Flavor of the month for: 72+ Months
Overall opinion: Without a doubt my favorite mmorpg of all time.
This is my first review, and this was the very first mmorpg I played seriously.
I was first introduced to Ragnarok Online (RO) when I was playing another mmo,
Runescape. Some fool was running around shouting about this much better game that everyone should go switch to, and since I had become pretty bored with Runescape at the time, I decided to give it a go. After a day of playing, I proceeded to log into Runescape and do the same as the guy before me.
I could talk for hours about RO, as I ended up actually spending more than 6 years of my life on this one mmo. As with any mmo, RO went through many many patches and versions. For the intent of this review, I am only covering the period leading up to the introduction of advanced classes, which is deemed by many as RO's "best times". It didn't have a lot of the fancy conveniences of modern mmos such as instanced dungeons, and often gave you literally no direction in which you were "supposed" to go. One had full control over their character progression, and could extremely easily break their character into an almost unusable state. These are some of the things I loved about RO. This game was not served to you on a silver platter, you had to learn and figure things out on your own, do research on builds, experiment, and die many times learning from experience. For the time, the graphics in this game were great, they utilized good quality sprite graphics for the characters and monsters, on a 3-d background. Since around this time, full 3D games were still very ugly, this was very pleasing to the eye, and many of the models contributed a "cute" factor as well.
As for the game play itself, RO was a top-down view with click to move, and utilized hot keys for skills as everyone is now familiar with. One difference though is that with most all skills, you would hit their hotkey, which would change your cursor to a skill cursor, then you would click the mob, versus the modern method of selecting your target then simply hitting your spell. In my opinion, this gave a much higher control and ease to targeting especially in mob situations. This even introduced a certain level of personal skill as far as reflexes are concerned.
PvE: The ever-expanding world offered hundred and hundreds of different mobs to fight, and bosses to kill. Most all mobs spawns were completely randomized over the entire map, which encouraged players to keep moving and seeing other areas of the map rather than 'camp' one single "good spot". As I said before there was very little guidance on where you "should" go to level, and many times there were multiple area options for specific levels. You could tailor your equipment to specialize in a certain area of your choosing. For example at beginner levels, you had 3-4 different choices of where to level; the underground culverts full of bug-type enemies, the forests full of animal and plant type monsters, the undersea island with fish and water elementals, or the cave full of undeads. One could pick based on personal preference, or after researching elemental properties, choose where to go that best suited their current equipment or needs.
PvP: Pvp in general has come in and out of balance many times as has every other mmo. There were two basic forms of pvp in RO, the free-for-all pvp rooms, and the biweekly castle wars, referred to as the War of Emperium (WoE). The pvp rooms are where ended up spending the vast majority of my time in game. Contrary to the free-for-all label, often these rooms would become the simple hangout for duel-minded players, where people could go to test out their new builds or gears in 1v1 duels, or just hang out and watch other people fight. Of course, you could also form a party and run through attacking everyone in sight as well, which was fun too. A number of rooms were offered so that you could migrate if a war started when you're just trying to chill. WoE was a biweekly war for control of 5 castles per major city, which could be conquered by guilds, and subsequently defended against other guilds. Control of the castles gave various benefits, especially bragging rights for castles that survived long periods of time without falling. These events would require entire guilds, or sometimes alliances of guilds to work together and a large variety of different defense and attack tactics were available. Very very rarely would pure numbers win one of these conflicts. In addition, there was no "useless" class in WoE, there was a strategic part for every single class, which was very nice.
Community: I can't really find a way to describe it in words or example, but something about the community in RO was different from every other mmo I have ever played. There was just this feel to it, that it was actually a 'real' community, not just a group of players. I personally have forged many long-lasting friendships through this game that I still have today, long after I quit. In every game since RO I have been searching for this same sense of community, family, or companionship, and have never found one quite the same.
OST: RO had a very great ost (One I actually purchased), composed by SoundTEMP, these guys definitely knew what they were doing for setting a scene to an area via music. In most games these days I tend to turn the music off very early in favor of my own playlist (which still includes tracks from RO to this day) but such was not usually the case with RO.
Overall: I can say without a doubt that despite it's numerous drawbacks, RO was and still is, the best mmorpg I have ever played. However, if you're reading this review and decide to go give it a try for yourself, take most of this with a grain of salt. After I quit, many more updates have come in and changed the game to something very different than what I grew up with, including the dreaded cash shops, and a complete mechanics overhaul that has dramatically changed and oversimplified the game. However, for giving me over 6 years of the best times of my life online, Ragnarok Online is still a 5/5 in my book.
My Characters:
iRO Chaos
Shiken - Knight - The original
Shiken: Shielding Mode - Crusader / Paladin - The PvP bum.
Dr. Shikenopolis - Priest - The best low-level healslave priest you'll ever find.
