A little thing I noticed.

The light that hits Victoria seems to be the same as the one emitting for the castle. I was going to write about how Nexon Korea could've planned the castle to be the Dark Magician's stronghold, or at least one of them, but I don't know if the idea for the Dark Magician was around, and the idea that Zakum, holding the music "FinalFight", was the end-boss at the time seems to shoot down any idea that it was originally planned.

Personally, I always felt El Nath and the surrounding areas to be the most eerie, and the best place for something sinister. The music, landscape, colors, and monsters contribute to make one of the greatest developed areas in the game. Sure, it may not be too much now, as years have passed since El Nath was developed in terms of new areas, but it still has the same feel it had years ago. If the maps were easier to train on, I'm sure it'd be more populated than it is today.

Yeah, I was thinking about the same thing. I doubt they originally planned several things which are in Maple now, such as Pink Bean, etc.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that, at first, they didn't think that Maple would've become such a huge game with such a great income. If you listen to the first BGMs, for example, they weren't as 'complex' as the latest ones. The concept of the game wasn't really complex either at first, but when they realized that it'd have become one of the most successful games in South Korea and in the rest of the world, with a great income for them, they hired more development staff, adding more and more concepts to the game, some of them which can be considered kind of 'complex', and developed better-looking areas, and better BGMs, to make the huge userbase happy.

What I'm saying is, yeah, they probably didn't plan to add many of the things which are now in Maple to begin with. The entire Black Wings plot only started with the Cygnus Knights only. The Black Magician stuff started with Magatia, and maybe it had other little references in Victoria Island quests (?).

So, who knows if they originally planned to do something with that castle in the background of the El Nath Dungeon.. I highly doubt, since, yeah, Zakum's background is named "FinalFight", so that could make one think that they planned to make Zakum the final boss at that time. OR it could just mean that it's El Nath's final boss.

So many questions and no answers.. It'd be great to be able to ask to a developer of the game questions like these.