Hello.

The theme of this post is interaction, with a focus on unusual or distinctive ways to engage with characters in games. Interaction is part of every game, but it is especially prominent in RPGs, where players step into the protagonist’s role and communicate with other characters, so much so that every action could be considered a form of interaction. Here, I have gathered some examples from MapleStory that I found particularly unusual.

When provoking an NPC comes at a price

On floor 49 of the Tower of Oz, Dorothy’s illusion presents a silhouette quiz featuring monsters from Victoria Island. You need to answer 5 questions correctly to clear the stage, while each wrong answer deducts 5 minutes from your remaining time inside the Tower of Oz.

Clicking on Dorothy’s illusion during this stage brings up 4 options. The first 3 are the sorts of choices you would expect, but the 4th and final option is rather unusual.

Selecting it immediately sends you back to the Tower of Oz lobby, regardless of how much time you have left. Since the Tower of Oz currently has 50 floors, placing this option on floor 49 seems like a deliberate trap, which makes it an interesting design choice.

Before this option was revised, it also included the expression “beep-beep-beep-beep,” and the dialogue that followed was different from the current version.

The wording seems to have been revised because it implied language that could get a player muted in chat. When that dialogue was still in place, however, some questions featured identical silhouettes, such as those of Jr. Cellion, Jr. Grupin, and Jr. Lioner shown above, leaving players no choice but to guess with a 1/3 or ½ chance of success. Since the 5-minute penalty for a wrong answer would immediately ruin a ranking attempt, the option was understandable in context.

I also remember these unfair silhouette questions, including the examples above, being removed around the same time. From then on, wrong answers came down to skill rather than luck, which made the revision to this option understandable as well.

Watching NPCs grow up

The recently concluded 엘라노스 event let players watch an NPC in the form of a puppy grow up, and some said they felt a sense of emptiness once it ended, having seen the character regularly for 3 months. An earlier event offered a similar experience, but with human characters rather than an animal like 엘라노스.

This was the theme of the 19th-anniversary event, Maple Momentree, held a full 4 years ago in 2022.

During the event, players cared for Ellie, named after Ellinia, and Rith, named after Lith Harbor, and watched them grow. There were 4 growth stages in total, each with its own sprites and illustrations.

Seeing an NPC grow from infancy to adulthood is uncommon, so this left quite an impression on me.

Players called the baby versions “Abubu,” borrowing from the NPCs’ babbling dialogue rather than using their official names. I also remember the android offered as one of the final rewards being nicknamed “Abuburoid” as a result.

Raising a boss monster

This quest lets you watch a monster grow rather than an NPC, as you raise Timer, one of Ludibrium’s master monsters. It is still available today.

Obtaining Timer’s egg involves using Tick-Tock and Chronos eggs rather than defeating Timer.

You receive Timer’s egg after completing the monster-hunting quest that follows.

Timer is cute as an adult, but this younger form is even cuter. You can help it grow by dragging the Clockwork Worms you collected while hunting earlier over to it as food.

Each growth stage requires 10 Clockwork Worms, for a total of 30.

Once Timer is fully grown, you can return to the NPC to collect your reward.

The reward is Empathy, perhaps because the experience resembles raising a pet. With the Item Pot’s item-eating creatures now gone as well, quests like this have become rare. Between that rarity, Timer’s cute appearance, and the relatively unappealing reward, I think keeping Timer in your Use inventory rather than handing it over is worth considering.

Calling the same NPC every day for 30 days

Finally, FriendStory, set in Kinesis’s home world, includes a quest that feels out of place even today: a mission to call Orca.

After obtaining Orca’s phone number as you progress through FriendStory, you call her and have a conversation every day for 30 days. The calls can only be made between 8 and 9 p.m., however, and the conditions are unforgiving: missing even a single day out of the 30 means starting again from the beginning.

Each of the 30 days has its own conversation, with subtle changes in the NPC’s responses as her attitude gradually softens. Although she has not been seen since the end of the Arcane River storyline, the attention to detail here offers an unusual example of just how much prominence she was given in official content at the time. You can read the dialogue for each day here.

The quest’s only reward is this chair featuring the girls having a pillow fight.

The reward alone would not usually justify that level of dedication, and the achievement that includes this hidden story reportedly still has a completion rate of just 0.03%. For players who like this NPC, though, the conversations themselves may be part of the appeal. I find it hard to imagine another quest offering this kind of communication with an NPC in the future, which makes this a particularly distinctive example of interaction.

Thank you for reading.