Ys The Arc of Napishtim First Impressions

[Game Collector]

I got this game nice and early this morning and I played through up to the first boss. First of all I have to say that what I read about there being no voice was correct Come on Konami, how hard would it have been to keep the voices intact!?! Pretty sad when games like Tales of Eternia, GTA and Comic Party Portable exist with their full voice. Anyway, I guess it doesn't bother me TOO much as I have not played the PS2 version and I have only played this on the PC up till now. Another silly thing Konami did was keep the save points, a very bad thing to have in a portable game.

The graphics are great, they look just like the PC version and there has been no slowdown or anything so far and the music is identical. There is no cheat mode in the menu and the only difficulty available at the begining is Normal.

The control is via the digital pad only, no analogue control but it controls great but diagonals are a pain as always with the stiff PSP D pad.

The loading is....OK I guess, it pauses for a second or so everytime you speak to a person in an area for the first time and then some of the other characters are instant. The loading in the village is about 5 or 6 seconds from house to house and the loading between areas in the playing field is about 10-12 seconds, so if like me you like to go back and forth from a populated area to level up, it can be quite annoying. At least the UMD access is nice and quiet unlike Eiyuu Densetsu Shiriki Majyo, Tales of Eternia and Double Cast.

Now for 1.5 users interested in what firmware this uses, the Japanese version uses ver.2.0, Konami may change this for the US release though. I also got 2 other recent JP releases, Taito Memories Pocket and Comic Party Portable, both are also ver.2.0. It seems like JP releases are not forcing above 2.0 so far, too bad I already updated to 2.6 for SD vs RAW.

Overall I highly recomend this game to Ys fans and anyone after a fantastic Action RPG, IMHO, this is one of the best games on the PSP and I really hope that Konami picks up The Oath in Felghana for PSP release. I also hope Falcom make a new Ys game soon!

[PSP_Newbie]

I've really been looking forward to a solid RPG game for the PSP, and this sounds like a good bet. As soon as I read some more reviews and find out whether it is encrypted for 2.0 only(like GTA) or it can be tricked to play on 1.5, it might just join my almost non-existant psp game collection

[Xan]

Just read few revievs of it.
I`m geting it the day its relased in EU , been waiting so long for good rpg for psp.