Ragnarok Online DS: Not All That Much Online

I love MMORPG’s.  Everything about them is great.  They are massive, which gives me a lot of world to explore and learn about.  They are multiplayer which let’s me meet people from all over the world.  They are online which allows to me easier connect with those people all over the world.  They are lastly role playing games, which let me be someone I am not and allow me to escape the real world for a little while, or a long while depending on how much free time I have that day.  Ragnarok Online or RO, as fans of the game refer to it is a very time consuming but sometimes enjoyable game.  It’s DS counterpart however is just time consuming.

Ragnarok Online DS has many of the things you expect from Ragnarok.  Clicking on mobs, fighting mobs, cute character graphics, spells, items, fantasy… stuff.  The one part it really seems lacking is the ONLINE!  Basically they took and MMO and cut it down to a single player game, maybe I’m missing the point but when I think of MMO I think about playing with other people and you know playing the game with them.  This DS port of the popular game allows some multiplayer aspect but really only three people.  Maybe that is massive enough for some people but not me.  Right off the bat this lowers this game’s ability to be good in my eyes.

My second gripe with this game is the introduction.  I know games like to give story and get the player ready to be a part of the world, but the intro to this game took way too long, and that was with me skipping every speech bubble it would let me skip.  I think I clicked the screen with the stylus for a good twenty minutes before I actually got to play.  Again I didn’t read anything but from just watching the little animations I got that there was an army after a guy with a really cool sword, and two people got seperated and the main character’s parents were dead.  How long did it take you to read that?  Double it by ten and you get the length of boring dialog they put in this game.

But what about gameplay you ask?  Well, it’s standard MMO style click and attack which is great, a bonus to this being on the DS is the use of the stylus which moves your character.  They also added interesting ways to do special moves which all require drawing a specific symbol on the screen to do them.  This seemed fun at first but I got tired of doing it about an hour into the game and just let normal attacks do all the work.  You also get NPC’s which as I understand can be controlled by your friends through the DS Wifi, which begs to ask, why couldn’t they just have used the DS Wifi to actually make this an MMO?  Too much for the DS to handle perhaps?  Anyway, the npc’s do a pretty good job on their own so unless you have some friends who like RO and don’t feel like playing the bigger, better, more online version you can just stick with having fewer people involved.

I understand what they were trying to do with this game, but I think it could have been so much more.  Many people don’t like Ragnarok Online because it is known as a very long “grind” game where you are killing mobs forever.  This DS port I assume would be cutting a lot of that out, but if you play an MMORPG as opposed to a regular RPG you play somewhat to show off the character you have made.  To let people see you as a player in the world.  In this DS adaptation unless you walk around with your DS showing it off to everyone, it doesn’t matter what you do in the game other than beat it.  I do hope that soon they decide to actually release a real MMO for a portable device, though that could cause the end of the world.