Suikoden Tierkreis: Finished. More thoughts later, perhaps.
Ys 6: The Ark of Naphistim. Finished. Normal Mode, Catastrophe Mode (= Oath / Origin style, no healing items aside from enemy drops).
It's good... but also clearly the weakest of the Ys 6 / Oath / Origin set. It is nice & short, though - probably slightly longer than a single Origin playthrough, so there's that.
Went to Naphistim at level 49 and not having max forged any of the 3 swords, but I did (thanks to FAQ) find out about the Pikkards & that some of the rando-bosses had respawned (with 0 message about this fact in-game) and gave uber accessories on drop.
The Good:
* It's still Ys combat.
* The second to the last boss fight is insanely awesome. Sopko mentioned that it's one of his favorites in the series, and I agree. Totally crazy fight with lots of stuff to keep track of (the boss's allies whom you can stun out but not permanently defeat, his sword moves, various lasers & such).
* As usual, the random townspeople are interesting / amusing enough you get to meet.
* Did I mention it's still Ys combat? This is a pretty big plus, since it's kind of what you do.
The Bad:
* Some of the moves are way too finicky. It's easy to do all the Oath moves, but the fancy lunge slash & jump is too hard to reliably make happen. Luckily you don't really *need* the hard ones, but it does mean that you're going to do a lot of downslashing for safe damage.
* Magic is a bit over-centralizing, especially against some of the bosses? I had to FAQ one boss in particular to find out that the strategy is basically "oh zap him with magic 5 times then dodge a lot the rest of the time." In the same way Magic is very key against the frue final to actually get good damage in quickly.
* Level is among the most potent it's been in the Ys series, and this is a series where level is very often the god stat. It's very easy to run up to enemies whom Adol does 0 damage (or lol damage) to in the next section of a dungeon. Going back to an earlier section of a dungeon will lead to Adol shrugging off any and all damage even if you play suicidally. I don't mean "going back to the previous dungeon", I mean "an earlier section of the same dungeon." So yeah, low HP and high subtractive defense will lead to that. Boo hiss, do it DS Castlevania style instead.
* And on that note, that screws up the sword balance. Brillante (fire-sword) is the best 90% of the time because it can actually break defense the best. In the rare cases where it's HP that's the limiting factor not defense, then Erricil (thunder sword) is obviously the best due to attacking faster. Wind sword is just stuck in the middle.
* For the fleet sequence, tsundere pirate-girl can't fight wut?? And you can't heal her on Catastrophe (well, intentionally). This means you're encouraged to stand still for awhile until your magic gauge recharges so you can WTFpwn the next set of enemies. Not a fan of making escort missions particularly hard, so eh.
* Some parts of the game are FAQ-bait, and not the fun kind of FAQ-bait. Your average Zelda will encourage you to return to areas, sure, but they'll do things like "area tauntingly out of reach with your current skillset" that you know you should check again later. Finding the 4 lost Pikkards is basically "walk through the entire game again if you didn't FAQ their locations." Thrilling. Same with not cluing you in that certain bosses randomly revived at endgame so that you can fight 'em and get loot.
* Final dungeon is lame-o. It should *obviously* be the Ark, a place that has a genuine excuse to be filled with evil monsters & defense systems and is the dramatic focus of the 3rd Act of the story. Instead, there's, uh, this random ancient super-city #47? Of the good guys? That's still filled with robots or something? And connects to the Ark, sort of, in having a platform to ride an insect over there? Couldn't I have done that from the shore? Whatever, these plots aren't about nitpicking, but it's a thematic fail. (For that matter the Limestone Cave had some weird in-game logic to go there. "Hey I saw some flotsam somewhere in the water, therefore I should go through a cave because maybe there's a cove with pirates on the other side." Right.)
* Plot is pretty weak, although it has its moments and is short, I suppose. Very much the same rough outline as Ys 4/ Celceta: crazy evil person inexplicably gets command of his own army to use to gain ultimate power from the Eldeen civilization, senselessly betrays his own troops, gets beaten down by Adol. Whatever. The fairies were a nice change though and totally unexpected from having played Ys 7 first.
The Ugly:
*The music. It's fine, but... Falcom, what happened?! You're known for ridiculously awesome soundtracks, and this one was just decent. Easily the weakest Ys game as far as soundtrack that I've played!
