People who haven't played Ragnarok Online should not try this game first.
The game opens with a scene of an "Adventurer" trying to keep a girl safe from soldiers. Unfortunately, during the sequence, the game tries to stick completely to using RO sprites, making scenes where characters are presumably "running" to look more like they are simply speed walking. Those who've played RO know that there are no sprites that actually express running.
The story shifts over to an all-too-cliche scene with a boy whose mother has passed away and whose father has run off somewhere, presumably leaving the mother and child to fend for themselves. The boy, Ales, naturally resents his father and blames him for his misery. During the scene, Ales explains to his mother's grave everything he's planning to do. I'm not sure if it was the developer or the localization team's fault, but after meeting the girl who the Adventurer was trying to protect, he repeats the speech about his desire to retrieve a Cleaning Stone from the cave to make money.
Upon entering the cave, a tutorial naturally follows to explain the basics of combat. Unfortunately, the developers decided there was no need to allow players to skip tutorials and so the player is forced to sit through every tutorial every time they play through the game (which may not even end up being once for me). In the end, the tutorials are almost all completely useless with Ales' explanations making them even less useful by stating such obvious statements as "Money is important!" and stating that when you level up, you "become stronger. Or something like that." Anyone that even knows what an RPG is already knows about level systems, so even mentioning it is completely useless to the player.
Word choice is another issue, in my opinion. I understand that the screen is called a "Touch Screen", but that doesn't mean that when you explain what you need to do that you need to tell people to "touch" things. For example, the First-Aid skill instructs players to "Touch Self". It may not mean much to younger players, but that phrase could seriously be reinterpreted to mean something else, especially by those with dirty minds. When you get to the tutorial that teaches the player how to control other characters in the party, we are again faced with the "touch" terminology as Lucifi tells the player to "touch him".
Despite Ales' repetition of his quest to find the Cleaning Stone, there is no diary or journal or quest log to be found. Meaning that, under the case that the player forgets what they were doing (suppose you haven't played in months), you're pretty much screwed unless you can figure out where to go next.
The game uses a menu-driven system for navigating the cities, and while this isn't that big of an issue considering the size of the cities in RO, the problem lies in the way the menu works. For whatever reason there could possibly be in the world, the developers found it necessary to make players have to double-tap menu options. The first tap results in the kafra employee explaining to the player what the menu option does. So for players that didn't realize that in order to save the game, they had to select the Save Game option, the kafra employee kindly explains that to the player before the save game process can be initiated with another tap.
Horror strikes when a player enters a shop. Gone are the nice item sheets of RO. Instead we get a menu-based shopping system. Rather than being able to "tap-and-drag" items from an inventory window to a "to be sold" section, the player must go through each item they want to buy/sell and individually buy/sell the item. Non-equippable items have sliders that allow the player to adjust the number they wish to buy/sell, equippable items do not. In other words, if you're carrying 100 equippable items that you want to sell, you have to sell each and every one of them individually, and since the shopkeeper needs confirm your sale with a message, that's an additional 100 taps of the stylus. Tales of games have been using the same shop system since Tales of Phantasia on SNES and it works much, much better than this.
When purchasing new equipment, one thing that the game lacks is a sort of "try before you buy" system (or at least telling you of all stats like in the Tales of games). Every time you select a weapon you might want to purchase, you get an up arrow and a down arrow if your character can use it and they aren't currently equipped with it. Checking the description will at best let you know that attack power will definitely change, but it doesn't tell you what else changes (e.g. attack speed).
Combat is as exciting as it gets on RO (which is to say hardly). You can basically select a monster and go grab a coffee, letting Sierra spam her healing magic on you to keep you and her alive, during the beginning. I never once found myself looking for an herb or potion when I played because Sierra was always healing when necessary and she seemingly has an infinite supply of SP.
When I decided to visit the Order regarding the mob infestation in the culvert (a quest that can be taken up in RO), I first thought that the swordsman was sending Ales and Sierra in alone (which made me think of the one line from Starship Troopers -- "More meat for the grinder.") until he mentioned the necessity of a test. One thing I quickly learned during the conversation is Ales is a cocky idiot. Despite the entirety of Prontera's swordsmen's difficulties in dealing with the problem, Ales offers to deal with it himself, suggesting he needs no help. This reminded me of the main character in the anime that was produced based off RO (of which I only watched a part of an episode before stopping and watching something else).
Despite the fact that I haven't play for long, the outlook on Ragnarok DS as a satisfying game is very, very bleak. The story feels very cliched, the main character is a retard, the shopping system is outdated, graphics, music and sounds are all copied directly from RO, etc. There's literally nothing that I can actually point out as a redeeming feature in this game. There's literally nothing new or innovative. RO fans might get some satisfaction, but if I were to choose between this or RO, I'd definitely play RO instead.