Mabinogi

Improving it on your own, though, is a slow and boring process, involving huge repetition and vast amounts of materials that aren't always easy to obtain. You'll be making absolutely no money from your crafting efforts for many, many hours.

As an illustration, to improve your Weaving skill so that you can make materials to use for clothing, you need to collect wool and cobwebs to turn into thread. You'll need five for each attempt, and the skill only improves with successful attempts - and you start off with a 20 to 40 per cent success rate. Consequently you'll have to spend 20 minutes shearing sheep in order to collect enough wool for just two or three successfully-crafted spools of thread, which is actually less enjoyable than squashing low-level spiders.

Happily, combat is one of Mabinogi's strengths. It's more skilled than is usual for an MMO, and though you'll certainly face the usual problem of being killed in one shot by the first coyote that sniffs you outside of the starting areas, fighting is about more than just strength in numbers. The basic combat skills all interact with each other in a complex rock-paper-scissors system, and rather than clicking continuously on wolves until they expire, the idea is to use the correct skills with precise timing to avoid getting hit at all.

Getting the timing right requires a lot of practice and trial-and-error experimentation with different enemies, which sadly isn't encouraged by the nasty experience penalties and item losses that Mabinogi punishes you with if you die. The combat's reliance on player skill is likely to turn off a lot of more casual players who'd rather just click their way through dungeons, but it does mean that Mabinogi is practically invulnerable to the bots that plague other games of its sort, particularly MapleStory.

Despite that, you can't ever shake the feeling that the balancing isn't quite right. The main problem is that armour, weapons and almost everything else is vastly expensive: most players, and all beginning ones, have to go without. Even spending hours on part-time jobs doesn't earn you enough to buy decent armour, and making it yourself with the Blacksmithing skill is far beyond any beginning player's abilities. It's not the sweet, cute, accessible game that it first appears to be.

Your chances are vastly improved, of course, if you get some help. Player population appears to be a bit of a problem at the moment. The US servers are full of young Americans prancing about with fishing rods, discussing anime and, unfortunately, role-playing out loud in the chat channel, but although the European servers are mercifully bereft of eleven-year-olds pretending to actually be their cutesy cartoon avatars, there's not all that much else going on at the moment.