The Mana World
is a free, open-source MMORPG started in 2004.
It is not an Allegedly Free Game, but truly free. Playing is free of charge, there is no item shop and there is no plan of the developers to ever change that. They are Doing It for the Art in their spare time without having any commercial interest.
The game uses retro 2D graphics which imitate the style of SNES games. Its small community consists mostly of open-source enthusiasts, and many players actively help with developing. Surprisingly, this all works well!
Includes Examples of:
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Many very difficult quests are only for getting a nice hat.
- Ascended Meme: Because of the continuous begging of the Brazilian players for "Itens" (a common translation error when translating Portugese to English), the developers added an actual item named "Iten", and later a spell to create said "Itens" with the incantation "#itenplz" which made all nearby mobs attack the user when cast.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: There is almost no punishment for dying.
- Evil Pays Better: Averted. Being evil gives you no advantage at anything, and makes you useless in PvP.
- Have a Nice Death: The player is greeted by a random amusing message on death.
- Infinity +1 Sword: Sorcerer's Robe. You can spend years to get one. Actual years.
- Killer Rabbit/Pintsized Powerhouse: Pink Flowers and butterflies are certainly deadlier than they look.
- Level Grinding
- Luck-Based Mission: The forest bow quest, the monster oil quest, and several others.
- Most Gamers Are Male: Averted. Maybe male players are majority, but not on higher levels. Also, an admin and many developers are female. That leads to NPCs like tall, muscular Christmas Elves.
- Multi-Platform: The official client for The Mana World, as well as a few other MMORPGs based on the same engine, are available for both mainstream proprietary desktop OSes (Windows/MacOS), a bunch of Unix distros and both mainstream mobile OSes (Android/iOS) as well.
- Naked on Arrival: You start off naked, but get rags during the introductory mission nonetheless.
- Playboy Bunny: The waitress in Dimonds Inn (The sprite was originally designed for the 2008 easter event)
- Random Drop: Drops are rather rare, but the one of the rarest and most expensive can drop from a defenseless plant.
- Shout-Out: Devs confirm they were inspired by Secret of Mana. In Tulimshar, there is even a merchant sharing a name with Neko.
- Do you want your possessions identified?
- An earlier version also had cameos of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. They were removed from the game due to copyright concerns, but the sprites still exist in the data files.
- 20 Bear Asses
- Underground Monkey: Multiple versions of many enemies exist. For example: Scorpions (Angry, Red, Black, etc.), Slimes (Yellow, Red, Green, Sea, Santa, Rudolph), Goblins (Fire, Ice), Maggots, Snakes, Skulls, Wisps, Skeletons, Zombies.
- We Buy Anything
