Review: Ragnarok DS

Developer: Gravity Co./GungHo Works

Publisher: Xseed Games

# of Players: 1-3 (Wi-Fi)

Rating: E10+

Official Site

Score: B

Squeezing a MMORPG down onto a handheld system is a pretty dangerous thing to do when you think about it. For starters, if the game is too condensed from the original PC iteration, longtime fans will want the scalps of the programmers and publishers for ruining their favorite game. On the other hand, if the game goes completely away from what's expected and tries to innovate too much, unless it does everything new right, it may alienate fans while it tries to please new players. Gravity and GungHo Works have managed to make Ragnarok DS an excellent example of bringing old and new elements together in a supremely addictive dungeon crawler geared towards new and old fans of their online classic. The game pulls you into its world with a nice combination of action and humor, plenty of quests to keep you busy and a fun, challenging multiplayer tower that allows up to three players to explore and battle monsters via Wi-Fi.

As this is a smaller scale version of a much larger online experience, there have been a few necessary changes. Rather than create a completely custom male or female avatar, you're thrust into the shoes of Ales, a young adventurer with dreams of riches and power who sets out to earn enough loot and respect to start his own guild. He meets up with Sierra, a partial amnesiac magic user who's shown escaping from some evil types in the game's opening section. Ales comes across her in a forest she's passed out in after a narrow escape and she tags along, allowing for a running plot element when the baddies chasing her pick up on her trail once again. The plot is pretty standard stuff, so don't come into this expecting a groundbreaking plot. Ales is an orphan, Sierra has amnesia, there's a cute mage with a sassy attitude and the usual masked teleporting evil meanie that pops in to make life miserable for the team at certain points.

While you're limited to Ales, Sierra and one other party member (from a small pool of characters you'll come across during your travels), the game has 17 job classes you can choose from as Ales gains levels. You can be a fighter, archer, a few types of magic user, hand to hand fighter and so forth and so on. Choosing a job gives you access to special skills linked to the job and each class has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, Archers have some great long range attacks, but suffer against up close melee fighters. Fighter types can dish out major damage against enemies up close and personal, but may be weaker to certain types of ranged or magic attacks ans so forth and so on. If you're well-versed in the RO world, you'll probably have a good idea of which class to play. However, no matter your previous experience with the online game, it's just pure fun to pick a class and discover what it can do once you get a few levels under your belt.

Leveling up your party members and their job skills makes things easier as you grind away, however, there's an interesting Catch-22 that pops up as the game continues. If you decide to play a "weaker" job, there will be a few times where you're stuck with a new party member who's under-leveled, which has your poor party getting beat up for a bit until everyone gets stronger. In actuality, there are no "useless" jobs here - it's up to you to unlock your chosen job's full powers as the game progresses. By the way, the game uses the Touch Screen exclusively for most of the controls and menus, but you can move around and access the inventory using the D-pad and buttons if you like. I ended up using the D-pad for the most part as I'd occasionally run into enemies too quickly with the stylus method.

Other than the occasional cinematic break before a boss fight, combat happens right on the lower screen. You can choose automatic or manual battles, the difference being how much you'll be tapping, dragging and slashing with your stylus. With automatic combat, regular attacks require a single tap on an enemy while special attacks are done with different stylus motions. Manual combat will give your fingers more of a workout as you need to tap and tap some more along with do all your specials as noted above. You can set your allies to a few different tactics, but you may want to keep Sierra as a healer for as much of the game as possible. As long as you keep her gear current and make sure she's not trapped by a strong enemy or enemies, she's a lifesaver that can keep you going during the toughest fights.

In a nifty touch, you can set "hotkeys" in order to use potions and skills on the fly, although the skill bar sometimes blocks your view of enemies approaching from the top right of the screen. You can close the bar with a quick tap of the stylus, but given that you're always going to be using one of the three switchable skill tabs, you'll find yourself keeping it open more often than not. Combat is fast paced and exciting with no shortage of respawning beasties. You can pretty much stay in one area early on and grind away at lesser foes, gaining levels and job skill points until your fingers go numb. When you level up, you gain multiple points to distribute among your main attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Agility, etc.) while a single Job Points is doled out once per job level up.

At Job level 30, you're allowed to take on an advanced job (an Archer will become a Hunter, for example) that has even more useful skills. The one caveat here is your Job Level drops back to 1, but you keep all your older skills. You'll breeze through the first 15 to 20 new Job levels fairly quickly, but by this time, you'll most likely be facing off against some pretty darn powerful monsters. If you're finding yourself getting whomped quickly, you can warp back to a previous town and beat up on some easier creatures until you get stronger. There are a bunch of side missions where you're gathering monster parts for certain folks and most of these quests will reward you with cash or decent items. One of the cool things about the game are the Cards you net from killing monsters that can be placed into weapon, armor or items with slots to boost your team's stats, sometimes dramatically.

Visually, the game looks very much like the PC original or a mid-level PSOne game with cute-looking anime-style 2D sprites and some sparsely detailed 3D maps. Equipped gear shows up on your party members and the emoticons that appear over almost everyone's heads during dialog sections are brilliantly implemented. You'll see some lovely ladies (presented as gorgeous painted portraits) as guides in each town and the different monster cards are quite amusing to look at. Speaking of amusing, the game uses a lot of humor throughout and if you're in the right mood, there are a few laugh out loud funny moments during some conversations. Yes, these are the requisite melodramatic RPG moments here and there, but the generally light tone of the game works quite well. While there's not a wisp of voice acting here, the musical score is simply outstanding. You've got light, bouncy tunes, dramatic battle themes, comical cut scene stuff and a lot more. From a presentation standpoint, this is one of those games that clicks on all cylinders.

My main complaint with the game is the camera zoom function. there are three settings and only the farthest one is any good for combat. Playing zoomed in or at medium view will only get your party wiped out, especially in areas with fast-moving or ranged enemies. The far view is near perfect, but you lose a bit of detail in the characters, making the game not quite as good looking as it is when zoomed in. Fortunately, cut scenes are presented as scaled in, so you'll catch every bit of emotion on screen. It would have been interesting to see what Gravity and GungHo could do with the PSP's higher resolution and wider screen, but I guess we'll have to see if the game sells well enough as a DS exclusive in order to find out.

As for multiplayer, players looking for a challenge will find the Mirage Tower waiting for them. Unlocked at level 25, this deadly dungeon packs 50 floors of high challenge, super powerful enemies and some excellent rewards for beating them. You can grab up to two other friends with a copy of the game and climb a few floors for fun and profit or go it alone for a true test of skill. I personally haven't cleared past the 20th floor, but I wanted to get this review in before I got sucked back into that deadly treasure-packed hell. In the end, your enjoyment of Ragnarok DS will depend on your appreciation of what's here plus a love for classic 16 and 32-bit era RPG's. Sure, what's here doesn't do much that hasn't been done before, but if you're a fan of the "daily grind" style of chase 'n chop RPG, you can't go wrong for a few dozen (or more) hours of monster-bashing, treasure grabbing fun.