Ragnarok Online will perhaps be a game that I will forever remember. If it wasn’t for that game, I wouldn’t have met some of my most closest online friends. That would include my most abled right-hand man, Crimz.

What better way to revive it (aside from playing on imba Private Servers or playing that trashy excuse for a game, RO2) than to have it brought over to the Nintendo DS? Source from 1up.

After seven years and several million players, Ragnarok Online, the Korean online game that is still the most popular MMORPG in Japan in terms of registered players, is expanding from the PC to the Nintendo DS. GungHo Works, a new console-gaming division of GungHo Online Entertainment (the outfit that runs Ragnarok in Japan), unleashed this week the first details about Ragnarok Online DS, a fantasy role-playing game that retains a surprisingly large chunk of what makes the PC game so interesting in the first place.

Basic gameplay is exactly the same, although some concessions have been made to make the game’s largely offline story mode more approachable. The main game has you controlling Ares, a mild-mannered kid who wants to start up his own guild and be a great adventurer like his father; you make this happen by recruiting party members and carrying out quests in the realm of Rune Midgard, building up your gang to the point where they earn new jobs and more powerful skills.

This is the first time that Ragnarok has been released for a non-PC platform — which GungHo head Kazuki Morishita says is “something we had hoped for since before online service began [in Japan]” — and the publisher is doing everything it can to make the adventure accessible for new gamers. The Nintendo DS version runs largely off the stylus, which serves the same function as the mouse in the PC game. You tap the screen to attack enemies and retrieve items, and the game occasionally asks you to draw circles and other designs in order to pull off spells and skills. Ragnarok veterans have little to fear: Most of the jobs from the MMORPG are available, along with two brand-new jobs — Dark Knight, which lets you unleash special moves that sap your hit points, and Shaman, which puts magic from a wide variety of elements at your fingertips. The DS Ragnarok also has an extensive online component — up to three people can team up over a wireless or Wi-Fi connection and challenge the Tower of Mirages, a 50-floor randomly generated dungeon that’s home to untold treasure and decidedly mean-looking monsters.

Ragnarok Online DS is due out December 18 in Japan for 6,090 yen; no U.S. release plans have been announced.