i miss who i was when i played maplestory

have you ever heard of maplestory?

the ride from ellinia to orbis via airship in maplestory.

maplestory is a korean mmo by Nexon featuring 2d-sidescrolling anime
characters in a rpg fantasy setting fighting to rid the world of evil.

in nearly every sense of the word, it is quintessentially mmorpg.
although i never got into raiding when i played maplestory,
i was 10 at the time so cut me some slack,
i look back on my time of being a literal child playing that game
for hours on end into the late hours of the night.

time felt like forever when you were a kid. this phenomenon isn’t unique
to playing maplestory, but that’s what my time was. playing maplestory
and wondering why it took literally forever to get even a single level,
fighting for every ounce of exp from CPQ and LudiPQ possible.
how to get the bathrobe. how to get a maple polearm. how to get a WG+10.

now, maplestory has evolved into something beyond my understanding.
from what i can tell it’s about the endgame, not about the journey.
but the magic of maplestory’s slowness in GMS2009 was that
it was so slow, that it truly felt like the beginning was everything.

that wonder and joy in feeling like it was the start of something new
is something that few things in this world manage to capture again so
organically as being a kid does. maybe it’s me who’s changed!

thanks for reading today’s post.
dreams of lith harbor in my mind