Ys: The Ark of Napishtim [PSP]

Quick, what's the shortest game name you can think of? Doom? SSX? WoW? Whatever it is, Ys has it beat. You probably didn't think of Ys because it's been missing from North America for a while, until a recent revival last year on the PlayStation 2. Ark of Napishtim was a passable lite RPG with a focus on action, leaning towards the style of Zelda. And now Konami has squeezed that same game onto the PSP with all the content intact, but some horrendous loading times that make it barely playable.

Ys is the story of a red-headed stranger washed ashore after a shipwreck, yadda yadda yadda. The game world is a small archipelago with the requisite dungeons underneath it. The themes are your typical stuff about tolerance between the human style race and the elfin race, with your hero in the middle. The game world has very little character and is ultimately bland and forgettable.

Most of your time is spent engaging in some very mild hack n' slash. You only have a single attack button. The closest thing you'll find to strategy is timing the interaction between attacking and jumping to tailor your fighting to certain creatures. You'll eventually get three weapons -- an air sword, a fire sword, and a lightning sword -- each of which can store up an appropriately themed magical attack. You gather crystals to upgrade your swords and gold to buy better armor and the healing potions you'll need to get you from one save point to another.

Although you can effectively suspend the game anywhere if you need to turn off your PSP, the main challenge in Ys is progressing between the glowing obelisks that serve as save points. Like so many RPGs, you'll need to level up your character to take on the increasingly difficult monsters you'll encounter. But Ys seems to demand a certain amount of experience point grinding.

In order to take on the monsters next door, the difficulty curve expects that you'll clear out the locals two or three times, effectively farming them for experience. With everything else in the game so streamlined -- there's no character development, inventory management, or exploration to speak of -- Ys is almost entirely a game about repetitive combat.