Named for my favorite MMORPG in the free-to-play market and the concept of player-crafted equipment, audible melodies and even personal fantasy lives within, Mabinogi Mondays is my latest column destined to feature some of my exploits in story-driven gameplay. And what better place to start than in the game wherein this column gets its name?
Let’s take a look at the picture that I have included herein from concluding one of my dungeon runs from a long time back. That’s a sample of my past and present guild/questing partners in the world of Mabinogi, pulled from an in-game screen capture during the Fallenangels era of our guild composition (we have since dropped and added other guildies and even merged into a separate guild known as Valorheroes). My avatar is the one on the far left; Alan, one of my frequent quest partners and a fixture in the group since the very beginning under the guild title of Ninegates (and who has a West Coast hometown to my Southern origin and Midwestern transition) is on the far right. (Coincidentally, I have since added a second human avatar to match up with my current Xbox 360 gamertag daJeyMan. The second avatar originated for the purpose of playing through storyline generations one, two and three in their entirety after bypassing them on Jeffsta, which is the pictured avatar and named for my original gamertag which is so long gone and lengthy that I cannot begin to describe it anymore.) Since the beginning of our collective gatherings, we have challenged various dungeons and missions and what-not in between each other’s storyline quests as if we were building our own stories with developer-provided event scripting.
Let me explain what I mean here: for one thing, my screen capture of a selection of my past and present guildies also represents group progression through side quests and mainstream scenarios. That’s because Alan recently served as part of my team for the completion of storyline generation one (you’ll know about the oddball choice of using the term generation instead of episode if you decide to play Mabinogi for yourself) on my newer in-game avatar, which brings with it a (spoiler alert: the NPC that serves to guide your way into Mabinogi’s game world at the start of the adventure had a very good reason for doing so). As with any good MMORPG (even in the free-to-play market) group play — even with members of your own guild to back you up — is often a much better choice than going solo if given the option.
Of course, this can even play into a special form of role-play quests where you (or a group of players) literally step into the shoes (or the skin, in this case) of a major NPC or three (or whatever the case is) and proceed through storyline events from his, her or their perspective(s). It’s a mechanic that pops up in various situations every now and then, and even a game such as Mabinogi will not be hesitant in dropping you into these situations when called for in the script. It’s like an interactive flashback — and in the case of memory item quests, that’s exactly what happens — and it’s something that can provide a bit of variety into an otherwise cut-and-dry MMO experience.
At the same time, Mabinogi even permits a kind of parallel story completion by allowing players to build personal stories from various directions — even if it’s at the expense of certain storyline events in other parallels (which literally occurs in at least one example, as if you decided to play episodes one, two and three of Star Wars between episodes five and six on your Blu-Ray player). This means that you can run the new Shakespearian quests (I’m not making that up!) alongside the Goddess Advent storyline and the Alchemist-related shadow missions based on which storyline elements you have played to reach whatever point you’re at in each individual sequence of events.
Does that sound like a good (if odd) example of story-based MMORPG gaming, or do you have your own ideas to share? Sound off in the comments and make your voices heard. Until next time…
