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MapleStory is a free-to-play side-scrolling 2D MMORPG from South Korea that is both loved and hated for its unique graphics reminiscent of 16-bit games. Oh, and there's also an anime version, which has a plot with nothing in common. Like most MMORPGs, MapleStory is crawling with all sorts of people, including (but not limited to) kids, tweens, teens, adults, noobs, hackers, people who take it too seriously, and normal people who want to have fun.

The various in-game regions found in MapleStory have differing backgrounds and plots. In order to really notice this information, the player has to finish certain quests and then connect the dots while looking through their completed quests log. These quests can be fairly boring since most of them are fetch quests requiring you to collect 20 Bear Asses. However, some quests are worthwhile and have good rewards, but you won't know this until you look at your 'In Progress' quest log AFTER accepting a quest (which most of the time shows the reward) or reading a quest guide on the internet beforehand. Interestingly, a few quests actually have some unexpected plot twists in them, but these tend to be ignored since the player is just clicking "Next" and not reading the text.

Later MapleStory expansionsnote  start to expand upon the game's plot, and reveal that an entity called the Black Mage, his Commanders, as well as an affiliated organization called the Black Wings, are responsible for the activities of some of the major bosses, as well as the chaos happening within the regions where these bosses reside.

In 2018, Nexon announced the BLACK update which finally added the Black Mage as a boss and a new area that will see the end of the long-running main plot of the game.

There are currently six main character factions: the Explorers, the Cygnus Knights, the Heroes, the Resistance, the Nova Race, and the Flora Race. All of them have been affected by the Black Mage in some way, with some factions having morenote  and some lessnote  to do with him. These character factions are simply organizations, and are unrelated to the different job classes available for players to choose in the game. The 5 main job classes are the warrior, magician, archer, thief, and pirate, each of which has its own further sub-branches (ex. the paladin and the hero are different classes, but both fall under the "warrior" branch). Each class has a weapon type unique to it, even some sub-classes having their own unique weapons, such as the Japanese katana for Hayato. Hayato is classified as one of the "warrior" classes; however, other non-Hayato warriors cannot wield the katana.

A fair word of warning while interacting with others in MapleStory: To a significant amount of players in this game, just about anything can be grounds for some Serious Business.

In short: Picture a 2-D Ragnarok Online and you get the idea. It is now available on Steam.

A sequel/reboot, Maple Story 2, was released in Korea in 2015, then in China in September 2017 and the rest of the world in October 2018. As opposed to the original game, MapleStory 2 is a 3D action MMORPG with a Minecraft-esque blocky voxel aesthetic and a greater degree of emphasis on customization and player creativity.

Now has a character sheet here.

Not to be confused with Cave Story or Maple Town.


MapleStory contains examples of:

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  • Absurdly High Level Cap: The old cap of 200 is much easier to reach now than it was years ago, with one player managing to do it in less than an hour. For many players, this is when the game truly begins. On the other hand, very few players have actually hit level 275 (and none in GMS have hit level 300, the new cap as of 2021), given that it takes several hundred hours even using every available method to speed things up.
  • Action Commands: When trying to activate a rune.
  • Adaptation Dye-Job: Sort of - official Nexon art and in-game sprites often tend to disagree on certain details such as the eye color, clothing and hair color of certain characters. This can be jarring when the official character art is released quite some time after the character was put into the game.
  • Aerith and Bob: The legendary hero classes: Mercedes, Aran, Phantom, Luminous, Shade, and Evan. The canonical true name of Kaiser is Kyle, which is contrasted with his friend Velderoth. Of the Black Mage's commanders, we have Will among Arkarium, Magnus, and Lucid. NPCs' names tend to be on the mundane side unless they're important.
  • Affectionate Parody: Basically almost every single area of the game and several weapons; even the BGM tends to do this.
  • The Ageless: Several characters qualify:
    • Ever since Maya took the Weird Medicine, she hasn't aged a day up to the point in the Future. This was later retconned into being an illusion created by the Black Mage as opposed to the future
    • Orchid hasn't seemed to age a day in almost a thousand years. It's likely to do with the fact the Black Mage was the one who made her and Lotus's bodies and the fact they were initially spirits.
    • Subverted with Athena Pierce. She's about a thousand years old, but has physically aged since leaving her home, going from a little girl, to a teenager, to an adult woman. Even so, in all that time she appears to be in her 20s, at best. (Justified, as she's an elf, and elves in-universe are shown to have extremely long lifespans.)
    • Inverted with the 5 (actually 6) heroes that fought the Black Mage about 800 years ago, as they were all sealed away.
    • Subverted with Wing The Fairy who tends to claim he's several centuries old... Mercedes correctly guesses his age as only 21.
    • Becoming a job leader seems to extend one's lifespan except for the Dark Lord, who seems prone to dying of unnatural causes. Dances With Balrog was an infant when Victoria Island was settled a few centuries ago and Kyrin is old enough to be your grandmother.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The main plot point of the Neo-Tokyo level.
  • All Accordingto Plan
    • The plan of the Black Mage, as revealed during the Tenebris Expedition. It is revealed that, during his time as the White Mage, he found a way to observe the future, seeing how to better the world as he hoped. However, he found the Overseers, who control and bind the Trancendents to their will. The only way free Maple world of them was to rid the world of Transcendents. Because the White Mage himself is a Transcendent, he could not harm or even kill other Transcendents, including himself. To do this, he had to become the Black Mage, and he needed to be sealed away so that the Arcane River will fill up with Erda, (due to Transcendents are the only thing preventing it from filling) to complete his plan. Furthermore, he saw that his commanders (except for Will) would oppose him and cause him to fail. However he needed them to kill the Transcendents. So he needed The Alliance to form and take them out after they kill the Transcendents. He saw the plan go one of two ways. He would destroy everyone, including himself, and recreate a peaceful Maple World, or he would die as the final Transcendent, bringing peace to Maple World. Either way, he would win and the Overseers wil no longer control Maple World.
      • However, this was proven false during the Kao's Memories questline. It is shown that while the Black mage succeded in creating a new Maple World, he failed to kill himself in the process. Thus the Overseers still control the new world. Seeing that the only way to save the world is be killed, the Black Mage sends Kao, the player's character who failed, into the past to change the future. A side effect from the time travel is that Kao lost all of their memories, and becomes the monk seen in the Temple of Time. They succeed in preventing Arma from attacking and wounding the player, but loses their life in the process. This change in the timeline cause the Black Mage to killed and completing his plan of freeing the world of the Overseers grasp.
  • All There in the Manual: Every once in a while Nexon releases a webcomic regarding behind the scenes information of some characters. The Secret Story artbook also reveals certain tidbits about the timeline, the heroes, and the Black Mage Commanders.
  • Aliens Speaking English: Maple World has a unified language(and even the ancient language, often represented by Greek text, was pronounced close enough that the 900+ year old Mercedes was able to communicate with no problem). This gets worse when Jett crashes on Maple World and speaks the same language. The home planets of Kaiser/Angelic Buster and Beast Tamer also speak it(and have for centuries). This also presents no problem whatsoever in Friend Story, when Maple World meets people from South Korea on Earth, let alone the Sengoku plot where several people from feudal Japan are sent to Maple World and have no issues at all communicating with the local population. The crossover events with Vocaloid, Mabinogi, Sword Art Online, Attack On Titan, Psy and many others have also featured no issues whatsoever.
  • Allegedly Free Game:
    • Although you can play for free, getting (good) hairstyles/faces, inventory slots/experience multipliers/clothes, and certain shop-only items require the use of real money. Real world money is also helpful if you want a chance at having higher leveled equipment or over 100 million mesos. It's probably ESSENTIAL to use real money if you want your character to have a shot at attempting to solo some of the harder bosses unless you're prepared to grind for months to work your way up.
    • Though as of 2011, Nexon has partnered with various companies that offer NX rewards for completing "surveys" (advertiser spam) and other such offers. It is now technically possible to earn NX funds without buying it, but it often requires a lot of patience and a willingness to have an email inbox filled with spam to do so.
    • As of 2015 Nexon has tried to remedy this with the special "Reboot" server, where the only items available for purchase with NX are cosmetics and pets, items such as cubes and Mastery Books are purchasable with mesos and trading is completely disabled.
  • All in a Row: Averted with pets, that kinda move all over the place.
  • All Swords Are the Same: Averted. Swords, 2H swords, Desperados, Greatswords, Alpha’s Katana, Hayato’s Katana…
  • Ambiguous Gender:
    • The same base sprite is used for male and female characters. Gender features are usually added by the face and hair overlays, and details such as breasts are hinted at by the way armor or clothing is drawn.
    • Hairstyles and faces opposite the gender you assign your character at creation are available in the Cash Shop on a limited time basis. Once you get your hands on them, you can use the Salon feature to swap them whenever you feel like it (and have 100k mesos in your pocket).
    • Many Cash Shop outfits, tops, and bottoms (stuff you can wear over your armor) can be worn by characters assigned either male or female at creation. This, combined with the above two examples, makes more or less any form of gender expression accommodatable in-game.
    • Your default pronouns in NPC dialogue are they/their, except for class storylines where gender is relevant.
  • Ambiguous Time Period: The Mirror World. It seems to mostly be grounded in the Maple World pre-Black Mage, as seen with the baby Horntail plotline, a young Freud, Kritias, and other things, but Non Player Characters from the current era are scattered around the place. It's possible that Will just mixed the past and present.
  • Anachronism Stew: Playable classes include fantasy staples such as warriors, mages and archers, but there are also classes such as Jett and Xenon who are very clearly based on Science Fiction. A number of modern-day and futuristic areas exist alongside more fantastic locales.
  • And Now You Must Marry Me: What the Mole King threatens two of the students with near the end of Ellinel Fairy Academy. He tries to soften it by claiming he has standards and will wait for the girls to become adults, but they aren't any less grossed out by this.
  • An Asskicking Christmas: Not only has Maple Story had a Christmas Event that involves slaying monsters, like most popular online games, but as of 2007, it occasionally has the Hanukkah-themed Shalom Temple for players of Jewish faith.
  • Animated Adaptation:
  • Animation Anatomy Aging:
    • All player characters share the same body type, and everything is interchangeable, so the only way character designs can represent age is by the size of the eyes on their default face.
    • Various NPCs bypass this with obvious facial features, body types and even being drawn larger- but they get by on using unique sprites rather than default player bodies.
  • An Ice Person: Some classes, like Ice/Lightning Magicians, Arans (read: ice warrior), and Marksmen (who can summon Frostprey, an ice hawk, and fire ice-charged shots).
  • Annoying Arrows: Corsair's and some Bowmens' primary single target skills fire relatively low-powered arrows at machine-gun frequency.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Wizet has progressively introduced a multitude of these for more casual players to the point that reaching the old level cap is nearly a no-brainer even for those who eschew cash - though it's only after that point the game's real depth begins to open up.
    • For the Black Heaven blockbuster (the pre-requisite for challenging the boss Lotus), there are a few difficult segments which allow you to skip them if you fail enough times in a row.
    • Upon completing your Fifth Job advancement, you get 3 stones that effectively double your EXP through level 201-202, some levels that can be a slog for those who can't 1-hit yet at the meta training maps.
    • Using an EXP buff item and get disconnected from the game? As long as you do not exit the client(relying on the game going to the channel select screen rather than the game itself simply closing on its own can be a gamble, of course) and can log back onto that character, the buff will still be in place.
  • Anti-Grinding: Inverted with the Pendant of the Spirit, which gives increasing experience multipliers based on how long you’ve been logged in.
  • Anti Poop-Socking:
    • "You have played MapleStory for X hours." (If X is greater than 3) "We suggest you take a break from Mapling." However, aside from the warning, the game does nothing else - and this warning has recently been removed.
    • Except in the Chinese version, where the game boots you off.
    • Subverted, as well. Many of the Marathon Boss enemies require several hours to finish, and there are actual awards (in the Global version, at least) for actually being on consistently for 3 hours or more.
    • Not only has GMS gotten rid of the "played for X hours" message, the Tempest event features the Gale Gourd, which rewards the player for staying on for a half hour. As soon as the player gets that award, they're given another Gourd to fill up, encouraging the player to stay on another half hour. The current Springtime event has a similar feature.
    • At this point, events that have you hold an item for a while are par for the course. Every event seems to have an item like this of some kind.
  • Anti-Hero:
    • Not only the backstory of Demon Slayer, but even the way he/she talks. While Evan is clearly a Wide-Eyed Idealist, Demon Slayer's motive for joining the Resistance is outright revenge, and he/she talks more like a villain in general than any of the other heroes (talking for instance about how he or she "can use this" Resistance to further their plans of payback).
    • Kyrin may want the Black Mage dead, but she's also out to make a fortune and it's implied that the Pirate ranks she leads contain any number of wanted criminals. She also considers selling Jett, either into slavery or for scientific research/dissection, upon learning that Jett is an alien. Jett’s ship, too – even if it is broken.
    • Dark Lord and the Dual Blade faction would probably be plundering the land and be engaged in a bloody war between each other, if not for the fact both of them hold a mutual hatred of the Black Mage.
    • After the events of Black Heaven, Orchid has apparently become this, as she lost her brother and no doubt isn't too happy with the Black Mage because of it, topped off with saving the population from Gelimer's plot.
  • Arbitrary Gun Power: Handguns (Corsairs) have the same potential to do damage as bazookas (Cannon Masters) and throwing stars (Night Lords).
  • Arbitrary Skepticism: Despite the presence of ghosts all over the place, most citizens of Maple World apparently do not believe in an afterlife. Even the White Mage, after the final battle, believes he's going to cease to exist upon death. The Afterlands are completely unknown to everyone and even the character that goes through the quest line is unsure of it really happened or if they were having a dream. Partly justified as it became well-known that all physical matter returns to the erda flow eventually, which is not an afterlife where souls are preserved. The Halloween 2020 event did drop hints that some people may be aware that the Afterlands do at least exist(even if they don't know what it's like) but that the dead don't simply cross over automatically, especially if they have any lingering wishes, doubts or unfinished business. To complicate things, the Masked Gentleman is absorbing sols to become the "lord of hell", meaning the Afterlands may not be the only afterlife.
  • Arc Welding:
    • The Black Heaven storyline ties together several previous storylines:
      • Beryl, from Xenon's story quests, survived, got adopted by two other robots as Bitterbot, and helps the player get onto the Black Heaven, despite seeing opposing Gelimer as futile.
      • Riena Strait was being melted because the Black Heaven needed a coolant. The commander seen there was Gelimer's childhood friend, and the Demolishizer returns and the player gets to control it.
      • The Evolving System was collecting combat data for Lotus.
      • Shinsoo's Teardrop is used to revive the player at the end of the story.
    • The Arcane River has so far tied together multiple late game stories:
      • Kao, mentioned in the explorers storyline, the former Ellin Forest questline, and the Vanshing Journey questline. is the player from a bad timeline and the amnesiac Temple of Time monk. Apparently, they were wounded in a battle against an Erda called Arma. This causing a chain of events that kills Ollie in Esfera, choosing (and failing) to kill Tama that allows the Black Mage to absorb her completly, and causing Maple World to be destroyed. They are able to change the future by protecting you from Arma, leaving the player at full strength to save Ollie and thus kill the Black Mage. As to how they went back in time...
      • Lachelein was created by Lucid, the same person responsible for the Bad Future area, and a key character in Mercedes' past and Shade's story.
      • Kritias' curse is explained, as well as revealing that it is the hometown of Tana and Arkarium's responsibility for what happened to it.
      • The Mirror World from Zero's story reappears, as well as Will.
  • Arrows on Fire: Bowmaster’s upgraded hurricane and flame surge.
  • Art Evolution:
    • Compare the first soundtracks (i.e. the Victoria Island ones) with the newer ones (i.e. the Arcane River ones) and you'll notice big differences.
    • Many NPCs (especially event ones) are given new sprites.
    • Classes generally get new dialogue sprites and promotional artwork with revamps. The Explorers (the oldest classes) have had three glow-ups since the game started: Original Artwork, [1], [2], [3]
    • Compare the sprites of monsters on Victoria Island/Ereve and their monster versions in the future world. Although they are gigantic mutants, you can see a huge boost in details.
    • Storyline development over time has come with more human and human-ish NPCs and bosses. Pre-Big Bang, most bosses were several times larger than the character, and there were no human mobs outside of Showa Town.
  • The Artifact: The many hair salons and plastic surgery centers throughout the game have become redundant ever since character redesign has been streamlined into the form of items that can be used anywhere. The relevant characters now merely mention your ability to do that.
    • Most Magician equipment pre-level 100 have a level requirement offset by 2 (as in, their level "70" equipment requires level 68 instead), a holdover from when Beginners could become Magicians at level 8 rather than 10 like the other classes.
    • Magic Rocks and Summoning Rocks were once used as regents for certain class abilities, but these requirements were removed, leaving the rocks as useless Etc. drops that only sell for 1 meso each.
    • The clocks displayed at the vast majority of inter-continental transportation services are a remnant of when the intercontinental travel was done in a scheduled manner, with ships carrying multiple people departing every 15 or 30 minutes. Travel is now streamlined to occur immediately at the player's behest, rendering the clocks purposeless.
    • The Victoria <-> Orbis ferry continues to have a crew and ticketing agents like back in the day with scheduled inter-continental transportation when other faster methods were either less accessible (Hyper Teleport Rocks) or nonexistent (the Maple Guide).
  • Art Shift: despite this being a super deformed game, actual facial photos are used in several places, notably Showa hideout and Red Leaf High.
  • The Atoner: Orchid. After being almost killed by Lotus/Suu and Gellimer and left to die in an alley, she was saved and nursed back to health by the Resistance, joining them and abandoning the Black Mage. Whether or not she feels genuine remorse is unknown, but she did stop Gelimer's mind-control bombs in Black Heaven, helped the player character get to safety after he/she was gassed and after having lost Lotus for good, she appears to be working against the Black Mage these days. Her reasons aside, she's switched sides.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Extractors. They basically allow people to rent your extractor to break down items into raw materials. They expire, much like androids. But here's the real great part, how do you make extractors? By extracting weapons, and gaining enough item crystals to put one together note .
    • Transformation potions. They let you temporarily become another monster. You lose the ability to fight or use your movement skills, and as soon as you get hit, you shift back to normal.
    • Older equipment which was only available through the CCG, such as the Arcana Crown and Bosshunter armor sets. These items were rare and looked nice, but were released well before Big Bang and are now obsolete. Being only level 70, even if potential is added, it's capped at 2% stat increases(4% for the double stat potential). Even the HP boosts the armor gave—which were quite useful to Bowmen back when their HP was a mess—are now moot as many changes since Big Bang have given players more HP, and boss attacks mostly eat a percentage of your HP rather than a set amount with few exceptions. The Arcana Crown has almost no useful stats whatsoever, making it eye candy.
      • The Fusion Anvil at least keeps these items relevant for players who want the appearance of the item, anyway.
    • Boats and airships. Thanks to various shortcuts in the game, most have become rather useless. The fastest way to get practically anywhere in 5 minutes or less- use the Dimensional Mirror in any town to go to Alishan, take the exit portal to Henesys, go 2 maps left to Six Paths Crossways and use the portal to Pantheon. From there click the portal and select your desired town.
  • Bears Are Bad News: There are several bear enemies in the game. The most fearsome of these is a raid boss that dwarfs any other seen in the game thus far and can one-hit you by tossing you into the air, strapping a bomb to you, or grabbing you and slamming you into the ground.
  • Beef Gate:
    • Leaving Victoria Island before your second job advancement isn't a very good idea. Especially after the Big Bang, which drastically increased the levels of almost every monster outside of Victoria Island, the World Tour areas and the various Noob Caves.
    • Monsters more than 20 levels above you will deal a lot more damage and take a lot less from you.
    • The Arcane River areas (Lv. 200+) require Arcane Force on top of your level, which is itself a very slow grind as a player can only earn a handful of Arcane Symbols per day. Fighting the Black Mage requires having all 6 of them at level 20, which can take months to years to obtain as each region is level-locked AND maps require a minimum Arcane Force to fight the monsters present.
      • Invoked by the guy who guides you through your 5th job advancement when he sends you to kill 1 Happy Erda without giving you an Arcane Symbol. Even with your fresh new skills, you still deal paper cuts in terms of damage while the mobs can easily do you in with a few hits and a lag spike.
    • The Lv. 260+ Grandis areas (Cernium and Hotel Arcus) take the Arcane Force mechanic up to eleven with Sacred Symbols and Sacred Force. Just when you thought you'd be done with dailies for good...
  • Beehive Barrier: The Battle Mage class has a Beehive Barrier that shields anyone in your party that stays inside it.
  • Big Bad:
    • After years without one, it finally got one with the Black Mage. (Actually, the Black Mage has been there since Orbis was released, but because of the majority of players neglected the questline, no one really knew about him.)
    • The Black Wings, an evil organization that intends to bring back the Black Mage, may act as the Big Bad, with the Black Mage himself acting as the Greater-Scope Villain. (As of Black Heaven, the Black Wings are gone. Most of their members were killed, the base wiped out when the airship crashed and exploded, and the only surviving members - Francis and Orchid - have turned on the Black Mage.)
    • After the Black Mage dies, the new Big Bad is Gerand Darmoor, High Prince of the High Flora race and the Grandis Trancendent of Life. Also, the the Overseers but they have mostly been in a background role.
  • Big Fancy Castle: Lion King's Castle. Now, the revamped Mushroom Castle as well.
  • Bilingual Bonus / Meaningful Name: Ludibrium is Latin for "plaything". Just look at the place. Edelstein also happens to be German for "gemstone". (It literally translates to "precious/noble stone", which is not far from the mark.) Edelstein is home to a gemstone mine.
  • Bittersweet Ending:
    • Heroes of Maple also ends on a bittersweet note. Damien's plans to become Transcendent of Life and absorb all life on the Maple World have been stopped, but the Demon is forced to finish off Damien with his own hands in order to destroy the evil spirits of his ancestors possessing Damien's sword, Alicia is forced to scatter her own life force in order to restore the life force Damien managed to drain, Alfrien is still dead and now that the other two Transcendents aren't in a position to oppose him, the Black Mage has decided to enact his plans. That's not counting further damage caused to Seoul, South Korea due to the Abraxas crash landing in it, on top of the giant sinkhole that leads into Reverse City
    • Winter Bard has our heroes all die trying to fight off Von Leon's army for long enough to light a distress beacon left behind by Freud. As Ryude finally dies defending the door to the beacon, the beacon lights just in time. Thanks to his sacrifice, the Heroes were rallied and the Black Mage was ultimately sealed. For his valor, Alicia enshrines his sword within her tower, where it can be acquired by players as a rare drop.
  • Bland-Name Product: Just look at the Kerning Square.
  • Bleak Level:
    • The Gate to the Future. The hills of Henesys are ablaze. Ereve has fallen to the surface of the Maple World. Perion has been taken over by the Resistance. And everywhere you look you'll find colossal versions of monsters from those areas, mutated into horrifically dangerous creatures.
    • The Vanishing Road (Lv. 200) introduced in the Fifth Job update is arguably worse, as its landscape features buildings and structures from nearly every other area in the game disintegrating into dust. The only enemies in this area are an assortment of faceless black creatures with white antlers. Further into the area, a fork in the road leads to two equally bleak areas: a shattered plateau with blue flames erupting from the crevasses, or an ominous forest of glowing blue mushrooms.
    • The Labyrinth of Suffering (Lv. 250) features you running around a maze where you are forced to Mercy Kill possessed comrades of the Maple Alliance while the only one that you rescued, Azalin, (Hilla in disguise) only seems to rub your despair in your face. All of this combined drives your character to nearly give up on making it out alive.
  • Blown Across the Room: The Dragon's Breath skill. Also, several boss monsters are capable of this.
  • Book Ends: Of a sort - Hilla is likely the first Commander boss the player is capable of accessing and defeating on their own, and will be the last Commander before the Final Boss, the Black Mage himself.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Battle Mages. First job’s main attack is triple blow. Second job’s main attack is quadruple blow. Five hits for third job and six hits for fourth job. One of your hyper skills is a blow skill as well.
    • The Junior Boogie Familiar, which heals 15% of the player's MP every ten seconds and is a common drop. This allows some classes to never use potions because of self-healing abilities.
    • All Mihile can do in 3rd and 4th job is fire small laser blasts. The damage itself isn't bad, though.
    • Wind Archers only ever use Song of Storm, which is a keydown skill. Thanks to the rapid fire rate and Trifling Wind, it's quite effective for just holding down a button.
    • Traits. Each one increases specific player stats every 5 levels. Raising these traits can take months of constant work, both due to the experience needed for higher levels AND the daily limit imposed on each one.
  • Boss Rush: The entire point of the Mu Lung Dojo, and Red Leaf High, currently.
  • Bottomless Magazines:
    • Mechanics cannot use bullets like their Gunslinger cousins, but they have gatling guns that do not use bullets.
    • Jett does not use bullets either, but it’s probably just special space technology… even if you’re wielding a Wild West handgun.
    • Mercedes uses energy arrows.
    • Angelic Buster gets an arm cannon which has unlimited ammo, but not many attacks actually fire it anyways.
    • Cannoneers don't require ammo either, despite the fact that they use weapons that can only hold a single cannonball at a time in real life.
    • While their weapons do need to be reloaded, Blasters will never run out of ammo doing so.
    • The "Destiny" update eventually modernized the few classes that did actually use ammo with new passives that let them always attack without consuming any ammo, as opposed to buffs that consumed some ammo to have temporarily infinite ammo some of those classes have.
  • Bowdlerise:
    • Until the Big Bang, when the Bowlderization was reversed, Global version's Showa Town had human monsters turning into animals when they died (to show that you weren't really killing humans) and all guns were turned into hammers. It was feared this would happen to Pirates, but it didn't.
    • Removal of Gachapon (slot machines) and introduction of Pigmy (egg-hatching pig, with prizes in the eggs) could also count, since it's Pigmy in Europe among others and gambling can get a +12 on an otherwise innocent game under PEGI.
  • Bragging Rights Reward: If you have a Kaiser at or above level 150 and seriously want to show off your skills at bossing, have a go at obtaining the Liberated Kaiserium. With +200 to all stats and 400 weapon attack, it is one of the strongest weapons in the entire game. However, you can only get it from a quest that requires the Cursed Kaiserium as well as 5 Spirit of Cursed Horns, both of which are only dropped by Magnus, and he is one of the most difficult bosses in the entire game, so once you've beaten him that many times...
    • Of course, thanks to power creep the Liberated Kaiserium's power level has more or less been eclipsed. It still has raw stats to compete with the level 200 Arcane weapon set, but lacks high bonus stat and potential tiers as well as set effect bonuses, a gap which becomes even more glaring compared to the more powerful Genesis weapons.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall:
    • There is a quest where you give a guard named Mike three different HP healing potions. When you complete the quest, he says ""Maybe the effects will kick in later. That's usually how medicine works, right? It's supposed to heal me right away? Haha! I don't know about that... It's not like this is a video game or something.
    • Mercedes acknowledging herself as being level 10 after awakening is regarded as another example
    • A rather large chunk of Phantom's dialogue is him complaining about his current level.
    • Many of the NPCs have dialogue that falls under this category. In fact there are probably too many examples to list.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory:
    • The Cash Shop used to only sell items (for real money) that were purely aesthetic. With the introduction of the Gachapon "coin-op" machines, real money can buy items that can change gameplay.
    • A few examples are items that: Double EXP gained (granted, it's for everyone), ignore EXP penalties upon death, and allow the user to teleport anywhere. Sayonara, ships.
    • Even that can be beaten. Two words: EXP Gachapon. You can buy your way all the way up to level 50.
    • With the introduction of Evan (in the Global version), buying special skillbooks from the Cash Shop was required to increase the level of essential skills such as Magic Guard. note  Cue many justified cries of Nexon (at least the branch running the Global version, as the original Korean version didn't do any of this) crossing the line and making the game no longer be truly Free-to-Play.
    • Also in Global with the release of the Dual Blade, like Evan there's mastery books in the Cash Shop for several skills. The people angry about the Evan mastery books are in a state of blistering fury about these ones as well. It doesn’t help that Dual Blade is one of the strongest classes for DPS in the game.
    • Miracle Cubes in the Cash Shop allow you to reset an item's Potential trait. Using enough of them with the in-game purchasable Magnifying Glass can give you Infinity Plus One Equipment. Expect to spend a lot of money buying hundreds of cubes if you want to get all your equipment to legendary potential.
    • Shielding Wards that allows you to use Equipment Enhancement Scrolls without penalty on an item up to 8 (12 in Korean Maple) stars.
    • Maple Leaf High is the ultimate example. Each successful run through the 11 rooms (provided the player does not die) can net at least 12%-15% experience, regardless of level (the EXP reward scales to your level, higher levels getting slightly less), and there are also various daily repeatable quests for more EXP (typically 1.5%-2% EXP per quest). You get one free entry a day, but extra keys can be bought in the cash shop... for 400 NX each (or 40 cents worth of NX). Several keys can be bought a day for very little cash(or bought in batches of 11 for 4000 NX, netting a free key by the bundle), making it possible for even top level players to level up quite fast. That's not counting the fact you get to complete a quest just by going to the school each day! At least the area is tied to an event that comes and goes, so it's not so bad if you play while the event is not on.
      • Not only that, but future versions of Maple Leaf High gave you a great skill for getting enough coins. The event would last for 15-or-so days, but you would need to run the schoolday 40 times.
    • Higher leveled gameplay tends to focus on AOE-ing down massive numbers of mobs at once, leaving a carpet of gold or greens that a pet-less character needs several minutes to pick up. Looting is a huge hassle, but a pet will automatically loot anything it walks over. You used to have to buy a meso magnet for it to pick up money and an item pouch for all items, but you no longer need to.
  • Built with LEGO: The world Ludibrium, complete with toy monsters. Even some of the monsters - and one Boss - are made of Lego.
  • Bus Crash: The Omega Sector revamp finally gives identities to the rest of the Mesorangers... and in the process gets rid of the original Pink Mesoranger and instead focuses on her successor. GMS in particular states that the first Pink Mesoranger was eaten by a dinosaur during a mission.
    • Some events are
    • Mr. Lee's Airlines, now removed from the game, had the player board a vacation flight that crash landed on an isolated island-slash-research-facility, forcing them to scavenge on randomized map layouts until they could find and repair an escape vehicle. Not only was the owner of the airlines legally immune to any consequences, but the questline was repeatable daily. The rewards included keeping the vehicle as a mount, and potentially finding a buff that gave massive boosts to weapon/magic attack, defense, and HP.
  • Butt-Monkey:
    • The game balance was never really kind to Archers. Their HP is among the lowest, have average DPM, and in general the buggiest class in the history of the game. The release of Wild Hunters also made this worse as they're basically Archers with superior mobility, DPM, and HP. Though this was finally changed in a later patch. Essentially, dropping the need for summoning rocks to use your bird, coupled with massive boosts to HP through summoning the Phoenix, more than made up for the lack of HP. The Phoenix no longer needs to be summoned to boost HP, the HP increase is now a passive skill. The character card system can also add additional HP and MP to every character on a player's account- if 6 characters are used and sorted correctly, up to a 1000 boost of each stat can be gained. However even after all this, they still have worse HP at level 200 than some characters will at level 140.
    • On one the hand, before Big Bang, Archers could actually win against boss enemies several levels above them. Post BB, there is a accuracy equation based on level difference that creates an automatic miss after 20 levels.
    • However a Bowmaster willing to activate the quiver skill every 30 seconds while their arrows have cycled to the red Drain Arrow skill, alike using a Jr. Boogie familiar to refill MP, can effectively stay alive by refilling HP with every attack and using no potions in the process. This does require a lot of time management and care, however and may not work too well on bosses with massive damage attacks.
    • Francis the Puppeteer, a low ranking Blackwings general and a minor boss in several characters' storylines, all of which canonically happen alongside each other. He starts to get a bit annoyed by how many people keep showing up to beat him up. His position in FriendStory isn’t much better.
  • Calling Your Attacks:
    • A toggleable feature when setting up macros. Sadly, it's less awesome in practice than in theory for various reasons. Any attacks that make your character flip or jump in midair make the text box disappear, and anything with a cooldown can’t be put on a macro.
    • Some classes have voice acting. Now, it can be turned off in the system options menu.
  • Canon Name:
    • Kind of. When playing as Angelic Buster or Kaiser, you can see that the official name for the other character is Tear and Kyle respectively. The official webtoon comics show Demon Slayer/Avenger's real name to be Demon.
    • Many playable characters have official names, even though the player can name them whatever they want.
  • Cap: There have been many different caps in the history of MapleStory, but perhaps the most famously meta defining cap is the damage cap, which has was 999,99 at first, but raised to 50,000,000 in the Unleashed update, 10,000,000,000 in the 5th job update and will increase to 150,000,000,000 in the Neo update. Power Creep assures that eventually a new damage cap will become feasible for most classes to reach on a regular basis, which begins to alter the balance of classes as Death of a Thousand Cuts classes can end up doing a lot more damage than stronger classes that output a lower number of actual lines per damage assuming both can reach the cap, creating an entirely unintentional Magikarp Power that Nexon generally tries to avoid once the situation becomes more common.
  • Captain Ersatz: Several. This is a game which features a lot of Lawyer Friendly Cameos and such-
    • Athena Pierce is likely based on Elwing from Shining Wind.
    • Grendel The Really Old is Gandalf.
    • Marco, an agent in a black suit and holding a big gun in Omega Sector, is based on Agent J (Will Smith) from Men in Black.
      • And as of the Big Bang patch, Nexon America renamed the character to "Agent M" in the Global version which makes it even more obvious.
    • Stirgeman, a costumed character in New Leaf City, is based on Batman.
      • Of the equip items he gives out, some are black and red, based on Batman Beyond.
    • Icebird Slymm, mayor of New Leaf City, looks a lot like Mayor Tilton from The Mask. (Though he's supposedly based on governor David Patterson, but Patterson is a rather skinny guy with some hair whereas Mayor Tilton and Icebyrd Slimm are rather overweight and bald. And the name would seem to be a shoutout to memoirist/crime writer Iceberg Slim.)
    • Lita Lawless seems to be based on Xena (hence the similar name to Lucy Lawless) though she wears armor more inspired by futuristic anime.
    • Bell, conductor of the subway to and from New Leaf City, looks a lot like another conductor of a rail vehicle.
    • Spiegelmann, the man who runs the Monster Carnival, is only a pointy nose off from being Batman's enemy The Penguin.
    • Tigun, the guard at Ariant castle (not Tigun The Advisor from Ludibrium) looks like a very overweight parody of Jonathan Frakes. No coincidence this character was created at a time Frakes was being hit with jokes about weight gain.
    • The Mesorangers in Omega Sector are basically the Power Rangers, specifically based on the earlier years of the show. There are also Chury, Hoony and Gunny, three characters which wear Power Rangers costumes but not the helmets.
    • The animal-color combination seems inspired by Choujuu Sentai Liveman.
    • A non-character example would be many of the shops in Kerning Square, which often look so much like the real businesses that it's skirting very close to the legal line.
    • Cake Boss Daniel, of the Cake VS Pie event, looks almost exactly like Hell's Kitchen host Gordon Ramsey. Pie Lord Tiara, of the same event, may be based on Rachel Ray but the visual likeless is not as strong.
    • There are two Cheshire Cat Expys, Fanzy and Tricky.
    • Ghosthunter Bob of Ludibrium is probably based on the Ghostbusters, but he looks more like the Filmation's Ghostbusters than the more well-known Dan Aykroyd film/Real Ghostbusters series. A mini version of the familiar "no ghost" logo can be seen on a related quest item, if you were doubting the connection.
    • Red Leaf High's "Four Pillars Off Heaven"; Hermoninny is Hermione, Ika looks like a white Chewbacca, with Vega's claw, Little Dragon is Bruce Lee with purple hair, Joe Joe may be based on Tomorrow's Joe since he turns white upon defeat, with a bit of West Side Story thrown in as well.
    • Boss Kumi was an almost direct sprite re-creation of a character from the Japanese TV series "Gokusen", only replacing the sword with a notebook. WAS. It seems legal hassles forced Nexon to totally redesign the character for her return in February 2013.
    • Eskalade, the ancient dragon that instructs Angelic Buster, may be a comedic rendition of Paarthurnax
    • General Orchid is an evil Sailor Moon wannabe in a Nazi uniform, and Hilla is Queen Beryl in a striperiffic Mayincatec outfit.
    • In The Afterlands' Land of Warriors, you encounter several characters that are all Expies named after figures of their class. The warrior is named Beodog, the magician is Vulcanelli, the archer is Reubenhood, the thief is Arsan Lupen, and the pirate is Edgar Tetch.
    • Black Mage looks like he came straight out of Heretic or Hexen
  • The Cassandra: Cassandra, the NPC fortuneteller, is named after the mythological figure. Rather than simply not being believed, she's played off as a complete idiot.
  • Cast from Hit Points:
    • Many of the Demon Slayer's skills use HP instead of MP, in addition to his character specific Demon Force. Also just about all the Dark Knight’s skills.
    • All of Demon Avenger's attacks use HP, as he does not use MP (or Demon Force, for that matter).
  • Charged Attack: The Crusader's Combo Attack is a Collect type that's charged by hitting the enemy.
    • The Buccaneer tree features the Energy Charge system, which allows you to collect energy from attacking. Additionally, Buccaneer Blast takes a few seconds to charge up before being fired.
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • In the former Ellin Forest quest line (which takes in the past), everyone mistakes you for a person named Kao, who is never seen and has seemingly gone missing. Later in the game you eventually do find Kao, who ended up at the Temple of Time without his memories. Just to top it off, the reveal gives him the same face as your player character. The other players on the ship in the Explorer tutorial also call you this name.
    • Shinsoo's Tear. It showed up back when the Cygnus Knights were first released and while it recieved mentions here and there, it's never really used. In the ending of Black Heaven, Empress Cygnus uses it to revive the player after they die to Gelimer's poison.
  • Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: The Maple World has a modern force of secret agents that are supposed to patrol the world. They were first seen in a massive event in version 72, and again in the alien invasion event prior to Big Bang, as well as one lone agent who was seen around the haunted mansion during a Halloween event. These agents are connected to the Omega Sector. But as of Big Bang, they've all but vanished, with only the original Agent Marco in Omega Sector remaining, as well as Gaga, who has had his role in the story changed since then. The rest of the agents have vanished without trace or hint of showing up again, and their role in the world seems to have been replaced by the Edelstein Resistance and Silent Crusade with some possible retconning happening to the overall plot.
  • Circling Birdies: Mushrooms, in this case.
  • Clothes Make the Superman: Some armors can have extremely powerful bonuses (e.g. up to 21% to your main damage stat). Additionally before the Big Bang patch physical defense was entirely dependent on armor.
  • Collectible Card Game:
    • The Monster Book. Doing this is beneficial, as once you collect enough cards of a specific monster, you can view basic background information about the monster, see everything that it Randomly Drops, and be able to gain bonus experience from that specific monster for an hour after collecting their final card. This was reworked in a later patch after being temporarily removed.
    • Also, the spinoff game Maple Story ITCG.
  • Conspiracy Redemption: Evan joins the Black Wings initially.
  • Continuing is Painful:
    • Until a 2021 patch, most classes would lose up to 10% exp when dying outside of a boss map, which wasn't good considering the amount of Level Grinding needed to level up at later levels. Since that patch, everyone now gets an 80% EXP and drop rate debuff for a short while, which can be removed by using a Safety Charm from the Cash Shop.
    • Having a higher LUK statistic used to reduce the penalty. In the past, mages that went "LU Kless" would lose over 30% of their EXP if they died.
    • As of Chaos and professions, building up the Ambition trait reduces EXP loss at death by a small bit every 5 levels it's raised.
  • Cool Chair: The very first chair you get (allowing you to sit down anywhere and recover health and MP) is a lounge chair for the beach, and it only gets fancier from there. You can eventually sit with key characters, bosses, on planets, inside potion bottles…
  • Covers Always Lie: All the promo art and material for Angelic Buster describe her as the "idol of the battlefield" and often show her holding a microphone. She never once sings in the game (with the exception of cutscenes, albeit being single-panel and without music). She IS declared some sort of battlefield mascot by her people but only for killing lots of monsters.
  • Critical Hit: All Archers, all Pirates (except Mechanics), Assassins, Cleric, Evans, and Battle Mages have skills that boost critical rate on all attacks. Other classes have only a 5% but some have skills that have separate critical hit chances. 4th advancement Archers can boost their entire party's critical rate and raise critical damage. Before the Big Bang only these classes (minus Clerics, Pirates and the classes that didn't exist at the time.) could critical hit at all. 5th job gives all archers a skill that lets their critical hit rate exceed 100%, which translates into significantly boosted critical hit damage.
  • Critical Hit Class: Phantom. Getting enough critical hits allows you to hurl a storm of cards and give you a buff. Your critical hit rate can easily go higher than the 70s, and Phantom’s Link Skill itself will increase the critical hit rate.
  • Crossover:
    • For the games' 9th year anniversary, Slave.In.Utero, author of Tower of God, was asked to do a promotional crossover. He delivered.
    • Nao from Mabinogi was brought into the game for a guest appearance, and some meager quests, in Septermber 2013.
    • The (JMS) Japanese server contains quite a number of anime crossovers... with notable examples being Steins;Gate, Full Metal Alchemist,K-ON!!, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Sword Art Online.
      • Attack On Titan and Sword Art Online were released in the US client as well
    • Korean musician Psy received a massive crossover event when "Gentleman" was released as a single. It was only released in Korea and Europe and most of the content was merely quests from old events with slight tweaks.
    • An official crossover event with Frozen (2013) took place in 2014... bizarrely it only happened in Korea. And if you're doubting this actually happened, a clip from Let It Go can be found in the game's sound.wz file.
    • The cast of Isekai Quartet, which in itself is an crossover, gets featured in an limited time event from March 11 to April 7, 2020.
  • Crutch Character:
    • Used to be the entire point of the Cygnus Knights. They become stronger faster, and get access to more advanced skills at an earlier level, as well as skills unique to the Cygnus Knights, but have a smaller level cap at 120note , where everyone else can eventually overtake them. They are meant for people that plan on losing their patience by then. Now, they have the regular level cap at 250 for all Cygnus Knights like everyone else and gain AP at a normal rate as well.
    • The Mechanic was the first class able to deal out such massive damage at early levels. This has become less unique with some of the newer classes, however.
  • Cutscene Drop: Very, very often, to the point where you might just take advantage of it to get somewhere faster.
  • Darker and Edgier: The beginning of the Demon storyline: he was once a commander for the Black Mage, but does a Heel–Face Turn when the Black Mage orders the world to be destroyed for defying his rule, starting with the place where the Demon Slayer's family lived. In a cutscene you visit their burning house and pick up a photo of his now-dead mother and brother. Made worse when you realize that at the end of the Heroes Blockbuster, he has once again lost the only family he had.
  • Dark Is Not Evil:
    • A lot of the Battle Mage's skills involve some very "dark" themes (ex: "Dark Genesis", "Summon Reaper"), but the backstory of the Resistance faction puts them as the good guys. Additionally, the Knights of Cygnus' "Night Walker" class, and the Adventurers' "Night Lord", "Shadower", and "Dark Knight" classes - all involve some form of manipulation of shadows, darkness, or otherwise normally "sinister" skills. Also the Demon is a half-demon good guy with very edgy, dark, spiky attacks. Even though he was a commander in the Black Mage's army, he was only there to protect his family.
    • Subverted with Luminous. His dark half is quite evil, coming straight from the Black Mage himself.
    • Death Seeker The Black Mage, as revealed during the end of the Tenebris Expedition
  • Death of a Child:
    • Vita is killed by a bomb. You may also count player character deaths if you want, since a lot of the in-game script suggests the average adventurer is a child.
    • Inverted with the Resistance character's early quests- the in-game dialogue suggests your character is merely a child, who is forced to kill an adult member of the Black Wings in combat.
  • Dem Bones: A lot of monsters, from humans to dogs to fish.
  • Developer's Foresight:
    • Event-only armor (such as the Frozen set during Burning Times) is usually given with a stat distribution and full-set bonus that makes all armor obsolete until very late game. Due to this, they're either given with a large amount of Star slots or don't come with gloves or boots so the player can wear armor that still allows them to tackle Star Power fields.
    • While most questlines just use a Recycled Script, certain quests use a unique one when the player is a certain class, such as one of the Heroes coming upon their past self during the Arkarium questline or Demon seeing Damien in Friendstory.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Literally, if playing as a Buccaneer, Thunder Breaker, or Eunwol.
  • Die, Chair, Die!: Ironic, in that most veteran players got their first chair from destroying boxes.
  • Disc-One Nuke:
    • Before you even make your second job advancement, a quest is available that requires you to kill one of five relatively easy bosses depending on your class, and the reward for said quest is a mask of that boss that boosts your class' main stat by 12, and even the defense of these masks is greater than many higher-leveled hats. (The downside being that these full-head helmets are butt-ugly, and hide your character's face for dozens of levels...unless of course you buy a NX hat.)
    • Killing monsters has the possibility of making them drop familiar cards, which allow you to use that monster in battle, but only if you are at least the same level as the monster. One of the most useful familiars is Jr. Boogie, which heals 15% of your MP every 10 seconds, making it incredibly difficult to run out of mana unless you're playing a mana intensive class with low reserves like Dawn Warrior. It can be used as early as level 20, and is usually used well into 4th job. For the manaless classes, the Level 7 Shroom can save a lot of money on health potions early on with its small healing effect of 5% of one's Max Health per 10 seconds.
    • If you can manage it, beating Crumbling Zakum at level 50 turns the Zakum Helmet into this. It provides +15 to all stats to boost your offense while providing the highest defense bonuses in the game up to that point. Aside from the fact that it isn't all that cool looking (but better than the helmets described above), it can easily serve you into the early-mid 100s. However, much like the original, Crumbling Zakum loves to spam status conditions and mana eater attacks, so defeating it is not an easy task for a first-timer.
  • Disciplines of Magic:
    • Explorer Magicians can branch into one of three schools: Fire/Poison magic, Ice/Lightning magic, or Holy magic, each with their own specialties. For instance, Fire/Poison mages can deal massive Damage Over Time damage while Holy magic users (better known as Priests) have powerful party-wide healing and other support tools.
    • The Cygnus Knights divide up their Magic Knights into five corps each corresponding to a different element: Dawn Warriors, Blaze Wizards, Night Walkers, Wind Archers and Thunder Breakers.
    • The Legends/Hero class group has two Magicians on their roster. Evan and Luminous, whose playstyles differ drastically due to their different power sources.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: Everyone in Henesys loves horny mushroom pie.
  • Do Not Run with a Gun: Jett and Angelic Buster can fire while moving, but most classes cannot.
  • Doom Doors: The game uses several of the stock sound effects heard in Doom, as well as a few other games- the viking monsters in Ludibrium, for example, make use of the Serious Sam kamikaze scream.
  • Double Jump: Originally a Thief skill, eventually given to some Pirate classes and later on to almost every class. A few classes can use their double jump twice.
  • Downer Ending: Due to the theme of the Grand Athenaeum allowing you to experience stories that history forgot, a large number of the scenarios end like this, with the protagonist's story being lost to time because they died alone.
  • Draconic Humanoid: The Nova race, which resemble humans with dragon wings, horns, and tail. Two of them are playable classes: Kaiser, who can temporarily transform into the less human-like variation of a Dragon Man, and Angelic Buster, who lacks a tail. (If you're wondering, both classes, as well as their race, came out right after Skyrim was released, so it's likely one big reference to the Dragonborn.)
  • Dumb Blonde: Cassandra and Shumi.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: Aside from the obvious with a game that has expanded and changed much over the years(more areas to explore, more player classes added, lower experience curve), one massive early difference was that players were only allowed to make characters of whichever gender they specified in their profiles when they signed up to play the game. It was also not possible to jump down from ledges prior to version .55, as any player who was in that far back can tell you, it was a massive setback being unable to do this.
  • Easing into the Adventure: Maple Island is pretty relaxed.
  • Eldritch Location:
    • The further down you get in the Ludibrium Clock Tower, the more the whole place seems off. It doesn't exactly help that a good portion of the monsters down there are technically ghosts, as well.
    • Although that's only the right side. The left side suffers from Soundtrack Dissonance.
  • Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors:
    • Before Big Bang, Fire would hurt plant-based and ice-based monsters. Ice would hurt fire-based and many fish. Holy would hurt undead and dark. This wasn't true in all cases however, which tended to annoy the elemental-users because of how most of the game is biased towards those who specialize in non-elemental offensive methods.
    • This is ironically enough one of the biggest reasons why Mages were nerfed retroactively after the Big Bang patch. Almost every area added after that patch contains neutral weak monsters making the Mages ability to exploit elemental weakness completely useless (it borders an Informed Ability.)
    • Classes with elemental affinities were all given Elemental Reset buffs that remove their elemental attributes entirely meant to allow them to deal with resistant enemies, but such buffs have been heavily nerfed as they gave those classes a huge advantage in terms of bossing, as all bosses are resistant to all elements, neutral included.
  • Emergent Gameplay: Before Big Bang, Lucky Seven had an increase in range if used while jumping. Additionally, classes that normally can’t attack while midair could attack and jump at the same time if timed perfectly. A quirk that let revamped Night Walkers throw stars twice as fast as they should be able to by jumping and throwing at the same time was also left in as it gave them a unique characteristic.
  • Emote Command: F1 – F8, ever since everything right of F3 was pushed forward.
  • Emotionless Girl: Lilin, according to video.
  • Engagement Challenge: In order to make an Engagement Ring, the male must acquire "Proofs of Love" from the various towns which are given by collecting certain amounts of items, as well as the materials to actually make the ring out of. The female has to get a blessing from her parents (Who are an in-game NPC), which also requires collecting "Proofs of Love". Of course, to actually get married, you have to buy a reservation from the Cash Shop.
  • Enough to Go Around: Quest items only exist for those who need them. Those players can see and obtain the items but for everyone else, the items are nowhere in the gameworld.
  • An Entrepreneur Is You: Monster Life. Additionally, you can now set characters to work part-time to get free stuff.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: Not the SNAILS!
    • Justified as the majority of creatures are under the Black Mage's command, and those not are still loyal to some other evil group, be they Showa's Yakuza or alien invaders.
  • Elaborate Equals Effective / Evolving Weapon: Lapis and Lazuli.
    • Additionally, lots of equipment, such as the reverse weapons, can also level up. However, it doesn’t increase attack by much.
  • Elite Tweak: Mercedes and Jett. They have the best in-combat mobility, allowing them to fight and jump to the next target at the same time. Their actual damage isn’t so great. However, if your equipment is powerful enough, you can always disregard that.
  • Equipment-Hiding Fashion: The Cash Shop has a large range of equipment-hiding fashion, with it being the only item purchasable for players before their characters reach level 60. These items are not permanent, disappearing 90 days after purchase.
  • Escape Sequence: In the blockbusters.
    • In first act of Black Heaven, for you and your NPC allies have to escape the Pulverizer, a machine that looks like a demonic steamroller. Not only does being touched by it mean instant death, but you have to avoid the falling rocks in the room you’re running through, which can cause you to lose health. You have to flee from this thing again at the end of Act 5, which adds even more obstacles (and it’s very, very gratifying to see Claudine and the other Resistance members swoop in and blow it to pieces after you succeed.)
    • MONAD's has you hightailing it from Julieta. Thankfully, she doesn't actually come close enough to attack you, but failing to dodge the frequent obstacles and monsters in the way can easily do you in.
  • Essence Drop: Weapon points, if hunting in the mirror world. Additionally, souls, if a soul weapon is equipped.
  • Evolutionary Retcon: Some NPCs get really nice-looking design revamps. Additionally, every time the explorers get a revamp, skills that don’t change suddenly look really nice.
  • Evolving Attack:
    • Kanna’s main attack is always Shikigami Haunting, but every job advancement gives you an elemental buff that increases its power, at an attempt to allow you to keep up the damage with other classes.
    • Demon Slayer’s Demon Lash is upgraded every job advancement.
  • Excuse Plot: Most people in the fanbase have taken a valiant stance that MapleStory’s overall plot is this (though part of this notion is a clear consequence of many skipping most of the actual story part of the game), while the rest believe that its plot is actually incredibly deep. However, Chase leaves her hometown simply because she wants to become one of the Legend classes, and that’s pretty clearly this trope.
  • Experience Booster: Many.
    • For starters, runes. +100% EXP for 3 minutes.
    • Mercedes’, Evan's, and Aran's link skills.
    • Zero’s Legion/Union buff. Thankfully, all experience boosters or multipliers stack with each other.
  • Explosive Overclocking:
    • For Dominator Pendants (one of the best and most difficult pendants to obtain), Fragments of Distorted Time work more often than Incredible Chaos Scrolls of Goodness (ICO Gs), but can potentially destroy the pendant they're used on if they fail. Certain Star Force scrolls obtainable from Gachapon work the same way.
    • Done in-universe with Mechanic’s overclock.

    F-J 
  • Fake Difficulty:
    • One of the biggest problems with jump quests is that the game has this tendency to lock up for really short split seconds. This doesn’t interfere with most aspects of play. But it totally interferes with your ability to make precisely-timed jumps.
  • Fake Ultimate Mook: The stone golems have become this as a result of the Big Bang.
  • Fallen Hero: The White Mage fits this, yet he never gives up on his dream to make a peaceful world, even if it mean he has to destroy everyone and himself.
  • Fantastic Foxes: An enemy. Additionally, Kanna’s fox Haku.
  • No Communities Were Harmed:
    • Ariant - Middle East
    • Commerci - Venice
    • Edelstein - pre-WWII urban Germany, but steampunk-ier
    • El Nath - pre-1948 Mount Lebanon (except with the snow being year-round)
    • Golden Temple - Thailand
    • Lith Harbor - Santorini, Greece
    • Korean Folk Town
    • Mu Lung & Herb Town - Imperial China
    • New Leaf City - New York for the name, Las Vegas for the monumentalist architecture
    • Zipangu - Japan
    • Averted with now-removed Malaysia and Singapore, which were explicitly named as such.
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Oh so much.
    • Half the planet seems to be based on medieval times and ancient myths of magic and wizardry, with a strong emphasis on swords and knights. The other half? American Indian culture, an inner city slum, a town made of building blocks, a futuristic military base, ancient Japan, modern Japan, Japan in the future, pirates... you get the idea. It can be jarring walking from a town that looks like it came from a Tolkien book to a town that looks like Compton.
    • In this universe, the story of Romeo and Juliet involves alchemists, advanced technology and Frankenstein's monster piloting a mech walker.
    • Don’t forget all the science fiction. Xenon is a playable robot hybrid and Jett is a futuristic alien/bounty hunter.
  • Fantastic Racism:
    • The fairies in Ellinia and Orbis usually consider humans to be selfish, inferior, or sometimes just plain destructive. While some of the humans they talk about really are such things, and a few do have human friends, some will still talk down to the (human or humanlike) player without provocation, or make an offhand remark about how said friend is good for a human. The Ellinel Fairy Academy theme dungeon revolves all around this and was in fact partially caused by the students being forced to hide their admiration for the non-fairy Heroes.
    • The Nova (Angelic Buster's, Kaiser's, Cadena's, and Kain's race)generally aren't fans of the High Flora (Adele's race) because of the devastating wars of conquest led by the latter's leader, Gerand Darmoor. In-story, Adele has to clarify that she rebelled against Darmoor to avoid trouble with the Nova.
  • Flat "What": Demon Slayer/Avenger gives one of these in the "Turn Me Back" quest. Also, following the release of the Black Heaven storyline, those playing as Angelic Buster will give one to Kaiser at the very end of Act 1. Kaiser notices that Angelic Buster is conspicuously similar to his friend Tear. As the player expects him to put two and two together, he says something totally different that catches her off guard.
  • Flash of Pain: The only thing that will prevent you from being decimated sometimes. Some hidden potentials can extend it.
  • Fluffy Cloud Heaven: Orbis looks like one, complete with heavenly music and angels. However, there are still monsters that will can kill you. Very fast if you aren't of high level.
  • Fluffy the Terrible: Bob the Snail. And Pink Bean. PINK BEAN.
  • Foe-Tossing Charge: All warriors except the Dawn Warrior will have this skill one time. Useful for grouping monsters together to kill them all at once, or shoving mobile bosses to a more convenient location or for some of their squishier friends. At one point, this was the only mobility skill the Explorer warriors had.
  • Foreign Culture Fetish: Cootie the Really Small, your main sidekick in the Ellinel Fairy Academy quest line, is a huge fairy fanboy.
  • Foreshadowing: Players familiar with Korean Folk Town from the early days will notice the nine-tailed fox boss is missing from the current version. Playing through the current questline for the region eventually reveals that Moni, your traveling companion through the quest, is the nine-tailed fox given human form after an incident with the magical stones in the past- the very same that caused the forest fire which closed off the region.
  • Fun with Acronyms: Combine the first letter of each name of the original five Legend classes and the main characters of the Explorer storyline and you get: MapleStorynote 
    • The first letter of each post Black Mage major patch focusing on the Grandis storyline spell "Grandis". note 
  • Future Badass: A lot of characters in the scenario presented as future Henesys have become quite tough, especially given that in the present many of them are either children or non-combat NPCs, like a hair stylist. Jay, Anne, and Big Headward have all taken up arms to defend what's left of their town, while Alex returned to Henesys at some point and is now the new chief.
  • Future Imperfect:
    • Going through the Door of the Future in the Temple of Time shows you that Henesys is now in ruins, and Ereve fell to the Maple World. Subverted as its a dream world.
    • The Alien Invasion event, prior to Big Bang, saw the Maple World in ruins, polluted so badly that people had to wear protective suits just to breathe... all because visitors from the past kept stealing chunks of the big crystal that kept the world going, causing it to malfunction, polluting the environment.
    • And even IF all the above is somehow prevented from happening, there's still the matter of those robots that will eventually bomb several major cities and send their machines to patrol the remains from the Neo City time traveler quest.
  • Game-Favored Gender:
    • Engagement ring quests for males involve collecting gold, diamond or other precious materials and gems, followed by the cost to make the ring. For females? Collecting Proofs of Love (which the males also do), and talking to your parents.
    • Also in terms of hair and clothing options, the female’s choices are better.
  • Gameplay Automation: Thankfully, Monster Life quickly added a way to automatically collect your Warus for you. You still have to open Monster Life, however.
  • Gameplay And Story Integation: Aran, Evan, and Mihile are invited guests at the Ereve Conference Pavilion. If you enter it as one of these characters, the respective NPC will not be present.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: A few-
    • Nearly every monster, with rare exception of some unrelated but still evil factions, is loyal to the Black Mage which is why you are killing even the snails and mushrooms so much, because they want you dead. However only some higher level monsters will attack on sight, every other monster ignores you until you attack first. Considering how hard some of those maps can be, if every monster honed in on you instantly the game would be much more difficult and potentially unplayable at lower levels.
    • Non-Explorer/Resistance/Cygnus characters are canonically distinct individuals, yet it's possible to be in a map with multiple copies of them if it's filled with players.
    • One Halloween event featured both Angelic Buster and Phantom as NPCs, even if the player was of either class.
    • Mihile's plot is supposed to take place some time before the present, yet a player will be walking through the same current world map and interacting with player characters regardless.
    • One notable aversion- in some maps, if two or more players are playing as the same unique character, they won't be able to see each other. However, they can still see the other player's monster kills, and are unable to interact with each other for purposes of trading or communicating, so it's a bit broken.
    • A rather comical one involving some explanation: There's an area called Ellin Forest, which exists in the past and requires time travel to reach. The former quest line for this area, that all classes are given, involves the player being mistaken for a resident of the forest named Kao. However, a class-specific quest line for Aran, who was alive in that time period before being sealed away for at least a hundred years, involves the townsfolk recognising Aran and being overjoyed that he or she is alive and well. When playing as Aran you can run these two questlines simultaneously, resulting in the NPCs flip-flopping repeatedly over whether you're Aran or "Kao".
      • Mercedes, however, did not get the same special treatment, so Athena Pierce utterly fails to recognize her and only sees Kao.
    • In the Friend Story line, you can use spells, abilities, and not wear your uniform as much as you want outside of Mote fields and nothing will come from it.
      • Angelic Buster can do the same in front of every character in the game.
    • While each class has their own distinct personality, scripted lines for special quests or dungeons are recycled, meaning they all react the same to a wide variety of situations.
    • Various crossover events tend to go forgotten after the event ends and any event related to real-world content such as a presidential election will also remain separate from the actual plot.
    • Despite being a winged race of humanoid dragons that can canonically fly, Kaiser & Angelic Buster lacks this ability in actual gameplay, made even more obvious when they have to be transformed into dragons to fly the 2 screens to Temple of Time as all players must do.
    • The game's events acknowledge yearly anniversaries, but the actual story is suggested to have run for around 3 years total.
    • Black Heaven says that the Black Wings were defeated and Edelstein is now free, but the actual maps are locked into the original state mostly so players can progress through the needed quests. The Black Mage is also dead in canon but most of the gameplay treats him as if he's still alive unless the player personally beats him- again, to avoid breaking most quests or licking out content.
  • Game Within a Game: Monster Life.
  • Gatling Good: Mechanics get a skill like this.
  • Gender-Blender Name: Evan, like any other class, can be either gender, but will still be called Evan even if she's female. In the opposite direction, Aran (now canonically female) and Mercedes as well.
    • Averted with Zero; Alpha and Beta are as gender neutral as names get.
    • Ollie, the cygnus knight sent to aid you in the Esfera region, is easily mistaken for male due to not only the name but having a face more in line with most male player faces. We aren't even given a hint that Ollie is female until she mentions wanting to be a "magical girl" as a child.
  • Get on the Boat:
    • With literal boats that take you places! Also comes in varieties such as airships, subway trains, random tour guides, and a cloth pouch carried by a crane.
    • And even one that gets invaded by Crimson Balrogs while you're traveling.
    • Notably, a flying boat made to resemble a brightly-colored plastic toy train.
    • Aaaaand a giant genie. And a bird that has a platform to stand on that's rather loosely attached...
  • Glass Cannon: Archers, and pirates on a lesser scale. Every other class seems to have some kind of workaround for their defensive issues. Warriors have massive HP, Magicians have Magic Guard, and Thieves have tons of evasion. Archers have evasion, but not as much, and pirates generally only have some kind of defensive buff that lets you drop 20% or so damage taken.
  • Global Airship: Owned by Phantom.
    • Monster familiars, of course, which even includes rare familiars of the higher level bosses.
  • God Save Us from the Queen!: Ariant Queen Areda. Also, Empress Cygnus in the future. Arguably the mook perspective on a high leveled Mercedes.
  • Goggles Do Nothing: Lampshaded, on the item Spectrum Goggles there is a description saying "Allows vision in multiple dimensions. Who says the goggles do nothing?" STR+1, LUK+1
  • Good Is Not Nice: Phantom is a thief, a womanizer and has a hair trigger. The only reason he's considered a hero is because the Black Mage killed a woman he was in love with. Had he perhaps not fallen for her he'd never have joined the fight and even Freud suggests at their meeting that he should be in prison.
  • Goomba Stomp: Using a Rune of Might causes the player sprite to enlarge several times over. Merely walking into enemies hurts them, jumping instantly kills any monster nearby when the player lands.
  • Gotta Catch Them All: Monster cards. Collecting a set allows the player to utilize stat or ability bonuses. While mooks drop their cards randomly, bosses seem to have a 100% drop rate. Also on Japan and Global servers are familiar cards, which allow the player to summon a monster to help fight and sometimes grant special boosts (increased money drops, faster HP/MP recovery, etc.). Unfortunately due to certain areas being closed off, it can be impossible to obtain full sets as the monsters are unavailable on any map.
    • Then they added Monster Collection, which is more or less the same, only it does not overlap with Monster Book. I hope you enjoy collecting all those monsters a second time! Made worse because some monsters require the elite versions which will only spawn if you are in level range or with a rare rune that randomly spawns. Higher level monsters have a low rate of collection meaning it may take hours of hunting to get one. Some monsters can only be added with certain items to unlock their entry. The rewards? Completing a line gets a single random item, completing a page gets a specific item, and completing so many monsters allows one to send a line of monsters off "exploring" which results in a random reward every few hours. Up to 5 explorations can be sent but this requires a full 600 monsters collected, although the 300 needed to send out 4 is not impossible to obtain and the 200 needed for 3 explorations is actually fairly easy. The good news? Collections are specific to the account, not the character, so you only have to fill one collection, and if some monsters are out of level range, just make a new character.
      • getting a normal Blood Harp card though is going to strain players' patience heavily, as only 3 of them spawn on a single map and it's a level 100+ monster with a low rate of addition. I said normal, the star version on other maps is a separate entry.
  • Gratuitous French: The Global name changes to some of Phantom's skills feature French expressions or English expressions using French words (Double Entendre, Carte Blanche, etc.), but the skill itself has little to nothing to do with what those words mean.
    • The leader of the Silent Crusade is named Bastille, with zero reference at all to the historical prison.
  • Gratuitous Greek: The signs in Orbis and at the Victoria island airship port are English written with Greek Letters. Among other things, they say "Cloud", and "Welcome to Orbis". Especially gratuitous is the fact that they simply typed the words in Greek mode on an English keyboard, which meant that some English letters were interpreted as completely different Greek ones, leading to a sign that's supposed to say "Victoria" saying "ςΙΧΤΟΡΙΑ", which would be pronounced "Sixtoria." Oh and if it looks weird that the first letter is lower case and the rest is upper case, they even tried to cover that up by scooting the ς at the start up a bit so it would match the height of the others. But because they moved the ς up, it appears to say "Sixtopia" to an unknowing observer, which is oddly fitting with six city-states on the surface of the island.
  • The Greys: Monsters in Omega Sector, which are even called Grays. Also includes purple octopus-like aliens (Mateons, their derivatives, and the appropriately-named Octopus).
  • Ground Pound: So many monsters do this, it's probably taught at monster school. Also, Mechanics do this when the land from their jet pack jumps.
  • Handguns: Every weapon a Gunslinger utilizes is a handgun resembling dated flintlock pistols. To put this in perspective, modern weaponry exists in the Maple World, but all job classes are expected to use medieval swords, bows and blunt weapons with Pirates being the most modern, but still quite outdated, in terms of equipment, whereas the random soldiers standing around in Omega Sector are armed with M-16s. (Averted with Xenon and Jett, who are futuristic.)
  • Haunted Castle: The haunted Prendergast Mansion, and it has many, many ghosts and ghouls. During October, it is replaced by a larger, bigger one for the Halloween event.
  • Heel–Face Brainwashing: Subverted. This happens to The Knights of Cygnus and their Queen in the FUTURE.
  • Heel–Face Turn:
    • The Demon Slayer does this when his house is burned with his brother inside.
    • Orchid sort of did this after her brother almost killed her under Gellimer's orders, the pair dumping her into an alley to die. She's saved by the Resistance and joins them, albeit is too weakened from the attack to really do much beyond offer information. Black Heaven's story focused on Gellimer trying to carry out a massive attack against Maple World, using the brainwashed Lotus. Orchid comes to, lays waste to Gellimer's artillery and helps the Maple Alliance to defeat Gellimer, although Lotus is killed thanks to a brain implant Gellimer activated once Lotus shook off the mind control. The epilogue scene showed Orchid plotting her revenge on the Black Mage thanks to this long series of events costing her brother's life, as he'd largely been responsible for what Gellimer did in the first place.
    • Seren, after the events of Cernium, has become the new "end game" boss as of 2021's Neo update. She is, at least, being influenced by a very angry god.
  • Heroic BSoD: Mercedes has one of these after finding out that the Black Mage cursed Elluel and the rest of the elves along with her during her battle. The elf counsel breaks her out of it quickly, though.
  • Heroes Prefer Swords: Averted with Aran, who uses the giant polearm.
  • Heroes "R" Us: As of 2017 the Free Market was eliminated and replaced with the Auction House(a misnomer as nothing is actually auctioned), a sub-menu similar to the Cash Shop that requires no NX to use, only a 2000 meso deposit to list an item and a 5% cut for anything sold. Items remain listed for 24 hours or until sold. This allows all players to sell items and for much easier browsing of goods as you no longer need to manually check every shop or pay 70 cents to search an item.
  • Heroic Sacrifice The Black Mage's plan that is basically a Zero-Approval Gambit. This actually works, as the Alliance defeat his Generals and the Adversary successfully kills him, ridding Maple World of the Overseers hold.
  • Historical Domain Character: The US-only 2012 presidential election event featured the spirit of George Washington vising Maple World. The Sengoku crossover plot also features many historical Japanese figures.
  • Hold the Line: One mission in the Mushroom Castle questline. Also several in Black Heaven.
  • Hollywood Density:
    • The strongest of the Mechanic mech equips are made of pure gold and the second strongest are still made primarily of gold. Hopefully the Maple World's version of "gold" is not the same as ours because if it were, these engines and other pieces would literally mangle themselves upon use, as gold is one of the softest metals in existence.
    • In the Maple World, gold is the median in terms of crafting materials.
  • A Homeowner Is You: The Destiny update adds the ability to purchase and manage a player home. The homes are shared between characters on the same world, and can be retreated to from any map at any time. Some furnishings the player can place in their house are even functional, such as a safe that accesses storage, or a workbench that can be used to craft.
  • Homing Boulders: All projectiles home towards enemies when applicable.
    • Wind Archer’s trifling wind projectiles like to perform shuttle loops before they ever actually target anything.
  • Horse of a Different Color: At level 70 or higher, adventurers can tame a pig for riding, Arans get a wolf, Evans learn to ride their own dragons. Cygnus Knights can get a bird at level 50 instead. A Wild Hunter can earn a mount at level 10 with the ability to tame a jaguar. Phantom gets a car at level 100. Yes, a car.
  • How Do I Shot Web?: The player is told that through the Power of the Adversary they possess, they are able to stop the Black Mage from erasing all of creation. The only problem is you have no idea how exactly you're supposed to awaken or even use this power to do so. It isn't until the last possible moment do you realize the power of the Adversary isn't the will to sacrifice as everyone has been telling you, but the will to survive.
  • HP to One: Annoyingly, many of the more well-known bosses can do this. If that wasn’t bad enough, it also drops your MP to One, stopping you from attacking – thankfully, not all classes use MP.
  • Hub Level:
    • Victoria Island during the first and second job. Orbis becomes this from the third job onward, due to being able to get to almost any region from there.
    • Victoria Island gets the Six Path Crossway from Big Bang; Instead of having to walk around the perimeter of the island to get from town to town, facing stronger monsters the further away from a town you got, all the towns are connected to the Crossway, with the monsters getting weaker the closer to it you get. The Crossway also holds the entrance to Sleepywood as well as the Airports.
    • Now that Six Path Crossway contains the portal to Pantheon, which itself contains a portal taking one to almost anywhere in the game, the Crossway/Pantheon can be thought of as a sort of hub even for more advanced players.
    • To make things even easier, New Leaf City can now be reached by the dimensional mirror, which is in nearly every major town. New Leaf City had a subway ride straight to Kerning, which itself is only 3 maps away from the portal to Pantheon. It can now take only 5 minutes of travel to reach most destinations in the game using this trick.
    • And it get's better. Since the Friendstory update there is essentially a free portal to Henesys from any major town with a Dimensional Mirror starting from Level 33. After this is unlocked one can simply port to Henesys and use the quickmove option in town to port to the airport, which is right on top of the portal to Pantheon, cutting out pretty much all of travel and waiting time associated with the previous method.
  • Hyperspace Arsenal: At any given time a player is usually carrying hundreds of potions, twenty or so different armors and weapons (ranging from suits of armor to two handed weapons, hundreds thousands of etc. items, and don't forget the equipment that they already may be wearing! Those poor mounts.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism:
    • To the point that it's silly. At any given moment while Level Grinding, your character will be sucking down potions, gulping handfuls of pills, or eating reserves of junk food in the double or triple digits. Recovery items can be ingested faster than you can breathe air.
    • To the point where you can consume an air bubble that allows you to breathe underwater.
    • In a store in Kerning City, there is a sign that says “Abuse of drugs is good for your health”. They’re right.
  • Idiot Ball:
    • By all accounts, Shumi is holding onto it tight. Her quests involve retrieving things she lost while wandering around in the old subway tunnels. That's not even getting into why a non-adventurer would even be down there but she does this 3 times!
    • Cassandra seems to get progressively dumber every few patches. This video suggests a glow stick is enough to distract her.
    • After seeing the Black Mage betray both the Demon and Orchid, one has to think that this is the only reason the rest of his generals are still loyal to him. Subverted as it was actually Arkarium who killed Demon's family and Phantom attacking Lotus.
    • "Heroes of Maple" displays the 6 legendary heroes as either incredibly arrogant or so dumb they won by sheer luck. Instead of taking a small army with them, which should be easy to gather as the planet is now filled with adventurers, the 6 go off on their own- and Shade has to stay behind due to the curse. The museum infiltration mostly sees Mercedes and Phantom bickering, Phantom caught after they enter the secure area, Mercedes blowing things by drawing her weapons on an innocent man, the Abraxas attacked and destroyed because only Aran and Evan are behind to defend it, and in the final battle only three of them choose to ascend the World Tree to fight Damien. Even with the damage to Maple World restored it still took Alicia sacrificing herself to do so AND South Korea had a massive piece of alien tech crash land in the middle of a major city, killing who knows how many people.
  • Immune to Flinching:
    • Various class abilities can protect the player from flinching when struck by an attack (at varying rates, depending on the ability); these are often high-level abilities, but some classes like the Mechanic, Demon Slayer, Shade, and Mihile can learn them earlier than others.
    • Mihile’s link skill allows any character to have this!
    • The "Destiny" update gives all classes their own passive source of 100% stance by 4th job.
  • Implied Love Interest: While the game itself runs on No Hugging, No Kissing, there are NPCs that have Ship Tease with certain player characters and generally have the feel of a love interest (i.e. Mastema for the demon, Yuna for Kinesis, and Gerome for Adele, as examples,).
  • Impossibly Cool Clothes: The Cash Shop has this in spades. There's even an outfit that can literally turn your character into a centaur.
  • Improbable Power Discrepancy: Especially in the mirror world. All of the monsters are the same as in the normal world, but scaled up to your level. Why are orange mushrooms suddenly level 120?
  • Improbable Weapon User:
    • And some of the non-NX Joke Items are even more effective than normal weapons.
    • Angelic Buster’s Soul Shooter is a dragon-shaped arm cannon that fires explosive space bubbles.
    • Permanent Beginners get stuff like Frozen Tuna and giant Sake Bottles with almost twice the base power of an equivalent regular weapon to make up for their lack of skills.
  • Infinity +1 Sword:
    • The potential scrolls and equipment enhancement scrolls turn your equipment into this. However if the scroll fails, severe penalties are incurred. (see Explosive Overclocking above)
    • Thanks to Nebulites from the March 2012 Alien event, it's now possible to have "infinity +2" equipment as nebulites stack with potential.
    • Now we have Bonus Potential... "infinity +3" just happened. Or "infinity +4" as you can get 2 lines of bonus potential per item with enough bonus stamps.
  • Instant Gravestone: When a player's character dies, a tombstone appears.
  • Interservice Rivalry: The Resistance is on bad terms with the Cygnus Knights because the Knights couldn't help when the Black Wings took Edelstein. Relations are a bit better in the present day enough that the Resistance and the Cygnus Knights are in an open alliance together, but there's still some bad blood between them, as seen in Black Heaven.
  • Interspecies Romance:
    • Demon's mother (a human) and Demon's father (a demon).
    • Dr. De Lang(human) and Phyllia(fairy) had one. It was a taboo relationship from the start as fairies generally look down on humans, and their romance would have been brief as fairies live for centuries. This ended abruptly when Dr. De Lang tried to decipher some of the Black Mage's old research and died in the process. They had one daughter, Keeny, who is physically ill when you first start the Magatia quest chain, due to severe health problems resulting from the cross-breeding. At the end of the quest chain, you deliver a rare, experimental cure to her which De Lang had been working on.
    • Implied/played with between Angelic Buster and Eskalade- it's one-sided but is all but stated that the only reason Eskalade took a shine to Tear is because he wants to have sex with her, and the whole Angelic Buster transformation is just his way of making her look more sexually appealing to him. Eugh...
    • Two of the three female characters you get to flirt with in the mini dating game in Red Leaf High aren't even human- one is a fairy, the other is an anthropomorphic panda girl.
    • Cassandra has admitted several times to having a strong romantic interest in her inanimate crystal ball, to the point she tries to feed it ice cream and thinks it's alive.
  • Interface Spoiler:
    • Quests that require you to look for an NPC or an item that isn't inferred to in the actual dialogue will usually give the option of showing where it is or what to specifically do.
    • An out of the way one; multiple characters make note of a "Kao" often, but the actual Kao is never seen. Opening the world map and searching for Kao will reveal their location on the Arcane River and show their sprite, which prematurely reveals they're the Amnesiac Temple Monk encountered later on.
  • Item Crafting: Players can choose to take up two of five professions, which are Herbalism and Alchemy for making recovery potions and novelty transformation potions, Mining and Smithing for making armor and weapons, and Mining and Accessory Crafting for making capes, rings, earrings, pendants, and belts.
  • Joke Item:
    • Various holiday/seasonal items, like V-day roses, summer inner tubes, and Independence Day US flags.
    • Lethal Joke Item: At one point, Snowboards and surfboards were generally seen as the best weapons to use as an Aran, due to their attack speed being "Normal" rather than "Slow" like most pre-120 polearms. Although one would think that they would break after a combo of 100 or so...
  • Jerkass Gods: The Overseers in general. In Grandis, they force Trancendences to destroy the races they don't like and let Darmoor do what he wants. While they have let Maple World and Earth do what they want, they only step in when their power is at risk. They are the main reason the White Mage became the Black Mage and started his Transcendent killing spree
  • Just Like Robin Hood: You get tricked into thinking you're doing this in the Sand Bandits storyline, before doing it for real.
  • Juxtaposed Halves Shot: Luminous has his character portraits which depict his normal and corrupted side.

    K-N 
  • Karma Houdini: Demon Slayer killed who knows how many people under the Black Mage's orders and Phantom was a wanted thief- both had their crimes practically forgotten about the second they turned on the Black Mage.
  • Killer Rabbit: One of the strongest bosses in the game looks like this.
  • Kill It with Fire: A few classes.
    • Bowmasters can learn to summon a phoenix and a mini firestorm with their arrows.
    • Fire/Poison Mages are half this.
    • Blaze Wizards are two halves this.
  • King Mook: If you kill enough mobs of your level range (that is defined as 20 levels below your level to 10 above) eventually, an Elite Monster will appear, a large version of the mobs with more HP, better stats, and a special ability. With the latest upgrade, there are Runes of Darkness that can be used to summon three at once. If an Elite Monster is killed, every player who participated gains a few special private drops (meaning you cannot see the other players' drops. Also, if enough Elite Monsters are killed in one area, one of the Elite Bosses will eventually appear; while tough, killing it starts a much coveted Bonus Round where the participants can grab mesos, XP, and some good Power Ups.
  • Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game: The promo art for the Explorer classes features a lot of equipment and weapons that do not appear in the game itself, nor are these characters ever seen anywhere outside of animated cutscenes or website material.
  • Late-Arrival Spoiler: The World Tree and the Scrapyard are late-game maps, but are also involved in the Heroes of Maple and Black Heaven blockbusters. As a result the game automatically assumes that the player has done both already, and thus doesn't hide the fact that Black Heaven was compromised and crashed in the first place or that Damien managed to kill the World Tree.
  • Lethal Lava Land: Deep within the El Nath mines. One of the most universally reviled Jump Quests (which is now optional, fortunately) is done over lava, and requires you to wade through it back to the starting point every time you fall.
  • Level Grinding:
    • And how. This game is famed for its level grinding, although as time went on it became much easier due to addition of party quests, experience needed to level up reduced by 25%, and the family system which lets even non-payers get 2x exp for 15-30min. However, its still near impossible unless you spend several hours to level up at much higher levels.
    • The game changing Big Bang patch dealt with this issue somewhat by greatly lowering the exp curve though it's still in effect at higher levels.
    • The insane amount of level grinding makes Priests extremely valuable in parties. In addition to healing and buffs, Priests have a skill called Holy Symbol, which gives 150% exp. It also stacks on top of family buffs and 2x exp events. Phantoms can steal and use this skill as well, though their stolen version doesn't work as well.
      • The grind is no longer there. Even at higher levels it takes only a few hours to level… until you get to 140 or so.
    • Nexon recently lowered level requirements for job advancement- 3rd job to 60(down from 70) and 4th job to 100(down from 120). Even without a change to the leveling curve, it means less work to advance.
    • The famed level cap of 200, is now 250! Thought you wouldn't have the patience to earn 2 billion experience for one measly level-up? Try 16 trillion.
    • As of the Black Mage patch they raised it to 275, with 250 AND all arcane symbols being maxed out required to fight the Black Mage. Considering that Darmoor is set up to be the next big bad, this seems to be leading into much tougher areas in the future.
    • The current curve as of 2020 allows a very fast grind to around level 140, with things slow but not terrible until level 200. Level 200 onward is comparable to level 70 onward from the early days of the game and is where most of the main story really takes place. Double experience coupons are also given out frequently and the "burning" events triple the level progression rate for new characters. However the Arcane River areas require Arcane Force on top of your level, which is itself a very slow grind as a player can only earn a handful of Arcane Symbols per day- fighting the Black Mage requires having all 6 of them at level 20, which can take months to years to obtain as each region is level-locked AND maps require a minimum Arcane Force to fight the monsters present. Players may have the earlier symbols maxed out before they even reach later areas. Some events will sell Arcane Symbol coupons or give them out as prizes, which can speed things up a bit.
      • Unfortunately the Cernium expansion made this even worse. Getting to level 250, maxing out all Arcane symbols and defeating the Black Mage isn't even considered "end game" as the level cap was raised to 275. More symbols have to be earned and maxed out in the process just to fight the new boss.
  • Level-Up Fill-Up: Your character gets healed fully upon level up.
  • Lighter and Softer: The Friendstory spinoff, which is a fun little High School AU compared to the canon story where the Black Mage threatens to destroy the universe.
  • Limit Break: Was originally possible in the Mu Lung Dojo, but very unlikely to happen unless you were really sucking against a boss and somehow still managing to survive, in which case it wouldn't make a difference anyway. However, some classes with healing spells could exploit this.
  • Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards:
    • Pre-Big Bang MS was built on this. Mage!Beginners are weaker than the others because they don't add stat points to dexterity or strength (which affect weapons), while Warrior!Beginners add to strength so they out damage everyone else. The Mages advance to the first job earlier but in order to be optimal have to spend several levels building up passive skills before they could start building up their attacking skills while the other classes just raise their skill damage from the beginning. In the end of the first job thanks to built in mastery Mages are the most powerful class. But when Mages move to the next job they have to build up their mastery for every new spell while the rest of the classes only have to build but mastery for their weapon type (and they only have to do this once). So at the beginning of every job mages are the weakest while near the end they end up the strongest thanks to Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors.
    • And of course the Big Bang changed this by giving mages a mastery skill and changing spells from having their own formula to multipliers which retroactively nerfed them. But later patches brought them back up to speed.
  • Living Relic: Mercedes. Somehow, this is averted in the case of Aran, but this is possibly due to the relatively short lifespan before the freeze in comparison.
  • Loot Boxes: The gachapon machines that have been present since the start of the game, requiring real money to purchase($1 per ticket or $10 for a batch of 11) hand out either equipment, chairs, familiar cards or other useful or cosmetic items. The system did see an overhaul at some point due to European gambling laws, and further simplification in 2018 when all machines now have the same prizes rather than requiring players to visit specific towns for specific item lists(which had the unfortunate side effect of making it HARDER to get certain items as the item pool only expanded massively for every machine). The cash shop also has the premium surprise box($3.60 for one box or $36 for 11 boxes, again, real money required), which hands out a random cosmetic only cash shop item, the difference between these and normal cash shop equipment is that they are permanent, tradeable with other players until they are equipped, and often contain either discontinued or otherwise items not available for purchase. Considering that many of these items can be sold to other plays for a fair bit of mesos(many cash items can sell for billions), and the lack of an expiration date if you get something you like, they an be worth the random reward chance.
  • Loot Command: When attempting to pick up a rune.
  • The Lost Woods: Ellinia, home of magicians. Also, the forest surrounding the Haunted Mansion and the forests surrounding Mushroom Shrine.
  • Luck Stat: Much like STR is to a warrior/brawler, DEX to an archer/gunslinger, and INT to a mage, LUK is to thieves. LUK used to influence the amount of EXP lost when a player dies. Now, it only influences accuracy, avoidability, and a vague stat called 'hands' (Which was later removed).
  • Machinima: A growing number of these are on YouTube, amazingly. Varies from animated music videos and homemade series to movie versions of romance movies.
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Zeno Eclipse can fire a barrage of rockets out of his mouth that collide into the ground near him, damaging the player with the resulting explosions. Deet and Roi has a similar attack that it spams much more often.
  • Mad God: The Overseers and the 365 Ancient Gods. The former defeated the latter by using their mortal warriors.
    • Despite the people of Cernium worshipping Mitra as a benevolent deity, we find out that the god is actually insanely violent as the quest goes on. Ultimately Mitra declares the "adversary"(your main player character) as a threat due to being bonded with the seal stone and turns Seren against you in an effort to destroy what it perceives as a threat.
    • The term Adversary was givin to the chossen warriors of the Overseers, the creators of the Trancendents that defeated and sealed the Ancient Gods. These warriors were implanted with Seal Stones that helped them fight the Gods. As the player became one after Black Heaven, it is reasonable that Mitra would see the player as a threat.
  • Magic Versus Science: Xenon’s attack power increases with all stats… except INT, the magic stat.
  • Magikarp Power: At one point in the game, before various revamps and rebalancing patches, the Gunslinger class would embody this trope. Due to a wonky damage formula, and generally weak abilities, they did abysmal damage in first and second job even if they go a statless or low-stat build. Come third job they began to catch up in damage thanks to a more powerful main attack and various abilities that increase their damage, and in fourth job they receive insanely powerful abilities, giving them top-tier DPM, rivaling Arans and Night Lords.
    • Back when there were no other classes besides the original four, Archers suffered heavily from this. Compared to the Assassins (the closest other class in terms of general mechanics), Archers in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd job were underpowered and generally unwanted in training parties and the then current end game content. Cue 4th job which included More Dakka (bow users only however) and the ability to give the entire party the ability to Critical Hit and they're suddenly they're a hot commodity.
    • Fifth Job offers a mechanic where players can boost the power of some of their skills, including some skills in 1st-3rd jobs. Since the boosts to lower job skills are higher to compensate for the low base power of those skills, there are a few classes that can actually take advantage of fully boosting one of their 1st-3rd job skills to the point where it becomes more effective than their 4th job skill.
  • Marathon Boss:
    • Many of them but Pink Bean is very notable, with his 2 BILLION health, 5 statues (with a couple million to their names that MUST be destroyed) and attacks that can one shot anyone. Oh and you gotta do it in a time limit. Did I mention that the statues can nullify your Magic or Physical Attacks? The new Chaos version of Pink Bean will also heal itself in a fashion via respawning—a total of 15 times. What makes this figure truly daunting is the damage reduction backing it up—180%. That means without at least 45% defense ignore, you'll only inflict 1 damage. Of course, CPB's ability to seduce, reflect damage on multiple timers, and cancel your damage-boosting equipment potentials only complicate matters further.
    • Queen Cygnus is now the leader of this trope. She has the ability to call on her Knights with just as much health as herself, has the ability to lock you into place while you take damage over time, the ability to disable your Infinity Plus One Equipment, and inherits the traits of Pink Bean. The map also slaps you with a cooldown on potions. Brutal.
    • Two words: Hell Gollux.
    • As of the Black Heaven update Lotus is the king of this trope with 900 Billion HP on normal mode. How hard is hard mode? Try 8.1 Trillion HP. He also has all of the tricks listed above and more. He's so hard, that even the best players on every server consider beating him on anything but Easy or Normal impossible.
      • As of the Reutrn of Heroes update, Damien takes the cake.
  • Mascot Mook: Orange Mushrooms and green slimes are featured prominently on the official website and the game's login screen. Ribbon Pigs and Iron Hogs show up a lot, too.
  • Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest:
    • Either you're committing genocide on the order of hundreds of creatures a quest, or you're collecting random drops at the same rate.
    • The game itself is essentially a supersized version of this trope as endgame is purely about maximizing farming efficiency.
  • Mayfly–December Romance: In Magatia, this was Dr. De Lang's motivation for trying to extend his lifespan; even his daughter Keeny would have outlived him by a mile, to say nothing of his fairy wife Phyllia. It drove him to do anything to live longer, including studying notes from the Black Magician. Unfortunately, not only did he learn far too much about Magatia's origins, but his experiment failed spectacularly, caused an explosion that threatened the town's livelihood, and made himself and his family into social outcasts.
  • Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Many, many classes.
    • Angelic Buster was born without magic, meaning she has no MP bar. However, her skills use the Soul Battery system, meaning you can use a skill multiple times in a row so long as it lands a “recharge” on hit. If you fail to recharge, you just use a different skill.
    • Aran casts his skills by using MP and combo count, which is obtained by hitting the enemy with his melee swings.
    • Beast Tamer can summon four animal guardians. You can only have the skills and passives of whichever animal guardian is currently summoned.
    • Demon Slayer casts skills from Demon Fury, which is obtained by using the regular attack, Demon Lash.
    • Demon Avenger’s damage isn’t based on STR, it’s based on Max HP. His buffs generally increase his Max HP Tenfold, and his skills cast using a percentage of his HP.
    • Kanna’s MP is locked at a maximum of 100. It recharges 50 MP every few seconds, but the only skills that use MP are sub-weapons.
    • Xenon uses a battery system. Energy is recharged upon successful attacks and dodges or the emergency recharge skill. It’s used to cast certain buffs and fire missiles.
    • Thunder Breakers can Lag Cancel using … every skill.
    • Zero is played as two characters. When using an attack as the other character, the character you were originally playing as sticks around for a few seconds. During that time, using an attack will have both characters fight. Additionally, attacks use Time Force, which regenerates so quickly that it’s never a problem.
  • Meganekko: Claudine, at least in her civilian doctor's outfit. It should be pointed out that there are very few characters in this game, not counting players with cash shop items, that even wear glasses in the first place- they could likely be counted on one hand.
  • Merchandise-Driven: Strangely subverted, despite the game's 10-year life span. There isn't much tie-in merchandise out, and what little there is has mostly been released in South Korea only- a few 3D papercraft town environments, art books and a small handful of building block sets by Oxford. The only US-released tie-in was the short-lived card game, which most players only bought for the in-game item codes(and since those codes no longer work, the cards themselves are all but worthless these days). There was a Maplestory store in Korean that was opened for a short time in 2015, selling various merchandise such as plushies of Pink Bean and Slime and figures of Maplestory 2 characters. 2018's Maplefest event finally saw proper figurines of the 6 heroes as well as other convention-exclusive merchandise only sold at the show. Good luck finding much of this without checking ebay frequently and preparing to pay a fortune in latecomer tax. This was even worse in Korea where the figurines were sold through the Cash Shop in-game for NX and in extremely limited numbers.
    • Presumably the reason, as tends to be with a lot of video games, is that the main source of income the company relies on is the game itself, extra merchandise is seen as purely superficial and unnecessary if the game is profitable.
  • Mind Screw: After clearing the Afterlands theme dungeon, in which the character apparently dies and fights their way out of the afterlife, they wake up having been told they were only out for a few minutes. Your character isn't sure if they simply dreamed they died or if they died and are now dreaming they're alive.
    • The Halloween 2020 event does drop a few hits that the Afterlands may be a real place.
  • Min-Maxing: Putting all EXP towards the few stats crucial to the specific job class. EVERY class has some sort of formula for stat allocation. Typically, secondary stats should be some function of the player's level, while the rest goes into the primary stat. Don't even THINK about putting anything in HP or MP, let alone any other stats.
    • As of Tempest, this has now been simplified to its logical extreme: You only need your primary stat for any and all equipment purposes. Combined with Global's simplified accuracy formula, there is practically no purpose whatsoever for putting points into any other stat unless making an HP build or reaching the natural stat limit of 999 (which otherwise happens a few levels below 200). The Auto Distribute Stat button has been adjusted accordingly, making the whole stat system little more than vestige.
  • Modesty Towel: Surprisingly, one of the better items to have while Min-Maxing. It gives you lots of speed.
  • Mon: Monsters will sometimes drop a card that can be picked up and clicked on in your inventory's use tab so you can summon that monster as your familiar to have it attack enemies and give you a buff, after which it can be summoned for several minutes before its Vitality meter empties and can get more Vitality meters if you use multiples of its card (to a maximum of 3). The chances of cards dropping is high in lower levels, but at higher levels you need to kill about a million of that monster to get one.
  • Monster Compendium: Monsters usually drop a card (larger than the above-mentioned familiar cards) that when picked up stores information on that monster in your Crusader Codex and allows you to see their HP, MP, and drops.
  • Money Sink:
    • Getting the class mounts costs ridiculous amounts of money for a casual player. Made worse with Evan, who has to pay for it multiple times as Mir grows larger!
    • Taxi and Cabs can transport you to various maps and dungeons for a((n) ever increasing) fee. Also there's a quest when an NPC straight up asks for 5 million mesos for very little justification. There's also a much higher-leveled quest that requires you to drop *50* million mesos for no apparent reason.
  • Money Spider: Possibly every monster save for the leprechaun, who actually has reason to carry money. Slyly done with the spider monster in the Black Wings mines; if you collect its familiar it increases the chance of items to drop from monsters by a large percentage.
  • Monster Is a Mommy: Mushmom, Zombie Mushmom, and Mushdad/Blue Mushmom.
  • Mook Horror Show: Due to the very fast respawn rate, Level Grinding effectively turns into this, with hundreds of adorable little mushrooms or slimes or piggies entering the scene and being instantly mass-murdered by Herd Hitting Attacks.
  • More Dakka: All ranged classes except Cannoneers with various degrees. Turned up to eleven with Bowmasters, who can drop an Arrow Blaster while firing Hurricane – both fire so rapidly that there’s no gap between the arrows.
  • Ms. Fanservice:
    • Kyrin is perhaps the closest example, given the chibi style of the graphics. She wears a tube top, leather skirt with a slit up the side, and thigh-high black boots.
    • Although Shumi, the dumb blonde schoolgirl, (as well as a few other characters that share a similar sprite) sits with her butt practically flashing the camera. If the sprites were any more detailed, the game would have a stricter rating thanks to Ms. Panty Shot.
    • One NPC sprite is of a woman in a pink Playboy bunny outfit, complete with large breasts. This one was present since the early days of the game and has even become a recurring character for Maplestory 2.
    • Aran is built on this, at least the female version- her default clothing has a top that leaves a lot of cleavage showing, her Maple Rising Star outfit and Secret Story comic appearance had her unbutton her shirt just to show off, and her Heroes of Maple outfit had an even smaller top with slits in the pants to show off leg.
    • The main boss of the Alishan region is a large-breasted woman in a leaf bikini.
    • Tail, a character from the 2018 Golden Harvest event, is purely this- despite being a Halflinger, a species where every other member has the same teddy bear body, she has a human body with large breasts and wears a sports bra and tiny shorts.
  • Multiple Life Bars: Alpha and Beta don’t share HP bars and regenerate 4% of their maximum HP per second when out of combat.
  • Murderous Mannequin: These appear as enemies in the Kerning Square area.
  • Mythology Gag: Whenever a storyline is completely replaced with a new one, the old storyline is generally still referenced as events having happened in the past. For example, the revamped Cygnus Knight questline features a re-enactment of the Master of Disguise attack from the original questline as a training exercise.
  • Near-Villain Victory: Black Heaven was very close to bombing Edelstein, and the player character would have died if not for Shinsoo's Tear.
  • Nerf: Maplestory has gotten infamous for this in recent years, with their version of balancing basically being "let's lower everyone's damage output because certain classes are a bit too strong!" Needless to say, this has garnered negative criticism, with the displeased calling the game "Nerfstory" due to just how prevalent this trope has become.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
    • According to the stories on the official website, the Cygnus Knights do this twice. First, they invaded Von Leon's castle, causing him to turn to the Black Mage for vengeance. In the future, Cygnus also steps right into the Black Mage's trap because she wants to find the Tree of Life for her knights.
    • The pre-Big Bang Alien Invasion event focused on Dr. Bing, an Omega Sector researcher, developing a crystal in the future that basically powered all technology and kept the planet safe. That is until his past self-peeks into the future, sees this crystal and takes samples to study it. This ruins the environment terribly and forces the population into protective suits, some of which are sent to the past to recover the stolen crystals and repair the damage... only to be mistaken as alien invaders which prompts the Omega Sector to send adventurers into the future to steal even MORE crystals, assuming the damage to have been caused by an invasion in the future, making things even worse! The end result relied on time travel and changing history to avoid the entire mess.
    • Everyone’s afraid of the Black Mage. Guess who actually ended up releasing the Black Mage from his seal? The explorer.
  • Nightmare Weaver: According to Shinsoo, the Bad Future your character encounters in the Gate to the Future is a nightmare caused by the Black Mage using the Dream Stones, and he assures you it is not likely to occur. (We have to trust Shinsoo on this, but seeing as the Black Mage did recruit a girl with the ability to manipulate dreams in the Cygnus Returns update, it makes sense.)
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
    • Zombie mushrooms, giant zombie mushrooms, ghost pirates, toy octopi riding generic block golems, just to list a few.
    • The transportation from one continent to another continent. There's a boat-plane-train with candy paint and swirly propellers!
    • Papulatus, a ghost vegetable thing riding a robotic clock that casts magic. That's pretty crazy.
  • No "Arc" in "Archery": Arrows (every projectile, really) only ever fire straight, or +- 30-or-so degrees. The only exception is Wind Archer’s Trifling Wind, which likes to perform shuttle loops before actually targeting anything.
  • No Ending:
    • Previously, the Silent Crusade questline, which ends with your partner quitting offscreen before you can make your confession to him/her, and you never see him/her again after that.
    • Played straight with Zero’s plotline. When everything is all good and done, and you enter the Maple World, you talk to the Black Mage’s commanders… and that’s it. Everything plays out normally.
    • Thanks to Jett being region-exclusive, her plot sort of ends with Burke's death and the recovery of the core. The fact her quest opened with the death of her king and several planets worth of bounty hunters after her is never brought up again, the one bounty hunter after her in the early promo videos never shows up in the game at all, and even the revamp didn't explain any of this. Furthermore, due to being region exclusive, she never factors into the main plot at all.
    • The Black Mage is dead? It turns out he was a minor threat compared to Gerand Darmoor, who leads the High Flora. Grandis has become the main story focus(Maple World was merged with the Grandis solar system, to excuse keeping the game's title relevant) with Seren being the level 275 boss and more story expansions coming.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Right before the Black Mage was sealed, he punished the heroes who fought him by casting a curse on them. Given, he is a villain.
  • Non-Human Sidekick:
    • The purchasable Pets. They can do various tricks when given verbal commands, and level up, learning more tricks and gaining the ability to talk. They're fundamentally all the same, though, with specific tricks they can do at certain levels, and after enough grinding, typically gain the ability to speak English. They automatically pick up all items and mesos. (A recent update.) Handy!
    • Cannoneer pals around with a handy monkey in a propeller cap who performs attacks with the character.
    • Eskelade, who is a dragon inside an arm ring.
  • Noob Cave: Everyone has a different one. Maple Island, Ereve, Rien, Momijigaoka, etc. Subverted with Edelstein, the Resistance starting area, which is a very large city that still has quests and training locations available well into a character's third job, presumably due to there not being enough room on the map to put it anywhere near Victoria Island.
  • Noodle Incident: It's been revealed in the Fall 2012 "Red Leaf High" event that Athena Pierce once "ate an entire donkey".

    O-S 
  • Only Smart People May Pass: Mir’s math quiz in Mirror Leafre. Also, the quiz to go on a date with PST during the final chapter of Friend Story.
  • On-Site Procurement: Kind of. NPC stores generally don’t sell equipment above level 50, but there are so many classes, so finding equipment of your level AND class was too difficult. Equipment is much more common now, allowing most players to find on average one piece every one and a half minutes of combat.
  • One Stat to Rule Them All: You only ever put AP into your main stat. There was a time where you would need a secondary stat, but most players would only put it at five points above your level, and some people didn’t even use it at all.
  • One-Winged Angel: Von Leon of the Lion King's Castle.
  • Organ Drops: Some monsters have particularly gruesome drops, like the Evil Eyes who sometimes drop their tails and their bleeding eyeballs upon death.
  • Orgasmic Combat: Queen Cygnus, SERIOUSLY. Listen to her voice while fighting her.
  • Our Hero Is Dead: Near the end of Black Heaven, the Player character gets poisoned by Gelimer, and the antidote gets destroyed right in front of them. The Hero really does die, but Shinsoo's Tear is used to resurrect them at the very end.
  • Palette Swap:
    • Pretty much played straight with older monsters but there are subversions. But it's not avoided with many equip items - some armors and weapons can have up to 4 different color versions, each with specialized stats... like 1 less STR and 1 more DEX! Yay?
    • Equips added after pirates were released come in one uniform color which includes all pirate equipment and most items beyond level 100.
  • Pamphlet Shelf: Averted. The books in Zero’s Temple are randomly selected in a pool of about 20.
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: In the Mushroom Castle quest line, the Prime Minister disguises himself with... a mole. Naturally, everyone but the Player Character is fooled.
  • People of Hair Color: The living forms of the Goddess Tears all share the common trait of blue hair, or in one character's case, blue fur. Once Alpha and Beta figure this out and start looking specifically for blue-haired people, the Shadow Knights plant fakes who have blue hair and fake time magic, causing the duo to waste time on them. After Arsen ends up hospitalized, his hair becomes brown, presumably its natural color.
  • The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: There are at most only mere hints that the Pirates, Thieves & other classes even do the things you'd expect them to do, as the players are general adventurers with differing skill sets and there is little room in the story to show any of these groups engaging in their supposed activities. Possibly justified due to the Maple Alliance once the Black Mage became a threat and now Darmoor's presence, but not so much in the early days of the game.
  • Player Headquarters: A more or less standard for classes these days is a beginner skill that lets them teleport to some kind of home base. These vary in their usefulness but generally include the minimal amenities a town would (or sometimes is literally their starting town), such as a storage unit and an NPC store. Some notable examples include:
    • Phantom: His airship the Lumiere. Notable in that rather than being a place he teleports, it's a place that flies to him. He can access the storage inside and then still exit Lumiere to the same map he called it from, or have it fly to any airport in Maple World.
    • Angelic Buster: The Lovely Buster Suite is notable in that it is entirely superfluous and serves no practical function, but exits into Pantheon, a full town and the most notable fast travel hub in the game.
    • Zero: Their temple in Mirror world serves as a hub that connects the entire rest of Mirror World. In addition to regular amenities, it also has their own special coin shop that runs on currency earned in Mirror World and a small library they can use to boost their attributes every day.
    • Xenon: Veritas. As an Underwater Base it technically exits to Aquarium, but the Promessa is parked there and like the Pantheon Portal, can be used for fast travel to any major town in Maple World.
  • Player Party:
    • Encouraged with EXP boosts while partying, and mandatory in some areas, like the Root Abyss. However, when one or two people can clear an entire map by themselves between spawns, more people are generally not welcome. Most monsters have not kept up with the players' Power Creep over the years, so this issue comes up regularly now.
    • Party Play Zones specifically enforce this, typically featuring very monsters with very high HP to require multiple players working together to defeat efficiently and even higher bonus exp boosts, the most popular of these featured a 50% per member bonus, for a staggering 250% exp bonus for a full party.
  • Player Versus Player: After years of bickering about the lack of this trope, it finally gets introduced in the Chaos Update. Years later … no one ever does it.
  • Plot Coupon That Does Something: Goddess’ Teardrops increase the level of Rhinne’s Blessing, rather than level.
  • Plot Hole: Thanks to region-exclusive content never being worked into the main plot, certain story elements that seem like they should happen are never considered, such as "why didn't they just use Jett's orbital space ship to blast Black Heaven out of the sky?"
  • Pop Quiz: Given during Friend Story. Requires knowledge of MapleStory, painters, and musicians for some reason. (Justified as Friend Story is set on Earth, so they'd likely be asking such questions. The former makes no plot sense whatsoever. Although since there are only so many questions and you can repeat this part infinitely, even if you don't know the answer, you can just keep playing until you guess everything.
  • Power-Up Mount: Averted. You can’t attack while on a mount, unless it’s Wild Hunter’s jaguar. Although many mounts provide you with some kind of jump skill, most class’ inherent jump skills are already faster.
  • Prestige Class: For example, magicians. They start as Magicians, then can become a Fire/Poison Wizard, Ice/Lightning Wizard, or a Cleric. The next job advancement goes onto Mages or Priests, then Arch Mages or Bishop. And that's just for Magicians.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: Mostly played straight with some exceptions.
    • Anyone can do any job save for Mihile, who is always male, and Angelic Buster, who is always female.
    • While contemporary promotional art usually picks a gender for a given class, in-game cutscene/dialogue sprites and voice acting (for the classes that have it) will correspond to the gender you assign your character.
    • Current meta armor is all gender-neutral. Compare this with back when sub-Lv. 120 armor was still in the meta (no longer the case as the game now takes your character to lv. 200 very quickly) and gender-specific armor for females tended to be cheaper due to lower demand.
    • This would occasionally fall under the variant of the writers just not caring that the character might be a different gender than expected, usually female instead of male. Some earlier questlines would have NPCs assume your character is male and treat them as such, playing up to masculine ideals, flirting with them despite being female themselves (this being a game where player marriages can't be between characters of the same sex), or outright using male pronouns. The Kaiser storyline, introduced in the early 2010s, is especially bad about this and does all three within the first thirty levels.
  • Rainbow Pimp Gear:
    • Back in the day, someone truly Min-Maxing would've probably been wearing a bathrobe, a Zakum Helmet (Complete with glow), some white gloves (with or without lightning bolt), shoes, earrings, and cape. Needless to say, NX items are recommended.
    • Big stone helmet with flashy glow, towel around the waist, pink cape. The standard adventuring gear amongst funded users. Animal mask optional.
    • This has been averted with the advents of the potential system, which gives bigger stat bonuses on higher-leveled gear, and equipment set bonuses (for example, +50 attack for wearing 3 pieces of Chaos Root Abyss gear).
    • Thanks to the Mysterious Anvil item, it's now possible to make any item you wear look like any other item of that type. Cue level 100 players in level 140 Empress gear and level 200 players in beginner clothing.
  • Rain of Arrows: Played straight with the Ranger's Arrow Rain skill. Inverted with the Sniper's Arrow Eruption skill (which has arrows shooting upwards from the ground instead).
    • Hayato’s Summer Rain skill is this. Additionally, Explorer-Thieves can get it as well.
    • Wind Archer's Chilling Fusillade also qualifies for this trope. The best part? It can be controlled.
  • Random Encounter: Crimson Balrog. Escape is recommended if you aren't trying to fight it.
  • Randomly Drops: See entry on that page for details.
    • There seems to be a serious case of Not Available in Stores going on for all weapons and armor, past about level 35, making the game particularly painful in the case of item hacks.
      • Averted with the introduction of shops in Orbis that sells equips to level 50 and Sakura Castle Theme Dungeon that sells equips up to level 70. That's still nothing as your character will likely reach 100 very quickly.
  • Recoil Boost:
    • Gunslingers get the Recoil Shot skill that lets them jump horizontally.
    • Cannoneers get Blast Back to move horizontally, and Cannon Jump to launch themselves vertically.
    • Blasters have Detonate that allows them to do either at the cost of using up one unit of ammunition.
  • Recurring Character:
    • Athena Pierce (also known as Helena), the main Bowman job instructor, has been frequently appearing as a plot-important character in Korean time travel expansions. Odd considering how the main job instructors for the other four classes are not featured as often, but who appears to have spent her entire life fighting the Black Mage In the Alliance cutscenes and the Explorer storylines she is the representative for the entire Explorer Guild.
    • Athena Pierce is said to be over 1000 years old. By contrast, Dark Lord is a title, not a name. It's been mentioned in-game that the current one is the ninth to hold the title. The previous one was killed. The other two may have had their lives extended by magic but are showing their ages. Kyrin is rather young, having only recently founded the Pirates and was raised from childhood by Athena Pierce until running away as a teenager.
      • The Mercedes patch plot revealed that Athena Pierce is not only old, but she's the only elf (besides her late father) that was not frozen solid with everyone else in Elluel. Not only is she ancient but she's been the only one of her kind that's been around for centuries.
    • Dances With Balrog DOES show up in the Ellin Forest area... although he's named Crawls With Balrog because he's only an infant.
  • Regenerating Health / Regenerating Mana: Depends on one’s class. By default, you can heal 10 HP by just standing there, which is next to nothing, but some classes such as Mercedes and Buccaneer have innate HP and MP regeneration that even works during combat.
  • Relationship Values: You and your pets.
  • Repeatable Quest: They did not introduce these until later versions despite growing and rather vocal demand for them in the early days.
  • Resting Recovery: It doesn’t mean much, but chairs do heal more HP than simply standing there.
  • Retcon:
    • Done several times, mostly with the expanding story of the Black Mage. Mercedes used a bow in Aran's flashback, before it was revealed that she used Dual Bowguns. Freud/Freed was also having stated to have fled the battle to protect Afrien's egg, which eventually became Mir, Evan's dragon. However, in the new Silent Crusade quest line he and his dragon Afrien shown to have left early to block off the moment in time when the Black Mage was sealed, using all his energy.
    • Cassandra, the fortune telling NPC used in various event quests, was originally a middle-aged woman with gray hair... now she's a young woman with blonde hair. No explanation, of course.
    • Hey, remember the Silent Crusade quest chain? The one where your character falls in love with a member of the Silent Crusade? As of the Alliance Rising patch of February 2012... well, none of it happened. They've reset the entire Silent Crusade story with a new quest series.
      • As of 2014 they've reset it again. Only... they didn't change the dialogue this time around. Things get really confusing when an NPC tells you to go to Ludibrium when your mark is in the Nihal Desert.
    • Ellin Forest is full of retcons or outright mistakes. It's a mess! Despite its age, the recent revamp changed nothing and made things even worse with no attempt to fix things.
      • The expedition is said to have fled Orbis and crash landed on Victoria Island right after the battle of the five heroes against the Black Mage. Athena Pierce is a teenager and talks about her home as if it were in Orbis. As of the Mercedes patch, Athena was only five years old when the battle happened and the Elf hometown is on Victoria Island, not far from Ellinia.
      • Athena and Yuris describe themselves as fairies, despite being elves.
      • Yuris states she's pregnant and is considering the name "Kyrin" for her daughter. Much of the other game lore suggests Kyrin isn't quite that old, only now they seem to be going with the idea that elves simply live a long time even without magic and Kyrin now also has an older brother who was mysteriously not seen in the past Ellin forest.
      • Yuris is an elf, despite Mercedes lore suggesting Athena Pierce and her father were the only two elves who left Elluel before the battle with the Black Mage. And now we have Lucid, an elf who also left prior to these events.
    • Little attempt is made to make a coherent story without retcons. It may be a mixture of poor translations, or they just don't care.
    • Prior to the Pirate revamp, Sharyl, prince of whales lived in the bottom of the Nautilus and had a one-sided crush on Kyrin. Now he's merely a visiting dignitary whom you will find several maps over.
    • In prerelease material and later, Aran was consistently played up as being canonically male, including his appearance in Silent Crusade Reloaded and as a chair. Then, between updates, Aran was inexplicably retconned to be female at least as of Heroes of Maple. Then in 2018 the male version reappears as a new chair.
      • To make matters worse, the male version is still occasionally used in certain scenes(the Maple Alliance meeting cutscenes even have two versions of the still shot with Aran). The licensed Oxford building block set uses the male artwork on the box, even though the minifigure is female. Worse still, the character design director merely gave Aran's gender as "Aran" when prompted to provide the canon gender. Male Aran is used in the Silent Crusade's time travel segment, even if you are playing as a female Aran, and while dialog with Maha acts as if it's the same character, no mention of the swapped gender is ever brought up. Alternate universe non-canon comics from Korea set in high schools have worked around the issue totally by depicting them as two separate characters.
      • Aran, Evan and Demon Slayer were all either/or in-game or official artwork while other unique characters can be either gender in-game, however Nexon began animating cutscenes for the game and it would likely become a massive expense to animate & voice multiple versions of each scene(the number of combinations needed for Heroes of Maple alone would have been rather high), which is why they likely changed to a canon gender for specific characters. Demon Slayer even has both versions of the introductory cutscene animated and voiced depending on player choice.
    • Future Henesys was originally just that- 20 years into the future after the Black Mage had escaped. This was later retconned into being an illusion world created by a mystical girl that the Back Mage recruited to demoralize Maple World.
    • Red Leaf High was renamed to Maple Leaf High, for no apparent reason.
    • Previously we were hinted at, or outright shown, that Maple World prior to the Black Mage's rise to power was somewhat medieval with a heavy aesthetic based on magic. Come MapleStory 2, set during that time, which has modern cities, cars, 2010 and later type touch screen cell phones, MP3 players, etc.
    • The five heroes are said to have two mages and no pirate because Pirates didn't exist back then. The introduction of Shade as the sixth Pirate Hero is hand waved with the character having suffered a case of Retgone, but that doesn't really address the notion that there weren't pirates at all.
    • Early plot elements said Athena Pierce escaped with her father. He's never been seen and modern cutscenes suggest she left on her own.
  • Revive Kills Zombie: Although not invoked directly, heal will target enemies, but only damage undead.
  • Reward from Nowhere: Low-level hunting quests in Henesys and mid/low-level quests in the Excavation Site allow you to receive a reward from a sign.
  • Romeo and Juliet: Plot used as a party quest in Magatia, where two alchemist groups (debating about the use of machinery in alchemy) are having a bitter rivalry.
  • Scunthorpe Problem: Ever tried matching wits with MapleStory's swear filter? The October 2013 update managed to make communicating in the game almost impossible. Nexon decided to add several HUNDRED new entries to their swear filter, ranging from words people would want to use in-game such as "GM" or "event" to odd entries such as "Blink-182". Not only was the filter expanded with many things that don't belong but it's made chatting with other players an incredible chore.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can / Epic Fail: The explorer plot quest unleashes this.
  • Secret Character: To some players, Zero. You have to be level 100 to even make one, but that’s the easy part. Zeros are generally locked and can only be made as some part of an event. Additionally, their plot and level design is laid out in such a way that they’re generally in their own little world from level 100 to 180. This makes them rare to some players.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: Some people choose to remain as a Beginner even after Level 10.
  • Self-Referential Humor: Upon reaching his 2nd job advancement, Phantom comments that he remembers it taking much longer to reach level 30 years ago.
  • Semi-Divine: The Trancendents. Nine of them were created for each of the three worlds, with each world having one of Life, Light, and Time.
    • They are managed by the Overseers, warrior gods that passively control them to keep themselves in power. However, most of the Trancendents do not know of their origin, as the power can be past down through descendants, or stolen. They can be killed, but they cannot kill each other or take their own life as this prevents the Overseers from controlling fate. This sets the White Mage on his path to become the Black Mage, and plan to 'break the chains' that the Overseers have on the world. As he cannot kill himself nor the others, he needs to find people to do it.
    • As quoted by the White Mage, [[Long ago the world was ruled by selfish gods. These gods used their powers freely, without regard for the worlds or the mortals who inhabited them. Chaos reigned. The Universe could not abide such madness. It forged chains of law to force the gods and all of creation back into order. Over long years, chaos subsided.But the universe was not yet satisfied. The ancient gods, chained into an unnatural slumber, could still awaken someday. Above all else, the universe wanted certainty.It wanted to reduce the variables, and create a predictable future. And so, the Transcendants were born. They served as jailors to the gods and enforcers of order. With chaos completely eradicated, the future became set in stone.]]
  • Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: The familiar system allows you to do this, but not very feasibly – they do fixed damage, and not very much of it.
  • Shamu Fu: Thunder Breakers can now punch people by using sharks. Before Cygnus Reborn, they could also throw them. Ultimate Explorer pirates can still throw the sharks, but they don’t do much damage.
  • Shifting Sand Land: Ariant.
  • Shoot the Dog: Damien's sword is possessed by the spirit of his and Demon's evil ancestors, who devastated Masteria in their lust for the power of a Transcendent. It corrupted Damien with this same desire and nearly did so to Evan as well. In order to prevent it from doing any more harm, Demon has to destroy it, but doing so comes at the cost of also killing Damien.
  • Short-Range Long-Range Weapon:
    • The Bows, Crossbows, Guns, and Claws (used for Throwing Stars), when compared in scale to characters, seem to only fly a few feet before the relevant projectile simply vanishes from existence. Justified overall in that there's no way to usefully have arrows and bullets fly the tens/hundreds of feet they could travel (like in real life), and further justified with the Throwing Stars and Claws in that those are meant to be used at similar ranges in real life to their in-game counterpart.
    • Pirates hold their handguns with one hand, and don't aim, so they probably only could reasonably hit monsters from that distance. Bow-wielding Hunters and Wind Archers seem to pull the bowstring back for only a little, so an arrow would be able to only fly a couple dozen feet at best anyway. Played straight for crossbowman, though.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Some ninja gear and attacks bring to mind Naruto. Cash Shop items have referenced anything from Korean mythology to movies to a certain anime about "befriending" others (Check the Cash Shop, and you will find Fate's Bardiche and Signum's Sword... somewhat.) Monsters have been anywhere from Shout Outs to affectionate parodies to "isn't this from another game?".
    • The look of the game is very similar to the Wonder Boy series (especially the Monster World games).
    • The Evan class is highly reminiscent of the Eragon series. Everything from the character starting out as a farmer, to the symbol appearing on the character's hand, to finding the egg in the woods which hatches a blue dragon basically screams ERAGON. (In the first Eragon book, the main character even uses the alias of "Evan" at one point.)
      • What's odd is that some Korean players theorized that the class was based on some Korean indie fantasy novel/comic book/whatever.
    • In the Omega Sector, we have the Mesorangers and an NPC who is a Will Smith look-alike that oddly enough sports a black suit and sunglasses. Not to mention that you find these NPCs in a level where you fight aliens...
    • The Mushroom Castle quest chain is a heavy example of this. Ghostie is Phantom. Mikhail uses Mihile’s KMS name and says butchered Knight Solaire quotes. Anne Nah is Anna from Frozen (2013), down to the point of singing hit song “Do you want to build a mushroom-man”. Bowser. HIMSELF is there! Oh, and it’s always at war with A tyrannical penguin.
    • Someone in the Nautilus says "This message brought to you by the letter ARRRRR!"
    • While it's not as tight of a fit as the Evan/Eragon connection, Aran awakening in the trailer is very reminiscent of Aang's awakening in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
    • There is also an item in the Cash Shop called the Alchemist Overall. It consists of a red jacket, black pants and black shirt.
      • There is also an outfit that resembles Winry's work outfit, and headgear that looks like Alphonse's helmet.
      • Now there's the Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter's hat, with red wig and blue face shadow, from Tim Burton's remake of Alice in Wonderland.
    • Starling and Crow, the two NPCs of the Silent Crusade, were name Sheryl and Crow in Tespia prior to the public release. No doubt this was changed to avoid some legal hassles with the singer.
    • A robot NPC in New Leaf City is named T-1337.
    • It may be a coincidence, but both adamantium ore and plates are orange. An episode of the old 1990s Fox X-Men cartoon showed off a solid bar of adamantium as a scientist was showing off to Wolverine prior to his infusion. It was orange. Though the inclusion of adamantium as a metal could also count as a Shout Out.
    • Also, the concept art for Mercedes looks like every elf in The Lord of the Rings. And did I mention that she's an archer and the Elf Queen? Here and here. Definitely a Shout Out to Legolas.
    • The various anime crossover projects between Nexon and Aniplex... Here's an example.
    • Ignoring the fact that the homes are meant for humans, almost every house in Henesys looks like the homes of the Smurfs.
    • The Silent Crusade storyline (2012 version) centers around portals opening across the land that the player must enter and fight monsters, a secretive group of heroes that recruits the player to fight an evil threatening the land, and an ancient wizard who has returned and plans to release an unstoppable villain onto the world, said villain being the wizard's close mentor and leader.
      • The final path in the Temple Of Time is called the "Road To Oblivion" and contains burning piles of lava rock everywhere. And a couple of final gates at the end of it look like lawyer-friendly copies of Oblivion gates, they're just missing the pointed corners.
      • The Dragon Tail Mage Robe, a level 140 armor for mage characters, looks like a black recolor of the robe worn by Uriel and Martin Septim. The "dragon" part of the name is significant as both men were "dragonborn".
      • Athena Pierce is now warning people of taking an arrow to the knee in her training center.
      • When Dances With Balrog quizzes the player on what's being built in Twilight Perion, one of the possible choices is "a giant siege weapon", a reference to the weapon the Daedra used to destroy Kvatch and almost destroyed Bruma with.
      • The Nova race are half-human, half-dragon people. They were included not long after Skyrim was released and "Nova" is pretty close to "Dovah"
      • Eunwol/Shade suffers nearly the exact same curse that the Gray Fox was inflicted with.
      • The High Flora are the Thalmor with more advanced technology. "Dalmoor" is also rather close to Thalmor, no doubt urging the use of "Darmoor" in the US
      • The overall plot of the Black Mage event drew heavily from the Molag Bal storyline of The Elder Scrolls Online while the White Mage's final speech, where the player is informed that they will now become a god, feels lifted from Jyggalag's words after being beaten in the Shivering Isles quest.
    • Mar the fairy, in Red Leaf High, humming out "dooby dooby doo" in her random dialog.
    • Jett's former partner is named Burke, referencing Carter Burke from the film Aliens.
    • During the Kanna storyline multiple figures from the Sengoku period will show up as NPCs and give quests. Among them is a female Uesugi Kenshin. While there are theories that Kenshin was female, the design bears some semblance to that of an infamous strategy games rendition of a female Kenshin.
    • Humanoid A, an android in the alchemist town of Magatia is probably based on Bicentennial Man as it visually resembles Robin Williams and the android from that film quite heavily.
    • A hairstyle available exclusively through a random hairstyle coupon in Kerning City resembles that of Rukia from Bleach.
    • Demon Slayer looks a bit like Alucard from Castlevania, mixed with a bit of the Elder Scrolls Dremora race. Demon Avenger only makes him look more like Alucard.
    • The scene of the Crystal Garden meeting Black Heaven for the first time evokes a similar scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation when the Enterprise D met the Borg Cube. Topped off by the interior of Black Heaven having creepy tech patterns with green glowing lights amidst poorly-lit rooms everywhere.
    • The Ludibrium airship music is titled "Flying In A Blue Dream".
    • When you're infiltrating the Black Heaven your number is 24601.
    • The general dialogue for Alvesh in the Riena Strait theme dungeon is "I am the watcher in the snow".
    • One of the available cash shop weapon masks is a chainsaw rifle resembling the same weapon from Gears of War
    • Upon reaching the time travel area of the Silent Crusade quest, your character will refer to the crack in time as "timey wimey." The male starter overall for a Resistance character is a long coat and scarf strongly resembling the 4th Doctor's attire, and of course a large afro is in the available hairstyles for that extra incentive.
    • While female Aran does seem to go against Aran being a male name, she does have a ponytail, so...
    • From the Star Squad 13 event we have mini games entitled "Beam Me Up'' and "Tower of Wobble", and the large phone-shaped chairs given out as prizes include clear references to 7 Of 9 and Doom demons.
    • The fake Athena Pierce in Ruined Henesys makes a reference to "Wind of Change" by rock band Scorpions.
    • Athena Pierce and Cassandra are clear nods to Greek mythology- Cassandra being a fortune teller and Athena Pierce being a warrior woman like the goddess she's named after.
    • The warrior job instructor is named Dances With Balrog and his supposed son in the ruined future illusion is Wrestles With Wolves.
    • During the Grand Athenaeum story "The Shadow Alchemist", Will eventually corners Fang, holding a red potion that will show him the truth behind his existence, and a blue one that will allow him to remain in ignorant bliss.
    • One of the monsters in Esfera, the sixth area of Arcane River, is a turtle with sprouts on its back, named Ahtuin.
    • During the Zero quest line, Alpha tries to sing. GMS uses the opening lyrics to "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey.
    • After defeating the Master of Disguise as a Cygnus Knight, he reminds you that despite all your rage you are still just a rat in a cage.
    • Black heaven features several to Mega Man including vehicles similar to the ride armors from Mega Man X & a later section features disappearing blocks like those that show up in many games in the series. Gelimer himself also appears to have been somewhat inspired by Dr. Wily.
  • Shows Damage: The boss Zakum slowly breaks down and falls apart as its health drops.
    • Bergamot and Nibelung, two giant robots from Neo City, do this- each is actually 3 enemies, killing one switches to the next copy, and so on. Their attacks are affected based on which part blows up.
  • Simultaneous Arcs: Aran's and Evan's storylines are very clearly happening at around the same time as each other. Evan helps Francis recover from his fight with Aran and Aran cleans up the giant Nependeaths Evan is tricked into planting.
  • Slippy-Slidey Ice World:
    • El Nath. Sliding can be prevented by buying and equipping snow boots.
    • There is a scroll that can also add "spikes" to any pair of shoes as well as a scroll that adds cold protection to capes (regardless of available slots). During the Maker skill, they had to be crafted. Now they merely drop from monsters and Maker was removed in favor of Professions. Though it's only a 10% scroll, so good luck with that.
    • Arans can exploit the sliding. The ice carries momentum and the Arans can use a quick jump boost to make them slide really fast. When it wears off... they're still sliding pretty fast.
      • Though with a bit of practice, almost anyone can use the sliding to their advantage.
    • Outlaws (3rd job Gunslingers) get this as well in the form of Recoil Shot, though its a backwards leap and deals damage to enemies.
  • The Slow Path: Aran travels back in time to the Altaire Camp to find the Heroes left an important letter with Athena Pierce. Unable to take it then due to time travel reasons, Athena (correctly) assumes she will still be alive in Aran's time and promises to save the letter until then.
  • So Last Season: Throughout the Black Mage arc, the player obtains the power of a Seal Stone to become the Adversary, giving them the power necessary to stand up to and defeat a Trasncendant. Following the Black Mage's defeat, the very first part of the Darmoor arc ends in Darmoor succesfully destroying the Seal Stone, preventing you from using it again to defeat him.
  • Solo Class:
    • Really, every class. At this point, every class gets some amount of in-combat and out-of-combat mobility. Low HP or MP can be offset by the character card system, accessories, and link skills. However, it wasn’t always that way…
    • When MapleStory had builds, clerics were possibly the only class that it actually makes some sense to turn into a HP magician, since their Magic Guard drains from the one thing their heal can't restore, instead of healing them directly. Nevertheless, this pretty much has to be supplemented with HP equips and done by someone who really knows what they're doing, or you end up with a class that takes roughly 30 hits to kill enemies of an equal level.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance:
    • From the cheery (and catchy!) music of the Swamp of Despair to calming underwater cave music while bone fish kill you horribly.
    • Most places have this, mostly because the music in the game is so beautiful. There are a few exceptions, like for Zakum and Horntail. Otherwise, feel free to listen to the music as you spam your HP potions because you're dying.
    • Almost always averted with a major boss, especially one that is significant to the plot. For example, Balrog. And although it's more of a super-easy puzzle without any real fighting, the Black Mage counts in the introductory cutscenes for the heroes as they try to seal him away (Luminous, Shade, Mercedes, and the like).
  • Spam Attack:
    • Tons. Dual Blade is the worst offender of this, performing so many slashes and stabs that you can’t really see this.
    • Buccaneer’s Octopunch hits eight times, nine with the hyper skill. Thunder Breaker’s annihilate can hit fourteen times, but there’s only one punch.
  • Spell My Name With An S: Erev/Ereve/Ereb. Alos, Freud/Freed
  • Spikes of Doom: Spikes, thorns, and brambles. Especially terrible during jump quests. However, if you hit them at the right angle, you can damage boost forward.
  • Springs, Springs Everywhere
  • Stance System: Hayato’s stance increases his combat statistics while draining his MP.
  • Sticks to the Back: This used to be a feature of only a few large weapons as they were introduced, but The Black update made an effort to extend this to nearly every 2-Handed weapon in the game, to the joy of many players as said weapons generally obscured 50% of their sprite with the previous idle stance of the character holding their weapon in front of them.
  • The Stinger:
    • After the credits for Black Heaven, a cutscene shows Arkaryum and the Black Mage discussing Gelimer's defeat and the seal stones being reborn in a new enemy (the player). The Black Mage decides to send out Damien, and he's more than ready with an army of what's most likely other demons. Another quest after Black Heaven shows that Francis and Orca escaped from Black Heaven before it's destruction and Orca meets Guwaru, the King of Spirits, and despite having defied their law by gaining a human body, asks him to help her unlock the true power of a spirit of darkness.
    • After the credits for Heroes of Maple, a cutscene shows Arkarium managed to survive being killed by Damien by moving his soul into his snake familiar. Black Mage instructs Hilla that it is time to open the door to allow the player to come to him, leading into the Arcane River storyline.
    • At the end of Mushroom Shrine Tales, Genkou is still alive, though where he is is unknown since the whole screen is black. A shrouded figure called the One-horned Man approaches him and says that he will take what power remains in Genkou. The silhouette of the One-horned Man is the same as that of Dunas, a boss from the Neo Tokyo area, which is no longer available in JMS.
    • At the end of Black Mage, Melange gives a report of the events to a superior that turns out to be Gerand Darmoor.
  • Squishy Wizard: Apart from Fort-mode Beast Tamer, Magicians generally all have low HP. However, this is averted in that there are many ways to get around it. Every Magician class (well, except for Beast Tamer, who has medium HP anyways) has a skill to take damage into MP. It’s made even better by using the Mana Eater skill that explorer magicians tend to have, which lets them siphon MP out of targets (and you do get a nice amount of it). Even so, character cards and accessories can boost your HP by at least a thousand easily.
  • Stable Time Loop: The Silent Crusade plotline eventually leads to the player travelling back in time and becoming the reason the heroes survived the battle with the Black Mage. This means the heroes can go back and time to save themselves.
  • Stance System: Hayato’s stance increases his combat statistics while draining his MP.
  • Stone Wall:
    • Subverted with the Paladin class after the Big Bang patch. They literally have up to eight different skills that directly affects the amount of damage they don't take, plus a dependable self-recovery skill that instantly heals them.
    • ... And their DPS is surprisingly on par with many others even on neutral-element monsters.
  • Stripperiffic: Kyrin(thigh-high boots, skimpy skirt and tube top), Shulynch(cut-off shorts, ripped shirt tied in the front), Hilla(a few straps across her body), to name a few.
  • Sugar Bowl: More like World of Sugar. Every monster is adorable, every female has a high Moe-factor, the environments are bright and whimsical. There are some darker elements (mostly to do with the Black Mage,) but overall this is a child's fairy-tale world.
  • Suicide by Cop: Beta, believing herself to be so thoroughly corrupted that she cannot become the Transcendent of Time, attacks Alpha, hoping that he will kill her in self-defense so that he can go on to become the Transcendent. Alpha (who remains in the player's control) does fight back, but he uses non-lethal force and talks her down from her attempted suicide.
  • Super-Deformed: The graphics in general.
  • Super Move Portrait Attack: Hayato, Kanna, and Zero.

    T-Z 
  • Take That!: The second promo video for Maple Rising Star, the game's 8th Anniversary event, is a 3 minute middle finger aimed at American Idol. First is the female judge, clearly mean to be Paula Abdul and even called "Paula", depicted as either being incredibly stupid or on serious drugs(consensus in the comments section leans towards the latter). The Simon Cowell lookalike is such a rude ass that the Black Mage gets offended and murders him on the spot for insulting both contestants and Paula. This is on the game's official Youtube channel!
  • Talking Is a Free Action: Averted. Don’t try to turn in quests if you’re not in a safe area.
  • A Taste of Power / Teased with Awesome: Many classes start you off as a level 250 character and remap the attack button to your main attack.
  • This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: A very old version of the Ludibrium Party Quest required a character with maxed-out range bonuses, which, at the time, was archers only.
  • Tier System: Rare, Epic, Unique, Legendary.
  • Time Stands Still: One of Zero’s Transcendent skills allow you to stop time, locking your health bar in place and making you invincible.
  • Time Trial: All of the Mirror Dungeons track your fastest time.
  • Timed Mission:
    • There’s no reason for said dungeons to have a time limit. Many boss raid fights have a time limit of one hour... which is a lot given that most inexperienced players fall within the first few minutes. It's not that long for the later boss raids, where the bosses have billions of HP.
    • There's also a hidden one in the Balrog raid. If 120,000 damage isn't dealt to the boss before five minutes pass (not very hard in a five man party of Level 65-100 players), everyone is booted back to the lobby and they're forced to start over. This is meant to discourage the players from simply waiting out the first phase, as the damage doesn't transfer over to the second phase.
  • Title Theme Drop: Whenever Wizet comes out with a promotional video and song, it plays before the login screen (but can be clicked to skip). One of these was the RED Promotional Video, which is also played during Friend Story when Francis decides to… not… stop… stalking…
  • Tornado Move: Kaiser, Buccaneer, and Battle Mage have this.
  • Tree Top Town: Ellinia.
  • Tsundere:
    • Starling of the Silent Crusade. "Don't you dare treat me like a little girl.", "Do what you want! I don't care!", "Enough smalltalk. Get to the point.", "Me? Worry about you? Ha!"
    • Crow of the Silent Crusade as well, particularly at the Magatia and Leafre parts of the questline.
    • Well, they were, anyway. That was the original Silent Crusade story... the retconned new version, not so much for either of them.
    • Definitely Lazuli, who says Alpha is only her “murder buddy, that’s all!”
    • Orchid, particularly during the Black Heaven Blockbuster, where she does her best to avoid showing gratitude for the player character.
  • 20 Bear Asses: Infamous for being much more like One Thousand Bear Asses, though the Big Bang update has eliminated quite a bit of such quests. Almost mitigated by the fact that almost all classes can One-Hit Polykill monsters by the truckload, and stuff respawns almost instantly. But then you realize how long it takes to loot the dead monsters and drops are not guaranteed.
  • Underground Monkey: Mushrooms. THE MUSHROOMS. EVERYWHERE. They aren't the only mobs that fits the Trope; Snails, Slimes, Pigs, and Stumps do too. Most of them have a Boss counterpart. (Or more than one.)
  • Under the Sea: Aqua Road. Popular for its Goby Houses and especially for Poison users since it's very easy to move around the map and poison everything.
  • Unwitting Pawn: Evan is lured into joining the Black Wings under the pretense that the organization is doing good for Maple World. In the process he not only does their dirty work but gets the Seal Stone of Ludibrium for them.
  • Vague Age: All of the generic classes seem to be written as KidHeroes of some young age, but the art style and the fact that characters can get married makes it hard to tell.
    • Generic Resistance characters in particular are implied to be elementary school students (their tutorial opens with them playing hide-and-seek with the children of Edelstein who see the player as a peer, and actually joining the Resistance involves talking to the headmaster of their school).
    • Almost none of the established characters have official ages, either. The closest we have are Kaiser and Angelic Buster, who are roughly 25 (the flashback cutscenes showed them as kids at age 5, with the present day being about 20 years later), and Athena Pierce who is between 900-1000. Kinesis is stated to be 18, while his friends Yuna and Jay are 18 and 17, respectively.
    • Heroes of Maple suggests that Phantom, Luminous, and Mercedes are at the very least old enough to pass for adults in the FriendStory universe. Likewise, the FriendStory universe counterparts of Cygnus, her Chief Knights, Neinheart, Lilin, Aran, and Francis are teenagers. But while some characters definitely aren't the age of their counterparts in the Maple universe, it's unclear how close the rest of them are to their counterparts.
  • Valley Girl: Cassandra, after the Big Bang retconned her. Her speech and stupidity have gotten progressively worse since then.
  • Virtual Paper Doll: Cash Shop items let players dress up their characters.
  • The War Sequence: The Dimensional Invasion Party Quest features a bonus stage that places the party in the middle of a war between two enemy armies. It is very long, the enemies are very strong, and is very rewarding if you can defeat them all before they defeat each other.
  • We Hardly Knew Ye: There are several instances of NPC characters that seem important, but get killed off not long after their first appearance (i.e. Gilmore in the Cernium questline as an example).
  • Wham Line: Damien revealing what his plan was:
    Damien: The World Tree is dead. I ate it.
  • Wham Shot: At the end of Monad, Alika slips into another dream after departing Abrup. There, she finds herself in a dark room full of ankle deep water before being warped into a crystal dome. The camera pans... And Oda Nobunaga, Burke, the Sengoku characters, and Naricain from Masteria through Time show up, followed by the Antellion, with Alika pulling out what seems to be a fragment of it, hugely hinting that Stellar Detectives, Sengoku, the Region Exclusives, Masteria through Time, and Monad are all tied together.
  • Whole-Plot Reference: Some have noticed that the plot of Friendstory's expansion ''Rock & Roll' is much like that of My Little Pony Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks.
  • Wide-Eyed Idealist: Evan. He/she wants what's best for Mir the dragon, and actually has a quest calling Condition for Joining the Secret Organization, where Evan gets duped into following the Black Wings.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: You have to learn how to sit via a subquest. Admittedly, you learn how to use a chair you can sit on anywhere, which heals you over time, but still... it's sitting down.
  • You Killed My Father:
    • The Black Mage killed Athena Pierce's father, which drove her insane and led her to form an army to hunt him, and became almost as bad in the process. People began to fear her, until she was finally forced to confront her darker side in combat (which is the "clone" that Bowman players fight for the 3rd job advancement). Since then she's been the Bowman job instructor and a respected member of Henesys, her efforts redirected into teaching others how to fight and to oppose the Black Mage.
    • This happened AGAIN with Kyrin. Both of her parents were killed by the Black Wings, and she was taken in and raised by Athena Pierce... until Kyrin overheard a conversation and learned what happened, then ran off on her own to hunt down the Black Mage. She eventually returned, as the head of the Pirates, though while she primarily serves as the captain of the Nautilus and Pirate job instructor, there are many in-game hints to suggest she's still hellbent on defeating the Black Mage.
    • In the case of the Demon, it's a "You Killed My Mother and Brother" despite the Black Mage's explicit promise to avoid doing so in exchange for the Demon's services. Subverted with the brother. Damien is currently the Black Mage's newest Commander.
  • Your Magic's No Good Here: The opening for the Kanna class has her in Japan on our world at level 200 with all her abilities. At the end of the tutorial she's transported to Zipangu in Maple World and she has to relearn all her magic.
  • You Shouldn't Know This Already:
    • Manually going into the Resistance HQ to make your first job advancement as a Resistance member won't work; you have to use the invitation that the Headmaster gives you.
    • At one point, Mercedes must track down and speak with Athena Pierce. It doesn't matter how many times the player has seen Athena before, or even if Mercedes has already accepted a completely unrelated quest from her; she still has to ask another NPC about her whereabouts. (Justified in this case, as Mercedes being good at history but totally oblivious to everyday events has no concept about Athena Pierce, despite having passed by her hut at least ten times!)
    • Some of the 20 Bear Asses quests will deliberately require you to kill the monsters, as well as grabbing 20 Bear Asses, just so someone can't simply give you the 20 Bear Asses needed. No this doesn't make any sense in context. The game makes sure you have to work your ass off.
    • Pocket slots... you must reach a Charm level of 30(requiring either lots and lots of fame, charm point bonuses from NX items or high level equips, or lots and lots of cologne item drops), then you must take a rose clipping(found by Herbalists during random digs) to Big Headward in Henesys to receive the slot. Does he magically do anything, doe she stitch a pocket into your clothes? No... he just tells you to put stuff in your pockets. Again... you have to be told by a hairdresser to put stuff into your pockets because it's not obvious to you from the start.
  • Zerg Rush: Dimension Invasion, blackgate City, and Kritias Invasion scenarios involve fighting wave after wave of endlessly spawning mobs.

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MapleStory - Angelic Buster

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