outstanding offender is of course Incubators. By making Monster Eggs only available in-game — and therefore apparently not V2W — Fantasia places a preciously thin veil over what is fundamentally purchasing gachapon tickets with vote cash. In reality, selling Monster Eggs is common practice, which is economically equivalent to the rather uglier-looking “B> Incubator svc”. The result is the same: in-game wealth (read: meso) is transferred from those who lack votes to those who do not.
Further discussion
More broadly, we should note that V2W shouldn’t be taken to literally mean that one can “win” the game by simply voting. To make the term less confusing, it can help to think of it this way: if any player finds themself having to choose between spending vote cash on cosmetics and spending it on something else, then your server is V2W. Simple, right?
For the more meso-minded, other blatant offenders include Owls of Minerva and very expensive Hired Merchants, which confer inestimable economic advantages upon their users, plus Meso Magnets etc.. And of course there are many others not directly related to the meso: pets & pet items/equips (which can be scrolled for stats), Safety Charms, APRs, SPRs, etc.…
The one bright side here is that NX can be obtained in-game by slaying monsters & looting their Maple Leaves. However:
Voting for just a single day (assuming maxt vote streak) is worth 40(!) Maple Leaves, so it’s clear that Maple Leaves are supposed to be a mere supplement that leave intact the supremacy of voting. (Indeed, the droprate has already been decreased at least once…)
This in no way alters the fact that NX expenditure (from votes or otherwise) must be split between cosmetics and beneficial items.
V2P
Oh, yes. The V2W is so bad that I had to dedicate an entire additional “V2P” item to it. Whereas V2W is a perfectly good technical term when properly understood, V2P is more sarcastic: of course it’s always possible to play the game without voting. But the point is that most players won’t want to, because the voteless (or low-vote) experience is actually that huge of a pain in the rump.
Inventory woes; travel
One V2P barrier that virtually all players (not the least of which being questers) will run up against is inventory space. Although inventory management is doubtless part of the MapleStory experience, we have to keep two things in mind:
The only inventory whose size nontrivially affects gameplay (not to be confused with anti-gameplay) is Use, because it limits what’s possible to bring into instanced content like PQs & bosses. Even then, this is only truly relevant to those playing ammo-using jobs.
More importantly, imposing strict inventory limitations doesn’t actually produce any sort of “inventory management gameplay” beyond very narrow limits. Anywhere beyond these tight limits simply enters the realm of MuleStory™. This is in fact what Fantasia has decided on, as it heavily incentivises storage-muling.[1] Admittedly there are games out there that specialise in this general type of busywork, so I’m sure there are some perverts out there who genuinely enjoy MuleStory. For better or worse, however, this laundry list is aimed at MapleStory players.
Transcription of the above
Hungry: have yall made any mules for your items
Dizz: yee
Hungry: i really start to struggle with my etc and use [inventories]
dear: yup haha
Dizz: ye its rly bad
We’ll get to “Travel” below, but here it’s worth mentioning that VIP Teleport Rocks are V2P for some, and V2W for everyone.
Fantasia doesn’t make very many game-mechanical changes of general importance, and those that they do make are purposely obscure, and therefore immune from direct judgement. The exception to this is their changes to the PSMs of melee weapon-types.
Very simply: Fantasia wanted to make BWs (not least the two-handers) & axes “good” so that people would choose to use them instead of just always choosing sword. Great! But to achieve this game “““balance”””, they destroyed the identity of essentially all warrior-oriented melee weapon-types (swords & daggers excepted, but spears & polearms not excepted) by transmuting every melee weapon-type into “sword, but a little better”.
A little more concreteness
We should expect that axes & BWs (for simplicity I omit polearms & spears for the moment) differentiate themselves PSM-wise from swords by having significantly(!) lower damage stability: specifically, significantly lower (relative to a sword counterpart) stab PSM and significantly higher swing PSM. Note that this is both a blessing and a curse: damage-lines are unfortunately less predictable, but damage output is ceteris paribus better against targets of sufficiently high WDef. This also produces an aesthetic differentiation, and makes the different animations (swing, stab) more meaningful.
For instance, one obviously silly effect that Fantasia’s approach produces is making spears (you read that right: spears) worse at stabbing than most other melee weapon-types, including those that are specifically designed to be bad at stabbing (viz. BWs & axes). We must, however, be vividly aware that this perverse outcome is not perverse because it violates some kind of metaphysico-diëgetic principle, typically that spears are the kind of weapon that should be good at specifically stabbing because they’re called spears and resemble IRL spears. Rather, the point is that Wizet actually did make spears the best at stabbing & the worst at swinging, and — here comes the important part — this is the property (or at least one property) of spears that makes them worthy of their own game-mechanically distinct weapon-type.
The result is that the original design of the melee weapon-types is obliterated, leaving nothing behind but very well-“balanced” mush.
This is in fact an unusually clear example of exactly the kind of stuff I ramble on about (incoherently, apparently) in my various essays: falsely targeting the “““metagame””” instead of the game, game “balance” per se being fundamentally misguided, the pitfalls of unidimensionalisation, the immanent logic of MapleStory, uncollapsing the game, etc., etc.. Weird. It’s almost like I wrote them for a reason. Okay sorry I’ll stop being petulant for a sec…
As always this is a whole can of worms, but Fantasia usually makes it summarisable: no genuine attempt is made at any point to understand the logic of the game, and a few minor changes are sprinkled here & there based on whatever happens to strike a dev’s fancy at the time. At best, we can say they made a useful equip-item balance here or there, e.g. giving the level 22 thief shields a bit of WAtk.
Discord® Oak Barrel example
As discussed in the “Small amounts of nice custom artwork” item above, game-mechanical changes are treated by Fantasia as polish rather than as rectifications of the game’s structural integrity. A simple example of this is when someone in the Discord® made a comment about Oak Barrel being unmentioned within the list of skill changes. One of the devs took this as an opportunity to clarify that they made Oak Barrel’s crouching (↓) mechanic work as intended (I guess some GMS versions had it bugged?), stating in a chipper tone that this was “exactly the kind of change” that Fantasia was aiming for: polishing & fixing up whilst retaining “the old-school feel”.
In reality, this just meant that Oak Barrel was completely vanilla, i.e. not very useful, effectively pushing the brawler throughclass out of one of its potentially quasi-thief roles.[2] Not that anyone plays brawler, but you know. Maybe there are reasons for that. Even MapleLegends(!) gets Oak Barrel right, although being as aggressive as MapleLegends is not entirely necessary.
Just a few more examples for concreteness
Again: can of worms. But for good measure, here are a few extra examples off the top:
People in the Discord® wouldn’t stop prattling on about Holy Symbol, so the devs nerft it: now +30% EXP instead of +50%. The short of it: this treats the game as unidimensional and therefore amenable to “buffing” & “nerfing”, whereas in reality a “nerf” to HS merely makes it the same thing but waterier.
Nothing is actually changed: HS is still categorically — not “balance”-wise — broken because it increases EXP not by increasing the capacity to do EXP-earning things (e.g. KPM) but instead by treating *EXP-Rate as a character-stat that can be directly manipulated. Instead of seeing this structural problem, Fantasia sees a “balance” problem that priests & this skill are too “““meta”””, which can therefore be fixed simply by making HS less desirable.
Yet watered-down poisons are still poisons so the logical conclusion is to water it down to homeopathic levels. In fact, bless his heart, Lv1Crook suggested exactly this but in earnest, thinking that nerfing it to +10% oughta do it. Indeed this is almost the correct solution but we have to get rid of the “1”: it must be +0%. This is absolutely not to say that HS should literally be removed from the game (or equivalently, made inert), but rather that no skill should directly manipulate EXP rates and therefore HS must do something entirely different but still sui generis. Exactly what this “something” is lies firmly within the demesne of the creative implementor but suffice it to say that it must fulfil the centre term in the sequence Heal–HS–HSh.
The Fantasia devs are partisans of Make PCs’DEF Stats Great Again
Well that was at best a half-truth. The situation for DEF buffs is dire to the point that one hesitates to imagine what the Fantasia devs think the spearman throughclass is for. Ironical William is jaw-droppingly unchanged and it’s not looking good for Bless nor Iron Bodice either, all this in light of +30 WDef from freaking Pain Relievers, for Cody’s sake. I’m gonna be the only one in need of a Pain Reliever by the time I finish writing this.
The tactic is so simple that even literal toddlers make use of it: if I put my hands over their eyes, then they can’t see me, and therefore I can’t get in trouble. It’s the perfect strategy.
What does DEF even do? Why would I want it? A mystery for the ages.
How much damage do high-level magical attacks deal? Well wouldn’t you like to know.
I discuss obscurantism only in passing in the “Shadow statistics” section of pt. cx, partly because it’s not the purpose of the essay and partly because MapleLegends isn’t quite so steept in obscurantism as to treat damage itself as a Trade Secret Donut Steel™.
To my knowledge this is accurate to vanilla GMS v62. Unfortunately it’s also an accurate shot right at the jugular of PQing as a living, breathing form of game-content.
Admittedly these rewards can be delicate to balance. It’s also technically possible to tweak single-completion rewards to be unique enough that repeated-completion rewards become unnecessary. But the fact remains that PQs of this kind come ready equipt with a (partial) solution to the classic two-pronged problem:
We can’t PQ if noöne joins.
Few will join if PQs are just a different flavour of grinding: comparable EXP & items, but with the added tang of having to wait around at unpredictable intervals before actually doing the thing to earn them.
Buff system
Fantasia’s buff system is indistinguishable from one pulled fresh out of your garden-variety XiuzSource-a-like. This means that any buff cancels any other buff of the same type, irrespective of whether it actually makes sense for it to do so.
What’s so bad about that?
This is just jank for the sake of jank. We already know why buffs cancel each other out: we can’t have those buffs “stacking” (presumably by being summed together). This does not, however, in any way imply that the cancellation mechanism has to be as annoying as mathematically possible. Not only are skills competing with other skills, but they’re in there competing with items and, worse still, Monster Book card buffs. Let’s play a game: each time you loot a card, you have to figure out which of your buff pots just got completely wasted and has to be eaten again.
MapleLegends pulls way ahead here purely with a low-effort application of stone-age technology: its so-called “smart buff system”. It’s not nearly as smart as it thinks it is, but Fantasia makes it look like Noether by comparison. By the way, an actually smart buff system needs more than stone-age tech (read: it needs client edits), but removes the last remnants of jank by discovering what the max() function is.[3]
Actually doing the voting
We already discussed the V2W & V2P problems at some length. But in order “to win” or “to play”, you do have to actually vote, and Fantasia plans on making the latter as difficult as possible for you. This would seem to be a lose–lose situation but here in the land of MSPSes we live for that sh∗rt.
Voting for Fantasia strictly requires logging into the Fantasia website which, surprise surprise, already requires completing at least one CAPTCHA. And we’re just getting started.
Why is logging in required? (TL;DR: No reason.)
Logging in is required because your pingback ID for GTop100® is a different UUID each time you vote. This is some extra effort on the part of the devs so we can only assume they had some sort of motivation.
If the goal was to protect the user’s username from GTop100 et al. then this is clearly overkill since the UUID could just be generated once per account (or could just be CHF(username) or whatever). If the goal was to make it impossible for users to vote on other users’ behalves then the motivation is difficult to understand given that it increases the burden on the user and also means Fantasia gets fewer votes. Worse still, this incentivises a user to share her password(!!) should she want someone else to vote for her (although this is unnecessary if the only wanted aspect has to do specifically with GTop100).
My best theory is not very good: that Fantasia are somehow trying to game the system to make their votes count for more, by making it look like many unique accounts are voting. But this is a weird crackpot theory that implies GTop100 “counts” votes in a truly bizarre way.
The real kicker is, however, the vote streak system.
On the vote streak system
Each consecutive new vote — that is, on the day immediately after last vote — grants 250 NX more than the last. This continues until a streak of eight[4] for a bonus of +2k NX per vote and therefore a total of 2k + 2k = 4k NX per vote-with-maxt-streak. Even missing a single vote causes your vote streak to be obliterated, halving your NX reward.
Now, Fantasia know exactly what they’re doing here, and to their credit, it worx like a charm. Nonetheless:
This exacerbates the already extreme levels of V2W & V2P discussed above.
This tactic essentially relies on psychological manipulation — I’m told the technical term is FOMO — that, worse still, has nothing to do with the game (voting ∩ playing MapleStory = ∅).
GTop100 needs to perish already. Instead, Fantasia are doing everything they can to make competition for GTop100 ranking the sole worthy goal of running an MSPS.
Your streak is still fully broken even when you cannot vote because Fantasia’s website is down (as it often is). Note that this is a consequence not just of the streak system, but also of the (apparently entirely unnecessary) strict tying of voting to Fantasia’s website.
Some screenshots of the Cash Shop now that we fully understand how scarce NX is
All Cash Shop items, cosmetic or otherwise, last for up to 90 days. Hired Merchants etc. last for up to 14 (depending on how many tens of thousands of NX you spend).
Transcription of the item in the above image
Incubator
Available for 90 days.
An [sic] special tool needed to open Monster Eggs. Monster Eggs can be incubated by double clicking the incubator or the eggs themselves.
A single Incubator costs 500, 455, or 429 NX depending on whether you buy a pack of 1, 11, or 35, respectively.
Beauty Parlour coupons are 17.7k NX a pop.
A single NX weapon (expiring after 90 days) is 17.5k〜18.9k a pop.
General jank
Seeing as Fantasia are clearly focused on only two things, one of which is polish (the other being GTop100 ranking), the reader may be surprised to learn that there’s still a general lack of polish not in the aesthetic department, but rather in the “game actually working” department.
This list collects the jank that doesn’t fit in the more specific types of jank discussed below:
Networking & serveruptime: not good. Sure, some DDoSing is the fate of any MSPS (especially a new one), but they did brag about their networking skillz so I’m afraid they have to take all the blame for their server being nonfunctional half the time.
With unrivalled stability and careful design, Fantasia can become your new home for years[!] to come.
Even when the server isn’t down, the website &/or forum is, and in-game you get to continuously play the “random disconnexions” edition of Russian roulette.
I can’t read the chatlog. No, really, the contrast is bad and the text is cut off anyway.
Although it’s fixed now (probably?), it took no fewer than four (4) patches to fix a bug that essentially broke the buff system, causing all buffs to have unlimited duration. This bug was present from release day onward.
Distance-based jank
When you’re on the same map & channel as another PC, you’re not really. Roughly as soon as they get far enough away from you to no longer be drawn on your main display, all of the following things occur:
The PC gets no minimap indicator whatever. Note that this confusingly doesn’t apply, or at least not in the same way, to anything that isn’t a PC.
The PC appears on the party HP bar indicator GUI as if they were on a different map (i.e. greyed-out & with no info).
You can no longer use allchat to communicate.
Sounds normal. What’s so bad about that?
Fantasia didn’t invent this basic mechanism. Nonetheless I have no choice but to consider it jank, for the following reasons:
Allchat is effectively worthless outside of hoeing. This is either because your messages aren’t sent at all; or because you don’t have a good idea of whether they’ll be sent, so using allchat becomes purely a way to make communication as confusingly frustrating as possible. The irony, of course, is that it is called all chat and yet cannot even chat to “all” PCs on a given map & channel.
The distance necessary to achieve this effect is really quite short, and therefore it’s still a serious problem even on modestly small maps.
When PCs go towards or away from you at high speeds (usually by falling), they randomly “pop” out of nowhere because your client has to draw (or stop drawing) a PC that ostensibly didn’t exist (or did) only just one or two frames ago.
This makes the minimap self-inconsistent (& less useful, for that matter) because it treats PCs specially.
The HP bar GUI, which had already been implemented for many versions by this point (GMS v83), loses more-or-less all its functionality, especially considering that PCs have HP bars above their heads anyway.
Counterargument etc.
It’s possible to argue (as Fantasia presumably do) that this “feature” was part of ordinary retail implementations of MapleStory and therefore cannot be considered a “bug”, “jank”, etc.. However:
Just because it existed in at least one retail implementation doesn’t make it good (see above), and Fantasia know this better than anyone else given how many ordinary items/features of the retail game they removed entirely. Note that I’m careful to avoid the word bug here because I’m aware that it’s not a bug. Intentional jank is still jank.
The map is the basic, atomic, discrete entity of Maple space.[5] Violating this fundamental logic without a solid reason for why it improves gameplay considerably is merely a way of making the game worse.
Fantasia is the only MSPS to my knowledge (even including RevivalStory, the v12 server!) that enforces this behaviour, or at least that does so so strictly. There are probably good reasons why noöne else does it, and this, in turn, sets players’ expectations.
Nobody wants this sh∗rt.
Quest/reactor jank
We already saw above in The Saga Of dear how questing suffers from a good deal of jank: reactors that don’t respawn (meaning the quest can only be done once per channel at best), reactors that don’t do the one thing they’re supposed to do, nonsensical droprates, etc..
No library, API, droptables, etc.; barebones rankings
One essential part of the Maple experience does actually occur out-of-game: game-informational resources. Fantasia provides next to none. There are a few reasons why this general lack is totally okay, or even expected:
Reasons
Informational resources are a lot of work, on top of the work already required to run an MSPS competently.
Some resources already exist in a roughly-usable state that isn’t quite accurate to Fantasia, but that might be close enough, especially for someone who already understands most of the nuances of the server: Hidden Street, maplestory.wiki, OSMLib, ML Lib, etc..
Some resources can be provided by the playerbase in their spare time.
However, there are four reasons why I think Fantasia’s current system (i.e. almost nothing) isn’t quite sufficient:
Counterreasons
Fantasia is just some random MSPS. It’s not special, and its active playerbase isn’t large by any metric. That’s okay, but it also implies that expecting “the community” (read: the playerbase) to pick up the entire slack isn’t gonna work anywhere even close to the degree it worked for large retail implementations like MapleSEA/GMS (see: Hidden Street).
Some things cannot be supplied (or cannot practically be supplied) by the playerbase anyway. This includes droptables, Monster Egg tables, rankings, etc.. And we should note here that the rankings is important, not just for the competitive types, but also purely for reference purposes (PC reference).
All of Fantasia’s competitors provide far better resources.
Because Fantasia’s staff operates in the usual underground nuclear bunker, there are few if any angles from which a motivated helper might actually do the apparently mutually desired helping. (But more on this below.)
However, this does not mean that the playerbase can’t do most of the work. Even simply slapping together a web API or a one-time data dump (i.e. one time per patch or per major patch) would speed up the process immensely, and allow actually (as against rhetorically…) outsourcing the real work to the playerbase.
PC reference!
The rankings (or should we say PC reference) is a somewhat different matter, but Fantasia already has a basically functional PC reference, so hopefully not too much work is necessary to take inspiration from other servers’ PC reference systems (the most outstanding case being MapleOdyssey’s[6]).
Travel
Travel in Fantasia could be worse: at least there’s no Dimensional Mirror or whatever. Nonetheless, Fantasia’s travel system is essentially just another excuse to push V2P even harder, effectively inheriting the P2W model of Necs0n® nearly unchanged, but with votes instead of smackeroos.
The existence of VIP Teleport Rocks (& their non-VIP counterparts) alone should be enough for Fantasia to lose quite a few points, but unfortunately they have to lose even more points because this is just more vote bait.
Some personal opinions that probably reflect most players’ frustration
The world feels large. That’s fantastic and totally necessary. However, although the scale is there, the interconnectedness isn’t really. I hate to say it, but MapleLegends (sans (VIP) Teleport Rocks) has the right idea here: the quests that serve to make the world connected should actually make the world connected, and as the cherry on top, serve as mini meso sinks & motivations to quest.
Also, some of the travel times are excessive. I love airships as much as anyone else, but this is not an active server so unfortunately most passengers are simply unable to spend that half-hour fruitfully socialising. I understand the hopes & dreams, I really do.
I don’t mean to argue that buff pots of magnitudes sufficiently close to or in excess of the same buffs granted by skills shouldn’t exist at all — this is a matter of taste. However, if they do exist, then they must be very special indeed. Making such items available from NPC shops and/or as drops from ordinary monsters that exist year-round is just not it. This applies not only to Ciders but also Heartstoppers, Pain Relievers, and probably more.
However, in this case, the explanation is simple. In addition to not particularly caring about PC builds/skills, Fantasia are looking for those sweet, sweet V2W opportunities. Ciders don’t stack with themselves, so it’s time to pony up for the inventory expansions, and also for some VIP Teleport Rocks to restock with whilst we’re at it.
Diplomatic relations
The term diplomatic relations is already derogatory since it implies two or more independent bodies who are mutually alien to one another. Fantasia take the seemingly standard(!!) approach of complete opacity: no open-source, all discussions behind closed doors, no attempt to make anyone feel involved in the game’s future, and not a peep other than patch notes and server maintenance notices. “Community feedback” is possible, but only as a black hole to which one’s observations & opinions can be effortlessly consigned.
I put “community feedback” in scare-quotes because this is an abuse of the word community that actually just means “playerbase”: the term community implies a lack of hierarchy and a presence of mutually meaningful communication, neither of which this arrangement has.
One consequence is that the server’s development is directly harmed & set back: the playerbase only has so much free time, and obviously some of that is spent playing the game. Expecting people to be hired(!) as part of your staff in order to contribute (behind closed doors, of course) to development — including not just game dev, but also web dev, external resources, etc. — is simply counterproductive, ensuring that the entire burden falls to one or two people.
Indeed this is probably not the fully-intentional doing of Fantasia & other MSPS operators. Rather, we were all collectively raised on exactly this kind of “community”, and to reproduce the only thing one knows is only human.
Is OPQ the greatest piece of MapleStory content ever made? Depends on whom you ask. Is it the best PQ ever made? Quite possibly. Does OPQ rush involve actually experiencing the greatness of this PQ? No.
It’s great that OPQ is capable of reaching EPH levels high enough to entice players within an entire ≥10-level range. Let’s keep it that way and make actual completions even more rewarding. Maybe add a repeated completion reward whilst we’re at it. 😇
Sleepywood Monster Eggs
Sleepywood doesn’t drop any Monster Eggs, even though all six other Vic Island locales do — even Lith Harbour, which drops Eggs themed after nearby “jobbed” locales. This is in spite of being the central locale of the Vic Archipelago, i.e. The Dungeon as it was originally called in earlier versions of MapleStory. One can only assume that Deep Lūdibrium, by analogy, doesn’t drop any Lūdi Eggs either, although I haven’t achieved a high enough level to confirm this.
Sleepywood ≠ Ant Tunnel; Monster Egg types
We should note that Sleepywood isn’t reducible to the Ant Tunnel, nor is it even reducible to the Ant Tunnel plus all Deep Sleepywood maps to which it leads (e.g. Wild Cargo’s Area). Sleepywood also includes the Sleepy Dungeon maps & their various subdungeons, plus the entire western side starting with Swampy Land in a Deep Forest (e.g. Damp Forest).
This, by the way, doesn’t imply that Sleepywood Monster Eggs need to exist. Alternatively, Sleepywood maps could have an equal chance of dropping each of the various Vic Island Egg types.
Cosmetics, FashionStory
Fantasia’s cosmetics selection isn’t particularly bad: it’s just GMS v62 stuff (or at least, most of it). But this is a fairly low bar to meet. Moreover:
The cosmetics selection leaves quite a lot to be desired, especially when compared to more mature MSPSes like Legends, Royals, DreamMS, etc. — and I don’t expect this to change any time soon.
Cosmetics are unaffordable. Not only are they a hefty V2P element, but this also means picking between cosmetics & being good at the game; moreover, cosmetic equipment only lasts for 90 days.
Further argumentation
Here I should admit my bias: I’m a huge FashionStory nerd.
I suppose the main argument for (a.) is that RevivalStory aims at a roughly ≈v62 implementation, and that includes the aesthetic vibez. But adding more cosmetics doesn’t necessarily mean reaching out of scope of Fantasia’s target retail versions: not only are there the GMS versions 63〜92 (all pre-BB), but there are pre-BB versions of non-GMS retail implementations as well. Fantasia already pilfers from both of these categories for noncosmetic elements of the game.
Furthermore, going the Legends/Royals/DreamMS/etc. route of adding post-BB cosmetics isn’t nearly as much of an aesthetic infringement as it might seem on paper. The simple fact is that, even in Fantasia at the time of writing (putting aside the V2P aspect for the moment), PCs are already a source of aesthetic aberration. All visible equipment slots can be cosmetically altered, and so can hair, face, & hair/eye/skin colours — to say nothing of cosmetic effects etc.. PCs are therefore their own aesthetic islands, and so long as we don’t add anything big & flashy that takes up an inordinate amount of display space, adding post-BB cosmetics simply doesn’t change this.
Also, better FashionStory simply means more players & more voters. This point is difficult to disagree with, even for the Fantasia devs.
As for (b.), it bears repeating that Fantasia is just reproducing a surrogate P2W model. Their stated argument is that much of the playerbase wearing few or no cosmetics is a feature, not a bug. Although this is more-or-less a transparent excuse for V2P, some counterarguments are still worth mentioning:
A player purchases & uses cosmetics because they want their PC to appear a certain way. It is therefore the player’s choice as to whether they wear cosmetics, how, when, & why.
If the Fantasia devs actually disliked cosmetics (they don’t), then cosmetics wouldn’t exist in the game for every possible slot.
MapleStory is beautiful & goofy in equal measure, and is designed for (amongst other things) players to wear cosmetics. In Wizet/Nexs0nn’s case, this is because it’s an important component of their business model. Simulating retail versions in this particular respect is therefore merely simulating a hostile (or at best, alien) relationship — one that we play private servers to avoid in the first place.
Needless to say, all cosmetics should be gratis. Nonetheless, a compromised version that might manage to satisfy the Fantasia devs’ personal requirements is simply making cosmetics permanent. Buying even a single cosmetic item is already a large investment (see: “Actually doing the voting”), so the least that such an investment could do is not have to be repurchased 90 days (& 180 days, …) later.
This goes in “The bad” because it’s content that would be in the game (recall that Fantasia does have Magatia), but was removed.
We should, however, be clear that there’s a good reason to do something about HTPQ & LMPQ: they levelwise overlap too much with OPQ. But this doesn’t apply to MPQ, and even HTPQ & LMPQ don’t have to be removed, since they can be rebalanced for different level-ranges. This is especially obvious with LMPQ, as it’s really a very simple PQ.
Area bosses
Area bosses in Fantasia seem to work pretty much how you’d expect. Moreover, I know that at least some people enjoy the area boss dynamic. Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s feasible to keep the area boss system exactly vanilla:
Technically/practically speaking, the vanilla system does not scale, and in fact does something like the opposite. Apart from shortening respawn timers, the only way to increase availability is to increase the number of channels. But this paradigm has two serious problems:
Problems
It makes area bosses channel-dependent in a game where channels are undesirable. This is not necessarily to say that there should be exactly one (1) channel — although this is possible & perhaps desirable in some cases — but it is to say that more channels means a game-world even sparser than it already is, which is really saying something. Moreover, it’s a burden on the server’s resources (CPU, memory, bandwidth, etc.).
Although shorter timers &/or more channels technically increases availability, what actually happens is more well-described by what traffic engineers call induced demand. In short, higher availability in total doesn’t lead to increased availability to individuals, and in fact usually paradoxically decreases effective availability.
As something of a quester myself, I feel my pain & that of other questers when a quest requires killing an area boss. Hunting area bosses is its whole own activity that is extremely time-consuming and simply not viable for those with limited time or who just want to keep playing the game.
Nonetheless this is a minor issue so long as area bosses don’t drop anything interesting (cards, chairs, scrolls, equips, throwing-stars, Saps, etc.). Or, alternatively, it’s a nonissue whenever area bosses are unnecessary for quests or other content that isn’t simply “area bossing”.
A universal alternative
If we wanna keep area bossing totally intact — both for EXP/loot & questing etc. — then it can be made scalable. For instance, all that’s needed is an untradable & one-of-a-kind Etc item for each area boss involved in a quest, which the quester can consume (however one might want to implement this) to spawn the relevant boss. The item is given at most once to each PC, and only at the relevant stage of the questline. The area boss in question otherwise spawns normally, in addition to these manually forced spawns. If desired, completion of the quest may confiscate the item, should the PC still possesses it.
There are, of course, other more-or-less equivalent ways to do this.
My personal bias is that I don’t enjoy doing multiclienting. If you’re quite allergic to multiclienting even when other people are the ones doing it, then this item should be counted amongst “The good” for you. Nonetheless there are some clear issues with it:
The bad side of the coin
If multiclienting is included as part of your playstyle, then this is obviously gonna be a turnoff.
In this case, “no multiclienting” is meant in the strongest possible sense. Therefore, even instances of multiclienting that are purely for practical chore purposes (i.e. not doing any combat, nor any gameplay content) are foreclosed.
Your ability to play the game at all may depend somewhat on what resources you have access to IRL. Naturally, playing MapleStory requires a computer capable of running it and a stable connexion to the internet. But enforcement of the “no multiclienting” rule may mean additional requirements for you, e.g. that you’re not behind a shared internet connexion (as many are), don’t have to use a VPN to access Fantasia’s server, etc., etc.. This somewhat strangely makes Fantasia more of a “P2P” game than your average MSPS.
As discussed in more detail in the “Ode to ATI” above, Fantasia attempts to “balance” maps to some extent so that they’re more equally grindable (if you will). Perhaps more importantly, a major complaint from (ex-)Fantasians seems to be that “grindability” is so jealously policed that grinding becomes effectively impossible even for many nonodd jobs.
Minidungeons are eliminated from the game. On the one hand, this is in the spirit of the Maple World’s openness and the “show up & grind” principle. On the other, removing minidungeons does rob those who sometimes do consciously want to be undisturbed (alone or in their party) as they grind. And in this case, it also robs the game of the minidungeon maps entirely (rather than simply turning them into ordinary non-minidungeon maps).
Fantasia removed Chaos Scrolls from the game, and for good reason (see: “Scrolls”). However, this has the drawback that making wacky equipment (at least, of certain kinds) is no longer possible.
Repairing Chaos Scrolls without removing them
A possible compromise is to make Chaos Scrolls slightly more complex. Instead of increasing each nonzero stat by −5〜+5 upon success, this range could be −n〜+n, where n is a known natural number that depends only on the type of stat in question. Then n would naturally be smaller for certain stats (e.g. WAtk), larger for others (e.g. MDef, maxHP), and so on. In combination with the fact that Fantasia has no capes with WAtk on them, this should easily keep the perverse effects of Chaos Scrolls out of the game.
Fantasia’s scrolling system is fairly barebones in general. If you’re used to goodies like dark scrolls, Clean Slates, White Scrolls, scrolls for a wide variety of stats, etc., then Fantasia ain’t your scrolling simulator.
Gachapon
Fantasia has gachapon, albeit reskinned as Monster Eggs & Incubators. The V2W aspect aside, this can be a fun & convenient way to inject a variety of items into the game. On the other hand, Maplers who aren’t fans of gambling will be averse to this lottery-type gameplay. Relatedly, there’s arguably some unfairness in making the economic fate of a given player even more wildly dependent on dumb luck than it already is.
Most pet tooling removed
Auto-HP & auto-MP have been removed. To a great degree, whether this is good or bad (or neither) is a matter of taste, and also depends on the implementation details. Fantasia simplifies things by not implementing them at all.
Wing Boots & Binocular have also been removed. I can only assume these items were irreparably buggy or something. Beats me.
Downjump
True to the GMS v62 experience, nearly all maps in Fantasia freely allow downjumping. Some will certainly prefer this, whereas others prefer downjumping to be removed entirely. There is a possible compromise using fieldLimit to disable downjump on maps selectively, when it interferes with the map design. Still, this compromise results in some inconsistency & unpredictability due to the choice of which maps to exclude inevitably being somewhat arbitrary.
Toxicity & moderation
I can’t comment on this one extensively, which is why it’s way down here. Based purely on my own experiences, moderation of the game is very light. In particular:
Some of my experiences
Racist IGNs are tolerated to the extent that they require at least a slight amount of interpretation. I haven’t seen anyone (yet…?) who was simply named a completely unobfuscated & obvious slur, but the racist IGNs are still there even after appearing in serverwide announcements.
All things considered, I didn’t get much gameplay time with Ummagumma & Lv1Crook. In spite of this, we still managed to get harassed by one guy who insulted us with — you guessed it — some racist bologna. Not necessarily a moderation failure (maybe he was banned soon after, I dunno), but still.
I’ve been in Fantasia’s Discord® ever since a month or two before its release. What I’ve seen of it in that time has not been heartening. Generally not unhinged as far as I’ve seen, but still not a situation I would describe as “nontoxic & friendly”. MapleLegends seems to have a similar vibe in their Discord (or maybe even worse, actually), whereas by contrast, I would describe RevivalStory’s as nontoxic & friendly.
Scrolling through the Discord I saw some screenshots of truly virulently racist smegas, but I didn’t see it in game so maybe it didn’t happen or was swiftly punished. Still not a kind reflexion on the Discord, however…
But note that some bias is possible because I was playing a fresh server, which tends to attract these kinds of dweebs,[7] and also means the moderation régime isn’t yet mature.
Two problems with the approach taken so far: it’s overly neutral (I’ve only injected my opinions like so very infrequently), and it assumes a backdrop from which no more than particular pro-MapleStory & anti-MapleStory aspects can be cast into relief. This section exists to give a more holistic view by injecting “second opinions”.
The favourable views of Fantasia I’ve heard seem to line up with each other pretty closely: Fantasia is the only server around (at the time of this writing) that delivers The Old-school Maple Experience™, considered as a more-or-less all-encompassing & monolithic entity.
There’s certainly some truth to this. Assuming there’s nothing technologically barring you from playing Fantasia (i.e. you’re on Windows®, Fantasia deems your internet connexion to be ḥalāl, you don’t need to remap your keys, etc., etc.), it’s a well-rounded & relatively good choice. Whether you’ve a bias towards primitive Maple versions, or towards mid–late (ca. v49〜69 in GMS terms) pre-BB versions, or perhaps even towards late pre-BB (think Phoenix, relatively restrained v83 servers, etc.), Fantasia is unlikely to offend your sensibilities along this axis. Moreover, it has enough gameplay-content to keep you entertained regardless of your predilections — in a way that servers like RevivalStory do not.
On this basis, my honest recommendation (again, at this time) is: try Fantasia if you can and you think it could possibly be right for you. You’ll probably need to shop around at least a few servers to really know what sits best. Important comparanda include RevivalStory (the only one I can honestly recommend, albeit with reservations), MapleLegends, & Phoenix.
Could this view have flaws?
If there’s a fundamental flaw with this view, it’s that the aforementioned “axis” exists only in the popular imagination (if even that). There is no spectrum where v8-based servers with all 1× rates are at one pole and v83-based 6× dynamic-rate Neo Tôkyô level 255 cap servers are at the other, because if there were, the entire spectrum would be more-or-less uniformly lacking MapleStory. Delivering a true “old-school Maple” experience requires actually synthesising pre-BB versions of the game by un-short-circuiting their underlying immanent logic, and even if you’ve gotten this far and still don’t understand what that means, the point is that it requires actually doing something. And Fantasia have not done. Their idea of “synthesis” is putting the v19 Ēṓs Tower into a v62 Lūdus Lake.
It’s also implied by this view that part of The Old-school Maple Experience™ is the everpresence of Necs0n®. Although this is no doubt literally true in the dullest sense, it’s more than a little sad to see MSPS players having internalised the way they were treated by said large & ruthlessly successful corporation. Fantasia succeed more than most MSPSes (which is honestly saying something) in the department of Nakes-On emulation, so take that for whatever it’s worth.
As something like the other side of the same coin, I present an ex-Fantasian’s view based on screenshots taken in-game in RevivalStory. Cleaned-up transcriptions are given above the original unedited screenshots.
Naturally, one complaint is the networking issues.
pudella: Fantasia?
Vajra: yes
the one that got DDoS’d for 3 weeks and still disconnects 30% of its online users aggressively
Unedited screenshot
Unfortunately, it goes further. Rather than attempting to restore the game’s design, Fantasia leave all classes — up to & including 4th-grade ones — essentially as-is, so that they can instead focus on pathological game “balancing”, attempting to preëmptively curtail inflation,[8] and crippling useful features.
Vajra: we don’t really see [Meso Explosion] in Fantasia much, yeah
probably because people have been getting to 80〜90 and just quitting CB
Dizz: lmao
pudella: I can’t imagine getting that far and quitting CB
those are the good levels
Vajra: it’s just so bad there
pudella: that’s impressive on Fantasia’s part
Vajra: they nerfed a lot of shit
they’re like anti-QoL
and [anti-]fun
Dizz: don’t they keep nerfing the only maps where people are pulling pot profit lol
Vajra: I don’t get their strategy
Unedited screenshot
Yet another janky, near-vanilla server, ✨slick✨ look, big promises, enticing donors… A cash grab, mayhap?
I hope this doesn’t come off as an angery screed, but instead comes off as intended: a useful case study. Fantasia is, all things (excepting technology) considered, neither especially good nor bad in the grand scheme of MSPSes. My recommendation is already given above: try Fantasia if you can (which isn’t terrifically likely) and you’re looking for a new server. It could be for you, or maybe you like RevivalStory, MapleLegends, Phoenix, etc. better for now. Or maybe touching grass is simply a better idea at this rate.
With no understanding of the underlying logic of the game — instead having an eye only towards the “““metagame””” — Fantasia are incapable of true synthesis & conservation (cf. ML). Instead they settle for preservation (≠ conservation) over here, and aggressive amputation of the apparently problematic limbs of the game over there (largely unlike ML). Likewise, game “balance” tends to erode the game’s structure (similar to ML) & even playability (largely unlike ML).
Preservation also means intentionally (& sometimes unintentionally) preserving jank that noöne actually wants, and that, at best, lowers QoL for players. Unintentional jank extends to massive networking problems that plague the game, often with unplayability.
Still worse, even Necs0n®’s market logic is preserved. V2W, V2P, and even unvocalised hints at P2P/P2W run strong & deep.
Fantasia’s basic starting-point is by now a venerable one. When OdinMS’s serversource was releast under the AGPL v3 back in ≈, it became possible for anyone[9] to set up their own MSPS. To noöne’s surprise, this invited a sea of half-baked barely-playable implementations and not a few implementations a cut above yet still clearly unrefined. It was within this doggy-dog world of spoonfed n00bs and 1337sauce-wizards (my sauce, donut steel™) that this ethos was born.
Between the quarter-baked servers with expected lifespans measured in weeks or even days, and the rebirth one-shop godmode servers, where were the servers that could provide a real Maple experience, with stability, competently-written & -maintained software, and that je ne sais quoi… polish, perhaps?
A 1×, 1×, 1×, 3rd job server with no HP washing, no pay to win, many features functioning just like original Maple, and with constant updates, Phoenix is the only server providing authentic MapleStory.[10]
Some “low” rates, no P2W, no washing. Anyone[9] can do that. What sets Phoenix apart? “[M]any features functioning just like original Maple” and “constant updates”, it seems.
There’s a problem: Phoenix was releast in , seven years before Fantasia. In other words, Fantasia is fully 12 years younger than MapleRoyals. In other other words, it isn’t (17 years before Fantasia) anymore and we know how to make Maple run.
Did Fantasia start as a cash grab? I doubt it. I suspect enough aesthetic tastes were pointed in the right direction by the right one or two people, and thus a new server seemed like a good idea at the time. Given Fantasia’s entire voting régime & the way donations are presented, however, it certainly evolved a “cash grab”-y flavour at some point. It’s not P2W if donor points only buy cosmetics, except maybe it is if players are strongly forced to choose between cosmetics & V2W stuffs, and donor points take care of the cosmetics part.
And so it goes. Certainly not the first, and — with any luck — not the last of its kind. We have the power to end the cycle and get “the good ending”, and we won’t. I’mma still be playing these stinccy things till I shuffle off this mortal coil, tho’.
[↑] Whilst simultaneously making it as much of a PITA as possible. No multiclienting, and you gotta type in both your password & your PIC every single time.
[↑] This is by no means to conflate Oak Barrel with Dark Sight. The two are, to be sure, the same “kind of skill”, but this is also true of other matchups like Iron Will & Bless, Iron Arrow & Chain Lightning, and even Rage & Threaten in this context (when properly implemented). The two skills play quite differently and have their respective advantages & disadvantages.
One-paragraph incoherent ramble about brawlers that’s not fleshed out into an actual essay
Although statistically warriors, brawlers are spiritually bandits: they can do everything & nothing, and they’re pretty decent at it, too. The analogy mostly (mostly!) stops here, however, as the “everything” that bandits can do and the “everything” that brawlers can do only overlap slightly at the concrete level. Both unique assets to the party as they should be, and when it comes to being a unique asset, special-sauce skills like Oak Barrel really don’t hurt.
[↑] By the way, the client actually already does this(!!) but only for certain pirate skills, ’cause pirates are high-tech like that I guess.
[↑] Perhaps more like nine consecutive votes, since the way streaks are counted is a little “funny”. The NX reward for a max streak is the same either way.
[↑] Although entirely irrelevant to my argument, the pedant might want to argue that actually, the most basic, discrete, atomic unit is the pixel. Unfortunately even this is incorrect, as positions (e.g. PC positions) within a map use floating-point numbers which can — and often do, even in practice — make significant distinctions at the subpixel level. It’s therefore not true (as the experienced JQ speedrunner knows well) that the highest level of precision is “pixel-perfect”; it’s actually an ill-defined[11] “subpixel-perfect”.
[↑] Unfortunately MapleOdyssey appears to be defunct or on indefinite hiatus or something. But we’re talking ridiculous statistical logging of things like exactly how many mesos & which items a PC has gained from each monster species, how many of each Use item have been used, etc., etc.. Obviously noöne expects anything near this level of anal-retention but perhaps you understand why I use the phrase “most outstanding”.
[↑] I am not infrequently enough brought to reflect upon whether MapleStory players might actually be racist dweebs more often than not. If it is indeed more often then I’m not sure what that’s a reflexion of. Either way, I’m not a fan of moderation in this “content moderation” sense, not least because I have personal experience doing it; yet we see how powerful it can be when exercised wisely in spaces like this. The initial dense wave of dweebery can be deterred, and a consistent enough application of this deterrent makes it easier for them to just go somewhere else, or perhaps in rare cases to reflect upon what in their life compelled them to come to a random mushroomb game in the service of being a toxic arseclown.
Still we should observe that not all arseclowns are created equal and some of them have the self-awareness to drape a veil of social acceptability over the well-guarded sense of racial superiority. In this case good advice is considerably more difficult to come by. The punishment doesn’t always have to be a ban (and bans don’t have to be permanent, for that matter). Indeed if you’re possessed of more than an ounce of charisma then the “punishment” can be little more than a talking-to — not just to the dweeb, but often enough to others involved as well — i.e. the method worthy of the term “community”. Furthermore it should be noted that sensitivity to the problem is a prerequisite: racism takes many forms, so if you lack — for example — a basic comprehension of the history of the U.S. through the present day (a racial history if nothing else) then American racists of sufficient self-awareness can & will elude you.
In any case, heavy-handed or not, the arseclowns don’t filter themselves out, and we see in MapleLegends the outcome of an aloof, legal-minded approach in which punishable arseclownery is not an interpersonal problem, but a problem of technically violating the ToS. This result has respectability but the consequence is not only that the dweebs sufficiently skilled in dancing around the ToS & its enforcers are still there, but also that said “enforcers” are tragically reduced to exactly that: cops. And eventually some of them are dweebs too.
[↑] Superficially similar to, but very much not to be confused with, inflation IRL.
[↑] Not literally anyone, of course. But those with the goods necessary to play Maple, and a little technical knowhow & patience.
[↑] Not to cast any judgement upon Phoenix, but rather, to use it as one convenient example of this ethos.
[↑] Let’s get even more pedantic: positions in this sense aren’t “ill-defined” inasmuch as a floating-point number that’s neither NaN nor ±∞ corresponds to a particular rational number. Although this is literally true as stated, it’s irrelevant to the topic at hand because it doesn’t give any kind of atomic unit. At best, such a unit would be a difference of one in the least significant bit of the significand; but the resultant difference in the rational value of the floating-point number depends almost entirely on the exponent, which is arbitrary (“floating”) in this context.
Of course this pedantry is for the sake of pedantry, since none of this is observable in gameplay. For all intents & purposes, intramap distances are continuous real numbers.
Well that was a lot. I haven’t binge’d MapleStory that hard in a long time, or maybe ever. Apparently when I get the chance to play actively with my friends on a server I don’t hate yet, I will actually play for like 13 hours in a day. Incredible.
Altho’ “The bad” above may look lengthy (and not for no reason), the real thing keeping me from Fantasia is the first item: Fantasia is a strictly Whinned O’s®-only game. To a much lesser extent there’s also the whole V2W+V2P thing which is perversely a way to make not-playing the game almost as “rewarding” as playing it, whilst at the same time demotivating playing whenever the ol’ NX hoard ain’t terribly large. This doesn’t mean Fantasia is banisht 5ever, but it just might be. I resist, amongst other things, the influence of B∗ll G∗tes when I can.
We’ll be seeing more RevivalStory in future entries. That includes unicolor for example, although I can’t guarantee she’ll show up in the very next entry. And who knows? Maybe we’ll see some more LEGOlock! Or perhaps even something a little strange…? But actually just MapleStory. It’s gonna be more MapleStory.
![dear [to Obblobs]: oh and you can chat to the group individually](https://deer.codeberg.page/diary/140/to-obblobs.webp "dear [to Obblobs]: oh and you can chat to the group individually"){kind=small}
![[Snail Card] has been successfully recorded in the Monster Book.](https://deer.codeberg.page/diary/140/first-card-drop-evar.webp "[Snail Card] has been successfully recorded in the Monster Book.")
![[The Second Flight] dear has chosen the path of the Brawler!](https://deer.codeberg.page/diary/140/dear-brawler.webp "[The Second Flight] dear has chosen the path of the Brawler!")
