MapleStory Idle RPG Reviews

Edit: thinking in this further, this is why NEXON created this unneeded problem.

The proliferation of this app spin-offs is a strategic shift by NEXON to appeal to us 30 year olds who now have more money and less time but the itch for nostalgia. Do not fall victim to this marketing strategy while skewing what this games boasts about delivering. This is low effort-high monetization for a quick dopamine hit of nostalgia.

This game is designed to look awesome, stylized and to many… nostalgic. This is the epitome of where mobile gaming is today. Pinching you for the card swipe instead of hours of grinding. Leaves a sour taste in your mouth. It feels shallow and intentionally creates a time deficit so you ask: Charge $5 for quick pass or grind 10 hours? That's the illusion of choice, predatory and gross. I downloaded last night, was feeling excited about it, here I am at 3 the day after uninstalling. Thanks for your time this app, I used to play in 2006. This isn’t for me, or for anyone of the fact- it’s for your shareholders to keep padding those wallets. Gross!

Nexon has disappointed all of their players with their recent actions and mishandling of compensation. 1st, the lies told about the cube system causing multiple people spending thousands of dollars rolling for something unattainable. 2nd, due to this issue, compensation was provided to the players as a “sorry”. Only for nexon to mess up in their end and give more compensation than they wanted to. This cause an unexpected maintenance and caused multiple accounts to be ban for 12+ hours (big issue as this is a time base game), due to us using the compensation they provided to us. 3rd, accounts were reverted back to what they were before they fumble the compensation, no compensation for what we really wanted (potential cubes). Instead they gave us crumbs, in attempt to fix the issue. I game I enjoy since launch and got all my friends to play has since left a terrible impression and distrust of anything they say. It’s a shame as I really enjoy this game.

Yeah okay cool game, nostalgic for lots of people. Then you get to above lvl 30 and then not only can you not compare to other players YOU NEVER WILL unless you start paying loads of money.
Classic p2w game that is only fun for 3 days before you realize it’s targeting an audience that doesn’t realize why so many micro transactions for a mobile game is terrible(kids). Weapon summon pass 11$, champ summon pass 19$, paywalled upgrades to certain game features, oh and like 10 different types of currency’s including free red diamonds(not really free considering you can spend money to buy them) and paid blue diamonds.

MapleStory got into main controversies for rigging their pull rng and scammed users on stats that did not apply in game. This prompted a huge controversy and led to the developer team offering full refund on game. At the same week Nexon’s stock fell by 19%. They kept shortening the eligible refund period claim time (from entire February to just within 15 days) and have used many misleading language and refuse to announce the exact pending duration on refunds. Then they banned f2p and all users when the game incorrectly distributed compensation while pulling 2 unannounced maintenance. The team is extremely irresponsible and have constantly made unannounced changes to game that takes away users’ rights and gave no communication.

Do not even attempt to download the game or spend on this. You may highly potentially risk face consequences to any account associate with this game (Nexon related) due to the unpredictability of the gaming developer’s decision.

The fact you need to be on the same server as your friends to actually play and this not being explained at all at the beginning is the most brain dead move you could have pulled... hours gone as I wanted to play with friends we finally get to good levels and low and behold we cannot play because the game devs were too brain dead to explain or just have the ability to channge server with out having to restart from 0. Uninstalling with MASSIVE disappointment and will drag this game on the floor everywhere im able to post about it...

It’s a very simple Idle RPG. I usually don’t like when there is too much to do but here there is too little to do. Not enough growth per day unless you buy and upgrade your character. Even then you’ll get stuck on a stage for days because you can’t improve enough on just the daily idle play. It’s edging people to buy and pay for upgrades for progression and at a certain point progression is slow with small purchases so you’d have to make bigger purchases just to feel like you can move onto the next stage. Anyone who is interested in this should just save their money and play the original mobile this app game.

Typical South Koreans at Nexon ready to take your money by making this P2W heavily in every sense after level 50. In no way or aspect will you ever be strong without spending money on this game. The likelihood of getting a character from tickets are slim as getting the weapons you need to level up and get stronger. Their game is rigged to make you spend more just so you can slowly catch up on and than they’ll slow you back down again. Every so often they’ll throw you a 2 day offer that will help you level up just for you to realize you dropped $40 here and $60 there to increase your global ranking. That’s it. There is nothing to gain from this game. It’s just a company that’s been greedy since Beta MS.

Considering what Nixon is capable of creating, they should be embarrassed by how low quality this is. Way too many resources and dailies to keep track of, terrible UI, super tiny buttons that you can’t even tell what they do, the auto combat is really inefficient and even a bot would play it better, the “companions” don’t even look anything like they’re advertised as, and the character customization options are PATHETIC. There’s barely any, and as far as I can tell you have to pay in order to change anything, there’s no free way to change from the default appearance. You literally have to pay to have a black character, it’s insulting.

Upon first starting this game I found myself impressed and immersed. The animations are crisp, monster and background designs beautiful, and I felt there was a ton of depth to the game. However, every day played since then has lessened my impression of this game. Once you figure out the few things to do as daily activities there is nothing else to do. It ends up being a super narrow idle game. You slowly gain equipment and skills that let you get to the next stage. That’s all there is to it. Maybe 3 minutes of gameplay to do every day. On top of that it absolutely wrecks my iPhone 17. It gets crazy hot and drains battery. It gets frequent LARGE updates which seems silly for a game with absolutely nothing to do- why is it so bloated? Worst is how the game caters to “whales” (people who blow obscene amounts of money on mobile games to eke out an advantage). If you want the game to progress slightly faster they will give you the option to purchase weapons and such directly for absurd prices. I’ve seen upwards of 70 dollars for job tickets. If you play this as a free player or player who puts in 5 or so dollars a month realize you will NEVER climb the leaderboards or make any sort of progression. It also seems silly to spend such large amounts of money on such a surface level game with nothing to do.

You will never make it in any top 100 without having to pay an arm and a leg, feels so CP blocked without having to spend money or wait a day or more to level up or get daily resets and if they don’t progress you enough you’re waiting another day… I miss the OG maple story on PC. Its fun and addicting on the mobile version but there isn’t always something you can do. Feels less like a challenge and more of a money grab unfortunately. Just need more to do, more challenges as a player rather than more challenges for my wallet. I really hope things can be improved because I really do love maple story and the grind but it just feels like there’s nothing to do unless you spend your hard earned money.

Played for a week or 2. Paid for the monthly membership.
The last day I played I got on in the morning but when I tried to log in later in the afternoon….”server error occurred”… haven’t been able to get on in 3 days and there is no way to contact support at all in the game menu where i kept getting kicked out. Playing the game for not even a month and then getting a soft ban is dumb. I’m uninstalling. The server I joined was riddled with 3rd party vendors and scammers/bots asking people to join there discord if they want to stay in the guild…. Decent game good concept for the maple story franchise…lots of bugs and bots and scammers and no real way to report any of them. What a joke. Think I’ll just stick with maple story M!

Never played a this app more than a couple hours but I’m very addicted to this. Pick it up for a little then put it down. The progression even for free to play felt balanced and doable until just now around 215M. For instance, I’m only at star force 9 out of 25 on some things and I have failed about 10 times of attempts to get it to 10. In a game that type of resources are limited and hard to get, failure should be less often. I’ve hit a wall of progression, still will play but come on devs.

Game starts off fun. Then you realize it’s repetitive. Same missions, same rewards, same everything.

At first I enjoyed the game because I didn’t think it was one of those pay to play games. But after some time, it will take you forever to level up or unlock high level weapons unless you pay. You’re literally stuck with the same weapon and same skills until you accumulate enough skills (may take days, maybe even weeks), because getting rewards eventually begins taking longer and longer to achieve as you level up more. If you don’t pay, you’re stuck in the same level for quite a while because realistically the only way to get to the next level is to power up enough to beat the bosses.

I am a free-to-play player when it comes to iPhone games so this review is based on that. Overall this game is nice for nostalgia and definitely has the old school maple story vibes to it. My major gripe with this game is that it takes FOREVER to progress. A lot of games similar to this style of “idle” (we will get to that below) at least gives a nice idle/exp ratio where you can progress at a nice pace. If you are strictly F2P prepared to spend a few days idling at the same area.

Also, this game says idle but in reality it punishes you for idle gameplay. A lot of the dungeons (exp, weapon, equipment, etc) and even map bosses require you to actually play the game if you want to progress. And the controls in this game aren’t great…there’s input lag and delay.

Average game for Maple Story enjoyers

The game is fun. Quite a bit to do as an idle game. I’m not sure if it’s because my phone is older, but I can’t play longer than 5 minutes at a time. The back of my phone gets extremely hot and the battery drains about 10% every few minutes. It’s also laggy, and “Waiting on Server Response” pops ups every 10-20 seconds which takes away from the smooth gameplay.

I only play idle games on my mobile phone. If I want a normal gaming experience, I just use a different device. But when it comes to idle games, this one takes the cake. It is very engaging, and im now 3 months into my gameplay and can still easily find 30-45minutes of active game play in this idle game. Nostalgia for the this app art style definitely adds to my enjoyment, but the gameplay is still solid. The game does have tons of microtransactions, but im free to play (maybe one day I’ll spend 5 or 10$) and still feel like my account progress is steady and rewarding. There are no mandatory ads, and do not throw ads in your face. Every day there are 5 ads you could watch to bolster that days progress, but it’s your own choosing, and they dont try to trick you into watching ads; very nice. I’d be very excited to see how they could enhance the social aspect by combining servers and channels, so you arent in a silo. And make account wide progress a game feature, such as having multiple characters on 1 account buffing each other. Maybe a new/additional companion system where you can select guild members, or your own alternative characters as companions too. This game is definitely staying on my phone for a long time to come.

I have played on and off casually since the PC version came out on PC many years ago. I just started this mobile version but it seems to be a good mobile translation. A fun addition is the random sprites from NexusTK, a game developed by Nexon many years ago. It brings me back to my childhood.

Really fun gameplay, fantastic once a day check in see progress type of game to bring a bit of fun to your morning. If you’re looking for a new game to play for 15 minutes in the morning it’s a perfect fit.


The monetization is pretty crazy, pop ups for $50 packs that expire in 1 days and constant large price tags items for power and progression being put in front of you. It’s all very optional and the game is still fun without them, but personally I wish I could just disable the pop ups entirely.

However, there is an option to purchase one year of no ads for a VERY reasonable price, and I think that should be rewarded and I thank the devs for giving us the option at a REASONABLE fee

Ever since The Big Bang on Maple Story, I lost interest in the game since everything became too easy and unchallenging. I’ve tried playing Maple Story M but I had a hard time using the virtual joy stick and couldn’t get the same experience as the old Maple Story. This version brings similar experience as the old Maple Story and even better since you don’t need to use the virtual joy stick to control the game. I love it how there’s plenty of quest and missions to encourage players to level up. Very creative on making different dungeons to receive different rewards. It’s very similar to the old version yet challenging and doesn’t feel old!

this game is a money sink: they charge you for literally everything, from cosmetics to gacha with DISGUSTING rates (how is a 0.01% rate without guarantee even legal? oh cuz the guarantee is behind $200 of battle pass.). even for an idle game, there’s nothing to do. if you download this game and play it for maybe 30 minutes, congratulations you’ve experienced the ENTIRE gameplay loop. It’s so boring people just run this on a separate device and let it auto 99.9% of the time. devs also had to issue a huge refund to the player base cuz they were gonna get sued due to false advertising on how a game mechanic worked. do I need to say more? rated 5 stars so this doesn’t get shadowbanned, but it probably still will.