All the tedium of an MMO but none of the camaraderie. Check out my video review here.
OK, question for you. What makes an MMORPG so addicting to play? Is it the battle system? No. Is it the beautiful graphics? No. Is it the exhilarating story? No. It's the massively multiplayer part. The fact that you're thrown into a virtual world, populated by thousands of other player's avatars, being able to fight against them and rack up experience points to become the strongest warrior in the land. So in this MMORPG port to the DS, all of the tedious features of an MMO have been transferred over, but the actual Massively Mutiplayer part, the part which makes an MMO so damn enjoyable, hasn't. This has lead me to believe this has to be one of the stupidest ideas for a game. Let's take a look anyway.
Story
Because Ragnarok DS is more of a single-player game than a multiplayer one, a story has been thrown in here. You play as a bratty kid who loses his Mother and who swears over her grave that he's going to become a grand successful adventurer and make her proud. You team up with a girl who suffers from; it pains me to say this, the classic video game illness that is amnesia. Urrgghh, moving on. You meet up and join forces with a bunch of other characters as you set off across the world, exploring dungeons, fighting monsters and mustering up some local fame. Unfortunately, the story leaves a lot to be desired. The characters interactions are lifeless and conversations are especially dull and drawn out way too long. Even an overshadowing plot about a dark sect bent on resurrecting a long-lost deity can't save this mundane narrative.
Gameplay
If you've has played games like Runescape, Summon Night or the original Ragnarok for the PC, you'll know what to expect here. Using the DS stylus, you move around the screen and tap on monsters to attack them. Once you've done this, you can select special attacks and pull of a stylus manoeuvre to use them. This didn't sound so bad to me at first, but despite the variety of moves you can do, the battle system got very repetitive, very quickly. Constant levelling up keeps things interesting, but advancing through dungeons just feels like a very long grind. Random enemies just don't prove much of a threat. Bosses up the ante, but you'll spend very little time facing them. The only reason I found to press onward and defeat more enemies was to make use of the job system. Early on you'll pick from a few core classes like Archer, Swordsman, and Merchant. These first-tier classes give you access to special gear and abilities, and they can eventually be upgraded to more powerful variants. There's a lot of equipping, upgrading and learning new moves here, as you would expect from an MMO inspired game and this feature was easily Ragnarok's greatest strength.
There is a multiplayer feature here, but I found it short-lived. You have to advance through quite a bit of the main game to unlock the multiplayer feature. You can connect locally or via wi-fi with 2 other players to just do the same thing you do in the main game, that being to make your way through dungeons killing monsters. It can be fun for a while, but it would've been nice to do something a little different, like battle the other players themselves for example.
Presentation
I think you can judge by what you've seen so far, that Ragnarok doesn't exactly push the DS. The animation is awful, there's no voice acting and the screen can get really messy at times when there's too much happening. I found the musical score quite appealing though as there's a nice assortment of memorable tunes here and there.
So should you bother with Ragnarok. Err..... no. If I could describe the game in one word, it would be 'lazy'. The game is a port of Ragnarok for the PC and has been stripped down to fit on a handheld device. If the game introduced something a bit more different or had a more engaging story for example, then it would hold some merit. Unless you are in dire need of a portable fix of Ragnarok, or if you're not too bothered by a repetitive battle system, I cannot recommend this comparatively lacklustre addition to the DS RPG market. I give Raganarok DS a 6.0 out of 10.