Ragnarok DS (DS)

Ragnarok Online is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that spun out of a Korean comic and found a good deal of success around the world, so much so that soon ideas arose for making video games in other genres using the same world and systems. Ragnarok DS was their first effort, an attempt to construct a more traditional single player RPG within the familiar Ragnarok universe. However, there are differences in how an MMORPG and a single-player RPG are designed beyond just how many players can participate. The long-term commitment of an MMO often leads to the game concocting reasons to return to familiar areas more often and when facing a monster your basic attacks are often executed automatically to simplify the process. These elements ended up being carried over into Ragnarok DS to some degree, but this role-playing game wasn’t some ambitious effort to fully replicate its always-online ancestor in miniature and thus has some room to grow into something with a unique identity.

 

Ragnarok DS takes place in a world inspired by Norse myth, although the inspiration shown here isn’t very extensive. A more typical medieval fantasy approach to art and world design seems to be at play even if there are places with names like Mt. Mjolnir and people at least pay lip service to worshipping gods like Odin and Freya. Ragnarok DS also borrows many creatures and locations from its progenitor, the Poring slimes one of the more iconic creatures but you can see their takes on living mushrooms and wolves out in the world as well so its ancestry is recognizable for those who know the series but thankfully still natural in the tale being told here. The game has you taking control of a red-haired young man you name yourself, although related materials often refer to him as Ales or Ares, and he isn’t the kind of blank slate protagonist one would find in an MMO. He has a personal history that drives him and ties into the plot, but more interestingly he isn’t the best person when the story kicks off and undergoes many small characters arcs over the course of it. Things kick off when he encounters Sierra, a woman who escapes from a research lab but finds she has almost no memories or even an understanding of basic human concepts like emotions. Ales latches onto the idea of helping her, but early on he is interested not in heroism but its money-making potential. He can be irrational and hot-headed, but Sierra is a good counterbalance to him because of her novel perspective to the world. As she starts to understand herself she also starts pushing Ales into a better direction and Ales feels compelled to compose himself because of his growing attachment to her, the relationships initially depicted almost more like an older brother helping a very young child start to understand the basics of life.

Their dynamic does change over time, but Ragnarok DS does have the time to build up Ales and Sierra as a suitable pair of leads to follow that can evoke some genuine emotion at times because their bond is practically the story’s major focus. In fact, it can take a while for the story to find much of greater consequence to pursue for a while, many of the required activities you engage with not exactly pressing problems even as you get deeper into the story. Ales has an ambition to start a guild and sometimes you will be required to do tasks like heading out to find a lost dog that are pretty mundane in concept, but these segments are almost little character tests for your slowly growing group of characters. The actual activities may not even involve too much player interaction in terms of completing the stated goal, the action sometimes more about fighting monsters along the way to some moment where one of your party members will either be able to share more about themselves or face some trial that can lead to a little personal progress. The core band of characters never goes beyond five and they eventually boil down to just support for the central duo as things do eventually evolve into a more dire situation with legitimate danger and stakes, but taking some time to actually flesh out the cast ends up being one of the game’s more engaging elements and something that helps stave off a bit of the monotony that comes from the game’s approach to quest and combat design.

 

Ragnarok DS lets you have three characters active in the field at once, and as you explore its world there are areas where monsters roam about freely and will often attack you on sight. To initiate battle with such foes is often as easy as tapping them on the touch screen, after which your three party members will all begin battling them. You only directly control Ales though, the other two free to pick their own actions but there is some way to influence them by tapping icons to pick their battle strategies. Sierra is a capable healer and her competence allows for you to explore the sometimes fairly large areas without worrying about running out of steam, especially since the SP utilized for special abilities will recover naturally and she isn’t wasteful in using it. The story will often necessitate switching in and out party members though so you can’t lean on your partners playing certain roles all the time, but Ales is definitely meant to be the main powerhouse and you can do more than simply watch him swing his weapon during a fight. A customizable shortcut bar has abilities you can utilize in battle, many of these involving some touch screen functionality like needing to draw a circle around your target or tap whoever you want to aim a helpful spell at. Ales’s abilities aren’t set in stone like his friends, the player actually able to pick which profession he pursues and gaining appropriate skills related to that job. A Magician focuses on offensive magic while an Acolyte instead plays a support role, a Swordsman is a durable fighter while the Assassin tries to land critical hits for heavy damage despite their comparative frailty. Taekwon Kid is a bit of strange name for the marital artist, but the Merchant class manages to still be a good fighter while also having abilities that can influence things like shop prices outside of combat.

 

The skills you choose to improve are up to you, the player given a good deal of control of how Ales evolves. Experience from battle goes towards both your own natural abilities and your job, the two not always leveling up at the same rate but you get to pick which normal stats like defense, strength, and speed to focus on for the standard levels while you can improve and unlock abilities with points earned from leveling up jobs. This does mean there is some depth to how you grow your character, but also that depth doesn’t necessarily translate to the actual combat too often. You can weave in special abilities often enough thanks to the recovering SP so you aren’t always left watching characters smack monsters without any involvement besides tapping the creature to kick things off, but the type of opposition you face isn’t very demanding. Things do start to pick up near the end of the game where more monsters will just make your incoming strikes miss to offset your gradual growth in power and some boss fights can be closer affairs, but the already simple battle system is let down some by how rarely it actually demands a good deal of attention. In some ways that automatic basic attacking helps alleviate that repetition though and few small skirmishes last long, but every now and then due to a jump in power or your party composition you may find a period where the action starts to require a bit more thought so you do need to be ready to tap and circle the right parts of the screen to survive. You can even earn cards from creatures you kill and then slot them into armor to further alter your abilities beyond the usual adjustment of stats new armor and gear can allow, but the card system is more a nice touch since armor with slots and card drops themselves aren’t often going to work their way into your possession.

One interesting aspect of party composition is after a certain point in the story you start a guild where you can recruit characters outside of your band of five to join you on your adventures. While story quests will often require a character or two beyond Ales and thus limit your options since your party can only be three members strong, you can recruit characters who have the same types of jobs available to Ales. Your guild members again lead to a technical increase in options on how to approach things but often not a substantial one because of the kind of activities you’ll be involved in, the monster battles often quite plain so you wouldn’t need to think about who to bring along too much. The story doesn’t help with the sense of repetition at times either, coming up with reasons to return to areas you’ve fought your way through before without always adding much new to them. Sometimes you will get a new unexplored part of it, but then there are areas like Mt. Mjolnir which has one lengthy spiral path, a bridge at the peak to cross, and then a second peak you now descend down from in a similar spiral path. While you can travel back to towns quickly with the right item, traversing the world can sometimes feel like too much of a walk just to get to a place you’ve been before, but again when the plot actually picks up there is at least a procession of new locations after the game wore down the early ones through revisits.

 

Visiting an evocatively named place like Ant Hell more than once isn’t necessarily awful, especially when there’s a decent story scene that actually justifies it, and on occasion the game can tease you with the promise of greater depths like when you first drop by the Prontera Culvert and only see a sliver of the sewer-like dungeon, but where the game perhaps wears things down a bit too far is the quest system. When visiting a town, you can pick certain locations from a menu to drop by and there are often quests available either at the tavern or from citizens standing in places like the equipment shops. Many of these quests are incredibly basic unfortunately. Some are as simple as giving them certain items, this a use for the Tokens monsters drop that otherwise are just meant to be sold for cash. Other times though you will be told to head out to a location you’ve visited before often to do a singular basic task like rescuing three miners just by talking to them or finding a flower on a mountaintop that you are able to pick unmolested. There are some with unique battle scenarios but you won’t always know if they’re actually going to be interesting or just busywork for sometimes a fairly measly reward. These do sometimes work as a decent task to complete along the way though, a small diversion if you are already heading somewhere, but unfortunately you can only have one quest active at once so you can’t just stock up on all of them and complete them on the side during the adventure. Only a few points in the plot actually require you to have done a decent amount of quests though and it seems like many of the less demanding ones will get you past those checks, but what could have been a nice way to add new activities instead ends up mostly a bunch of busywork that can’t be buoyed by the few times it musters up some creativity.

 

There is a multiplayer component to be found in Rangarok DS though and it unlocks once you find the Mirage Tower out in the desert. This tower is a fifty-floor challenge dungeon where you cannot bring in any of your normal allies, either needing to tackle it alone or bring in up two other Ragnarok DS players to assist. The Mirage Tower’s interior is fairly basic, consisting of linked together square rooms where monsters will be ambling about, and the deeper you get into the tower, the more dangerous the monsters are and the more fearsome the boss you face on every fifth floor becomes. A few floors do introduce special conditions like needing to kill all monsters before moving on, finding a floor full of invincible monsters you just need to avoid and find the entrance, or ones with switches or glass spheres you need to find and activate to open the warp to the next floor. You need to be fairly strong from the main game to make it to the end and you won’t be able to open menus so you have to make sure you have all your helpful items set to the shortcut bars, but this effort to give a new challenge to complete after the story doesn’t pan out perfectly because it still hinges mostly on the simple combat. Again, the fighting isn’t outright boring because you can continuously integrate special abilities, but it’s often not compelling because the fights don’t have room to be complex or don’t ask too much from you besides just repeating skill uses. Ragnarok DS definitely works best if you don’t stray too far from the main path of the plot, but it isn’t painful to dabble in something like the Mirage Tower out of curiosity as you can get some goodies that help on the core adventure too.

THE VERDICT: Ragnarok DS works well enough when it has focus, the main duo undergoing an entertaining and natural development over the course of the story and the game even takes the time to design moments that serve as tests of character for your party members so they can form a decent band of memorable characters. It unfortunately retreads familiar ground fairly often and much of the side content only ups the repetitiveness without contributing much new, but on the main story path you can find enough variety once things get going to carry you to the end. The job and leveling system plus guild recruitment gives you a lot of room to tinker with your party composition and hero, but the basic battle system could do with more demanding design as you can lean on the auto-attack and light ability management a bit too often. If you get sidetracked easily the game can become a drag, but stay focused and Ragnarok DS does have some story moments and monster battles worth putting in the effort to reach.

 

And so, I give Ragnarok DS for Nintendo DS…

An OKAY rating. I’ve said before a good story can justify even some fairly basic or bland combat in a role-playing game, and Ragnarok DS sort of sits in that zone. The story isn’t quite excellent, the characters appealing but Ales and Sierra are certainly the stars of the show and sometimes taking a diversion to help Lucifi overcome his fear of ghosts feels inconsequential. At the same time, taking some time to build up the supporting cast means they are decent players in the core story despite the fact it spends much more time building up Sierra and starting to pick apart Ales’s personal problems as the two help each other become better people both actively and inadvertently. It perhaps meanders a bit too much that the early hook of Sierra escaping a research lab is left off the table for too long, but it also ignites some excitement in the later portions of the adventure where the game does start putting together a better approach to introducing new areas and crafting enemies that can put up a fight. The early areas you need to revisit frequently despite their design not being too conducive to it do get things off to a rough start and it makes the quest system seem unappealing because of it, but it’s not a totally persistent problem and the game is at least not too shy in showing early that optional activities are best done along the journey rather than as a point of particular focus. Packing in more unique or entertaining scenarios in the side content would definitely give this game more life than something like the rather limited longevity of the Mirage Tower, but mostly the main component that kept the game from being better is the battle system. It gives you a lot of room to figure out how to gear up and compose your team and mold Ales into the kind of fighter you wish to control, but the opposition is often too basic to provoke involved use of all your options. You’ll still find enough moments where you do need to keep a good cycling of abilities going as foes get a boost to strength or a threatening special power, but many fights just fade into a blur because they’re so easy to mindlessly push through.

 

That MMO DNA is what held Ragnarok DS back the most in the end, despite likely being put in so that the transition for fans of the online game would find something similar enough to what they’re used to. Ragnarok DS is a mostly single-player linear narrative and thus it could justify building more areas for only a single portion of the story, but it instead wrung out a few of them through too much repeated use. The battle system didn’t need to have nail-biting battles with even the most basic of creatures, but some more emphasis on the effects or influence of abilities rather than them being ways to change how big damage numbers are could invigorate even simple fights a bit. One advantage of the MMO approach though is that design is meant to make certain actions forgettable in the long term, the rewards arising from the fights that do start to push you more and the narrative beats helping to bury memories of the basic beast killing and empty quests. Ragnarok DS’s weaker moments can fade into the background enough that you can focus on its successes, but it would need to devote more time to such moments if it wanted to be more than a passable portable RPG.