Among contemporary Ys releases and remakes—Seven, The Oath in Felghana, and Memories of Celceta—The Ark of Napishtim is more reliant on support provided by its adopted hardware. Unfortunately its tangled journey to the personal computer cost as many features as it gained, leaving The Ark of Napishtim as little more than a curious architect of the Ys games that followed.
The Ark of Napishtim begins with a natural Ys paradigm; Adol Christin, mute protagonist extraordinaire, washes up on an anonymous beach somewhere in Canaan. There, he meets a race of beast folk in Rehdan Village whom we quickly learn harbor a certain animosity toward normal human beings. Their particular beef lies with the folks up north in Port Rimorge, escalating over the demise of a literal broken bridge. While haphazardly trying to address this dispute, Adol gets wrapped up in uniting pieces of a broken mirror. This action sets up the machinations that drive The Ark of Napishtim’s consuming plot; save the world (or at least this specific part of it).
While I appreciate the cold open, it’s worth noting that the PlayStation 2 release of The Ark of Napishtim predicated this introduction with a fully-voiced CG cut-scene. This particular sequence, along with the original translation and the accompanying voice work, has been dumped for the 2015 PC release. Reasons for such a deliberate departure are speculative, suffice to say that the original publisher (Konami) and the current publisher (XSEED) possibly didn’t have rights to the same parts of The Ark of Napishtim. The fallout of which are imperceptible new translation quirks (does it matter that “Ruins of Amnesia” is now “Ruins of Lost Time”?) with the viable concession of keeping certain details of The Ark of Napishtim more tonally consistent with Celceta, Oath, and Seven. If anything, it makes The Ark of Napishtim feel more like part of the same worldrather than a disparate adventure.
What hasn’t changed is Adol’s proclivity for beating up scores of monsters scattered about the lands. True to Ys’ simple roots, Adol is extremely adept at exterminating everything in his path—almost by just walking up to it. In reality combat is more nuanced, but the speed at which it operates may surprise those used to more calm and calculated action games. A trio of upgradeable swords corresponding to specific elements fleshes out a bit of diversity in combat, and they each offer their own single combo sets and magic attacks, but 90% of combat time in The Ark of Napishtim breaks down to the satisfying crunch of a well-executed strategy.
How one arrives at that particular strategy may be contentious. The basics of swinging a sword are as simple as mashing The Ark of Napishtim’s single attack button, but the loose controls powering movement augmentations are kind of a racket. The jumping stabbing-sword-down motion is easy enough but advanced maneuvers in the form the dash-jump—which the game never explicitly teaches—are almost impossible to grasp without basic internet research. While not outright required for normal progression, the dash-jump is a great help as an offensive move and a requirement to horizontally propel Adol to otherwise hidden areas. It’s better once you get it, but its unspoken necessity is a bizarre relic of a time when games didn’t spell things out for you (and I admit there’s nostalgic romance about this, but honestly I would prefer a little instruction now).
There’s also the matter of Ys slippery approach to combat. The Ark of Napishtim (and Ys in general) is a decedent from a time before lock-on mechanisms or proper 3D cameras. As a sprite-based game in a polygonal world, it can be difficult to tell where in the exact hell you’re heading when executing a jump attack. On the normal difficulty I always had enough healing items to correct the pratfalls from this margin of error, but on certain bosses—hello Lanaluna—I had a difficult time nailing down what part of the enemy I should be hitting. Like the dash-jump, it’s fine when you finally get a grip on it, but the journey there isn’t without frustration.
Dungeon navigation has its hits and misses as well. There aren’t that many sequences of arcane switch throwing, and most dungeons feel more like excuses to kill different kinds of monsters than solve a specific mystery. Exceptions to this are Limewater Cave, a cavern devoured by darkness and a litany of vaguely hidden areas that I never want to experience again. The Ruins of Lost Time, despite some tricky platforming sequences and debilitating laser enemies, was actually a weird joy to explore simply because of how well it always doubled back on itself.
Given what games like Seven and Memories of Celceta became, it’s odd how contained The Ark of Napishtim feels in comparison. There are only five sets of armor and five different shields and there are only three vendors in the game. Accessories are more varied, and often the rewards of vanquishing optional mini-bosses, but there’s not much loot to rack up in The Ark of Napishtim. Watching cachets of sword-upgrading Emel pop out of enemies is satisfying (really, nothing ever busts up and explodes into goodies quite as good as it does in Ys) and earning experience and gold have their own rewards, The Ark of Napishtim says farewell before getting too deep in the loot game.
While this port drops optional challenges in the form of Alma’s Trials, it does bring a couple of modern amenities along with it. Resolution options, access from a separate tool in the Steam version of The Ark of Napishtim, are greatly appreciated. The pixel art really is wonderful, and the game scales well enough to make me wish we were in an alternate timeline where The Ark of Napishtim (and Grandia and Xenogears) defined their own retro-style on par with 16-bit classics. Additionally, Wings of Alma, an accessory previously used to warp out of dungeons, can now be used to instantly warp to any save point in Canaan. In addition to cutting down on backtracking, this also doubles as a cheap bailout if your health is getting dangerous in the middle of a dungeon, which I can certainly appreciate.
There’s also the addition of Catastrophe Mode, a scaling feature applied to any difficulty that negates your ability to hoard consumable healing items. Instead, you only heal instantly as those items pop out of vanquished enemies. I personally feel this is an invitation to madness, but I know hardcore Ys fans will celebrate Catastrophe Mode’s inclusion.
“Anachronism” has a negative ring to it, but there’s no better way to encapsulate my response to The Ark of Napishtim. With only three other Ys games under my belt (chronologically III and IV were preceding VI but Oath in Felghana and Memories of Celceta, respectively, were produced after The Ark of Napishtim. Ys is weird.), The Ark of Napishtim was the clear progenitor of many of the themes and mechanics I cherished in later games. By necessity those ideas were also refined and all around better in those games, leaving The Ark of Napishtim’s narrative and the exploration of its environments as its enduring signature. That twelve hour journey is a perfectly suitable way to spend a weekend, albeit not up to the vacation taken with The Ark of Napishtim’s successors.
