When the flash animation for Ludibrium first came out on the Maplesea website, I was so excited. Ever since Global got their Ludibrium maps first, I couldn’t wait for it to come to Msea. I thought it would be so cool to jump down a hundred storied tower and poke the cute lil’ ratz. I was so excited when I saw the flash, I was so excited to see the itsy bitsy patch, I was so excited to take the first train (that didn’t DC on me), so excited to land, so excited to start the new quests, so excited to finally get to poke those ratz… you get the idea.

Today however, the novelty for Ludi officially wore off for me. The main reason? The @#$%^tall-huge-difficult-to-Climb tower.

After touchdown, I was greeted by Marcel, who cheerfully gave me my first Ludi quest. So I immediately started for the Eos Tower. However, being so adept at getting lost in a 2D world, I promptly struck out in the wrong direction. I found myself deep inside the toy factory, then the whirlpool of time. After realising my mistake (which took so long, my brain must have been comatose that day), I finally had the sense to check the maps at hidden-street.net, then make my way towards Ludibrium Village.

What made me most impatient was the largeness of the town maps. For a non-magical mortal with no Teleport and lousy speed equipment (I. Need. A. Red. Whip.), it was like a great huge snail crawl. Only when I reached the other end of the Village, then I discovered the useful portal that could have saved me precious time, which I had happily neglected to spot on the hs.net maps. Wonderful.

So I started on the quests, climbing down the tower to complete them. First, it was just ratz. Okay, not too bad. They’re close to the entrance, easy to kill, look cute when dead, squashy- *coughs* Right.

Then I reached the Lost Guard. Yay, I thought, the Ludi version of the Tower scroll quest. 30 propellers, 30 goggles, no problemo. I could gather 200+ sentinel shells in the Orbis Tower in one sitting, this should be easy.

The people at Wizet must have been cheerfully plotting such torment in their dark, dank, windowless offices. Painfully colourful, the outside of Eos Tower was a psychedelic dream (or nightmare. In fact, right now, I feel the Entire Ludibrium is one huge psychedelic joke.) Filled with bright plastic slides and cute little lego cubes that serve as steps. And flying critters.

For a bowman, the most common complaint is the ‘STUPID CLOSE RANGE!?!!’ that we get. At least, for an unskilled player like me. :/ And it makes the whole flying critters thing so irritating.

Intelligently, I bombed the flock of flying critters; half of them sank down, stunned.

Okaay, I thought, and jumped down after them. I misjudged, and ended up bouncing my cheery way down the cute lego steps and landed on the bottom of that floor. While I was scrambling to regain my cyber footing, the stunned critters recovered, and dashed at me. There was no room to draw my bow at all. So I ended up whacking all them critters to death with Power Knockback (PKb).

Quoting my brother: ‘What, since when did you become a mini-warrior?’

So I learnt my lesson: Don’t bomb them. Still they were such a pain, flying out of my range before I could aim, diving right at me when I don’t want them to. And I still used PKb so much, I really felt like a noobie warrior using Slashblast.

And the critter distribution outside the Eos Tower is so very strange. The map that had most Chirppies was so far from the map with the most Hellies. It ended up taking a good part of an hour to get the required items, with all the climbing to chase down a wayward target, scrambling to pick up the precious leftovers, and the slow climb up back to the Lost Guard.

Even more time went down the drain with the latter parts of the ‘Cleaning up Eos Tower’ quest, because of the sheer size of the Tower, and the inexplicable ability to Climb up properly. I would hop up three steps, then get bumped by a critter and fall down four steps, helped by the most persuasive hand of Gravity. Either that, or I’ll misjudge, then get dragged down to the ground by the loving arms of Gravity (or whatever gravity equivalent Maple has).

I wrote it all down to bad planning and bad tactics, things that happen very often to me. And Gravity, of course.

Then came the ‘Eos Tower Threatened!’ quest. Which took me all the way down to the… 6th, 7th floor? A single digit floor number in a hundred storied tower, anyway. I thought, hey, no problem, there are the rock scrolls. But, wait a minute. I’m running low on them.

To my horror, the Lost Guard quest couldn’t be repeated, even though I had done it two nights ago. No one I asked knew when it could be reactivated, so I couldn’t replenish my precious scrolls. I couldn’t buy them from anyone too, since everyone was hoarding. (By the way, when exactly can be it repeated? Could anyone tell me?) I felt like screaming ‘Get lost!’ to the Lost Guard, but I realised that he already was.

So I had to scrimp on the scrolls. Used two, dropped down the rest of the floors. At least gravity helped me. Killing the golems was a breeze, an enjoyable one too. The cooling kind that comes on a hot summer day, making your skin tingle…um. Moving on.

Then, I had to Climb. [Insert appropriate dramatic-horror-thriller-canned-screams music] Reached the 2nd Eos Rock, use my last two scrolls, then more Climbing.

At periods when I really couldn’t take the Climbing experience anymore, I would wail on my buddy chat for sympathy. What I got? ‘Teleport FTW, f2.’

At the end of it? I was hoping I’ll at the very least get an Bow attack scroll. The other quests in Ludi all ended up giving me equipments that are so below my level and so well represented in the market, I just npc-ed them. Maybe, I thought, All my efforts in appreciating the vastness and the tall-ness of the most Colourful Eos Tower will be well rewarded.

A flash of light later: #$@%#^, A TWO-HANDED BW SCROLL!! F5!

That was the last straw. I raided the potions shop for all the pills I could carry, smuggled them onto the first Ossyria-bound train I could catch, and escaped to the mildly coloured Orbis to become a drug distributor in Ossyria.

Nah.

I just popped them all and got on a real high while training at Hectors + Jr Yetis. And in my drugged state, I managed to get two average stats Green Napoleons, and at that moment, enlightenment dawned.

Ossyria still loves me better.

No way I’ll go back to Ludibrium until I can comfortably pwn those things in its dungeons. At least I’ll get an outlet for all that frustration them Ludi large spaces can give. :X

Disclaimer: Situations in the above text may have been exaggerated for your reading pleasure. Any resulting confusion, disgust, misplaced eyeballs due to too much rolling, and temporary insanity cannot be my responsibility. Thank you.

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