MabiPro: The Authentic Old-School Mabinogi Experience

I do second honeybuck's statement that with Destinies training up skills isn't too difficult. However, I would like to see skill training seals with certain skills because skills like Weaving can get extremely cumbersome. But if I had to vote yes or no, I don't think they would be necessary.

Seeing that I shamefully have spent countless hours running Sky Palace, and that it is edging towards a year since A2’s release, I wanted to write down some of my thoughts about the content as a whole. I picked up that it has been rather divisive for a plethora of reasons but these are my personal thoughts.

The bottom line, at least for me, is that Sky Palace and A2 is definitely one of my favorite additions to the server. While the lack of progress towards your main character puts off a lot of people, I adore the change of pace it has from the main game. I love trying out new play styles (I have shattered four Leucosia shards as of this post because I have never played mage) and I especially love how it forces you to play more carefully and methodically unless you want to lose your crystal. If the beginning of A2 was not just a bit overwhelming, I think it also offers a great tutorial into the different combat styles that Mabinogi has to offer.

Speaking of the class styles, it really shows how much care and precision the content creator, whom I presume is Jade, put into it. While I am not the person to talk about game balance with, I enjoy the amount of detail that each class has. Little things like how Mari has a Soulstream class, an allusion to her rebirth as Nao, or how Jenna’s classes tap into her Temple Knights history drive home how much care was put into the content’s construction. Even the relic orb ghosts and their messages flicker with lore, which is something most of the players miss out on because of cutscene skips and the lack of translation. The vaguely rage-inducing things of Sky Palace like getting caught by a frozen trap while running for a Consub Gnu or having only 17 arrows on the eighth floor with no Tiro in sight are well-designed in regard that they value caution and planning. They’re also peak-Mabinogi as well, a mess of luck and RNG.

Naturally, I do have some gripes about the content. The vast reward pool for most of the chests, and the inaccessibility of Glimmerings most of the time are frustrating, especially when you are rewarded with ten firewood. Clearing out the floors takes some time, even with a party, and I’ve counted runs in the double digits of not getting a single Glimmering chest. I also find some of the bugginess of SP game breaking, like how letting a finish expire would bork the entire floor set or getting knocked back into a wall and dying will mean shattering my crystal because my teammates can’t resurrect me. The solutions, in my opinion, are to offer a bit more of an incentive to run SP, like maybe a gold/EXP reward for clearing a floor set. I know nothing about game design so I’ll let someone else speak on the more technical gripes. And even then, these are not barriers in any shape or form in running the content.

Either way, I immensely enjoy Sky Palace and I think it is one of MabiPro’s shining examples of a dedicated content team and their creativity. Many of my newer guild members have remarked how much they enjoy the content as well, and there have been many points where we grinded the hell out of it for hours. I really look forward to future floor sets and what Jade has up her sleeve.