Kerning City
Posted by dd5872 on April 9, 2010
MapleStory is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Over one hundred million players worldwide play MapleStory, including over ten million in MapleStory Global (primarily North America). There are twelve character classes in MapleStory: five Adventurer classes (Bowman, Magician, Pirate, Thief, and Warrior), five corresponding Cygnus Knights, Aran, and Evan. While all Adventurers start in the Beginner class on Maple Island (an island exclusively for Beginners), each has a primary city on Victoria Island. The cities for the Bowman, Magician, Pirate, Thief, and Warrior classes are Henesys, Ellinia, Nautilus, Kerning City, and Perion, respectively. In this post, I write about the primary city of the Thief class, Kerning City, and the representation of the city in MapleStory.
Kerning City represents several of the negative elements associated with cities. Because Kerning City is the primary city of the Thief class (Assassins and Bandits), it is associated with crime. This darkness of the city is also present in the buildings in the city, which are literally not well lighted and do not look safe. The graffiti on the city walls, pictured below, strengthens this association. Finally, the Thief leader, who can let you advance to the next job, is named the Dark Lord – a direct representation of the darkness of the city.
Kerning City
This representation extends to the areas adjacent to Kerning City. The Kerning City Subway consists of standard dark monsters, including bats (Stirges), ghosts (Jr. Wraiths, Wraiths, and Shades), and snakes (Jr. Neckis). Alternatively, players can enter the sewer to kill alligators (Ligators), crocodiles (Crocos), and zombie monkeys (Zombie Lupins). Other locations include abandoned construction sites; for example, see the image of Victoria Road: Kerning City Construction Site below.
Victoria Road: Kerning City Construction Site
While Kerning City represents the negative elements of urban environments, other cities in MapleStory are less dark. For example, Ellinia is a city where fairies live. Singapore is also less negatively represented in this secondary world, but Singapore in our primary world is crime-free and safe to a larger extent. However, Singapore in our primary world is also criticized for other elements of urban environments, including high population density (the highest in the world) and fast change.