Mabinogi (video game)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alt-Itis: Some players (usually the less frugal ones) may fall under this, especially if they create extra characters for the following reasons.
    • Extra inventory space when the extra bank space provided by premium service.
    • Event item farming for non-repeatable quests.
    • To dress-up and look pretty. However, this is not as common as it is in other MMORPGs, as the creation of a new character costs money. Those people are there, though.
    • If one counts the player-controllable pets, then the amount is almost innumerable; they are bought for various reasons such as their usefulness toward their actual humanoid characters, their appealing appearances, or... for their extra inventory space (see above).
  • Angst? What Angst?: Poor Nao would have a lot to cry about, but is normally cheerful unless painful events in her past are directly brought up.
  • Anticlimax Boss: Esras is pathetic. The only real challenge is her Skeletons.
    • Though her pathetic...ness is slightly lessened by the fact that Tabhartas is a real challenge.
  • Breather Level: A whole Breather Campaign! G12 is considerably easier than G11, though not without difficulty. In particular, where G11 was stuffed full of Marathon Levels, G12's missions tend to be short and decisive.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome:
    • The background music playing during the final battles of Generation 1, 9, 10, 11, and 12.
      • Dungeon Theme 8 - Which plays as you run through the final dungeon of G1, I believe. Absolutely dripping with epic.
    • Also, music from G9 onward is a leap up in quality from previous music, due to a change of composers.
    • The opening title song. As one YouTube user states: "I stayed at the login screen for 30 mins to listen to this." (a.k.a "An Old Story from Grandma")
    • Generation 13 adds Avon's background music to this list.
  • Demonic Spiders: There are many of these, including Goblin Archers and just about anything that attacks in groups.
    • The black ship rats in Rundal... I hate you so....
    • Imps for earlier players. They're so bad that a more recently released species of enemies complain about them.
    • Light Gargoyles for new players in Generation 1's Albey Dungeon, assuming their two partymates aren't totally overleveled. The fact that the dungeon forbids all but one form of revival adds to the frustration with them.
    • If you've ever done G11 or the Ghost of Partholon Shadow Mission, you'll remember the Blinkers. They're completely immune to knockback (in a game where stun is the best way to dispose of an opponent) and their main attack is to fly out of harm's way and rapidly sap the HP out of you.
    • Ghasts are actually the toughest foes in the game. They have a good 15,000 hit points each, soak up the first 300 points of damage dealt to them, and don't flinch from any attack whatsoever. They also spawn in packs of six. The only real way to defeat them is to surround them with Windmill attacks while mages bombard them with high-level Fireball and Thunder spells. And then there's Shock, which one would think would be the perfect counter to them... except that it completely ignores Ghasts for some strange reason.
  • Evil Is Sexy / Fetish Fuel: The Succubus. Just some applicable tropes for the Succubus include, in no particular order:
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: NaoXMorrighan seems to be the absolutely One True Pairing of Mabinogi, since no other pair exists.
  • Fashion Victim Villain: What is that fur around Morgant's neck?
  • Fixer Sue: Surprisingly Averted; the placement of the Main Character into the Plot of Hamlet could easily have ended this way, but it doesn't happen. Hamlet still gets its dramatic Kill'Em All ending.
  • Fridge Horror: All Elves eventually become Desert Ghosts. Portia will too. What will happen between her and Bassanio when she does...>
  • Goddamn Bats: Enemies that appear in swarms, especially if some Archers are thrown in the mix. Made worse if these enemies exhibit multiaggro behavior.
    • Overall subverted by the bats themselves. They have less HP than you might expect from their combat power.
      • Bandits. They spawn all over while trading in the form of Inescapable Ambush if you come too close to them on the field, and can appear in groups of up to eight. Two of them will do their damndest to keep you busy (and god help you if it's the local archers or mages that do it) while the rest beeline to steal your trade goods. In some areas you can't go more than five steps without tripping over them.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Nao used to be jealous of other girls who "matured" (read:grew breasts) faster than she did. She certainly matured since then. Doubly so, since she's actually sensitive now about the size of her breasts.
  • It Was His Sled: Neamhain is a villain.
  • Magnificent Bastard:
    • Cichol. After playing everyone like a fool through G1, trapping the Goddess of War and Revenge, and revealing he you to kill Glas Ghaibhleann, since doing so opens Him up an invasion corridor to Erinn, he ends it all by killing Mores effortlessly, attempting the same on you, and then taunting the Goddess of War and Revenge who had just sworn revenge on him.
    • Lugh Lavada's plan during G16 is just full of magnificent bastardry. He uses Shakespeare as his pawn to kill the king, casting doubt on Milletians, and then has Bella mind control the court into accepting him over Eirawen as the successor.
  • Memetic Mutation: In a more meta sense, the aptly-named "Mohawk Guy" in the background during one of Mabinogi's recent videos which showed their actual office environment.
  • Most Annoying Sound:
    • The penguin pets when they idle. OH MORRIGHAN THE PENGUINS!
    • The background music that plays when you faint. (It's now playing in your head, how would you like to revive?)
  • The Scrappy: Oh, Ferghus. Widely known, widely reviled.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: Tarlach is frequently spoken to for Generations one and three, but you can't speak to him while he's a Bear. The frequent result of this is sitting around and waiting until Night to fall.
  • "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: The players dueling in front of the Healer's House in Dunbarton are very serious about their game. Fortunately, you can just ignore them and go about your business.
  • That One Boss: Blame Tethra's enemy version of Life Drain.
    • Python Knight's "Shadow Death" move is a One-Hit Kill, and the player can only block it by using an item in their inventory at the exact right time. This has to be done successfully three times in order to move on to the next phase of the battle
  • That One Level: Baol Dungeon in G3. The first time time you run through it, it combines Useless Useful Stealth with Demonic Spiders with Luck-Based Mission. The second time through, it's a five-floor complex that contains the toughest foes in the game that a character of that level couldn't possibly fight. Of course, they can bring experienced players along, but who wants to go through a two-and-a-half hour dungeon without any promise of a reward? The former is totally Averted if you stock a good amount of Ice Mines, or have the ability to go Demigod to throw Spears of Light at your enemies, or have a extremely high level in Golem Summoning.
    • Generation 11. Or, specifically (since most of the time you can rope in a Royal Alchemist to help), a small piece of hell called "Buchanan inside the Castle". You are sent in to check on the status of librarian Buchanan. To "help" you, you are provided with "assistance" from Leymore and Cai, supposedly the best alchemists around, except they have an extremely suicidal AI and their skills are generally not enough to go up to par with the poor attempt at Dynamic Difficulty Shadow Missions give you, since the exponential increase in enemy stats is far more than the Empty Levels you have, turning this into an Escort Mission; one of them dies and you fail the mission. The mission has White Orbs, which basically serve to continue spawning enemies at ridiculous rates before you can deactivate the switches. You also can't bring in a Royal Alchemist to help, and the "suggested" way to beat it according to most players is to actually wait out the time for transformations, making this mission hit at least four hours. You can't bring Royal Alchemists on, either. And Buchanan turns out to be fine anyway, ruining any plot-based pride you might have gotten.
  • That One Sidequest: You could use Shock anytime after getting it in the G11 storyline, but if you want to level it beyond Novice rank, you will have to collect all ten pages of its skill book. All ten pages are Randomly Drops from bosses or rewards from Shadow Missions - and the percentage for the drops can be as low as 0.86%.
    • This is true for any collection book quest, besides maybe Thunder and Paladin Passive Defense; buying pages often go for 2-3 million gold.
    • Generation 15 has made the Shock collection quest somewhat easier, with the three hardest pages (1, 2, and 10) now able to drop from field monsters with 'the Ancient' title.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: A sizable portion of North American users disliked and were even angered by Nexon's redesigned advanced service, despite having enough time to financially/mentally prepare for it when similar services were announced in the original Korean version long ago. Occasional balancing to certain in-game mechanics have gained this reaction as well.
    • A bit of this is Justified, in that the services do vary by localization (although NA is closest to Korea); and the costs of certain features were substantially increased.
    • Users generally use this every time Nexon releases any update; while many of them are Justified, as updates often come with a new set of glitches or a need to re-train, it can get to ridiculous levels.
  • The Woobie: Yoff.
  • What an Idiot!: Shakespeare's plan to kill the winged Goddess? Knock her off a building. Even if he was actually attacking Morrighan and not the King, it's highly doubtful that his plan would have worked.
  • Woolseyism: While the early translation (before G9) fell into Blind Idiot Translation, the later generations have a much better thought out translation. For example, the Beepers in the original version became Blinkers, and the G11 script contained references to memes the NA community has. However, the script still has quite a few typoes.