Genre: Action RPG
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Falcom
Release Date: February 28, 2006

Ys: Ark of Napishtim was one of the upcoming games that convinced me that a PSP would be in my future, which, consequentially, means it helped Sony's case that the PSP would have a future. Maybe it does. Right now, I see it as an official Capcom game player, ready-made to run Megaman Powered-Up, Maverick Hunter, Powerstone Collection, and Capcom Classics (complete with Strider!). Oh, and the odd Exit or Tokobot, cute, portable games that are far too rare on the platform so far.

Ys is in my PSP now. It's here. So why isn't it on the above list? Where is it? Why isn't it a part of my developing romantic view on the console? It doesn't deserve to be there. It has no part in the future of this console. It is not the game it should have been.

I should have known this from the start, since I'd played Ark of Napishtim on the PlayStation 2, and it was quaint but mediocre. Basic concepts like collision detection were a major problem, and story was … a Falcom story (see: Legend of Heroes review). It was also the ugliest little action RPG I'd seen in years. I put hope in the PSP version despite all this because of the cries of strident Falcom supporters, who universally denounced Konami's PS2 tweaking (raping, they would call it) of the original version, a Japanese-only PC release. 2D sprites were turned into blocky 3D models, and the soundtrack was rearranged into what fans thought to be an unjustified mess.

The PSP version was supposed to fix all of this, and it has (aside from the uninspiring story). It also added a list – a long list, too long – of fresh technical issues. And it turns out that the final game wasn't what it was cracked up to be, playing like a freeware labor of love, something respectable had it been made by a scrappy group of artists and coders working between exams and part-time jobs, not an experienced Japanese developer. As I have now become ever more familiar with, Falcom is a substandard team that churns out passable but forgettable RPGs.

Ys games have been mostly held to the same overhead, real-time RPG action since the late '80s when the series premiered on just about every platform known to man: PC Engine, Famicom, Master System (the only version of the original released in the U.S., to my knowledge), and a number of computer systems. The exception to the rule was the near-classic Wanderers from Ys, which employed a side-scrolling battle system that made fans of Zelda II: Link's Adventure, myself included, cry with regret that another Zelda game like this would never happen again. Of course, Wanderers from Ys lacked the charm of a Zelda game, which allowed for only momentary relief from the loss of strange new directions for the Zelda series. This Ys was recently remade for PS2, and hasn't been released in the U.S. for obvious reasons (SCEA. Need I say more?). It is also much more interesting than Ark of Napishtim could ever hope to be.

Ark of Napishtim has the basics of Alundra emulated far too well, including the problems that entails: bad jumping control, loose combo control. These are issues I'd hoped would be quarantined to the PS2 version of Ark, but seem to be what the game was in the first place. Record of Lodoss War and its spiritual successor Shining Force Neo show that modern action RPGs need can be better than this, and those games left much to be desired. Even Shining Soul 2 for the Game Boy Advance shows up Ark mightily, and no sensible gamer would deem that game anything but average. Battling in Ark shows up both of these games, proving that Falcom lives in their own world, influenced by nothing but Dungeons and Dragons, Dragon Quest, and past games created by … Falcom.

Perhaps I have been jaded by playing through far too many Japanese RPGs in recent months, but I have proof that this somewhat ferocious response to Ys is not entirely unjustified. Legend of Heroes bored me to death with its terrible pacing and bad story. Old Final Fantasy games have not shown me the light with their overly self-referential nature, while recent games in the franchise are too reliant on bad character designs and needless melodrama to grip me in any way (XII shows a great deal of promise, however). The Shin Megami Tensei games have proven that this genre is not entirely clichéd. Shadow Hearts has an extremely creative setting that makes up for its flawed battle system. I've recently picked up Earthbound again, the holy grail of narrative creativity that has probably set off my hatred of most charmless Japanese RPGs in the first place.

Most telling, however, is that the game taking up the most of my time in recent weeks is Dragon Quest VIII, an unabashedly anachronistic fantasy RPG that is simply well made. It is not wildly creative, but it is so well produced, so well put together, so fun to play that it escapes the criticism that I have readied for Ys. To go for a far-out metaphor, Dragon Quest is like Kanye West's Late Registration, a mainstream hip-hop album that does everything right, and allows people otherwise avoidant of the genre to enjoy it, while Ark of Napishtim is Flava-Flav's reality show, ever-present even though he used to scream about how he was "never gonna sell out."

Aside from the intrinsic flaws, the PSP version brings in those aforementioned technical issues that, quite honestly, shouldn't be there. The game is running rudimentary polygonal backgrounds, sprites with limited animation, and an especially terrible '80s-style soundtrack. Why the game sputters, freezes, and takes far too long to load can't be just the fault of the PSP – although that slow drive certainly contributes – when my copy of Liberty City Stories proves that much more complex geometry can be streamed with much less effort than Ys pretends is necessary. This is a game that takes seconds to load a menu that sputters every time a different item is selected with the cursor, randomly halts for little reason, and freezes when configuring something as simple as the stat changes from a level up.

To go for the bad journalist's follow-up for a paragraph like the one you just read: "Ouch."

Ark of Napishtim is not a regrettable botch of a port – well, in a way it is – but it simply isn't the game that it was cracked up to be. There isn't anything special about it that Alundra, Shining Soul II, and a great number of other games haven't done before it. Why Falcom gets so much credit in this decade I'll never know; they haven't learned how to move past what they started so many years ago. Perhaps a PSP port of Wanderers From Ys is in order? Ark doesn't seem to have enough going for it to warrant its presence on three platforms.

Score: 5.0/10