It?s been a productive few years for ?hack and slash? RPGs. Typically isometric 3/4 top down games with real time battle systems, it?s been argued time and time again in the RPG community whether or not these games are in fact RPGs. Regardless of the debate, North American gamers now have the chance to play Ragnarok Online, a recently released hack and slash style MMORPG based on a relatively obscure series of Manga drawn by Myoujin Lee. Made by Korean developer Gravity, this MMORPG continues the trend of foreign companies making extremely popular online games of late. During the free open Beta test period, over ten thousand people logged on the game daily.

This was a change of pace from the last free testing period, where the game got no more than three thousand users, distributed over two servers. Soon after this latest period, on a week?s notice, players were informed that the game was going P2P (Pay to play) again. I figured that I would stick with the game for a month to see if it coming out of beta had changed anything. Now that the month is up, I realize that popularity isn?t always an indicator of a quality gaming experience.

For starters, the graphics are quite dynamic for the game which has been billed as an "Anime-themed" MMORPG. 3-D environments with 2D sprite avatars work quite well, both on paper and in practice. Xenogears would be the closest graphical example I can think of. Sprite animations are well done too, each type of weapon, daggers and two-handed swords, bows and so on, have a unique animation for every class and sex. This sounds fine, given the number of total classes, but there is still no remedy for seeing the same animation time after time, and it can get rather aggravating. Environments are passable, even with the large amount of reused textures, static water, and blurry edges on everything. All this has the end effect of making every series of dungeons or outdoor maps look exactly alike. Monsters often are reused sprites painted a different color. Often, a harder ?mob?, as they?re called, is easily distinguished by, say a new color, or maybe a super sized version of the original one. It?s almost as if to save time, Gravity decided to reuse the first 25 designs they came up with to save work.

Music in RO is probably one of my high points for this game. While entering a new town or area, you?re greeted with crisp .wav files playing catchy, pop-like instrumentals, and at times; brooding piano solos whilst you face hordes of monsters. My only complaint is that the actual tracks themselves are too short. Upon opening the music folder in my Ragnarok Online directory, I realized most were 1-2 minutes long. Granted, the music IS good, that doesn?t mean looping it after a minute makes it any better. Sounds fit well, but are easily forgotten; there are too few of them. Every sword/knife/axe sounds the same, the arrows sound like a face being slapped, and the magic sounds like¡­magic. Think of crackling and shards of ice. With one sound in each of these categories, you know you won?t be enjoying the music for too long; the speakers will go off long before that happens.

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