Ragnarok Online

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Ragnarok Online is a Korean MMORPG established in 2001 by Gravity Co., Ltd. Originally an adaption of the Manhwa Ragnarok, RO was eventually released to several countries, yet mostly stayed popular in Asia. Most Korean MMORPGs afterwards have had a nasty habit of almost copying the game to a T; it might have popularized the free beta idea as well, not to mention, possibly, the more-or-less standard licensing architecture foreign online game developers tend to use when setting their games up overseas. In a rather sad twist, more people play Ragnarok than World of Warcraft... if you count all the illegal, mostly free private servers.

Also of note is Ragnarok Online's rather colourful history, markedly more so than most MMORPGs and definitely remarkable given the game's general success despite the various tribulations. At the end of its original closed beta period, a group of hackers, apparently angered by the game moving into a pay to play format, attacked the servers, not only of the game but Gravity as well, destroying everything, setting RO's development back, and causing it to disappear from the radar for a long time before finally resurfacing. A lot of anger can be seen under the community at this, at times, as not only did it enable the private servers to come about by stealing a copy of the basic Aegis architecture at the core of the game, but caused many features, such as player owned apartments, to be dropped from the final release. Not to mention a near disastrous case of Executive Meddling by Samsung after they saved Gravity from total bankruptcy (though Samsung saw how horrible things were going because of the meddling, and backed off just in time).

A sequel, Ragnarok Online 2: The Gate of the World, was available in open beta in 2007, but was scrapped in 2010 and replaced by Ragnarok Online 2: Legend of the Second.

Tropes used in Ragnarok Online include:
  • The Anime of the Game: Ragnarok the Animation. Humorous, since the anime is based on the world of Ragnarok Online, which is loosely based on the original Ragnarok Manhwa. The natural consequence of Adaptation Displacement.
  • Absolute Cleavage: Female Assassin Crosses.
    • And Female Alchemists/Biochemists.
  • Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Both Prontera and Glast Heim's culverts, though not serious offencers, both cities being large, ancient affairs, and even then the culverts feature large numbers of difficult-looking walk-ways, on the rare occasions the characters aren't simply wading through sewage.
  • Action Commands: Both the Monk and Tae Kwon Kid/Master classes use these to initiate specific skills and combos.
  • Alliterative Name: the Biolabs' ghosts Errende Ebecee and Kathryne Keyron.
  • An Adventurer Is You: As a rule, most classes can generally follow at least three of the archetypes, or a combination thereof - often more, and sometimes with somewhat unusual possibilities and 'user-created' ones. Especially of note for the former is the 'Super Novice' class, which can take skills from any of the classes a novice can become (barring extended classes), and for the latter, the 'perma-' characters, which aren't so much classes as a willful decision not to progress, and usually stand to prove just how scary a level 99 Acolyte can be (looking at you, Aragan). While still uncommon, this seems to be remarkably fashionable compared to most MMO's.
  • Apathetic Citizens: Town NPCs are completely unfazed whenever aggressive monsters show up. Kafra maids, the game's version of the Save Point and other useful utilities, also show up at various dungeon entrances, even if the map itself is hostile.
  • Arrows on Fire: Fire arrows. Pretty common as well.
  • Artificial Stupidity: In an art form. Many skills seem to even be designed to take advantage of the fact that all aggressive monsters make a bee-line for players or stand in place and rain projectiles.
  • Ascended Extra: Do you know that Endless Tower is based on Ragnarok DS' Tower of Mirage?
  • Awesome but Impractical: Mages get quite a few of these. The Mighty Staff adds a huge amount of Strength, yet is mostly useless for most stat builds that mages use. The Dagger of Counter gives the largest critical bonus in the game, yet is usually employed during PVP to stall other players.
    • Soul Linkers can also use the Dagger of Counter, which can turn them into Lethal Joke Characters.
    • Certain Monk builds can enjoy the power boost from the Mighty Staff as well.
    • Taekwon class is practically made of this trope. First, there is a massive power for a massive Interface Screw exchange detalied below. Secondly, there is their ability to become an unstoppable engine of destruction - but only after getting a specific buff from other class and only on three maps in the whole game, decided once and for all.
      • It IS possible to change the maps, but it's very impractical to do so, and you need some assistance to do it.
    • Water Ball is an extremely fast, easily spammable, high-damaging Water spell - more so for Rogue classes, who can actually copy an overleveled version (level 10, while the version used by Wizard classes only goes up to level 5). The catch? First, you can't spam it unless you're either standing on water or have a Ninja or Sage slave to help you. Second, if you're using it on a non-PvP scenario, take a guess on what's the Element of a monster that lives near the water.
  • Back Stab: Used to be the main skill for Rogues, but has been seriously nerfed over the years.
  • Bare-Fisted Monk
  • Bare Your Midriff Even with the male characters.
  • Belly Dancer: The dancer and gypsy classes are modeled after belly dancers.
  • The Beast Master: The Alchemist class and the Homunculi.
    • A few other classes have animal partners as well. Hunters and Snipers have their falcons, and the new Rangers have wolves called Wargs.
    • There is current talk and possible proof of an actual pet-based class. Along with one based off of the undead lovers Bongun and Munaks
  • Betting Minigame - The Casino in the southern beach town, Comodo. It was removed from the International release.
  • BFS: The Atlas Weapon and the Doom Bringer, the latter of which is actually a terribly weak axe unless the user has over 90 base STR.
    • Another pretty good example would be the Violet Fear, a huge sword which was made from two magic (and equally huge) swords fused into one. Those two swords is a drop from a huge monster, the Naght Sieger.
  • Black Mage The Mage class
  • The Blacksmith
  • Boring but Practical: Pretty much the basis of the entire game. Wizards and most classes alike tend to be strapped with one main, powerful skill to use throughout their entire leveling career, and most flashy, rare weapons tend to not be anywhere near as powerful as customized "normal" weapons.
    • Should be noted, though, that in a lot of cases, for these weapons to be truly better than standard 'rares', the risks involved in the upgrade process are huge, and involve the application of often-times even rarer upgrade items and huge amounts of money. Thus, a 'customised normal weapon' of that level is usually an extremely rare item in and of itself. Indeed, even rarer than this is the fully upgraded/customised rare weapon, which, while of such rarity as to be nigh-impossible to acquire, is just plain frightening when it does turn up.
    • Which is part of the game creator's frustration. A common weapon for magic user is a regular, easy to obtain rod with 4 slots plus 4 cards either decreasing casting time quite decently or increasing magical attack. Since they don't hit anything with it, the upgrades don't matter either and can last in some cases until the endgame. Good luck adding new weapons without them being Game Breaker.
  • Boss in Mook Clothing: Loads. Among the most (in)famous are the Valkyries of Odin's Temple and the Transcendent Ghosts from the Biolabs.
    • The Pori Pori is the supreme example of this. Disguised as an ordinary Poring, the weakest monster in the game, this monster has close to 100 million HP, ridiculous attack power, can strip gear, and cast, in some cases, twice-as-powerful versions of player skills.
    • The Valkyries might still not count - anything that big's bound to leave a mark, right? But the Biolabs ghosts sure as hell do, with at least two of them overlapping into Demonic Spiders. The worst offender is Cecil Damon, whose normal attacks are already nearly as painful as a normal Sniper's Double Strafe, yet can still quadruple her attack power.
      • What's irritating about the Biolab minibosses is that not only do they look exactly like the normal enemies in that dungeon, but there are fake bosses among them.
  • Bragging Rights Reward: The Boy's Cap, which does absolutely nothing, but requires 20 rare drops from a boss, among other things.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: What becomes to Nydhogg when Satan Morroc's seal was weakened. She gets better after we snapped her Shadow.
  • Breakable Weapons: Normally, player equipment is unbreakable, but some skills and weapons can damage them, rendering them unequippable until repaired. There's a worse degree of breaking: attempting to refine a piece of equipment to increase its performance permanently has a fat chance of destroying it.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: Many service providers started selling useful virtual items for real life money.
    • An in-game example is quite blatant, as well - the game's economy is such that pretty much anything can be sold, and the prevalence of Boring but Practical means that unlike in some other MMORPGs even gamebreaking stuff will be available to anyone... with the right amount of cash on hand.
      • The gamebreaking element is normally kept out by the more capable service providers, however. That is to say, most of the breakage will be on the less-than-legal servers.. though I hear the licensed Phillipines RO is quite a mess.
      • Yeah, it is. No thanks to the jackasses running it. Seriously, they legalized bots for more money.
    • In addition, some servers will reward the player with a (sometimes) custom item, usually quite good, for donating to the server or buying limited edition swag.
    • And we have Merchant characters who uses the ingame money to use their skills. Perhaps they thought about "money is power" a bit to straight
  • Calling Your Attacks: Skill names, when used, turn up in a little text box over characters heads [ Lord of Vermillion!! ]
    • A special, hidden ability is available to the Super Novice while their experience percentage is a multiple of ten. By the player themselves calling (typing) the lines: 'Dear angel, can you hear my voice?', 'I am <name> Super Novice', 'Help me out Please~ T_T', '<final line of player's composition, triggering activation>', they can invoke an angel's blessings ( massive bonus to critical hit rate ). Unfortunately the game can be horribly finicky about syntax here.
  • Cast from Hit Points: Scholars use this to convert HP into SP with the Indulge skill.
    • Don't forget the Paladin's Matyr's Recknoning skill. It hurts like all get out when properly built and ignores defenses but the trade-off is that it takes A LOT of HP once you complete the attacks. Better have some Priests and Alchemists with you because after completing the combo the Paladin becomes horribly weak and any mook can take him out soon after.
    • Ninja's Killing Stroke is pretty much this.
  • Chainmail Bikini: pretty much literally done with female Rune Knights the upcoming 3rd class Knight class and the female Royal Guard. The upcoming 3rd class Crusaders appear to be in a losing game of strip poker but not as close to this trope as their alternate 3rd class.
  • Christianity Is Catholic/Crystal Dragon Jesus: Rune-Midgart's primary religion is not explicitly Christian, but still has a pointedly Catholic flavour.
    • With the entire setting being based significantly on Norse Mythology, as well. But it still tastes Catholic.
  • Church Militant
  • Combos
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Water Ball, an extremely powerful Wizard spell, requires the player to be standing on a water cell or certain other skills in order for them to use it. However, if a monster has it, you can expect a lot of hurt even when they're standing on dry land.
    • A few enemies also have versions of player spells that are way stronger than the strongest player usable versions, like the normal, non-boss version of the High Wizard enemy in the Biolab floor 3. It can cast level 28 Jupitel Thunder, which hits 30 times (players' Jupitel Thunder can only go up to level 10, and hits 12 times)
  • Continuity Nod: Loki from Ragnarok manhwa appeared on Bifrost update.
  • Crazy Prepared: The Alchemist/Biochemist classes, to some extent. All of their skills require a potion or bottle, but give access to unique and powerful skills, most notable being throwing a Molotov Cocktail and an Acid Bottle at the same time at the enemy. Said skill ist the most powerful single-enemy skill (which gets even stronger the more hitpoints the enemy has) , but needs a lot of time farming the parts and preparing the bottles.
  • Cute Monster Girl: Tons.
  • Deflector Shields: The priest has two kinds: one that blocks melee damage, and one that cuts all damage by half.
  • Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: Each class of ranged weapons has several kinds of ammo, ranging from common standard to pretty exotic. Depending on the type, they work better against specific enemies...or worse. And sometimes not at all.
  • Detached Sleeves: Gypsy class. Case rested.
    • Scholars too.
  • Disability Superpower/Interface Screw: Played with, a little brutally, by the Star Knight/Taekwon Master class. Their skill, 'Demon of the Sun, Moon, and Stars' (or 'Solar, Lunar, and Stellar Shadow'), grants its owner a + 30% bonus to Attack Speed - note, this bonus is insanely large. In exchange? The character's sight. This isn't like the 'Blind' status effect, where a character takes a hit to their accuracy - accuracy is just fine. However the player's screen becomes black the moment this skill is learned, with a lighted area surrounding their character. As the skill is levelled up and the attack speed bonus moves closer to + 30%, the lighted area shrinks, until at level 10 and + 30% ASPD, the tiles immediately surrounding a character can just be made out. These effects are permanent and utterly irrevocable.
    • Not to mention their 'Solar, Lunar and Stellar Union', which lets them go Super Saiyan on enemies, at the cost of losing a percentage of their HP per attack. The fact that you need a buff from a Soul Linker, their counterpart class, makes this troper wonder if it's really worth it...
  • Does Not Like Shoes: Taekwons and Shuras.
  • Doom Doors: The sound effect for the Shadow Chaser skill, Manhole.
  • Down the Drain: The different culvert areas.
  • Dual-Wielding: Assassins can wield a katar in either hand, or a combination of swords, daggers, axes, and/or knives. Gunslingers can also use a pair of handguns.
  • Dub Name Change: The international server changed Professor to Scholar, Creator to Biochemist, Whitesmith to Mastersmith, and Clown to Minstrel. And that's just the classes.
  • Easter Egg: The Super Novice class is all but made of these, such as Never give up!, Guardian Angel, and Really Super.
  • Elemental Crafting
  • Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors
  • Emulation: Some private servers run the semi-legal eAthena core architecture, which is a Ragnarok Online server emulator. Others run on a pirated version of Gravity's Aegis core. The first is legal right up until servers start putting copyrighted media (the rest of the game) on it, the other is entirely illegal.
  • Evolutionary Levels: Porings. The poring species of monster has an ill-defined evolutionary tree, including Poporing (green), Drops (yellow), Marin (blue), Ghostring (a ghostly poring), Angeling, Deviring, Mastering, Arch-Angeling...
    • More keep getting added, too, like Metaling and Stapo.
    • We've got the Pouring and Bombring to liven things up these days. And who could forget Pori Pori/Poring the Conqueror/Bring It On?
    • With the Port Malaya update, we now have the Jejeling, fashioned after the Philippine-exclusive "Jejemon" phenomenon.
  • Executive Meddling: As noted in the description, after Gravity was nearly destroyed by a hacking incident at the end of the first closed beta, Samsung 'saved' them by buying them out. Samsung then put a director in place to oversee the recovery of the almost totally destroyed game, who tried to impose his radically different vision on the design team. Samsung caught wind of this when a very large portion of the design team proceeded to rebel and quit, however, and pulled the director, installing someone else with instructions to leave the development be, and while some damage was done, disaster was largely averted.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
    • Payon is Korea.
    • The whole of the Republic of Schwarzvald has a rather German flavor.
    • Rachel: Jerusalem.
    • Amatsu is Japan.
    • Ayothaya is Thailand.
    • Kunlun is Taiwan.
    • Jawaii is Hawaii.
    • Louyang is imperial China.
    • Moscovia is Russia.
    • Brasilis is Brazil.
    • Dewata is Indonesia.
    • Port Malaya is the Philippines.
  • Fireballs
  • Fire, Ice, Lightning, Earth
  • Fetch Quest: So many.
  • Floating Continent: Juno, Gonryun, and the second level of the Gonryun dungeon.
  • Flunky Boss: Pretty much all the MVP bosses, most mini bosses and even some normal monsters have a 'mob' of lesser creatures around them. Killing them is a waste of time, since their master almost instantly re-summons them, and they're at least annoying, since fighting against multiple enemies lowers your defensive stats. Not to mention the mooks of the higher bosses, who are often quite challenging even when encountered on their own...
  • Foreshadowing:
    • Around the time Hugel patch came, the Blacksmith Guild is moved from Geffen to Einbroch. Einbroch is a Steampunk-esque city full of industrial machines. Now, what is the third class of Blacksmith and their specialty?
    • On the southeast of the Biolabs' third floor, there's a stair going downwards. The problem is, it's covered in water. Then, the Biolabs 4 update came and to access that floor the players must enter the warp on above-mentioned stair.
  • Fridge Horror: Certain monsters can be "tamed" as pets to provide certain bonuses once they reach a certain loyalty level (as well as chattering in broken engrish). Among them is the Isis, a naked woman with the lower body of a snake. Among her random chatter is a mention that she was cursed to look the way she does now, and occasionally sighing wistfully about "nothing important". A young woman was captured, cursed, and forced to guard a tomb for god-knows-how-long, only to be captured by an adventurer with a bauble - an adventurer whom she now calls "master" and presumably obeys every command of, in spite of being fully aware of what's happened to her.
    • Speaking of Fridge Horror and taming items, what about Sohee? Their taming item is the sort of knife supposedly kept by Japanese noblewomen, in case they should ever need to enact seppuku.
  • Frilly Upgrade: every advanced jobs. But Transcended class is this to Second class in terms of costumes.
  • Full-Contact Magic: Spell Fist is about the power of a LEVEL 10 BOLT for a Sorcerer.
  • Gaiden Game: Ragnarok Battle Offline. A side-scrolling single player Beat'Em Up with plenty of shout-outs to the habbits of the player community.
    • There are three games published by Gungho (Japanese RO's publisher).
      • Ragnarok DS (for, obviously, Nintendo DS): starring a Novice called Ales (whose name you can change) who wants to build a guild and help people in need. In his journey, he meets Sierra (a Shaman), Lucifi (Swordsman), Lisir (Mage), and Viselc (Thief). In addition of two exclusive classes (Dark Knight and Shaman), it also has a multiplayer feature called Tower Of Mirage (the concept later become the basis of Endless Tower in the online version).
      • Ragnarok Hikari to Yami no Kojou (lit. Imperial Princess of Light and Darkness) for PlayStation Portable: the story is unknown for now, but is supposedly linked to online version (most likely a prequel). Set on the continent of Gran Tritter, with raging war between Branchardo Empire and Aura Kingdom as the main problem of story. Featuring most of Transcendent classes (with exception of Stalker, Biochemist, and Scholar), two exclusive classes from Ragnarok DS, and -suprisingly- Zonda and Kafra. The developer is Appolonsoft and Chime, while the artwork is provided by Tomatika (who'd you recognize from Eternal Poison).
      • Ragnarok Odyssey for Play Station Vita: a Monster Hunter clone with a dash of Phantasy Star developed by Game Arts (Grandia and Lunar series' developer). The already revealed classes are Sword Master, Mage, Hunter, Assassin, Cleric, and Hammer Smith.
  • Gainaxing
    • Especially bad with the Monk/Champion class tree, but thankfully averted with the upcoming Shura third class.
    • Also, Stalkers.
    • Female Blacksmith/Whitesmith also jiggles quite a lot in their idle battle animation.
    • Female novices (whose sprite, despite its bust, is by size implicitly youngest of all the classes) who display this despite their metal breastplate.
    • Harpies jiggle quite a bit as they flap their wings.
  • Game Favored Gender: Some female players complain how weaker the Gypsies are compared to Minstrels. While Gypsies do have two extremely powerful skills (Dazzler, which stuns everyone on the screen and Slow Grace, which slows enemies down and debuffs them out of speed-related effects), they are not as important as a Minstrel in War of Emperium and all other solo skills just downright suck.
  • Getting Crap Past the Radar: The game has a 'Teen' rating, but loitering quietly in the background are nudity, sexualized youngsters, BDSM, gore, and maybe even implied rape elements. It might have something to do with the game using pixel sprites rather than 3D ones; how else could they have gotten away with a boss monster that's a cute little girl who wears nothing whatsoever below chest level?
  • Guide Dang It: If you start distributing your status and skill points without consulting the guides on the fan message boards, your character will be ineffective for 'serious' play by level 60. And heaven help you if you take such a character into either player vs player or guild vs guild battles.
    • What often bushwacks new players, or those spoiled by other MMOs, is that your stat and skill allocations are PERMANENT. Fooling around, or even lag or misclicks, could gimp your character permanently. That road to 99 is long and brutal, so variations from "proper builds" start to hurt bad at high levels. There's now some reset options, but these cost real money (on iRO at least). Almost every RO player has had to scrap their first character entirely, before reading the guides and starting over with subsequent characters.
  • The Gunslinger: The, well, Gunslinger class. Who, all by itself, brings PLENTY of additional, gun-related tropes into the game.
  • He Knows Too Much: Rekenber Corporation evoked this. You disagree with their ideas, know their secrets, or just violating Lighthalzen's rules, God helps you to stay alive. Digotz, Shinokas, and the Biolabs' ghosts (when they're still alive) learned this on REALLY hard way. Thankfully, Schwartzvalt Republic's president, Kiel Hyre, and the players (of course) avert this.
  • Healing Shiv
  • Health Damage Asymmetry: Since renewal. take a look at this monster list.
  • Highly-Visible Ninja: Ninja's advanced class, Kagerou/Oboro, traded the purple ninja suit for the white one. For bonus, their sub-colors are red and BRIGHT YELLOW.
  • Holiday Mode: Lutie.
  • Holy Hand Grenade: The Acolyte magic skill Holy Light. The Archbishop gets a lot more options.
    • May be played straight with the Paladin's Gloria Domini skill. It counts as a ranged attack, hits for 2000 HP at maximium skill and can damage even bosses since it ignores defenses.
  • Horse of a Different Color: The PecoPecos, for whom comparisons can of course be drawn to Chocobos. Except unlike the intelligent, highly empathetic, giant canary things, PecoPecos are big, dumb, orange pelicans.
    • More recently, Rune Knights have been introduced, which can ride Feruses (big lizards). Also, Rangers can ride Wargs (big blue wolves). The Royal Guards ride Gryphons.
    • Just recently, every classes apparently gets mounts for each group. Ranging from huge Porings, Nine-tailed Foxes, to Alpacas and Giant Frogs.
  • Immortality Inducer: the Soul Linker job change implies that your character owns several.

This Witherless Rose will wither away instead of you...
This Immortal Heart will cease to pump blood, instead of yours.
This Diamond will turn to dust in place of your mortal body.

  • Impossibly Cool Clothes: Not the lower classes so much, but second class sprites, transcendants, and especially the new third class ones fit.
  • Improbable Weapon User: Some sages and a few priests fight with books; bards can fight with musical instruments.
  • Instrument of Murder: Bards and their more powerful counterparts fight with their musical instruments. What doesn't entirely make sense is how they manage to throw/shoot arrows (depending on the skill) by swinging it at their opponents.
  • Intrepid Merchant: The Merchant class tree revolves around kicking monster butt, collecting drops, selling Vendor Trash at greater prices and idle in Prontera or Payon after setting up your trading post for other players to buy your rarest drops.
  • Item Crafting
  • Karma Houdini: The Pickpocket NPC in Lighthalzen. He randomly appears in three different locations and steals players off their money when they get too near. In one location, if he gets cornered by the players, he...makes players buy his Speed Potions for a very hefty price.
  • Karma Meter: A planned feature that has swung wildly in and out of implementation over the various stages of release. The idea was to use a PVP system, among other aspects, to control a characters rating within two areas, and for a long time the bare bones of it were there to be seen in game, unactivated. In the most recent versions however, these vestiges have disappeared entirely but for an unresponsive 'Temperament' tab in the stats window, and most believe that the feature has been completely given up on.
  • La Résistance: Secret Wing, an organization with a goal to take Rekenber Corporation down from its domination over Schwartzvalt Republic. Interestingly, it's sponsored by Schwartzvalt Republic's president and Kafra Corporation.
  • Lethal Joke Character: The instant-cast Super Novice.
    • Before renewal it was... Now, it has almost no advantage compared to a Bolt Sage, except maybe for the Heal.
    • Super Novices also can get the highest flee in the game but because flee is lost quickly the more monsters are attacking you, it's not so great.
    • Also the expanded classes, namely the Ninja and Taekwon classes. The former are basically not-so-squishy wizards who can spam you to shreds if you're not a caster yourself. The latter, besides having a skill that can potentially block anything and everything (Tumbling), has access to potentially game breaking abilities such as massive mana drain and unblockable attacks (Taekwon Masters), unlimited combo chaining (Taekwon Rankers), and near-immortality OR crazy physical damage that ignores the target's Flee and Defense since they are Critical, depending on how you build yours (Soul Linkers).
    • The other expanded class, Gunslinger, has the frighteningly-powerful Full Blast skill if properly built, as well as Gunslinger Mine to work around those pesky ninjas' Cicada Skin Shed.
      • Not only they have a insane DPS with Desperado and a mighty finisher with Full Blast, he also doubles as a debuffer, removing an enemy's weapon (at long range), inflicting status with the Mines and decreasing DEF with Coin Fling.
  • Life Meter
  • Lightning Bruiser: Two-Handed Lord Knights in Frenzy. OH.MY.GOD. Lord Knights with Frenzy! Especially one that's well built.
  • Loot Drama: Loot and EXP are divided across party members in proportion to the total damage each character has done to the monster in question. Fortunately damage dealers tend to be polite enough to divide the plunder (EXP can be set to be equally distributed all party members are of a similar level). Gets a little more serious after War Of Emperium: the prize a guild earns for conquering (and maintaining) a castle is access to their treasure room, which has treasure chests with rare drops that refill daily. Only the guild leader gets to enter.
  • Lost Technology: The Juperos Dungeon have tons of robots that still active.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Certain quests involve this.
  • Luck Stat: Raises critical and perfect dodge rate.
  • MacGuffin: The Heart of Ymir.
  • Magic Dance: Dancers.
  • Magic Knight: The Sage/Professor/Sorcerer and Crusader/Paladin/Royal Guard classes, as well as the new Rune Knight third class.
    • There are cards and weapons that allow for automatic spellcasting. Whether the spell damage is any good depends on your character and his stats.
  • Magic Music: Bards and Dancers.
  • Mana Meter
  • Mascot Mook: Porings! But not their evolved powerful relatives.
  • The Medic: The Priest class, with a Full Support build.
  • Meido: Alices and Alizas. On the NPC side, Kafras.
  • Mega Manning: The rogue class's Intimidate skill (known as Plagiarize outside of iRO). Shadow Chasers also get Reproduce, which let them permanently copy any one skill at a time. Also worth noting is that most skills they copy are much more useful and/or powerful in their hands as compared to the version used by the original job classes (the aforementioned Water Ball, plus a few other examples). That they can copy even the signature, One-Hit Kill moves of the other jobs (the Monk's Asura Strike, the Sura's Gate of Hell) would make this seem like a total Game Breaker; however, since their copied skills retain the requirements (items, Required Secondary Powers) as used by the original job class, some of the copied skills may be Awesome but Impractical.
  • Mighty Glacier: Shield Crusaders/Paladins become this with many of their defensive skills mastered.
  • Mismatched Eyes: Rachel's Pope, her twin brother, Transcended Valkyrie and "Girl With Cat" in Orleans' kitchen have this.
  • Mushroom Man: The Spore and Red Spore monsters, which resemble mushrooms with faces; their caps pop open to reveal a huge mouth full of teeth. Players can also get a hat that resembles a mushroom cap and look like one themselves.
  • Musical Assassin: Bards and Minstrels. Dancers and Gypsies also count, since some of their attacks are music-based.
  • Nice Hat: This is, in a way, RO's 'thing'. Being relatively old as MMORPG's go, and using semi-modular 32bit, 2D sprites for characters, character customisation is a little limited. Besides hair colour and style, and later several types of clothing dye, one of the biggest customisation elements are headgears, occupying the lower, middle and upper parts of the head. Ragnarok Online, therefore, has a huge number of hats.
  • Norse Mythology
  • Ocular Gushers
  • Ominous Pipe Organ: For some reason, used inside the non-Corrupt Church. If your background music turns weddings into Nightmare Fuel, you're doing something wrong.
  • The One Hit Killers: Monks/Champs/Assassin Cross. There are servers where at least 60% of all characters you'll see are any of those three...
    • One-Hit Kill: every attacking skill has potential to be one. The most infamous example would be Ashura Strike/Guillotine Fist for Monk branch and Killing Stroke for Ninja.
    • This does allow for bragging rights if you manage to beat them without access to a similar move.
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: You just have to wear a pair of geek glasses and a white mustache to get pass the guard to the Rekenber Corporation's Laboratory, and it doesn't matter if your hairstyle and clothing is different or if you're a female.
  • Player Versus Player
  • Power of Rock: Loki's Weil/Classical Pluck.
  • Prestige Class: The entire "transcendent" class line, which require you to max your levels out and then do it all again with higher EXP requirements to level.
  • Pretty in Mink: Stalkers, High Wizards, Scholars, Snipers, and female Alchemists include fur in their outfits. The Santa outfits get this too, unsurprisingly. Also, Shadow Chasers and Wanderers.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: Mostly true, but averted when it comes to the 2-2 classes for Archers: Females become Dancers, and males become Bards. The division continues for subsequent class advancement.
    • To also be averted with a upcoming update that will add a class change to ninjas which will also be a split for them like it was for bards/gypsys with each gender getting exclusive skills
  • Rain of Arrows: The Maestro's / Wanderer's new skill, Severe Rainstorm. Also, Ranger's Arrow Storm.
  • Random Drop
  • Really Seven Hundred Years Old: The NPC for the Soul Linker job change looks like a kid, but is 300 years old.
  • Repeatable Quest: The Bragging Rights Reward hats (among other awards, but mostly hats) can be obtained in Fetch Quests, and can be repeated as long as the player is willing to hunt down the same items.
  • Retool: A few of RO's updates (the Comodo update in particular sticks out in this troper's mind) have drastically altered monster spawns in the past in order to keep the game fresh (possibly to combat botting as well; how else do you explain the Hunter Flies in Geffen1?). More recently, the game's developers have decided to take things a step further, and are currently rebalancing the entire game in order to appeal to modern MMO gamers, including changing how character stats work, altering the exp table, and, of course, drastically altering monster stats and spawns.
    • A recent update to iRO's repeatable EXP quests has been put in effect to further combat botting, while drastically changing the way the repeatable EXP quests themselves work.
    • Around a year ago, RO gets "Renewal" patch, that meant to make the game comfortable for users, new or old. Whether this is good or not, YMMV.
  • Ridiculously-Human Robots: The Kiel Hyre Academy
  • Real Money Trade: Typically for an MMORPG, albeit a bit more pronounced given RO's age. The international server had a somewhat unconventional response to the issue, replacing its free trial with a wholly free server (while giving significant benefits to the original, subscriber servers). Valkyrie functions in effect both as a free trial, and a glorified RMT trap, since the primary servers need a working credit card and payment for access. Whether exposing your new players to the EULA-breaching excrement of the game in full force is a good idea or not, however, is questionable.
  • Roboteching: Most notably the Soul Strike spell, though there are a few other cases as well.
  • Sexy Priest: The priest class has rather uncharacteristically enticing outfits.
  • Sexy Santa Dress: Female Santa outfits.
  • Shout-Out: Priests using golf clubs? That sounds familiar.
    • The captain of the Airship? He's called Captain Tarlock.
    • Also, Maestros have now a Skill called Melancholy/Gloomy Shyness. That's the icon of the skill. Why is it important? That's why.
    • Maybe this is a bit subtle, but Lighthalzen Somatology Biolaboratory's official name is "Regenschirm", which is Germanese of "Umbrella". Remembering what happened there, most likely it's a reference to Umberella Corp from Resident Evil.
    • From 'The Sign' quest, we have Vigogra, which is RO's version of, well...
  • Showgirl Skirt: Many of the girl's class outfits. For Assassin branch, this applies to both gender until Guillotine Cross.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: Abyss Lake dungeon is one of the hardest dungeons in the entire game, full of high-level dragons that can wipe out your party quickly. It has this as its background music.
  • Spell My Name with an "S": Rune-Midgarts or Rune-Midgard? Juno or Yuno? Morroc or Morrocc? Niffleheim, Nibelheim, or Niflheim? Rael or Rachel? Schwarzvald or Schwaltzvalt? And that's just locations!
  • Sprite Polygon Mix
  • Status Buff and Status Buff Dispel
  • Stripperiffic: Show me any female class, besides Acolyte and Merchant, who has a non-stripperific outfit. The Genies Dancer and Gypsy classes are the worse offenders as a whole, followed by the full tree of Mage classes, who wear "dresses" seemingly inspired by the character Maniña Yerichana of Soap Opera Ka-ina fame (In fact, the female mage's outfit has been described as "A bikinni with a mudflap and a rain cape"). Ironically, the ones who tends to be treated as the Ms. Fanservice in most of the ecchi and hentai works are the Priest(ess), one of the more clothed classes, but who shows quite a lot of leg (with garters and stockings) and the sprite flashes when in dead position (though this has been edited out of the international version).
    • Mind you, that counts for both female and male priests.
    • Assassin Crosses. 'nuff said.
    • Do not forget Rogues and Stalkers.
    • The 3rd classes as a whole, male and female, are very skimpily dressed even if their previous classes were a bit more modest. Crasaders in particular were covered from head to toe in armor, only to take most of it off in the upgrade to Royal Guard.
  • Summon Magic: Alchemists can summon plant monsters and Marine Spheres.
    • Not to mention the Dead Branch item, and its more potent sister, the Bloody Branch. These summon a random monster to to the location of the user, with the latter having a great chance of calling up something nasty.
    • A recent update allows Sorcerers to summon one of four Elemental Spirits, which can enhance the spells corresponding on their own elements.
    • Sages have a random skill called Hocus Pocus that has a chance of doing just about anything in the game including summoning MV Ps. This was abused for nearly a year to level characters quickly to 99 before players got upset about the ease of grinding off Lord of Death and nerfed MVP mobs to give no EXP.
  • The Syndicate: Rekenber Corporation. There's a saying on the fandom that if something bad happens, 90% chance Rekenber has something to do with it.
  • Theme Naming: The servers are traditionally named after characters from the original Manhwa.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Warlock's Comet spell. Not the damage, but range: 31x31 in Level 5. It covers more than your whole screen sight and is absolutely unnecessary in every scenario except War of Emperium 2.0.
  • Throwaway Country: This might actually be said of Morroc, after the Nightmare of Morroc update.
  • Throw the Book At Them: One of the melee weapons for magic types.
    • A properly built Sage (or its transcended variants) can really dish out some hurt with it, too.
    • For some reason, Star Gladiators can equip them as weapons, but not actually use them to attack. They kick the enemy to death instead.
  • Toy Time: The Toy Factory dungeon.
  • Unpleasable Fanbase: This seems to be the case so far with the sequel (in beta as of this writing). While many fans are delighted to see a version of Ragnarok Online with modern MMO features (minimap, action bars, quest tracker, etc.), many others are upset over changes that they feel make the game unlike its predecessor. Some of these complaints include the removal of the Novice class (largely responsible for the You Have Researched Breathing trope below), the lack of manually allocated stats, the switch from a birds-eye camera to an over-the-shoulder camera, and the addition of modern MMO features (minimap, action bars, quest tracker, etc.).
    • Just to note, the Ragnarok Online '1' has the above features. The only one it didn't have during its initial few years of operation was the quest tracker (though this feature is, admittedly, a little unreliable).
  • Unwinnable: Many quests can become this by selecting the wrong dialog option during a Dialogue Tree resulting in content never becoming accessible to the player. Extremely annoying in a game which is played online and thus does not allow Save Scumming.
  • Vendor Trash
  • Video Game Stealing: Successful use of the Steal skill gives you one random item from the monster's droplist. This item is "extra" and doesn't affect the actual drops. Of course, many droplists contain bodyparts from their monsters...so yeah, you can "steal" the beak of a bird that's attacking you (with that beak), kill it...and get the beak again.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: Digotz and Maku from Friendship Quest is Type II.
  • Walking Shirtless Scene: Several male versions of classes, particularly higher tier ones.
  • Whip It Good: The Dancer classes.
  • Wrench Wench: Female Mechanics.
  • Yoko Kanno: Composed Ragnarok Online 2's soundtrack.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: An especially egregious example.
    • To be specific, you have to level a few times before you can even learn to sit. VG Cats even had a strip about it here. /sit is a bit of meme in the RO community, which views it rather fondly.
    • Thief classes need to complete a quest to gain the ability to... throw rocks. And another one to just pick them from the ground.
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