It took me about 50 Ragnarok Odyssey quests before I finally gave up on the game. I played mission after mission after mission trying to extract fun out of the experience, but there was precious little to be found. Mercilessly repetitive and surprisingly shallow for such a presumably vast RPG, Ragnarok Odyssey represents one of the most unfortunate things that could happen in gaming: when something so promising simply doesn’t deliver.

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Ragnarok Odyssey comes by way of GungHo Online Entertainment, a sizable Japanese developer best known for its connection with the Korean MMORPG Ragnarok Online. It’s from that game that Ragnarok Odyssey derives not only its name, but its style, enemies and lore as well. The thing is, whether coupled with the prolific MMO or played on its own, Ragnarok Odyssey on PlayStation Vita just isn’t a good game. It’s formulaic, predictable, obtuse and static. It takes precious little from the formula that makes good RPGs good or great RPGs great; it instead relies upon half-baked interpretations of the formula and combines them to make an entirely underwhelming product.At its core, Ragnarok Odyssey is a third-person, class-based action-RPG that can be played by yourself or online with up to three other players. It revolves almost entirely around loot, something that immediately sounds appealing to a contingent of Vita’s userbase. With that loot, Ragnarok Odyssey becomes a game reliant on customization, and it’s this customization coupled with seamlessly changing classes as well as playing online that, on the periphery, makes Ragnarok Odyssey sound undeniably appealing.But Ragnarok Odyssey falls woefully short with just about everything it does. For an hour or two, the game is undeniably fun. Hacking and slashing (or spell-casting or letting arrows fly) against your enemies seems at home on the PlayStation Vita. But monotony quickly sets in as Ragnarok Odyssey sets you off on the same maps over and over again, fighting the same enemies over and over again, doing the same tired fetch-and-kill quests over and over again. The game is rapidly overwhelmed by a deluge of the same old thing. It becomes dull and tired mere hours after beginning.Playing online makes the game marginally more enjoyable, but there are problems there too. You can only go to missions accessible to the lowest level person you’re with, meaning that if you’re on chapter five and everyone else is on chapter one, you can’t do anything but what’s on chapter one. Moreover, connection problems can make gameplay spotty, and the tavern that acts as the online lobby doesn’t compel gamers to head right into the action. If someone wants to equip weapons endlessly, they can do that for five minutes, leaving everyone else hanging at the “ready” door.Of course, if there was any real motive behind your quests, things would be different. We often forgive the cyclical nature of many turn-based RPGs because their stories and characters give you a reason to stay. Even certain action-oriented RPGs – Mass Effect, for instance – are excused from what some might call average gameplay because you care about your character and the greater plot. But there’s none of that here. Bad dialogue from a handful of archetypical characters do very little to engage players. It’s all about the next quest. And when the next quest takes place on the same map you already visited a dozen times with the same enemies you’ve slayed hundreds of times, you don’t have fun. You become annoyed.Combat itself is fine, albeit button-mashy. I played mostly as a sword-wielding warrior, though I occasionally switched it up to try some of the other classes. You’ll no doubt fight with the camera from time to time (especially when you’re cornered by many enemies, causing the camera to freak out), but combat can be satisfying, especially if you’re fighting the enemy horde with folks online. But when you factor in that you’re fighting the same enemies over and over again (occasionally palate-swapped, for good measure), you’re really doing it for the loot. Right?Wrong. The loot system in Ragnarok Odyssey – which is what it focuses on – is where the game really begins to fall apart. I wouldn’t mind the mind-numbing act of fighting in the same scenario over and over again if I was doing something meaningful with my character. If he’s getting stronger because of my actions, if I’m gaining experience points, and if the loot I’m toiling to collect can be meaningfully used, then by all means, let’s focus on that. Everything else becomes a means to an end.But your character in Ragnarok Odyssey doesn’t collect experience points. He doesn’t level up. He only becomes stronger when you complete a “chapter” of quests. That means that fighting enemies means nothing apart from actually completing quests. Want to clean up an entire map’s worth of enemies? Don’t bother. There’s absolutely no reason to do that. And as for the loot you’re finding, good luck figuring out easy ways to use it. Augmenting and powering-up your weapons and armor is, in a word, nebulous. The game’s menus do a poor job of communicating what you need to upgrade what items; you have to press a button four times after going to the augment screen to figure that out. What’s the point of collecting endless loot if it’s unclear how you even use it?The lack of leveling and experience is supposed to be excused by Ragnarok Odyssey’s card system, which is a bit annoying, but functional. You’ll find a slew of cards in the game that each have a different numeric value, as well as powers. The numeric value adds to the overall amount of cards you can equip on your armor at one time, while the powers can give you advantages (and at times deficits) in all manner of skills and stats.But what I really want in an RPG like this is to have complete control over my character. I want to feel like I’m doing something with him, that I’m not just going through the motions. Ragnarok Odyssey makes you go through the motions, though, and they’re pretty boring motions at that.