Dear MapleStory,

It has been a fair while since I was involved with you. Over the years, I just lost interest in you and your quirky, chibi Korean MMO ways. Recently you came back into my attention as me and my college gamer boyfriend were looking for ways to game together over the summer break. Even though it was not your latest patch, I heard about your Reboot server; a special server where you would try to recapture the challenge of your earliest years.

I was immediately intrigued. Even when my plan to game-date with my boyfriend fell through, as you refuse to run on Macs, I still decided to make a character and log back in with my old account, just to see if you kept your promise.

But you did not, Maplestory. I logged in, created a brand new character, and then went through a boring, linear Maple Island with every direction and command broadcasted with flashing arrows. I tried to have some sense of agency doing the quest lines, but there was only ever one quest line. Before I knew it, I was warped to Lith Harbor, where my chosen job instructor (the wizard one; I have always had a thing for mages) literally had me warp to the wizard hub town. I had no choice to walk from the town to the hub; it was either that or choose another class entirely. After that there is only the main "plot" quest line and other optional one-off quests.

You know, for the first main quest, I had to fight Green Mushrooms. They were on the first map outside of Henesys, one of the four central hubs on Victoria Island. That just feels ... wrong. Green Mushrooms are supposed to be hidden inside the trees of Ellinia, to be carefully sniped as one hit will do massive damage to your squishy wizard. I miss that.

I miss the labyrinthine maps and actually having to trek between cities, avoiding monsters way above your level. I miss how big Victoria Island used to feel, with so many hidden maps (do they still have Pig Beach?) and how long it took to level up; I barely got to level 25 on my main before the Big Bang update lowered the experience curve. I even miss the stupid jump quests.

Stupid, stupid jump quests.

I don't know. Maybe we've both changed. All I do know is that you are not the MapleStory I grew up with; the MapleStory I spent an hour every weekend playing with my sister before Sunday School; the MapleStory I daydreamed about, planning to make a comic using game sprite tools about a wizard girl named Hazel and all the different classes going to war over stupid plot objects. She would end up falling in love with the one boss Papulatus (which I never fought; again, only got to level 25), and after she got the fourth job advancement there would be a virus and everyone would start turning into Digimon and there would be a crossover with my then-current Digimon adventure quest. During middle school, when I discovered this game, I always had a Digimon adventure quest brewing in the back of my mind. But I digress.

This is the boss in question. Of course I ended up humanizing it. Again, I was a strange child.

I don't think I'll be seeing much of you anymore, MapleStory. Unless you make a hard version server like there was in the European version for a while, I don't think I'll actually enjoy you, at least in the weird, antisocial way I used to. Except to maybe play the new Kinesis class, the description of which shows just how ludicrous and unbelievable you have become:

Seriously.