obviously, this is an ys game, so that ship sinks pretty quickly, but eventually, you start to find survivors, and everyone except the rich noble prick comes together to build a cosy little village. but i didn’t take any screenshots, so instead, enjoy these amazing views
and now, the final warning: if you intend to play this game and don’t want to see spoilers, turn back now! there are huge spoilers in the post below, because i need to talk about how insane this game’s plot becomes!
okay, so you might have noticed that the eponymous blue-haired girl dana appears in screenshots from both the present day and the ancient past. not only can she project her conciousness between the eras, but she’s also actually been alive in the interim years, though she was asleep for most of it.
before you know why she’s been alive all this time, you need to know this about dana and her civilisation: they aren’t actually human, but descended from dinosaurs. dana is an unusually short adult of the species, as most of them are 7-10 feet tall
now, in the present day, the area on the island where the ruins of the ancient civilisation should be have suddenly been engulfed in a fog, and more and more dinosaurs and other huge powerful monsters keep spilling out of the fog. then these guys appear.
these guys are the last survivors of previous dominant species of the earth, and they reveal that not only is dana the same, but adol soon will be too. this is because of one of the most insane rpg revelations i’ve ever encountered: evolution isn’t an automatic and gradual process of natural selection. instead, the huge tree on this island will, whenever a species becomes to dominant, summon an apocalyptic disaster to wipe them out. dana’s people were killed by meteors, humankind is destined to be killed by the dinosaur fog
I see a screenshot that I guess is the game failing to live uo to that amazing first reveal concept art but how does the game live or not live up to Adol standing on a cliff facing off an impossibly huge dragon?
Guess Dinosaurs had millions of years and Humans get around 100,000? Evolution is crazy!
a lot of the “ancient species” enemies have elements of both dinosaur and dragon in their designs. i don’t know about “impossibly huge”, but there aregiant enemies roaming around some areas of the game, that you’re meant to avoid unless you go back there during your endgame grind when you’re a lot stronger.
they’re bigger than real dinosaurs, like velociraptor-looking guys are 2-3 times your size, for example
I’m about 11 or so hours into this game (I skipped basically every screen shot after the first post).
It is good so far but… I kinda feel bad for the game? This may be just me drawing random connections that aren’t really there but at least early on it feels like it tries to hit some of the same notes that Breath of the Wild does when it comes to a big interconnected place. Given when development started they likely didn’t know this until a good ways in and the spot they were aiming for was basically revolutionized between the domestic and international release. I still find it pleasant but I could see being much more impressed by how it handles the island if I had played this game first.
I like how the game seems perfectly fine just borrowing elements from other games that it liked. Dungeons have Souls-esque shortcuts that allow you to skip much of it to get back to the save point. Giant obstacles blocking off parts of the island are surpassed by you gathering enough castaways to Pikmin them out of the way.
Adol seems like a stereotypical silent protagonist except that there was a point where if he said nothing it’d be weird, so he got a single spoken line.
i haven’t played breath of the wild, so i can’t comment on that specifically, but when i describe the game to people, i do usually just say “it’s kinda like zelda but more actiony”
How is the switch port? I was kinda waiting till that came out to decide what I should go for, with the knowledge that I am a lot more likley to finish an RPG if it is on a portable.
I’ve just been playing it on Switch for around 40 hours so far. The game is tonnes of fun, but has some visual weirdness that might take some adjusting to. There seems to be no anti-aliasing or texture filtering or whatever, because certain things like grass and trees look like a bunch of fuzzy TV static from a distance. The shadows have this weird checkerboard effect, and water tends to look super blurry.
I’ve been enjoying playing it on the bus, although whenever there’s a cutscene focusing on Dana I get that weird feeling that I hope nobody behind me is watching over my shoulder. Lucky the Switch version has a cool pirate outfit for her.
I know that at launch the Switch version when docked had all kinds of issues that went beyond it being a bit less pretty, but I believe that they patched it into better shape. Beyond that, the Switch version has a worse framerate and is lacking some visual effects but seemingly not to a game breaking degree.
A bit further into the game and what sticks out to me is that, for a game series that at one point I knew for its great boss fights (mainly Oath in Felghana and Origins) the ones here are sadly bog standard.
