Ys' 6: Ark of Napishtim - Finished it tonight and kind of ok overall. The final boss had a neat shmup laser spam.
I've always enjoyed and hated the leveling aspect of Ys. It's fun when you do a dungeon and at the start you're struggling to survive and taking on enemies one at a time, but by the end of the dungeon 5+ levels higher you're decimating those same enemies. The sense of character progression is wholly satisfying.
But the cost of that is that the boss battles often feel wrong. They're either too difficult where you're doing 0 damage or tedious when doing 1-5 damage per hit, or often they're too easy and you can just mash mash mash boss dead. It's really hard with the levels and stats and equipment to always be at that perfect sweet spot where the boss fights are challenging and fun like an action game. It especially gets worse towards the end because the game isn't balanced for all the optional equipment since some players might not get it. The end bosses were a joke, whereas the early bosses I was doing 0 damage until I leveled a bit more and upgraded my swords.
You see this in time attack where for the most part all of the fights are at that perfect sweet spot and a ton of fun. It really makes me wish they'd do a Ys game without any levels or stats and just pure skill and challenge.
That being said even the boss rush is kind of iffy in this one because about half of the bosses suck. Either there's some weird hitbox attacks or they spend 2/3rds of the time out of reach so you can't even hit them. Or the ones that you can hit but only with a single jump attack over and over, which isn't fun.
The dungeons are fun outside of the 2nd half of the Lost Ruins with the lava and razor blade throwing dudes which is super annoying the first time through. But the game needed far more dungeons. The game is super, super short. Mainly because there's only like 5 or 6 dungeons in the game total. Especially since a lot of the bosses are junk, the dungeons are the best part and unfortunately not only are there few of them but they tend to be fairly short. Maybe Ys works better with more games like Origin where it's just pure dungeon with story events since the dungeons are great in Ys.
The story was probably the best of the Ys games I've played, but I feel kind of bad for the writers in Ys games. No matter how good the story is or characters are, every minute that I'm not either A) In a dungeon fighting stuff or B) Fighting a boss, I'm always going to be a little annoyed that I'm not doing A or B so I always see the story as a chore and just push through it as quickly as possible to get to the next dungeon where the fun is at. I'm not sure how they can adjust that, since I usually like story and cutscenes in my rpgs, but to me Ys is more of a pure action game and the "high" of being in the groove and having a good time with Ys is dungeon crawling with great music and good fast combat and story just gets in the way. But that being said, I liked the plot of the Ark and the mysterious island surrounded by a vortex.
Music had some good tunes and controls were a bit janky. It's definitely my least favorite of the Ys6 engine games. I still need to play Ys 1&2 along with 5 whenever it gets remade, but for me Oath>Origin>Ys7>Ark>>>Celceta. For whatever reason Celceta just really didin't click with me, I found the story extremely boring, the world uninteresting, the gameplay just average and the graphics muddy and ugly. Otherwise even with the jank and mainly bad boss fights, I still had a good time with Ys6. Hopefully Ys8 tries to find a good middle ground between the Ys6/Oath/Origin style and the Ys7/Celceta style. The 7/Celceta stuff is definitely inferior (although they have some good boss fights), but I think there's probably a way to bring the party system up to the quality of the solo combat games.
