If you liked the first game and are worried about the mixed reviews, I was too.

Just buy it lol.

I put a lot of time (and a small bit of money) into this game because it seemed like the passion project of someone who grew up playing Maple, and wanted to transform it into something of his own while removing the more predatory aspects. In fact, one of the game's main selling points it boasted was not and never being p2w. And for a long time that's exactly what it was, but I guess now that the player base is large enough he's seen money signs and is cashing out.

A couple of years ago you could get an absurd amount of gems (premium currency) just by tuning into the dev's streams and finding him in-game, whereas now he's just added an OP gacha update with a *second* premium currency that can only be bought with real money. The dev's response to the extreme backlash has more or less been to throw temper-tantrums while banning as many people from discord/deleting as many reddit posts as he can, which tbh is kinda par for the course with him anytime there's controversy. Real sad how this game ended up.

Honestly, I didn't think I'd get this far. I thought I'd probably look at the tutorial, wander around the main hub a bit, then give up.

But it's so pretty guys. Like, really uniquely pretty. If you're the kind of person to ever stop and admire the view in a video game, you'll find a lot to appreciate here. I can't go a single play session without pausing for a photo shoot 2-3 times. I thought maybe I'd stop once I finished all the achievements but I keep logging back in, I want to see more.

The gameplay though? It's at least as bad as it looks. Combat is decent when it works, there are a good number of fun special moves, but 50% of the time you'll be struggling to make your attacks connect, even if you're targeting the enemy perfectly and standing directly in front of them. Aggro is very inconsistent and weird, and you can't damage enemies who aren't attacking you. There's also just constantly a few enemies per area that seem to be broken and can't be targeted at all. Which is a shame, because the crafting system is kind of fun/accessible and there's some cool looking armor.

The quests are boring at best and slogs at worst, especially once you get a few worlds in and they stop being shy about it. If you're really lucky it's just "kill 15 enemies" or something. More often it's "click on a small item on the ground to watch a progress bar slowly fill up, this will drop an item for you to collect. Do that 30 times". Sometimes the dialogue is funny, but the story's very disjointed and quick to trail off. Maybe reading the books helps with that.

I knew all this going in. I almost didn't download the game, thinking that Youtube videos had already shown me all the pretty parts there were to see. Every time I log in I have to pull up a wiki maintained by (probably) 2 people for when something inevitably breaks. I've already had to ask a GM to rescue my otherwise perma-stuck character. The servers go down at the drop of a dime. And yet I keep coming back, just to wander.