The bump system felt more to me the "pin enemies up against the wall" system, because that is the safest and most efficient way to handle the game's monsters.
The worst thing about this game is that it does not seem like you can hurt the water dragon boss (the second boss of the game) unless you are level 14. Which means a lot of grinding (I got there at level 9 in my normal play). By the time you are level 14, nothing in Xak 1 can even hurt you, including the final boss. They all die within 1 second of contact with your sword.
Actually, building off of that, the balance in Xak's PCE remake is very off, with the above being symptomatic of it. Either you are one level under what you should be, and everything kills you in one hit, or you are one level over, in which nothing can kill you. Most of my deaths were probably in the very beginning, and at the very poorly-designed platforming segments.
The dragon segment is cool but I don't know why they only give you horizontal control of your dragon's movement and lock you in the center of the screen. The only way to change your position is to get hit and have the natural knockback throw you down... where you still can only move left or right! It smells half-baked.
The magic is hilariously broken because it tries to do the Ys thing of "one fireball on-screen at a time." However, Falcom understood that to balance this meant that the fireball had to go through the enemy leaving you locked to that one fireball shot unless you were on the edge of the screen. In Xak it destroys on contact, resetting the limit. This means that if you get close to an enemy or a boss, you will rapid-fire them into oblivion. It's how I killed Badu in half a second at the end of Xak I, as well as Gospel in Xak II. I don't know what Telenet did, but I highly doubt the PC games were that wonky.
I enjoyed the game in a "this is kinda fun" sort of way.
