I was scrolling through YouTube when I was forcibly reminded of an iOS MMO I played back in 2010 - 2012 called Graal Online. The video was a solid retrospective of the game and reminded me that it was still active today. I logged in again after 14 years and was greeted by the familiar home screen song, and once I recovered my old account it loaded me back into a familiar but different world.

Graal Online was inspired by Zelda A Link to the Past iirc, so it's the same top down 2D style of game. Your character has a sword and shield, and you can use bombs and arrows to fight enemies or other players. The last time I played, I rememebered there being a big focus on cosmetic items purchased with in game currency called graalats that you could earn at a fairly reasonable rate by killing enemies or farming patches of grass with bombs. In addition to hats, heads, accessories, and bodies for your character, you could purchase a huge variety of furniture items for your in game house.

The big draw for many players in Graal was/is the combat, often in 1v1 sparring, guild based defending of strongholds across the game world, or PK free for alls just outside the main area of Graal City. I was never great at the combat mechanics, due in part to poor internet speeds that often made me lag out midway through a match. On the other hand, I enjoyed the RP side of the game, even making my own cult guild themed around Zelda called the Order of Hylia. Unfortunately, it looks like that guild was deleted about 7 years ago due to inactivity.

Coming back to the game after all this time was bittersweet. It was fun exploring new parts of a world I spent hundreds of hours in, but some of the changes were jarring. My home layout had changed just enough that the furniture was all over the place, including in the walls, and my graalat farm area had significantly shrunk in size. There were a myriad of new shops to buy cosmetics and furniture in, but the prices all felt higher overall than what I remembered. Beyond my guild being purged from existence, my friends list was also completely devoid of online presences.

I did enjoy running through a new quest (that didn't exist 14 years ago) involving time portal shenanigans that would transport the player to a specific area of the map ripped from the old versions of the game from '09, '10, and '12. This gave me a good opportunity to really be reminded of what certain areas looked and felt like so long ago and compare them to the modern version of Graal. Also as I learned later, this quest was originally released in 2020, so I was experiencing a nostalgia trip with something that itself might trigger similar feelings in a player that played the game more recently than I had.

All in all, I might keep up with Graal for a bit now that I can play it on something other than a gen 2 iPod Touch with a busted screen, but it does remind me that the place or time you long for in nostalgia is somewhere you can never go back to. I will never hear from the fellow Zelda nerds that I convinced to join a digital church ever again, I will never experience the joy of riding the rail system connecting the towns for the first time, and I will probably never get lifted out of a crowd of fellow Graalians by an admin to get a cool hat for free again. Even so, I'm excited to see that there's still a small but thriving community of players on this decades old mobile app MMO and I'm curious what Graal has coming next.