My history with Ragnarok has been scarce, but personal. Back in the day, a now ex of mine that to this day I consider a damn good friend introduced me to the original game on a private server she played on, and we had fun running around and wrecking monsters for a little while. But I never found myself interested in the game itself enough to go play any of it’s sequels. But it’s introduction left the series feeling warm and something I might to play with later. When I saw this game, it was already late in it’s life, but that warmth and wanting to see if something can stand up to Phantasy Star with Sega refusing to bring their newest game to the west, I gave it a shot. All I can say is I hope I'm not looking at the original game with rose-colored glasses due to who I was playing with at the time.
Story: The world has moved on. As one based (loosely) on Norse Mythology and after the world-ending event of Ragnarok, it is a land of monsters with mankind left behind to try to survive. But this world of man had an impenetrable border once. It was a wall of mountains so high that even the birds couldn’t get past it. Mankind always wondered what was on the other side, until giants busted through and raged into the land. All warriors of the land banded together to drive them back, establishing Fort Farthest as a last resort to keep them from whence they came.
But with the knights in tatters afterwards, it’s up to a team of mercenaries to hold the line, and you are their newest recruit! After meeting your leaders, you go off on your first mission and learn the land. Unfortunately, I never got the over-arching story to progress more then that as in the 8 hours I gave this game, I only got about 1/3rd through it. And based on how hard it is to find anyone discussing the plot of this game at all, I wouldn’t expect much more then an excuse to be wherever it takes you.
5/10
Graphics: Honestly, I can not say this game looks half bad. Ragnarok Odyssey ACE is a 3rd person action/RPG title that the developers decided to display with an “anime” ascetic and worked with it to to create a pleasing result, even if it is fairly simple compared to even other games on this platform. (Although to be fair to this game, it is an update to a PS Vita only release.)
And that may be the only real complaint for how this game’s rendered world looks. Everything has plenty of detail, but it’s clear even looking around town that the geometry in it’s population is just shy enough of up to what the system could do that you notice. You don’t mind cause it looks pretty damn good, but you notice.
You also quickly notice how there is no face animations in this game at all. Rather, the game chooses to go traditional to the franchise and all facial expressions are put in word-bubbles above the heads of the characters. For old-school fans of the franchise, it’s a familiar move that they are used to, but the original game did this because it was a sprite-based title with relatively small characters, so if you want to be expressive, you need to be a lot more creative about how you show it. This game, on the other hand, is fully 3D rendered and had the power available to show enough detail in the faces to show the expression. Yes, in scenes where you are looking over a room of people so to make it perfectly clear, this can be useful. But in places where you are talking to a single zoomed in character, it just looks off.
7/10
Sound: Sadly I can not say there is anything special about the sound… at all. This game features fairly upbeat but generic orchestral tones that translate to fit the mood of the map you are in, or in some cases, absolute silence to jazz up the tension before a big tough boss drops in front of you. But there is nothing that will either wow you or make you remember it.
Add to this a very standard set of sound effects and each AI assistant having a single line to repeat when they die and come back to life on the field, and there is just not much to talk about.
5/10
Gameplay: Even as I have to admit I have come to hate this game, I don’t really know that I can call this game terrible so much as unfortunate. The reason for this is it can no longer be played the way it was meant to be played. There are a lot of functions in this game wrapped around it’s online servers. But those are long gone, taking a lot of what you can do with them. And what’s left kinda sucks.
You start the game by building your character. What this boils down to is some cosmetic choices, picking a voice to go with it for when you die/get back up, and your initial job. In this game your character does not have stats of their own, but get them based on your rank, your job, and your equipment. At this point in the game, however, you will have the base gear of the job you choose only, so this is the only choice you make that will make any kind of difference.
Once you have your character, most of your time will be spent between the shops in Fort Farthest, your room, and going out on missions. The shops will provide you with new weapons, suits, and even head-gear/new cosmetic setups as you choose, provided you have the cash and materials the game asks you trade for them.
And while the weapons work out fairly well, the outfits do very little in their own right. Rather, they give you an affect or two and space to equip items known as cards which you can use to enhance your character, and this is where one of the biggest problems in the game as it stands is.
You collect these cards in three specific ways: you grind for them in battle, you buy them at the card store, or you trade for them. If you are grinding, you will be putting a lot of time into it, as the drop rates are fairly low and each monster has it’s own set of cards it can drop, so you will be working like hell to get most of what is actually useful. If you choose to buy, you have to hope something good is in the shop as it changes every time you come back from a mission (win or lose) at random and the odds of good cards being available are also fairly slim. But the real bullshit option is trading.
Much like buying cards, the cards available to trade for will be randomly setup when you get back from a mission, but you need to have the correct card with the correct abilities on it to trade for anything. In my entire 8 hours with this game, there were all of two times when a single card was available for trade that I either had or could by the required cards to trade for it. Both times, the card sucked.
And since this is an RPG where you only get a rank (or level in any other RPG) at the end of a chapter (so you can’t really grind) this is the main way you can enhance your character as you play, so expect to not really get much improvement without investing stupid amounts of time and that’s with some luck.
But it’s not like you have to go it alone, even though the game is now single player only. When you go into battle you will eventually get the option to hire assistant AI characters to help you out for a piece of the reward money the quest offers. This could have been a good option to help out where the game was clearly meant to form a team with your friends and go kick ass, but unfortunately like the odds of cards being useful in the ONLY way you are allowed to really progress, these AI are pretty piss poor too. It doesn’t matter what job you choose for your AI, they all behave the same way: run forward and attack with the exception the cleric who will try to heal whoever has the least health (usually the other AI who will undo it in seconds with more “run forward and swing”). Keep in mind this includes the two ranged jobs: the mage who should be throwing fire and ice and whatever at the enemy and the archer. Let that sink in… the guy with a bow and arrow as their main attack will run forward to shoot point blank! To call these guys useless and possibly the worst AI I’ve seen in any game just might be an understatement.
And those missions you take them on are fairly repetitive. The same maps are used and reused as you do different missions in the same small locations again and again, each made of smaller rooms/arenas you will have to fight the same handful of monsters as you make your way through. You will quickly become familiar with the rooms that make up the small set of paths as most of your missions will ask you to kill X number of Y monsters or collect an item most likely dropped by Y monsters before the time (usually 30 minutes) runs out. Its incredibly similar and it won’t take you long before you are not having much fun, but simply going through the motions to progress the story and just get through the game.
At the end of each chapter you will have a mission to take out a giant monster which will run the gamut of stupidly easy to retardedly hard. From a large orc to lizards that throw poison literally everywhere to giants that even by story you just cant finish killing so much as wear down. The completely unreliable difficulty curve just suggests more how this game was designed with the idea of playing as a group even though you simply can not do so anymore.
Simply put its dull, repetitive and just plain awful now that the full options of how to play have been taken away from the player by a shut-down server.
3/10
Bugs: If I can say one really good thing about this game, it’s that it did run very well. Aside from loading times (which can be just about removed by installing 2 GBs to the PS3’s hard drive), the game ran like a top.
Overall: If we were playing this game back when this game came out, I might be able to have fun and recommend it for others to join the fight for mankind’s survival against the giant hoards. But back then, you would have been able to join your friends and have a good time planning how to work together as a group to take down the admittedly massive challenges this game offers.
However, the chance to do this ended in the middle of 2015, leaving you to face that same hoard alone in maps that are constantly reused and not even reconfigured for new missions, assisted only by the absolute worst AI that can actually make things worse in some missions then if you go on your own, and since the only “level” system is measured upgrades between each of the 9 chapters, the only way you can improve your stats and customize your build for what you are doing is dependent on one of the worst randomization systems I have ever seen. Long story short, what’s left here is a wasteland of what could have been and no one needs stay and see it.
Score:
3/10
Source: Gamestop
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