A little over a month ago, I bought a new tablet – a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+ to be exact. I’ve had a couple tablets in the past, but these were always smaller in screen size, and usually suffered in terms of not having enough storage space. Even the one older tablet that had an SD card expansion really couldn’t utilize it well because though you could store apps on the SD card, they would stutter and run poorly.

This time around, I went for a higher-end bigger screen tablet. My thoughts on this were:

• My laptop is over 7 years old and it would be nice to replace it with something smaller and more portable – I can always hook up a blue tooth keyboard and mouse to a tablet
• I was using the laptop primarily as a violin practice machine – but putting all my music files, sheet music, videos, etc on a more portable device would be nice!
• My previous tablet struggles to run anything anymore, so while I didn’t use it a ton, it would be nice to replace it
• My phone is also aging and has NO internal memory left — if I could offload some apps to another mobile device, I could free up some room on my phone and hopefully make it last a little longer

I wanted an Android in particular because all of my tablets have been Android (while I have an Iphone). It just gives me the best of both worlds. Plus, I’ve purchased apps and games from the Google store and I wanted them to carry over to my new tablet.

All of those things added up to point me to this unexpected purchase.

What do I think of the tablet?

So far, I love it! I’ve been able to do everything that I’ve hoped to with it so far.

I’ve made it my main violin practice device – the speakers are just loud enough to allow me to practice along with music tracks. I can also use it for portable sheet music – I can take photos of my music books, then practice from those images on my tablet. If I want to scribble on the sheet music to make notes to myself (such as bowing direction) I can do that on the digital version without messing up the original book!

I have offloaded some of my phone apps to the tablet, mainly my social media apps. I’ve also successfully transferred most of my old Google Play apps to the new tablet, so I didn’t lose any of those in the long run.

But all of this is leading up to what I really wanted to talk about today… gaming on my tablet.

The Labyrinth of Ragnarok

I haven’t been into too many mobile games as of last couple years. Mostly, that’s because I’m busy with my Switch as a portable option. Also, my phone is tiny, old and out of space, so downloading games to it is a no-go.

Because of that, I’ve not really even looked much at the Google Play store until this week in terms of finding games. I did download that one game everyone was going on about… what was it… Genshin Impact. I rolled a character but I really haven’t gotten into it. I feel like maybe I need to look into a controller for that kind of game.

I downloaded a few of those time-wasters out of curiosity… you know, those merge-things games that seem to be all the rage right now?

While browsing what was out there, I took note of Labyrinth of Ragnarok, which is obviously a mobile RO spin-off. I didn’t realize it was one of those idle games – games that play without you needing to do much interaction with it – but in the end, I’m glad it is.

It’s a RO style idle MMO mobile game where you level up your character, choose from class trees, and “group” with other people’s characters through a sharing system (but only when they’re not online).

I didn’t realize at first that you could actually have several character slots as you progress through this game – I was somewhat paralyzed by the choice of jobs on my second job change and was relieved to know I could be a Hunter and a Bard on one account! 🙂

Anyhow, it’s got timed mechanics, a RMT shop, RNG, gatcha and all the stuff you’d expect from a mobile game now days. But all that being said, I’m still having fun with it.

The RNG is either not absolutely dismal, or I’m just super lucky so far… because I was able to score a 5* bow for my bard – the exact one I wanted – from a random weapon box…

AND my other character was able to score a 4* Poring Hat from the prize wheel spin.

Maybe it’s a trap, I dunno.

What I really like about it is the character share and grouping system. So, whenever I go offline on a character (even if I’m just playing another), I have my characters set to be shareable. This means that other people can randomly pull my offline characters into their group. When I come back, I’ve earned some experience, zeny and sometimes items as well.

There’s really not much in the way of guides out there for this game – I’ve found a few videos that have helped with my low level progression builds. It doesn’t take too long to push a character to level 40 and beyond with the right sharing group members supporting you. I’ve only been playing a few days and my highest is level 55.

I’m sure there’ll be some kind of catch eventually – there always is – but I haven’t experienced much in the way of bugs or forced purchases so far. There have been a few places that request you to watch ads, but only very sparsely compared to other free apps I’ve messed with lately.

For now, I’m having fun and as long as I’m having fun, I’ll keep “playing.”