Hi guys! Earlier today, I managed to finish the Madhouse event, and oh boy, what an event it was...
This is one of those contents in-game that kinda puts me on the fence on where we can draw the line for what feels appropriate to be released in a game as MapleStory. But before I'll get into that because at first it might seem I disliked the Madhouse event, I want to point out I actually enjoyed this event - and I'll also explain "why".
The Madhouse is an unique event which is built around a "dungeon" system where the player progresses through a fixed amount of maps by solving puzzles in order to get to the next. Solving puzzles is optional, but it is rewarding and you'll most likely to go through them all in order to 100% this event. Unlike other events, you're actually encouraged to gather resources in said maps, because you'll need those in order to survive - you'll need certain resources to get through or access certain maps. You can either just farm for resources, ignore most of the puzzles and breeze through maps - or you can do them if you feel like it.
I do like that kind of system in a game such as MapleStory, and I'm sure there are other people who usually play games that are centered around this type of gameplay as well - but the environment and the story behind it is what spices it up.
Let's put the PEGI and ESRB systems aside. It's a suggestion, they have to put it there. There isn't much content in Maple that feels out of place to me "for a PEGI 7 game" - and to be fair, this game started out as "PEGI 12" when it was still rather young. Aside to the Madhouse event, other things that felt slightly out of place for even Maple's standards, were such things as Gelimer's plan and where he ultimately ended up during the Black Heaven storyline, or just some minor character/monster designs such as the often-made-fun-of Cold Eyes and the Crimson Queen boss.
The Madhouse centers around an abandoned hospital where you enter with several other characters, after you've been contacted through an old friend (which goes by the name Chloe) that you haven't seen since like forever. Well, this sounds already fantastically familiar, right? What could possibly go wrong, assuming you have been living under a rock ever since they introduced any media such as books or movies?
Going through the Madhouse itself is pretty straight forward, and because this is a hospital, you'll find a lot of useful (and convenient!) tools to open air vents and doors, recharge your flashlight, etc. There's plenty of anatomical and skeleton models to whack for resources as well. And well, if you're a fan of background stories and you often read NPC dialogues (let's be honest, most of you guys don't), you'll figure out a thing or two about what happened to this hospital by finding pieces of paper of Chloe's diary. And this is where things become disturbing and puts me on the fence. And no, to keep things rather spoiler free, I won't discuss the story details here.
That aside - this event has been a very generous one to get permanent Totems! Since we got the Totem slots in EMS a few weeks ago, Nexon Europe has been thoughtful of releasing events and other content for us to immediately get those as soon as possible. While most permanent content, such as Dong Fang Shen Zhou and Alishan gives phenomenal Totems, either they expire monthly and you have to get a new one by farming, or you need to do months of daily quests to get them.
Madhouse gives three permanent Totems straight off the bat, for about 2200 coins. While that usually that requires you some hefty farming with Maple's standards, you could get a lot of coins a run (usually between 300 and 400 should be very easy to get) if you get the hang of it (which usually ends up over 500 coins each run). There's plenty of guides out there to explain how "coin farming" in this event works.
While you can get a maximum of three entrances a day, unlike most events, the entry tickets are permanent! So you want to stack them up and find a moment where you can run a few hours, and about one week of tickets should be more than enough for all three Totems!
Probably the reason why we got the Madhouse event, has to do with the Sengoku High and Shimo's Hunter Club events - two other infamous events to gain fantastic permanent Totems. We already had both of them more than once, prior to the Totem slots. And instead of those rewards being Totems, they were actually changed to be Badges and Pocket items - which is actually pretty good. Especially when you consider we didn't have the Boat Quay Town's Badge that can have Potential and you could get the Sengoku Secret Manual skill passively without the need of equipping a certain item set you need to do in order to get that skill. And if you run with a lot of Attack in your build, that might be even better than what you could pull off with Potential...
While I'm not sure if we'd ever see the "Totem-variant" of both events, I would love to see those being released for the players who either don't like the Madhouse event or simply weren't playing at the time this event was running. I would certainly be happy to see the "Badge/Pocket" variants of said events again too! I haven't been able to get the Rifle Bullet Pocket item, despite doing two perfect attendances, so yeah... the Ribgol of all Pocket Items I guess.
That aside, while this event was rather "2spooky4me", I did like the "dungeon" system and the need of resources, but especially the fact that you have plenty of options to tackle puzzles - and you don't even need to. I always enjoy fresh ideas like these and Nexon has rarely failed to surprise me to come up with new things for this game. And well, if there's another thing what this event did right, is the environment. Just don't play this event with your background music on. It doesn't help!
While there's an almost guarantee that I'll hit Level 213 (Yay!) later on today, I'll rather save the blogpost for tomorrow or something. Because I'm far from home this month due to working abroad (gotta fund my LEGO® stuff somehow right?) and thus I'm playing on my toaster laptop, I have a hard time creating images for my blog so I'll probably can't even record my Level Up (it'll probably be captured like this instead).
That's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!
No comments:
Post a Comment