A port of Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand
Ys V was originally released in 1995. In 1996, Falcom released a second version of the game for the Super Famicom with a higher difficulty level, known as Ys V Expert.
Also in series
Reviews View More
It took me a few days to get through it, but I have finally reached the end of my journey through the 16-bit Ys games. I wouldn’t have originally played this version, honestly, but a partner of mine told me that the original version of Ys V was so easy that it had a reputation for feeling pointless, so I erred on the side of caution and picked the harder of the two to go through instead. Some research afterwards revealed that that may have been just as much of a mistake as it was the correct decision, but we’ll get into that later XD. It took me around 10.5 hours to make it through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or rewinds.
Ys V finds our hero Adol getting off a ship in a new land as usual (though oddly enough without Dogi, who went sailing off with him at the end of the last game). In this mysterious new land, there’s a legend of a lost, legendary city of gold called Kefin. In his usual fashion, he sets out to find it, helping out the local moneybags in a crystal hunt that’ll see him ultimately saving the world! (as if that’s a surprise to anyone). Narratively, this is the best Ys has been up to this point (though that’s hardly a high bar to cross). Ys had managed to be this funny and this functionally well put together as a narrative before, but this is the first time that we’d managed to rise beyond that. Though its pacing is a bit rougher than Ys IV (SFC) and its narrative in many ways a fairly direct retread of Ys I & II, it manages to have actual themes and messaging in its story in a way that none of those games ever managed to.
Granted, it’s hardly the biggest achievement of storytelling on the console. Heck, it’s not even the best written action/adventure game on the SFC. That said, I’d still say it’s one of the better written action/adventure games on the system, and it certainly manages to be better put together than a mess like Terranigma and more interesting than something a bit more typical and uncinematic like Brain Lord. The narrative is hardly a reason to rush out to play the game at once, but it being better put together than a lot of its contemporaries is certainly something worthy of praise in my book.
It's good that the narrative is decent and fun, because the gameplay is decidedly not. In a significant departure from both versions of Ys IV, we’ve once again abandoned bump combat in favor of pressing a button to swing our sword! What’s more, you can even press another button to actively put out your shield, and you’ve even got a jump button! We also have a magic system that revolves around collecting elemental stones and taking them to merchants to combine into alchemy stones (which you can affix to your equipped weapon (permanently) to give it the ability to do various magics). It’s a relatively linear adventure with some quite good signposting, but it’s got a pretty tough balancing act to manage with getting all of those new mechanics to work in harmony, and it’s a balancing act it fails hard.
The most glaring and obvious issue that cannot go without elaborating on is that the hit detection is absolutely dreadful. Swinging your sword at things is a constant gamble on if you’re actually going to harm them at all, as enemys’ sprites very rarely actually indicate where their hit box is in relation to your sword. This goes even more so for bosses, who are naturally the most difficult things you’ll usually be facing (even though you can actually carry around tons of healing items if you want, which does trivialize a fair bit of combat). There’s even a stat that makes enemies move faster (as you are “slower”) as you equip better armor and weapons!. All of this results in combat routinely struggling to be tolerable, let alone fun, and it's miserable. You could theoretically use magic to fight things instead, of course, but Ys V goes out of its way to make that an extremely unappealing alternative with one of the most poorly implemented magic systems I’ve seen in a while.
Unlike other Ys titles with magic systems up to this point, there is no dedicated magic button. Instead, you hold the R button down until a gauge hits 100, and then pressing your sword swinging button launches the magic attack and depletes that gauge a bit, meaning you can’t spam magic (you need to wait for the gauge to hit 100 again before firing another shot). This is already very awkward, but to make matters even more awkward, those elemental stones you combine into spells are almost universally hidden in invisible hiding places around the game. You’ll randomly be hugging a wall and suddenly find one, and it happens all the time, particularly in the late game. As if that didn’t make magic annoying enough to use, there are not only a limited amount of these stones in the game, but you also have no idea what spell you’re even making at the alchemy merchants until you just make it and then test it out. This means that you’re going to be doing a ton of save-loading looking for decent spells if you’re keen to use magic a lot, not that you really have much reason to use magic all that much.
The most farcical thing about magic isn’t just that it seemingly can’t harm bosses at all. That’s bad enough all on its own. What’s most absurd of all is that magic actually has an entirely separate experience tree! You gain one kind of experience for killing things with your sword, and another type for killing with magic. While this is a pretty typical Ys game in that there’s a fair bit of grinding, this makes the game have a truly unforgiveable amount if you want to use magic meaningfully at all. Never mind that you get magic late enough in the game (compared to your sword) that it’s a rough choice to start grinding magic in the first place, or that killing things with magic gives you NO money from kills. That’s just all insult to injury. Ultimately, a lot of this just doesn’t matter, as you basically never really need magic to fight enemies even a little, but it is truly baffling just how poorly put together the magic system is in a game with already miserable combat.
And the bad combat is a real death blow in an action/adventure game of this kind. It doesn’t matter that dungeons are nicely put together (if a bit puzzle-barren and small) or that bosses are varied in their designs. It’s honestly barely worth mentioning that the jumping puzzles aren’t too bad, that different swords almost pointlessly have different kinds of attacking (as there are only like 5 swords in the whole game), or that they removed the earlier games’ save anywhere feature in favor of quick saving anywhere and only being able to perma-save at inns (which is indeed a baffling change that just makes the game worse). Like Trials of Mana that I played earlier this year, there’s barely any point in praising or slagging off other aspects of the design in an action game like this if fighting basically anything always sucks.
The boss design isn’t that well done in the first place, frankly, with a lot of them (particularly later in the game) being really easy to just mulch down with barely any strategy at all. The combat is so bad, of course, that a lot of later “harder” fights being so simple is a small blessing, and even if you’re having a bit of trouble, you can always dip into that huge stockpile of healing items you can carry around.
The strangest part of it all is that this is Ys V – “Expert”. This is purposefully the harder version of the game, and my research actually shows that a decent amount of these are features, not bugs (as it were). The number one surprising thing I learned in looking into differences between the original version and this game is that the poor hit detection (on top of shielded enemies just blocking more) actually was added for the Expert version to make it harder! They certainly accomplished that, I’ve got to say, as enemies that not only hit harder but are harder to hit certainly does make for a harder experience, though I’d struggle to say it makes for a very fun one. The thing is, it’s weird to even describe this game as “harder” in a lot of ways due to the only real changes being worse hit detection and higher enemy stats. Bosses and such still aren’t that hard because you can bring so many healing items with you, especially later in the game. The changes Expert brings to the table largely just make the game more frustrating and grindy than they actually do to make it any more of a fun challenge, and it’s a damn shame.
Tragically (and ironically), it’s not even much of a way out to play the original instead, as site after site on the Japanese internet bemoaned just what a constantly freezing buggy mess the original release of Ys V was and just how far Expert went in fixing those issues (I can confirm I never hit a single freeze during my 10-ish hours with it). Expert may be the “better” version in that it doesn’t crash anymore and has a little bit of extra content, but the overall experience has been made so much worse that either version frankly sounds like a big waste of your time.
Thankfully, the presentation does manage to at least hold its own for what you’d expect for an Ys game. The music is excellent, with Falcom’s music team once again putting out a game packed with good music. Additionally, where Mask of the Sun didn’t really impress for a mid-life SFC game, Ys V really does look like a game released in ’95, as it’s absolutely beautiful. You’ve got a bit of slowdown here and there, and there are some weird graphical hiccups and flashes (though nothing nearly as bad as the flashing in Mask of the Sun) which honestly seemed to be the game trying not to crash, but it all at least runs pretty darn well for how good it looks, and that’s a nice silver lining to everything else, I suppose.
Verdict: Not Recommended. If you can get past how often the original version of Ys V apparently crashes, then perhaps the better hit detection and less grinding in that version makes it a better time. As it is, Expert may be less boringly easy than the first one (if its reputation is to be believed), but it’s worse in so many ways that I cannot in good conscience possibly recommend it to even a big fan of the genre. The combat is something to trudge through the whole way through, and it only gets easier when you’ve finally done enough grinding to be able to easily plow through (or safely ignore) the enemies that give you so much grief. There is no shortage of far better action/adventure games on this console, so you are far better off experiencing the story and aesthetics through a lets play on Youtube than wasting your valuable time banging your head against something as clumsily and poorly put together as this frustrating mess of a late-life SFC game.
Ys V finds our hero Adol getting off a ship in a new land as usual (though oddly enough without Dogi, who went sailing off with him at the end of the last game). In this mysterious new land, there’s a legend of a lost, legendary city of gold called Kefin. In his usual fashion, he sets out to find it, helping out the local moneybags in a crystal hunt that’ll see him ultimately saving the world! (as if that’s a surprise to anyone). Narratively, this is the best Ys has been up to this point (though that’s hardly a high bar to cross). Ys had managed to be this funny and this functionally well put together as a narrative before, but this is the first time that we’d managed to rise beyond that. Though its pacing is a bit rougher than Ys IV (SFC) and its narrative in many ways a fairly direct retread of Ys I & II, it manages to have actual themes and messaging in its story in a way that none of those games ever managed to.
Granted, it’s hardly the biggest achievement of storytelling on the console. Heck, it’s not even the best written action/adventure game on the SFC. That said, I’d still say it’s one of the better written action/adventure games on the system, and it certainly manages to be better put together than a mess like Terranigma and more interesting than something a bit more typical and uncinematic like Brain Lord. The narrative is hardly a reason to rush out to play the game at once, but it being better put together than a lot of its contemporaries is certainly something worthy of praise in my book.
It's good that the narrative is decent and fun, because the gameplay is decidedly not. In a significant departure from both versions of Ys IV, we’ve once again abandoned bump combat in favor of pressing a button to swing our sword! What’s more, you can even press another button to actively put out your shield, and you’ve even got a jump button! We also have a magic system that revolves around collecting elemental stones and taking them to merchants to combine into alchemy stones (which you can affix to your equipped weapon (permanently) to give it the ability to do various magics). It’s a relatively linear adventure with some quite good signposting, but it’s got a pretty tough balancing act to manage with getting all of those new mechanics to work in harmony, and it’s a balancing act it fails hard.
The most glaring and obvious issue that cannot go without elaborating on is that the hit detection is absolutely dreadful. Swinging your sword at things is a constant gamble on if you’re actually going to harm them at all, as enemys’ sprites very rarely actually indicate where their hit box is in relation to your sword. This goes even more so for bosses, who are naturally the most difficult things you’ll usually be facing (even though you can actually carry around tons of healing items if you want, which does trivialize a fair bit of combat). There’s even a stat that makes enemies move faster (as you are “slower”) as you equip better armor and weapons!. All of this results in combat routinely struggling to be tolerable, let alone fun, and it's miserable. You could theoretically use magic to fight things instead, of course, but Ys V goes out of its way to make that an extremely unappealing alternative with one of the most poorly implemented magic systems I’ve seen in a while.
Unlike other Ys titles with magic systems up to this point, there is no dedicated magic button. Instead, you hold the R button down until a gauge hits 100, and then pressing your sword swinging button launches the magic attack and depletes that gauge a bit, meaning you can’t spam magic (you need to wait for the gauge to hit 100 again before firing another shot). This is already very awkward, but to make matters even more awkward, those elemental stones you combine into spells are almost universally hidden in invisible hiding places around the game. You’ll randomly be hugging a wall and suddenly find one, and it happens all the time, particularly in the late game. As if that didn’t make magic annoying enough to use, there are not only a limited amount of these stones in the game, but you also have no idea what spell you’re even making at the alchemy merchants until you just make it and then test it out. This means that you’re going to be doing a ton of save-loading looking for decent spells if you’re keen to use magic a lot, not that you really have much reason to use magic all that much.
The most farcical thing about magic isn’t just that it seemingly can’t harm bosses at all. That’s bad enough all on its own. What’s most absurd of all is that magic actually has an entirely separate experience tree! You gain one kind of experience for killing things with your sword, and another type for killing with magic. While this is a pretty typical Ys game in that there’s a fair bit of grinding, this makes the game have a truly unforgiveable amount if you want to use magic meaningfully at all. Never mind that you get magic late enough in the game (compared to your sword) that it’s a rough choice to start grinding magic in the first place, or that killing things with magic gives you NO money from kills. That’s just all insult to injury. Ultimately, a lot of this just doesn’t matter, as you basically never really need magic to fight enemies even a little, but it is truly baffling just how poorly put together the magic system is in a game with already miserable combat.
And the bad combat is a real death blow in an action/adventure game of this kind. It doesn’t matter that dungeons are nicely put together (if a bit puzzle-barren and small) or that bosses are varied in their designs. It’s honestly barely worth mentioning that the jumping puzzles aren’t too bad, that different swords almost pointlessly have different kinds of attacking (as there are only like 5 swords in the whole game), or that they removed the earlier games’ save anywhere feature in favor of quick saving anywhere and only being able to perma-save at inns (which is indeed a baffling change that just makes the game worse). Like Trials of Mana that I played earlier this year, there’s barely any point in praising or slagging off other aspects of the design in an action game like this if fighting basically anything always sucks.
The boss design isn’t that well done in the first place, frankly, with a lot of them (particularly later in the game) being really easy to just mulch down with barely any strategy at all. The combat is so bad, of course, that a lot of later “harder” fights being so simple is a small blessing, and even if you’re having a bit of trouble, you can always dip into that huge stockpile of healing items you can carry around.
The strangest part of it all is that this is Ys V – “Expert”. This is purposefully the harder version of the game, and my research actually shows that a decent amount of these are features, not bugs (as it were). The number one surprising thing I learned in looking into differences between the original version and this game is that the poor hit detection (on top of shielded enemies just blocking more) actually was added for the Expert version to make it harder! They certainly accomplished that, I’ve got to say, as enemies that not only hit harder but are harder to hit certainly does make for a harder experience, though I’d struggle to say it makes for a very fun one. The thing is, it’s weird to even describe this game as “harder” in a lot of ways due to the only real changes being worse hit detection and higher enemy stats. Bosses and such still aren’t that hard because you can bring so many healing items with you, especially later in the game. The changes Expert brings to the table largely just make the game more frustrating and grindy than they actually do to make it any more of a fun challenge, and it’s a damn shame.
Tragically (and ironically), it’s not even much of a way out to play the original instead, as site after site on the Japanese internet bemoaned just what a constantly freezing buggy mess the original release of Ys V was and just how far Expert went in fixing those issues (I can confirm I never hit a single freeze during my 10-ish hours with it). Expert may be the “better” version in that it doesn’t crash anymore and has a little bit of extra content, but the overall experience has been made so much worse that either version frankly sounds like a big waste of your time.
Thankfully, the presentation does manage to at least hold its own for what you’d expect for an Ys game. The music is excellent, with Falcom’s music team once again putting out a game packed with good music. Additionally, where Mask of the Sun didn’t really impress for a mid-life SFC game, Ys V really does look like a game released in ’95, as it’s absolutely beautiful. You’ve got a bit of slowdown here and there, and there are some weird graphical hiccups and flashes (though nothing nearly as bad as the flashing in Mask of the Sun) which honestly seemed to be the game trying not to crash, but it all at least runs pretty darn well for how good it looks, and that’s a nice silver lining to everything else, I suppose.
Verdict: Not Recommended. If you can get past how often the original version of Ys V apparently crashes, then perhaps the better hit detection and less grinding in that version makes it a better time. As it is, Expert may be less boringly easy than the first one (if its reputation is to be believed), but it’s worse in so many ways that I cannot in good conscience possibly recommend it to even a big fan of the genre. The combat is something to trudge through the whole way through, and it only gets easier when you’ve finally done enough grinding to be able to easily plow through (or safely ignore) the enemies that give you so much grief. There is no shortage of far better action/adventure games on this console, so you are far better off experiencing the story and aesthetics through a lets play on Youtube than wasting your valuable time banging your head against something as clumsily and poorly put together as this frustrating mess of a late-life SFC game.