Mabinogi: Another Online Game, and a Wonderful Time-Waster

Mabinogi
a Nexon online game

My daughters introduced this game to me. It's another of those 'massive multi-player' online games. Mabinogi lets players operate characters in a fantasy world that's rather like late-medieval Europe, except with magic and seriously over-sized spiders. Other monsters too, I understand.

It isn't a simple hack-and-slash: characters can fish, go to school, and (I understand) develop a moderately rich set of skills. Just to see what it's like, I loaded it (all 800 megabytes!) on my computer today, and got a character started.

In the process, I learned that I'll have to be careful about playing it: It's entirely too much fun - and has the potential for taking up huge tracts of time.

I play Runescape, another MMP game, from time to time. The big difference I see at this point is that Mabinogi has much more detailed graphics.

And a larger footprint on your hard drive.

Still, it's fun.

One more thing: there's a free version (that's what I played with today), and a not-so-free version. Also quite a few opportunities to spend (real) money.

Finally, I'm told that the dialogs and descriptions were originally written in Korean. The translations are quite understandable - but I suspect that some Korean idioms were translated word-for-word into English. An example: one character has a helmet that covers his face "up to his nose." The illustration shows a chap with a helmet that lets you see his mouth and chin, but not his nose, eyes, forehead, or hair.

The linguistic oddities haven't gotten in the way of playing the game, though.

Finally, my son is looking forward to being thirteen. One of the many reasons is that players of this game must be 13 or older.