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Ragnarok Odyssey Review for PS Vita

Ragnarok Odyssey Review for PS Vita

Ragnarok Odyssey Tried To Convince Me That Mages Aren’t Manly

When I first picked up Ragnarok Odyssey, my co-worker/friend Jenni Lada told me that I shouldn’t pick the Mage class. I took this as a challenge to my manliness and decided to pick the Mage to spite her. In fact, I even gave him some epic facial hair to prove just how manly he was.

It turns out, Jenni’s a better friend than I thought, and she had given me that advice out of kindness rather than as a challenge. Picking the Mage was a terrible idea. My bearded spellcaster simply couldn’t survive the waves of monsters that were thrown at him, and I ended up starting over with a class that wasn’t completely worthless in battle. (I do miss that beard, though.)

Ragnarok Odyssey Screenshot

Now, I understand that this is a co-op game, and that the Mage could potentially be halfway decent as a support class in a group, but I have a feeling that most people who pick up Ragnarok Odyssey are going to be forced to play it solo. It’s a niche title on a system that hasn’t exactly sold a lot of units, after all. The fact that there are classes that are simply too ineffective to be much value for solo players is a pretty huge problem in my book.

And, unfortunately, that’s only one of the many glaring problems with Ragnarok Odyssey.

For example, the pause menu is completely counterintuitive. In just about any game ever made, hitting the Start button pauses the game, right? Maybe there’s a menu that pops up, maybe there’s just a floating piece of text that says “Pause,” or maybe the action of the game just freezes in place. Either way, “Start button equals Pause” is a decades-old control formula that I think we can all agree is a positive thing.

Ragnarok Odyssey doesn’t think so. For some reason, hitting Start brings up a menu, but it doesn’t pause the game. Now, you can pause the game from this menu, but since you do so using the X button, and the X button is one of the fundamental buttons you’ll be pressing in combat (X is your jump button, which, as I’ll explain later, is sort of important in combat), there’s absolutely no discernable reason that the game won’t pause when this menu pops up.

To make these frustrations worse, the “not really a pause menu” doesn’t even have touchscreen functionality. This is baffling, because the social menu (which is neatly tucked away on the side of the screen) does . It’s as if there were two completely separate teams working on menus, and the team in charge of the “pause” menu spent most of their time getting drunk and playing Monster Hunter. It’s just baffling to me that there could ever be so much inconsistency between menu systems within a single game.

Ragnarok Odyssey Screenshot

Surely the gameplay makes up for the bad menu system and the fact that some classes are embarrassingly underpowered, right?

Well, that’s a loaded question, and the answer is both yes and no. You see, the combat is actually pretty cool. You have an attack button, a dash button, and two attack buttons, and a shoulder button that will allow you to lock onto your enemies. In addition, both classes I tried out have a combo that launches enemies up into the air where they will hover until you jump up and spike them back down to the ground like volleyballs. Slamming them down will injure and stagger all the nearby enemies, so when you have two or three enemies in the air and two or three more trying to crowd you, you can use this combo to deal massive AEO damage.

Ragnarok Odyssey Screenshot

All of these things work together to build a combat system that feels satisfying. There is a lot of button mashing, sure, but there is also a strategic element to it all, which makes that button mashing feel a hell of a lot more deliberate.

This combat could have been excellent if paired with a halfway decent progression system. Unfortunately, Ragnarok Odyssey provides no such thing. There’s no XP or level-up progression here at all; the only upgrades you’ll get involve the equipment you wear, the weapon you use, and the cards you equip.

Yes, the game has a card system, which allows you to find cards out in the wild that affect your stats in various ways. It’s a neat little system, but it certainly doesn’t make up for the lack of an XP system. I want to be able to see my character progressing with each monster killed; I don’t want to repeat missions over and over again in the hopes that I’ll find a card that’s just slightly better than the ones I already have. If you come to a particularly hard portion of the game—which you will, I guarantee it—you can’t just grind a few levels and try again. You could potentially spend hours searching for a card that ever-so-slightly increases your stats. This isn’t fun; this is tedious.

In fact, “tedious” is the perfect word to describe Ragnarok Odyssey. Sure, it begins with what’s probably the coolest cinematic I’ve ever seen on a handheld device, featuring an epic battle against some Shadow of the Colossus-sized baddies. From there, though, it goes downhill faster than a Jamaican bobsled. You’re instantly thrown into an inn—which will serve as your basic hub for quests, as well as provide you with a bank and some shops—where you’ll have to endure some downright unbearable tutorials. Seriously, haven’t we figured out how to make an RPG tutorial that doesn’t involve massive walls of text? We’re gamers here; we have no attention spans.

Ragnarok Odyssey Screenshot

If you can manage to stay awake through the barrage of tutorials, you’ll be introduced to the game’s basic structure: Pick up a quest at the inn, go out into the world to slay some monsters, get rewarded with some junk you probably won’t use unless it’s a card. Rinse, repeat.

To make this even less bearable, these quests are nothing more than kill and fetch quests, and they’ll send you out to the same areas over and over again. Of course, every once in a while there’s a boss fight quest, which honestly doesn’t switch things up all that much. Also, you can only pick up a single quest at a time, so it’s not like you can stock up on five or six quests and complete them all while you’re out. I mean, why would Ragnarok Odyssey ever want to make things convenient for their players? I almost feel like this game just flat-out hates me.

Ultimately, Ragnarok Odyssey is a game that’s painfully mediocre and flawed at its very core. It’s wrapped in a fairly respectable combat system and sparkled up with an incredible opening cinematic, but those things can’t make up for the sheer tedium of playing through the same areas and fighting the same monsters over and over again. If you have any respect whatsoever for the world or lore of Ragnarok Online, please don’t soil it by picking up this endless grind-fest.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.0 Graphics
The opening cinematic is probably the nicest looking thing I’ve ever seen on a handheld device. The gameplay graphics do a bit worse, but they’re still not bad for the Vita. 3.0 Control
Combat controls are great. Unfortunately the menu system is completely baffling. 3.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
There’s nothing special in the audio department here. 2.0 Play Value
There’s a lot of content, but it’s samey and repetitive enough that you won’t ever want to see it all. 2.2 Overall Rating – Poor
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • While drawing inspiration from the popular world of Ragnarok Online, Ragnarok Odyssey was developed by Game Arts, the developer behind the Lunar and Grandia series, with an original story anyone can enjoy.
  • Fling enemies skyward, defy gravity to continue your assault in mid-air, then finish off the combo by smacking them clear across the stage.
  • With over 20,000 combinations based on gender, facial features, accessories, and more, plus six selectable job classes consisting of Sword Warrior, Hunter, Hammersmith, Assassin, Mage, and Cleric, no two player-created characters will ever be alike.
  • Up to four players can play together online to take on some of the most fearsome and challenging giants in the game.

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