> Asian free-to-play MMOs like MapleStory and Fantasy Journey to the West have always been more popular than World of Warcraft, but prejudice erased them.

Yeah no, it wasn't prejudice that erased them, but budget and quality. I mean just look at three screenshots of these games tell me you'd be as excited about them as you'd be about World of Warcraft, as a kid.

I remember seeing plenty of ads for MapleStory in the 2000s online, but then, and even now, I have zero idea what kind of game it even is, or if it was even a game. I didn't know. It seemed like some kind of anime flash/browser social chatroom for weebs. As I recall the marketing for it was truly baffling and ineffective.

World of WarCraft, on the other hand, I knew exactly what it was because me and my friends and cousins had all been playing WarCraft and StarCraft since around 1995 or so.

But MapleStory? I couldn't even have told you with certainty if it was even actually a game or not. Turns out it is, but I didn't know that back then. I just looked and saw that it released in NA in 2005, that was halfway through highschool for me but I never met a single person there or in college that played it. If lots of people were playing it, I have no idea who they were.

Yeah lmao, I was well aware of maple story as a kid, it was advertised to me on the western websites I used growing up, it was just bad and clearly not as impressive as something loke WoW which I also didn't play but at a light glance I can clearly say it had a lot more effort put into it