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When MapleStory’s low-level stretch started to feel dull, party quests completely changed that part of the game for me. Moon Bunny Party Quest and Ludibrium Party Quest, especially, turned time that used to be spent hunting alone into time spent working through something together.

Today, I want to look back on how MapleStory party quests helped me break out of that boring early leveling grind.

To be honest, the early part of MapleStory can feel pretty boring at times. When you keep hunting the same monsters on the same map over and over, there comes a point where your hands just stop. You sit there enduring it, watching the EXP bar crawl up little by little, and then eventually you log off—and if you’ve played Maple for a long time, you’ve probably gone through that pattern at least once.

Then I first found out about party quests, and the feeling was completely different. Instead of hunting by myself, I was clearing stages with other players, and suddenly the game itself felt different. In pre-Big Bang Maple, party quests were core content for players who were worn out from solo play, and they were one of the best ways to level faster than grinding alone. Back then, though, if you wanted to do a party quest, you had to physically go to the region yourself. If you wanted Moon Bunny PQ, you went to Henesys; if you wanted Ludibrium PQ, you made your way to Ludibrium and built a party there. Even the trip itself was already the start of communicating with your future party members.

It was the kind of era where you could type, “Anyone want to do a party quest together?” in channel chat and people would gather almost right away. Looking back now, even that whole process—checking levels, checking classes, seeing whether everyone met the requirements, and then joining up—was a pretty fun experience in itself. There was no matching system like there is now, so you had to run around and make it happen on your own, but in a way, that’s exactly what created a sense of connection with your party members.

Moon Bunny Party Quest is a PQ you enter from Henesys, and its main gimmick is that party members call out the colors of the rice cakes they each get in chat so everyone can match them properly. People would type abbreviated color names like red, blue, purple, pink, brown, and yellow, and at first I remember thinking, what exactly is going on here? It almost felt less like playing a game and more like taking part in some kind of color quiz.

But once you actually try it, communicating with your party while matching the colors is a lot more exciting than you’d expect. Everyone has to quickly post the rice cake colors they got, and once the right combination comes up, the whole party can move forward, so every single person’s role feels important. If even one member calls out a color too late or types it wrong, the whole run gets stuck.

At first, I didn’t even know that if you got brown and purple together, you had to switch the order when typing because of the chat filter. I still remember my first time doing the PQ, typing them in the wrong order, getting filtered by chat, and then getting lightly scolded by the party for it. Little mistakes like that somehow became part of the charm, and part of the humor, of party quests. And when we finally collected all 10 rice cakes and cleared it, there was always that moment where everyone in the party got excited together.

On top of that, if you collected 20 more rice cakes, you could get a bonus reward, and once the party got fired up about gathering more, time would pass before you even noticed. Even though these were people you had only just met, party quests had this way of making it feel like you had accomplished something together. Moon Bunny PQ was the kind of PQ where you could feel that charm in the lightest, most cheerful way.

Ludibrium Party Quest was much more complicated than Moon Bunny PQ. You entered from the 101st floor of Eos Tower, and you could only proceed with a full party of 6, so even putting the group together was part of the strategy. You needed at least one magician with Teleport, one thief who could use Dark Sight, and you also needed a hunter and a crossbowman to get past certain stages.

If those conditions weren’t met, you either couldn’t start the PQ at all or you would get stuck at a certain stage and be unable to continue. So from the very beginning, party composition mattered, and that naturally created a whole culture of players going around looking for the classes they needed. It was the kind of time when the Eos Tower chat window would be full of messages like “Looking for magician for LPQ” or “If there’s a thief, come join us.”

The biggest feature of LPQ was that every class had a different role to play. The magician moved party members around with Teleport, the thief used Dark Sight to get through certain sections, and because everyone had their own job, the stages simply would not progress unless the whole party stayed focused. One person making a mistake could affect the entire run, so communication between party members was absolutely essential.

Even from Stage 1, where you collected passes and handed them to the party leader, and Stage 2, where you had to coordinate signals for the trap map, the party needed to be in sync. In Stage 2, breaking the second box would send everyone on the map into the trap map, so the usual method was to send one person there first, wait for the “ㄱㄱ” signal, and only then go through the portal. If that timing got missed, the whole party could be sent into the trap map and end up in a situation where you had to start over from the beginning.

The most infamous part of Ludibrium Party Quest was Stage 8. That stage was basically a luck check with 1/126 odds. If you got stuck there, sometimes you had to start over from the very beginning, and when that happened, party reactions usually split into two kinds. There were the people who got genuinely mad, and the people who just laughed and said, “Let’s go again.”

What was interesting was that even when the party got stopped at Stage 8 and had to restart from scratch, a lot of groups stayed together and tried again instead of leaving. By that point, you had already built a certain sense of connection just by clearing the earlier stages together. You started with total strangers, but after a few stages, people would naturally start joking around, and even when someone made a mistake, the mood often turned into one where everyone just laughed it off together. That’s why party quests felt like more than just a leveling method.

The final boss of Ludibrium Party Quest, Alishar, is a pretty intimidating boss at level 52 with 125,000 HP. It uses status effects like Seal and Darkness, and it puts pressure on the party by summoning Chronos and Platoon Chronos too. Its long-range magic attack hits hard enough that the party really only holds together if the Cleric keeps Heal going.

Because the outcome depended so heavily on how well the Cleric performed, the whole party could be in danger the moment the Cleric got hit with Seal and couldn’t cast Heal. So the Cleric had to bring plenty of status recovery potions, and the rest of the party had to keep an eye on the Cleric’s condition while moving as well. It was the kind of fight where everyone had to look after each other.

I still remember how excited everyone was the first time we cleared Alishar. Since the boss clear EXP was divided and shared, that moment when everyone watched their EXP bars rise together felt completely different from hunting alone. Even now, I still remember the sense of accomplishment that came from clearing all 9 stages and defeating Alishar within the 59 minute 30 second time limit.

As I rotated between Moon Bunny PQ and Ludibrium PQ, that feeling that the low-level range was boring disappeared completely. Unlike solo hunting on the same map over and over, PQs gave you something different to do at every stage, and because you had to keep communicating with your party as you went, there was always something to focus on.

The EXP efficiency was better than mindless grinding alone, sure, but more than that, the biggest reason was simple: it was fun to do it together. Sometimes, after running a few party quests with people you had just met, you naturally ended up getting friendly with them, and later on you’d find yourself doing PQs with those same people again. A surprising number of connections people made in MapleStory really did begin in party quests.

If you’ve ever felt bored by solo hunting in MapleStory’s low-level range, I really recommend trying Moon Bunny PQ and Ludibrium PQ at least once. The EXP efficiency is better than hunting alone, but beyond that, there’s a special kind of fun in clearing stages while talking things through with your party. That feeling of having accomplished something together with people you had just met—that’s something party quests gave in a way almost nothing else could.

Which MapleStory PQ do you remember the most? Let’s talk about it in the comments.