It's new to me: Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim

A real step up from Ys V, but Falcom hadn't quite reached the series' resurgence point yet.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Following 1995’s Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand, Nihon Falcom took an extended break from developing Ys titles. While five original Ys games were released between the eight-year period of 1987 to 1995, and there were some remakes in and after that stretch, too, there wouldn’t be another brand new Ys until 2003.

Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim released exclusively in Japan, for Microsoft Windows, in 2003. It would receive a Playstation 2 release, as well, and that one would reach North America in 2005, with a Playstation Portable version coming out the next year, but it wouldn’t be until 2015 that the initial Windows version, with blood and gore intact, released worldwide. Video game ratings for consoles in the aughts were pretty wild, if the very basic blood of a Ys game was adversely impacting who can buy them, but so it goes.

Ys VI is, all things considered, a fairly mediocre Ys game. Which makes it a good game, because even the worst Ys title out there has redeeming qualities, and no one is saying The Ark of Napishtim is the worst of the bunch. It’s a little below-average for the franchise, but doesn’t overstay its welcome, and you can see that its most significant problem is just that the seeds it would plant wouldn’t sprout and fully bloom until subsequent entries. It feels less like a bridge game than Ys V, though, and it’s not close: for all of what The Ark of Napishtim is not, it’s far more fully realized and Ys-like than Lost Kefin, which felt like it had unfinished systems in addition to being somewhat generic and lacking the “feels good to play” vibes that power Ys’ action RPG empire.

The magic system of Ys V has been scrapped, and with it, the overly complicated, seemingly half-baked alchemy system that powered it. No longer do you have to experiment mixing together portions of spells that you can charge up and fire through your sword at enemies that might not even be impacted by said magic: no, now you have swords with different elemental properties that you can swap at any time once you have them, and those each have a magical attack that will help make for a more robust action RPG experience.

Rather than the slow and cumbersome Ys V system, now you have what would form the basis of Ys’ combat in the post-bump games. Wait for a meter to fill, do a special magic attack based on the element and level your equipped weapon possesses, rinse, repeat. Mix in these special attacks in between regular ones, simply by pressing a button. This is so much better than interrupting your momentum to charge an attack that might not even work, that you had to build yourself.

In general, the combat is significantly better than in Ys V, even in terms of just swinging your sword around for standard attacks. Adol felt slow in Lost Kefin, his range and speed limited in the first overhead Ys title with combat performed with button presses instead of just ramming into foes and letting background math do the work for you. Now, though, the speed of the actual sword swings has increased, and Adol moves with more agility and dexterity than in the plodding Lost Kefin. Something Ys and Metroid have in common, in terms of how they feel at their best, is how easily you can dispatch anything in your way, without breaking a sweat or your gait, in areas you’re revisiting for one reason or another. Ys VI is successful in letting you run roughshod over these foes and areas in your return to them, because the speed and ease with which you can attack has been so significantly increased from the previous game. (And thanks to a robust fast-travel system that’s available early, revisiting old locations won’t feel like a massive burden, either, and helps keep things moving.) All of these systems would feel even better in Oath of Felghana and Origin, yeah, but they already feel pretty good in their non-ideal form, too.

Ys VI begins with Adol, fresh off of falling out of a friendly pirate ship and into the sea, waking up on an inhabited island he didn’t know existed thanks to the rescue efforts of the young priestess, Osha. Apparently, the island is cut off from the rest of the world by the storms surrounding it, and you’ll have to wait until later in the story to find out why. Suffice to say, being Ys, it involves the ancients, lost technology, and someone who wants to use the power of both for their own benefit, at the expense of everyone else. Adol will eventually meet up with the crew of the pirate ship, who are as shocked to see him as they are worried about ever traveling on a ship with this who can’t sail from Point A to B without an emergency again, but before then, he’ll have to reunite the indigenous people of the island with those shipwrecked folks who formed their own village on the other side of the now-fallen bridge between them.

Adol, by being his usual selfless, heroic self, manages to ingratiate himself with the (understandably and rightfully) embittered and distrustful native islanders, and receives the first of four elemental swords that not only give him something he can tackle the island’s fearsome monsters with, but also play a major role in the game’s story, for his effort. The Romun Empire eventually gets involved on the island, which helps unite all its people against them, as well as make Adol a new… friend? Begrudging coworker? Geis isn’t the most open and friendliest buddy in the world, especially compared to Dogi, but the issues he’s got to work out are also pretty understandable ones, so cut him some slack, alright?

It’s a solid story with likable characters and a worthy mystery to unravel, and I appreciate that while much of the game happens in fairly similar environments to other Ys titles despite the island setting — more jungle than woods now, sure, but mountains, caves, and ancient underground temples are pretty standard fare — the music manages to invoke its environment more often. Rather than just the more Euro-centric instrumentation that had also defined the series’ selection of regions to this point, you hear more Caribbean island influences, such as in the choice of steel drums, accompanying the more traditional Ys sounds in songs like Gratitude for Nature’s Blessings:

That’s because, despite the fact that the islands of Canaan the game takes places on are, geographically, where the Azores are found, they are more aligned with islands further west, due to the “vortex” that sucks in ships and people certainly being a riff on the Bermuda Triangle of the Bahamas. That’s my guess, anyway, and the Ys Wiki mentions the same things, so that basically makes it truth, right?

Speaking of the music, it’s more electronic-focused than Ys games before it. It’s not that Falcom Sound Team moved away from the more hard/progressive rock kind of thing Ys was built on, but they didn’t go all the way back to what had been done before after switching gears for Ys V, which was very much designed with the Super Famicom’s sound chip capabilities in mind. So, you end up with some pretty classic Ys-style thrashers, like “Mighty Obstacle”…

…but you also see them striking a balance between some of the softer soundscapes introduced in Lost Kefin and Ys’ head-banging past, such as in the field music for the Quatera Woods…

…and then also doing what I can best describe as an ode to the work of Taito’s house band, Zuntata, with numbers like “Black Ark Unveiled”:

Go on, tell me that track wouldn’t feel right at home in a Darius or Ray’z game.

What’s most important about the music is that the driving themes are back after a one-game absence. Whether they have more of an electronic influence or are straight guitar-and-drum bangers, Falcom Sound Team wanted to drive you ever-forward in your sword-slashing adventure once more, which is what you want out of a Ys game. Well, it’s what I want, but if that’s not a universal feeling, the rest of y’all are missing out on something wondrous whenever you boot one of these babies up.

Like with the battle systems, the sound design for this game would also evolve further in future Ys titles. The arrangement of “The Boy’s Got Wings” found in The Oath in Felghana, for instance, probably doesn’t sound the way it does without Falcom experimenting with those same sounds in Ark of Napishtim first.

Lastly, there is the major graphical change: the game is in 3D, being a release from 2003, but it’s a mix of pre-rendered 3D sprites and 3D models. It’s significantly better looking than Ys V was, in terms of it “looking like Ys” instead of something more generic like Lost Kingdom: it helps that the large-scale character artwork is back, and that dialogue is once again presented as more than just words on a page, but everything is also just drawn more Ys-like to begin with, as well. It certainly looks like a Windows release from the early aughts that would find itself on the Playstation 2 and PSP, yeah, but there’s nothing wrong with that, either.

Ys VI isn’t a must-play entry in the series unless you’re a completionist sicko, but it’s a good time that doesn’t linger beyond where it should. It has just enough of what was to come in future Ys titles in it to be very enjoyable, even if there are now better Ys games that are just as easily available to enjoy instead. Luckily, the version that’s easiest to access — the worldwide Windows re-release from 2015 — is also a superior one, as the PSP edition has unbearably long load times even shifting from one section of an area to another. It’s often on sale, and can be found in Steam and non-DRM versions at a variety of retailers like GOG or Humble.

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