I tried playing Mabinogi. It appears to be a social game. Appearance is customizable, but every time you change your skin tone or hairstyle, your clothes change randomly too, making it difficult to really tell the difference. I was blocky and my shirt was a radioactive gumdrop blue. I felt like a cartoon man in the real world. You can choose your character's age, from 10-17. Their target demographic, I assume. If you're over 18 they assume you'll be out smoking, joining the marines, or one of those other things we keep minors from doing. I played for half an hour and I'm not sure if I fought anything. The first quest I got was "get five chicken eggs and hand them to me". I'm used to games where they start you killing stuff right off the bat. I didn't even have to punch the chickens. Getting the eggs was kinda fun. Then I spent five minutes trying to turn the quest in and failing. Maybe I was supposed to punch the NPC.
You get skills by walking around and talking to people. There are about a dozen dialogue topics, and if you talk to people a lot, you get better stuff. I'm supposed to keep track of which shopkeepers like talking about "skills" or "farmlands". If I wanted to spend weeks getting to know video game characters, I'd play Animal Crossing. That way I could at least choose what I say. The Pete/Pelly/Phyllis love triangle is more interesting anyhow.