Ys: The Ark of Napishtim

"Nostalgic Old School Action RPG With a Few Bugs"

For the uninitiated, the Ys series has been around for a long time. I imported Ys from the Super Famicom (SNES) Japanese over 10 years ago (Ys III The Wanderer I recall). This game is reminiscent of the old school 8 bit and 16 bit Action/RPGs such as Zelda, Final Fantasy 1,2, and 3, Dragon Warrior 1-3, Chrono Trigger, and Legend of Mana. It is basically a Japanese Anime swashbuckling title, in which you fight numerously respawning monsters as you level up. While leveling up you must discover armor, swords, items, and tools on your way to save the priestess(princess anyone). Only the swords and the character, Adol, level up. Meanwhile you must choose your poison with a limited number of equipment.

Adol, the red haired protagonist of the story, is like the second coming of the early 90s Link. Complete with acorns for energy, shields and swords to discover, and a beach with hidden weapons. Ever present is the save the damsel in distress/princess themes complete with super difficult bosses and 3 forces to master. In this rendition of Ys, Adol is swept through a vortex and must crawl his way to uniting the native cat like humanoids with the many other human washed up refugees. The journey is long and arduous, but much attention is placed on mystery and uncovering the plot piece by piece on your own in an open world environment.

The real drawback to this game is the constant load time for each screen you move into. There had to be a better way. If the company had perhaps used bigger save space, or loaded up numerous areas at a time. In addition, the need for the painstakingly tricky dash attack jump in order to reach secret platform laden areas with absolutely no clues that his is the only way to complete your inventory. Only old schoolers, hard-core gamers, or cheaters can figure out the locations of these "hard to dash-jump to" items that end up causing damage to you in one way or the other but can be required to move the story. Otherwise this game is fun, loaded with extras, and quite entertaining. That is until you are forced to keep "now loading" over and over again as you work your way back to platforms you failed to dash jump to. If a sequel eliminated these flaws, it could get a ten. But the game game gets a seven for the nostalgia feelings. The PSP is definitely deficient of RPGs of any type, so I picked this up and so should you until we can get more true RPGs on the system.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/01/07