Just finished Ark of Napishtim. Normal Catastrophe (I wanted something between Origin's Normal and Felghana's Hard, alas this was easier than even the former).
Compared to engine brethren Oath in Felghana and Origin, this game has a much more limited moveset. No double jump, no air combo, no dash. But the moveset it does have is solid, and it's fun making the most of it. Also your basic combo changes depending on your elemental sword, with red not having a finisher but instead a charge attack. Cool concept, but in my experience, there was never any reason to e.g. go for yellow's finisher (except to reach a certain platform). It would just kind of happen, and sometimes you'd chain it nicely, but it was all very incidental.
The limit breaks were sorta good. Red probably being the best. Dash jump platforming was interesting. It's like the devs knew it wasn't the easiest thing to pull off with any consistency so they never demanded you chain it or anything. Just careful, mostly costless (just have to climb back up), attempts.
Not many bosses in this one, but the end game is 3 bosses one after the other and they're all quite good, so I appreciated that. Elizabeth was a particularly memorable and fun fight. Also they all looked great. In general, compared to other games on the same engine, this one looked better. Makes sense, as I guess the engine was designed around the art for this game. If I had to single out why I'd say the lighting on the pre-rendered sprites which had more white in it and the lighting on the bosses.
Dungeons were great, the cave being a particular highlight, which I had to map out. The mountain was probably great, but I cheesed it. Ruins of time had some good secrets and fun navigation via falling (a dungeon crawling favorite of mine).
Speaking of cheesing things the main mechanism was selling water for armor, and later water for seeds. Seeds being the mechanism for stat allocation. So I bought seeds of power (STR+) to be exact. I beat the game at level 50 with 306 strength lol - the final boss went down in 3 openings.
Game world was a bit more free form than either Origin or Oath. Unlike what I played of Xanadu Next, the world did not open up via shortcuts, only teleportation, which is not nearly as amusing, but very welcome because there are a few reasons to revisit some spots, regrettably including "talk to this guy in this town, then this other guy in this village". There are 3 optional bosses, appearing in stronger form after a certain point in the game, and giving some nice equipment.
The music is not as memorable as the speed metal takes on chip tune classics you have in Chronicles, Oath or Origin, and definitely not as good as the chip tunes themselves. But, pretty cool music anyway. Kind of relaxing. The music in the final dungeon reminded me a bit of the Bare Knucle 2 OST I guess the Falcom guys stayed Koshiro fans long after his departure.
Turns out there are many Galbalen, turns out Feena and Reah are indeed members of an entire race of winged gods, Alma also being one. But honestly, who cares. It's all obviously very ad-hoc after the guys behind Ys I and II left. I did like the ancient underground weather machine computer thing though. Reminded me of Votoms.
The game ends with Adol on a ship with his Pirate admirer, while a pure priestess and her loli younger sister tearfully wave goodbye. It's all very anime.
Anyway game is good. In terms of pure action, it's not as good as Oath in Felghana or Origin, and in terms of adventure and dungeon crawling it's not as good as Chronicles (would be closer if the default movement speed was as brisk). But it's not far behind the latter, and a simpler easier to grasp alternative to the former. The game is just a lot more relaxing on the whole for a Ys game, so maybe it has its place as the cool-off Ys.
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