Adol Christin is back!
While writing this I just started my vacation and if you are reading it at release I unfortunatly been working for 2 months, but what better way to spend your summer vacation with video games? And a game set on a deserted island, it screams of summer morning adventures. The latest game in the Ys-series, and I've only played Ys 1 & 2 as described here. It starts out at sea on the cruiser Lombardia captained by Barbarosa and you, Adol Christin, and Dogi work as sailors for passage over the Greekian sea. During the night the ship is attacked by what people would call a kraken and the ship is sunk. Adol ends up on one side of the island and later stumbles upon Laxia von Roswell... as she is taking a bath in the nude. Now, I won't deny that as a heterosexual man, it tries to cater to me and I don't mind that in particular, but... is the first thing you do as you washed ashore on a deserted island with several beasts on it, to take a bath? Admittedly, she had her rapier close at hand and was able to swipe at Adol as he approached... leading to her dropping her towel (where did she get that?) and exposing herself. What nagged me about this is that Adol got blamed for snooping by her, and she wouldn't let it go for the first part of the game. Which feels kinda unfair to me, I wouldn't know, but I at least wouldn't take a bath after being washed up on an island especially not alone. I've seen enough horror movies and others to know that isn't a good idea.
Besides that, you find the captain and start to look for other survivors to be able to build a camp and trying to find a way out of the island. You find some obnoxious nobleman, a doctor, Dogi, some kid and more. Meanwhile Adol, Laxia and the fisherman Sahad explores the island in search of materials and a way off the island. During the night Adol have dreams of a woman named Dana that was the Maiden of the Great Tree, a prophet of the lost empire of Eternia that ruled the island. Apparently evolved from saurian (dinosaurs) so basically reptile people. Eternia was destroyed in a Lacrimosa, a reaccuring natural catastrophe that resets the world by destroying the dominant species and you can pretty much guess that humans are next. So far it's pretty much the Lost World or other Jules Vernes work. And then it turns to Jack the Ripper. One survivor is a Romun officer in charge of apprehending the Ripper, a serial killer that was last noted aboard the Lombardia. And then the captain is attacked, then the nobleman and you have to find him... since the captain can identify that it was a man that called out to him. So the males of the camp is a suspect. There's Adol, the captain, the doctor, the nobleman, Sahad, Hummel (another playable character), the romun officer and the last person you found, a sailor with medical experience... it's the doctor isn't it? I got it 20 minutes before the game spelled it out. You fight the doctor, but he is able to fatally injure the captain, the nobleman i killed by the kraken as he tries to escape with a rowboat and the doctor is then killed himself by a freaking dinosaur. AMAZING GAME!
After that Adol tries to reach the north side of the island where the dreams of Dana takes place. The dreams become more real as you now get to play Dana as she lives through the end of Eternia with more saurian attacks, random weather phenomenas and as she gets visions of the future tries to guide Adol from the past by planting saplings that will keep ruins stable across the millenia or other "change the past" deals like moving a rock and so on. You also can do a special dungeon that tells the history of the kingdom. In the end Dana arrives in the future and it is revealed that the kingdom flourished with the help of the Great Tree that gave the eternians the power of essence, that is basically magic. That is part of the Great Tree's plan in causing evolution and rejection. It brings forth a dominant species and when it rules the world, destroys them and take one champion to continue warding the evolution. Four times before the age of man it have caused the Lacrimosa and reset the world. You enter the tree to release the caught spirits in the tree to power up your sword and after that beat up the tree. Adol wakes up and the castaways are preparing to leave. Dana is nowhere to be seen and everyone else have forgotten her. Adol travels to where the tree is supposed to be and finds a new smaller tree, with Gaia, the goddess of Earth explaining that she set up the tree to foster the evolution of all living things. And then tells them that they can meet Dana again by traveling through another dimension where they fight some creature and this for some reason brings back Dana as goddess fo Evolution and the bringer of the Lacrimosa if humans gets out of control and then they leave.
It was a fun game. While Tales of Vesperia dragged on in the end, this was fun from start to finish. It was fun gameplay with quick fights and grinding to get materials to get new weapons, armours or brew potions and other things. It had mystery about what happened to the eternians, the castaway rescue mission felt important and the characters gave me the feelings I was supposed to get. Sadly I gathered that if I had played Ys III-VII would have enhanced the game more since they constantly referenced events from other games and the only one I knew was Dogi the Wallcrusher since he appeared in the second game. Music great at times, the sad theme really got me in the end, and I think the captains death really hammered it in. Didn't help that all he talked about was his kid daughter he would see when he got home. *sniff*.
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