Korea has already seen the shutdown of both Ragnarok: Ash Vacuum and Ragnarok: Valkyrie Uprising last year in 2015 with the North American version of Ash Vacuum biting the dust a few months after the developers' version. It seems Valkyrie Uprising (now known as either Path of Heroes or War of Gods) may be set to be tossed into oblivion as well.
Korea Shutdown Notice of Ragnarök: Ash Vacuum
Korea Shutdown Notice of Ragnarök: Valkyrie Uprising
It's a little strange to be starting up all these Ragnarök mobile games only to shut them down 2-3 years later. Ragnarok Violet is still kickin', but only because that's a single-player game that doesn't require continuous maintenance and server hosting. However Ragnarok Scarlet is nowhere to be found, likely because it never got released outside of Korea so it didn't have a chance of surviving like its predecessor Ragnarök Violet.
Much like how SquareEnix tried to capitalize on the Final Fantasy name so, too, did GRAVITY try to capitalize on the Ragnarök name. However, unlike the Final Fantasy franchise, Lee Myung-jin never even completed the original manhwa so that holds back the potential of the Ragnarök franchise more than anything. It's held back what interesting lore that could have already been fleshed out in RO and RO2 and relied too much on spin-off after spin-off to hold people's interest. Trying to push the manhwa content into the online games 10+ YEARS after the manhwa was put on hiatus is too little too late. People have already moved on to other, better managed franchises such as Star Wars, Warcraft, Harry Potter, and Tolkien because the base storyline of those franchises have already been laid out and set for intriguing expansions. Ragnarök was a shell of itself before it even started and unless Lee finishes the manhwa, there's not really much to capitalize on.
It's rather ironic that both Final Fantasy and Ragnarök were both supposed to represent the end of something and yet here they are still chugging along on who knows what. At least SquareEnix had the success of the first 10 Final Fantasy games to work with; what does GRAVITY have? A hack job of an MMO that they purposefully neglected and only just recently decided to give it some TLC that it should've gotten a LONG time ago. At this point, I'm tired of Final Fantasy and Ragnarök feels like it's going to hit that point with me soon.
Not to worry, I'll still work on this Wiki. The interest is waning, but still there. Although I can't make any guarantees if Ragnarök dies out completely. We'll see. <<
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