Its a frustrating, short game, but its fun

User Rating: 6 | Ys: The Ark of Napishtim PS2

This game is colorful, a typical hack n slash game with rpg elements such as collecting orbs throughout the maps to improve your sword, story is mediocre but it carries out with the gameplay. There are no companions, its just you against the world, the mighty silent hero.

The games difficulty goes from mid to easy, its easy to grind up your level which is something good, there are no random battle in here, also, a single level up can make a HUGE difference fighting monsters (the same goes for boss fights), monsters' difficulty is divided by areas on the map..this means that if you are not supposed to go to a certain location...well you will be able to go there anyways, BUT enemies there will be REALLY tough for you to handle and you’ll most likely end up dead in 1 or 2 hits, you can try to level up one more time to see if you can handle the situation if not, then it means you should go somewhere else.

Jumping puzzle s are a pain in the back to do correctly since threes something wrong with the timing and landing it really gets frustrating...sometimes it feels the game depends more on luck than ability ( that’s something very bad for a game)

Boss fights tend to be difficult at the first try since there is usually no clue where and where you have to hit them so you’ll end up fighting them over and over again...even though at the end you can memorize attack patterns and weaknesses, AGAIN, these fights seem to rely more on luck, when landing a hit, than skill.

Timing on weapon combos is hard to do, and you are supposed to know how to trigger them since there is no tutorial or at least a hint on how to do them, you will usually realize there are weapon combos randomly smashing all buttons until it triggers, this makes the learning curve for the fighting mechanics a little high if you want to master it (yeah even though the mechanics are simple)

Amount of items is VERY limited, you get a world map, but it’s really useless, it’s just a big picture of the world map with the locations, no paths, no nothing.

Voice acting goes from terrible to so-so, several voices here are amongst the worst one I’ve ever heard.

On the good side: Visuals are colorful, a couple voice actors do quite well on their performance, attack system is simple and it usually works good on simple situations, there is a good variety of puzzles throughout out the game.