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Throwing Everything at the Wall - Ys Online: The Ark of Napishtim Review
43K View2022-09-05
Falcom’s Ys franchise has seen red-haired protagonist Adol Christin going on epic adventures for thirty-five years now. Though it’s never received the level of respect it deserves, it has continued to hold a place of high regard from a certain subset of hardcore fans—a group I proudly count myself among.
The secret to Ys’s longevity and success has always been a certain sharpness to its formula. From 1987’s Ys I on the Sega Master System all the way to 2016’s excellent Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana on the PlayStation 4, games in this series have showcased a willingness to pare back the excesses of the RPG genre, to remove bloat and focus in on the things it does best. And those things are fast-paced action combat, exploration, and simple, adventurous stories of ancient cultures and strange new lands.
Strange then that Ys Online: The Ark of Napishtim, a newly launched mobile reimagining of 2003’s Ys VI, has gone in essentially the opposite direction. As is the case with most of the recent crop of mobile MMOs and gacha games, Ys Online embraces an attitude that I’ve come to call “busy-maxing”—essentially, ensuring there’s always dozens upon dozens of activities to keep players occupied and hopefully spending money. While this kind of game design can be engaging, it can also be used as a way to hide an ultimately shallow core. Ys Online treads a sometimes-frustrating middle road between these two.
This new version of The Ark of Napishtim opens similarly to how the original Ys VI started: with a shipwreck that lands series protagonist Adol (alongside the player-created character) onto the unfamiliar shores of the Canaan Islands. Though the plot had been modified to include the player character, the broad strokes are the same. Players will join Adol for familiar plot beats as he encounters the tribal peoples of Rehdan Village, befriends two young priestesses with connections to the secrets of the islands, and endeavors to save the world from an impending calamity.
It’s a totally fine if traditional JRPG storyline, but if you’re really interested in experiencing it, Ys Online is probably your worst option. The earlier iteration of Ark of Napishtim is available digitally on PC, or you could order old copies of the PlayStation 2 or PlayStation Portable versions. Any of those would be better choices for digging into the narrative of Ys VI, because in this remake, story very much takes a back seat.
And what’s driving then? CONTENT. Lots and lots of content. Or at least what passes for it in the mobile MMO space. Here is an incomplete list of some of the many activities that you can take part in while playing Ys Online: The Ark of Napishtim:
• Main: This represents the game’s main story, which is a new plot created for the game delivered mostly via short cutscenes and instanced fights.
• Further Tales: This multi-chapter set of linear levels is Ys Online’s version of the story from the original Ark of Napishtim.
• Coliseum: This player-versus-player mode sees you and your team (including a pet and characters recruited through the game’s gacha system) going up against teams put together by other players in one-on-one arena battles.
• Equipment Trials: These short dungeons can be taken on solo or in a group of up to four players, and as the name suggests, completion rewards lots of loot and resources to upgrade existing equipment.
• Bejeweled Seas: You and a team hunt down pirates on the seas surrounding the Canaan Islands, performing a series of boss battles in order to warm resources for leveling up your pets and your soul cards.
• Mecha Awakening: Another solo or team-based mode, Mecha Awakening lets you spend a lot of time hunting down and smashing robots, and it rewards oodles of experiences points for taking out these metallic menaces.
• Tower of Illusions: This floor-based dungeon offers greater challenges (and greater rewards), the higher that you and your team climb, but it’s only available on certain days, so you’ll want to set a reminder.
• Manor: As a side activity, Ys Online allows you to build your own estate, including crops and mines for harvesting materials, citizens to manage, and dozens upon dozens of building upgrades, each of which take longer and longer to complete.
• Overlord Challenge: This option presents you with a series of NPCs in each zone that you can challenge to a fight, essentially operating as a list of increasingly difficult one-off boss battles with ever-climbing strength requirements.
• Romantic Rendezvous: If you need a break from the action, you can check out this activity, which lets you meet up with another player for a relaxing (and perhaps enchanting) meet-up on the beach. There’s even a marriage system for players who want to take their relationship to the next level.
Okay, that’s ten distinct activities of varying depth and detail. Obviously most players are likely to spend more time doing things like Further Tales or Equipment Trials than other options like the Manor or the quick, daily Scholar Quiz, which tests your knowledge of lore from this game and the Ys series as a whole. But I cannot stress enough that these ten activities are but a portion—maybe a third or so—of the total number of things that Ys Online throws at you to keep busy with.
And here’s the kicker: None of these are bad. I enjoyed my time in almost every one of these modes. Maybe Romantic Rendezvous was a little awkward and boring, but for the most part, each of Ys Online’s things is fun. That’s in large part due to the game’s quick-moving battle system, which is very close to the series standard of hack-and-slashing with lots of flashy special moves and challenging boss encounters.
And yet I can’t help but notice how that fun core gameplay is sometimes totally subsumed by Ys Online’s all-encompassing desire to make sure players never ever run out of stuff to do. The main story is regularly paused to push you through more tutorials introducing a seemingly never-ending set of modes and methods for increasing your character’s power. And whether you’re jumping into that main story or one of those many side modes I mentioned before, the game always sets your character to “auto” as things begin. It’s like it knows that the way it’s structured means players will want to rush right through whatever they’re doing...even if rushing means missing out on the actually very fun gameplay.
That misguided focus that structures Ys Online’s abundance of content carries over to its abundance of monetization. Surprisingly, the gacha isn’t the biggest issue here, as the things you can roll the gacha for (transform soul cards and heroes) are only a small piece of the puzzle that makes up your BP (Battle Points), which serves as a measure of your character’s strength and a means of gating more difficult content. In fact, it’s the number of pieces to that puzzle that’s the main concern.
The BP breakdown in your character profile in Ys Online (pictured above) lists over a dozen different sources of BP, several of which I hadn’t even started digging into after twenty-plus hours playing. In the in-game store, these sources of power are represented as...so, so many ways to spend money. There’s cheap daily packs full of currency, the ability to buy specific pets or heroes outright, multiple VIP passes that offer further daily rewards, a battlepass style “Permit” with many levels of quests and rewards to earn, and on and on and on.
Given the wallet and the lack of willpower, a player could easily spend hundreds of dollars in Ys Online and still have plenty left to buy—and each dollar spent translates directly into player power. If you’re planning to move through the game fully free-to-play, you will absolutely be left in the dust by players who are willing to pay up.
It’s only in spite of its many stumbles—and only just barely in spite of them—that Ys Online provides some worthwhile gaming. Longtime fans of the series will likely be disappointed by the game’s swollen nature, the way that it takes on all the worst excesses of the genre it is transitioning into. But those same fans, and newbies to Ys alike, will find much to appreciate in the moment-to-moment gameplay, especially the intense boss fights. They’ll just need to make sure to turn off the “auto” button before they do so.
SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5
PLAY IF YOU LIKE:
• Cross Summoner:R, Tales Noir, and other middle-of-the-road gacha games. Like the two examples here, Ys Online: The Ark of Napishtim is neither the best of the gacha style nor the worst. If you can still find enjoyment with mobile MMOs and gacha games that have some big flaws, you’ll probably be able to appreciate the good parts of Ys Online as well.
• Falcom games. Ys Online doesn’t come close to living up to the highlights of Falcom’s amazing history, but it does successfully capture the look and some of the feel that makes these titles so special. If you’ve played everything Falcom has to offer, you’ll at least be able to mine some nostalgia from this side trip.
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Literal trash. Better buy the real game on Steam lmao than top up on this trash P2W autoplay game.
2022-09-16
Author likedI would definitely recommend the original over this, hands down
2022-09-16
deleted the game after playing for 7 days, reason is... played as ninja my power was 118k i lost in battles against 80k-90k which didn't make sense...
2022-09-07
Author likedthat's so strange! I wonder why that is. maybe ninja underpowered?
2022-09-07
nice one
2022-09-05
Author liked2022-09-05