I've played quite a few MMORPGs in my time. But the first one I really really got into was the game Ragnarok Online. Years and years ago a friend of mine (Dovac) told me about this new game coming out that looked like Final Fantasy Tactics mixed with Secret of Mana. Since those are both really awesome games I decided to try it out. At the time the game had just started Alpha testing. When I started it was litterally less than 2 weeks old. I would log in during the day and there might be 15 people online total.

   

   

I startred out in the game as an archer. At the time most of the classes were pretty pointless to play as there were 0 skills in the game. A majority of my friends picked to play the swordsman and for whatever reason I was the only one to select archer. Since I didn't really have much of a job at the time and I had just finished high school, I had all day every day to play. So naturally I ended up getting pretty far advanced beyond my friends. I remember at one point going around just punching things to death with no weapon equiped because I had become so powerful.

   

   

After a few months, people got bored of the game and it had moved along to the beta version in Korea, so we all found ways to make korean accounts and played that for awhile. I remember all of us walking around all the new areas just freaking out at all the random stuff on the ground and the way the enemies looked and whatnot. It was times like that I really miss having. When everything was exciting and new. So many MMORPGs today all look and feel so much the same that I rarely get excited any more. Or perhaps it's because I've gone through so many MMOs that I've lost that. Either way eventually the American beta came out and we all moved back over to playing that version.

   

   

   

   

The American beta was super buggy. I remember for the longest time everyone making fun of the "Now Loading" screen that lasted infinitely. I also remember all my items randomly deleting themselves between loading screens and still taking up weight in my bags. I remember my character getting permistuck in a wall and having to start completely over again. I remember complaining to Gravity one year at E3 and them not speaking english and just smiling and agreeing with my telling them how retarded they are.

   

   

   

Eventually the full version came out. I played that for several years before finally giving up on the game. I at one point had like 3 accounts I used across 2 computers. For the longest time I had an archer and acolyte I dual boxed till my archer got high enough level to become a dancer. I started off the full version with a thief that I stopped playing for a really long while and eventually got them to an assassin with the help of my acolyte. After awhile I ended up creating another dancer, Carl Winslow, and stuck with that character till I quit the game at around level 70-something.

For a majority of the full version I just played with a friend of mine. They had an assassin and a knight they played. We eventually made a guild called Team-Rose that had a couple of random people in it. The Team-Rose name has continued on for a few other games that we played but it's roots were in RO. In any case, RO was a great game that I could still to this day go back and play with little complaints. The Secret of Mana style gameplay is one of my favorite styles and it was executed very well in this game. Sadly with all the other things I got going on nowadays, my adventures with RO have come to a close and will forever remain that way as far as I can tell.