Ys IV Part 1 : Mask of the Flop
After the troublesome development of Ys III, the development team composed of developer Masaya Hashimoto and scenario writer Tomoyoshi Miyazaki as well as all the other less known employees who worked on the first three titles, decided to leave Falcom for greener pastures by forming an independent studio by the name of “Quintet” under the guise of Enix one of the most prominent gaming publishers at the time responsible for publishing several hit like EVO, Star Ocean and of course the worldwide phenomenon that is the Dragon Quest series. Here they will make a few cult classics on the Super Nintendo such as Actraiser, the “Heaven and Earth Trilogy” (Soul Blazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terranigma) or even Robotrek before slowly fading into obscurity in the middle of the PS1 era with most of its staff never to be seen again after filing for bankruptcy in 2003.
Around the same time, Falcom will know another developers exodus, this time the development team behind the first person dungeon crawler Dinosaur (a game which disappointingly has no actual dinosaurs in it, Dinosaur being the name of the antagonist) left the company to also become a new studio by the name of “Studio Alex” where they’ll make the Lunar Series before filing for bankruptcy after some unfortunate controversy regarding the animation of one of the series third and entry and most of the employees where then forced to move on to Game Arts (the company who co-developed the Lunar Series) where they’ll create the Grandia series before Game Arts started dwindling in the mid 2000’s only now releasing HD ports of their past hits.
Around the end of the 80’s, the work environment at Falcom wasn’t really the best, they went from frontrunners of the RPG industry to second fiddle in a matter of years which is actually fascinating to me because there’s definitely a universe where Falcom did succeed and became a legendary game developers the likes of Squaresoft or even Atlus instead of that one scrimblo company who to this day still struggles for relevance. I mean for crying out loud, Falcom was a studio full of talented people and while the 2 we mentioned earlier made a few bangers before going into a whiff, some of them like Tetsuya Takahashi or later down the line Makoto Shinkai will know fruitful careers after departing from Falcom, one as the genius behind the Xeno Series beloved by all RPG fans who respects themselves a little and one as a successful worldwide known anime filmmaker (can you imagine that there’s a parallel universe where Makoto Shinkai, the director of “Your Name” could’ve been the Tetsuya Nomura of Falcom ? Crazy to think about isn’t it ?).
Suffice to say that with 3⁄4th of their staff gone to the wind and the few remaining members of the A-Team focusing on making games in the ever so expanding Dragon Slayer franchise which wasn’t seeing much success either, the future of Falcom and most topically for this review Ys was in trouble. But Falcom had a few trick up their sleeves but most importantly they had connections, the next game in the Ys series “Ys IV” was already in preparation but without a development team ready to work on it, Falcom had to rely on two of its most reliable ally : Tonkin House and Hudson Soft.
Both companies helped port the Ys franchise on console, Tonkin House was responsible for porting them on Nintendo and Sega’s hardware and Hudson Soft had the rights to publish straight up remakes of these titles to promote their very own console : The PC-Engine.
After being given a design document on what Ys IV was supposed to look like as well as a complete sheet of original composition by Falcom at the time newly formed “Sound JDK” team, both teams set up to create their own version of Ys IV with full creative liberties from Falcom to add or take away anything they wanted as long as they followed the rough outline of the original script and kept the initial gameplay planned for this episode intact.
And that’s how we ended up with two versions of Ys IV which seems similar at first glance as they were released roughly at the same time in 1991 but are vastly different in their execution enough so that they’re completely different games only sharing similar plot beats and characters. These wouldn’t be the only version of Ys IV however, there’s a grand total of 4 version of Ys IV with one developed by Taito in 2005 for the PS2 and which is supposed to be a remake of the SNES version we’re going to talk about today and finally another version this time actually developed by Falcom for the PS Vita roughly 20 years after the release of the first two version of Ys IV.
Since Tonkin House is the first one to release their take on Ys IV, this review will cover “Ys IV : Mask of the Sun”, released exclusively for the Super Famicom and in the second part of this review we’ll take a look at Hudson’s version named “Ys IV : The Dawn of Ys” !
Tonkin House, as previously mentioned is the company which ported the older Ys titles on console but if we take a look at their history with both the franchise and the rest of their catalog, it doesn’t bode well for this game at all. Unlike Hudson Soft which was a renowned game developer and console manufacturer at the time, Tonkin House was a relatively smaller studio even smaller than Falcom was at the time. They’ve released a few titles, mostly sports games which have seen moderate success and helped other companies on other titles in fact their port of Ys III for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo is one of the few rare time when they actually had full-hands on a project and it was for a port and how did that well ?
Bad
Ys III on both the Sega Genesis but especially on the Super Nintendo are really bad and that’s saying a lot considering what I had to say about Ys III in its best version, the SNES version is commonly accepted as the worst version of Ys III with even wankier controls, even wankier collision errors, glitches up the wazoo (but tbf, one allows you to level up instantly to max level so it’s kind of a neat feature lol) and with terrible ear-bleeding renditions of the soundtrack on a console that’s known for having one of the best sound chip in the history of gaming.
You know how people are impressed by Nobuo Uematsu when he manages to compose a 17 minutes long prog-rock symphonic masterpiece on the equivalent of a box of Crayola ? Well I’m similarly impressed at Tonkin House for taking that box of Crayola and just spectacularly set it out on fire ! Fucking up music on the Genesis is one thing, only a few god-like composer like Yuzo Koshiro or Michael Jackson (assuming he was the one doing the music for Sonic 3, I’m never sure) can make something out of the piece of scrap metal that is the YM2612 but the Super Nintendo soundchip ? That’s just insane, just listen and compare to the PC-Engine version. It's wild https://youtu.be/BxkElFJb5zI?si=ERx3kIU64vCZMz4F !
The reason I’m saying this is because the first thing you’re going to realize when booting up Ys IV : Mask of the Sun is how poor the sound quality, in a series that’s mostly known for its excellent soundtrack, Mask of the Sun just doesn’t bring homage to the series legacy on that front. The music themselves aren’t badly composed, in fact like I said earlier, the team was given a full sheet of original composition by the JDK team, it’s almost the exact same soundtrack as Hudson’s version and if you go and listen to the perfect edition of the soundtrack, you’ll realize it’s one of Falcom’s best OST album to date ! If your first experience with Ys IV soundtrack is the Super Famicom version then I’m deeply sorry for you because the way it’s compressed and crunched up is so messy that it will make the snail inside your ear commit seppuku just playing the game for an extended period of time. There’s a few original compositions made specifically for this version of the game and they’re the only stand-out track but even then, the general quality of the arrangements doesn’t help them shine the way they should.
But bad music aside, which already deals a huge blow to the franchise core identity, how does the game or heck even the story hold up ?
Well… not good…
When developing Ys IV, it was decided after the harsh feedback Ys III received for its gameplay system to go back to a more classical top-down adventure and surprisingly although everybody was moving on to the Zelda style of having an attack button which became the norm, it was decided that Ys IV returned to the tried and true bump system from the original 2 games, this return to form for Ys was also shown through the story and most importantly how Ys IV places itself in the continuity, taking place between Ys II and Ys III and as such acting as a direct continuation to Adol’s adventure in Esteria.
While both Mask of The Sun and Hudson follows some rough outlines when it comes to the story, their execution is pretty different, Tonkin House didn’t take any real risk when it comes to the story and decided to follow the guideline of Falcom’s original document but I feel like when it comes to Mask of The Sun at least, they read the synopsis, the concept and roughly the big ideas and set pieces of Ys IV but forgot to actually add… an actually coherent storyline to tie all these conceptual elements together ???
In this version of Ys IV, Adol is wandering on the beach of Esteria thinking back on his adventure in Ys I&II until suddenly he finds a letter in a bottle in a language he doesn’t understand, after getting it translated by Luther (a character from Ys 1) the letter reveals that the distant land of Celceta is in danger ! And someone is asking for a hero to save the day. Adol, hearing the call for adventure once more, decides to hop on his boat to explore Celceta and figure out what’s going on over there…
And then… well…
The story sort of just… happens ?
Yeah that’s probably my main issue with Mask of the Sun storytelling, there’s a few notable high points connected by various steps along the way which didn’t seem all that well thought out and seem to be more of an excuse to pad the game time more than telling a story.
The progression of the story and how you explore Celceta feels very disjointed and while the fan translation of the game courtesy of Aeon Genesis is rather excellent and in fact much better than what a typical localization for a game of this era should be, I don’t necessarily think the actual script at play deserved such premium treatment ! Story beats really just happens at random with the only real narrative arc holding the game together being Dr.Flair accompanying Adol on his quest to find Celceta’s flower to prepare medicine for Lilia until the actual story about Eldeel, Lisa and his three goons starts out of genuinely nowhere leading you on a scavenger quest for a bunch of McGuffin needed to obtain a special sword to defeat the big bad guy of the week and really, don’t even ask me the entire process of behind the plot because I don’t really remember much of what you actually do in the game…
And when I say the actual plot kicks off out of nowhere, I really mean it, Adol goes inside a random forest, gets struck by lightning, taken into a castle and witness a conversation between the villains of the game before being discovered and comedically beaten out to death in gloriously limited Super Nintendo scene direction ! It’s genuinely hysterical how the game goes from 0 to a 100, at some point the characters are like “let’s go back to Esteria !” which is a cool way to let you visit the map from Ys I but it’s terribly limited and done very poorly and also comes out of genuinely nowhere or when Lilia gets randomly kidnapped and die but thanks to some random thingamajig, you’re able to bring her back to life (tho fighting through hordes of enemy while carrying Lilia’s lifeless body is one of the few standout moment of the game !).
The scene direction is pretty hilarious too with people jumping around, spinning, interrupting each others (thankfully the text is colored to follow who says who in this mess of dialogue bubble overlapping each others) but even with those funny SNES limitations, the story in it of itself while not lacking in striking moment or even good idea to extend on the universe of the series comes off as pretty awkward and at the end we’re only left with a confused feeling of having experience only the rough draft of something that could if given the proper care actually be amazing and thankfully we’ll see that in the next review when we’ll talk about Dawn.
Also Adol talks in this game, and he talks a lot more than he did in Ys III, it’s the last time the franchise will attempt at giving Adol somewhat of a personality until Memories of Celceta and I’m glad they dropped the idea quickly. I know there’s some debate on the internet on whether or not silent protagonist are even needed in the gaming sphere anymore but I think everyone would agree that I’d rather Adol being a mute and speaking most of his words through actions rather than just stating some flat platitude about the next step of his quest or random answer to NPC which feels more randomly generated than anything, the gameplay and the general narration sells Adol more than any piece of dialogue ever can in my opinion.
But Ys stories have always pretty much been secondary, most of the time the game excels more at narration and telling a story through gameplay, subtle hints and clues and this more direct approach definitely needed to be perfected to compensate for the abysmal gameplay of Mask of The Sun…
Yeah Tonkin House didn’t really learn anything from how wack their version of Ys III on console were and if they could fuck up a gameplay system which just needed to be adapted imagine the results when you task them to actually make a fun return to bump combat.
Following the harsh criticism of Ys III gameplay, Falcom tasked both developers to create something closer to Ys I&II, so close in fact that virtually speaking almost nothing change, you still have the same bump system, the same magics, the same equipment and accessories and aside from a few oddball novelties which are barely noticeable, it plays… roughly the same as Ys I&II…
Or does it ?
There’s a common criticism of Bump Combat amongst people going back to the older titles. That it feels jank, unpolished, outdated, unfair even, that it’s not natural, that the hitboxes are wack and the system itself has no real qualities to it whatsoever and feels more limiting than anything and for many people Bump Combat is the relic of a bygone era that should never see the light of day again. And while I personally agree that Bump Combat doesn’t necessarily have a place in the modern action-rpg scene, I will disagree with the sometimes harsh and unwarranted criticism toward such a system because one, it’s not without its merits and I went over them in detail in my first review and two because Ys 1&2 doing it so well means that there’s room for fucking it up royally and that’s what Tonkin House managed to do !!!
I want you to take your bias against Ys 1&2 and I’m inviting you to play Mask of The Sun for at least 10 minutes ! Just 10 minutes is enough to realize how good you bunch of ungrateful pricks had it with the original title and now look how they’ve massacred my bumpy boy…
First off, it's still only 4 directional movement, but that’s ok because Ys 1&2 had enemies designed around that limitation and positioning was a core aspect of the combat system but not in Mask of the Sun ! Enemies goes super fast, zooming on the screen erratically, shooting projectiles off center guaranteeing you to take a hit and their hitboxes are out of this world, they are simply no rules to how hitboxes behave in this game, you will systematically at least 7 times out of 10 take a hit and not even understanding why you did take a hit ! Also if you thought bump combat was bad, imagine bump combat but now with STATUS EFFECTS. Because yes, some enemies can inflict you status effects including but not limited to poison !
I repeat, in a game where the ENTIRE POINT is to go in direct contact with the enemies to hurt them, you can randomly get poisoned and how does poison behave in Mask of the Sun ? Well much like every classic JRPG of course ! By losing health with every step when we stated in our first review that the core strength and entire point of the bump system was that it was based on CONSTANTLY MOVING !
There is a special kind of hell for design decisions like this which completely disregard any notion of common sense and goes against the initial main philosophy behind the series core game design philosophy ! It’s really hard to make you understand through text the immediate stark contrast between how it feels to play Ys 1&2 and how it feels to play Mask of the Sun especially if you weren’t particularly convinced by the bump system in the original 2 games and rightfully so since it’s already a pretty acquired taste ! Thankfully magic is back and while it’s ineffective on bosses, it makes a lot of regular combat encounters much smoother to go through and speaking of bosses…
WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE BOSSES ?
I swear, if the combat struggles to function in regular combat encounters, wait until you reach a boss in this mess of a game ! It’s crazy how Ys 1 bosses even in all of their wack sometimes, still managed to play to the strength of the bump system but not here ! There is zero telling on when they’re vulnerable, they’re completely immune to magic which means that it has the opposite balancing issue as Ys II and most of all their patterns just… are not real ! Sometimes they’ll shoot a projectile and you’ll get his when you’re clearly not being hit, one boss in the early game drops the framerate like crazy (oh yeah the game also run terribly btw) and the flames you need to dodge becomes invisible because of SPRITE FLICKERING ! ON THE SUPER NINTENDO !!!! Another boss is so badly designed, that you need to stay in the middle of his two lasers but guess what, staying in the middle gets you hit so the boss is literally a DPS check on whether you can kill him before it kills you !
Grinding is especially obnoxious too, early Ys game always had a bit of an issue with grinding but here, it’s not really good at all and if the battle system would not want to make you want to kill yourself, it’s absolutely the level design !
It’s simple, the level design, is non-existent, it feels like each areas was randomly generated using an RPG maker “generate random dungeon” tool, areas are way too big and the enemy spawn is fucking obnoxious as fuck with the fucked up scrolling and how much of them they are in a single place ! The areas are big and don’t have any striking landmarks to navigate through them and sometimes the themes repeat themselves for no reason later in the game ! However I’ll say that geographically, the world is coherent and cohesive and gives a bigger degree of liberty for explorations compared to Ys II but the actual areas are a nightmare to go through and you will absolutely dread the final dungeon of the game…
It’s 3 part dungeon, one is a fairly straight line, the other is a gigantic maze where you have to go back and forth from places to places in the dark, where rooms have 8 exits but only one of them leads to the rest of the dungeon and the other 7 to dead end but not like you could understand at first glance because the whole thing is in the dark !!! And the last part is the golden tower which is yet another maze but ! WITH TELEPORTERS YEEPEE WHAT A FUN VIDEO GAME !
Mask of the Sun is a shockingly incompetent game and let’s be fair, after the dud that was Ys III, the last thing I wanted to cover was another crappy game but at least Ys III was rushed and was experimenting with what Ys could be. Tonkin House wasn’t and they were tasked to just recreate a game like Ys 1 and 2 which doesn’t sound so impossible to do but yet they did, Tonkin House are genuinely incompetent and it’s no wonder that the company was lost into depth of history and fell off quickly into bankruptcy a little after releasing this awful mess !
The worst part is that since Tonkin House followed the guideline more closely than Hudson, Mask of the Sun was deemed the canonical version of Ys IV for years to come meaning that for how shitty the game is, it left a bigger legacy than Hudson’s game and it makes me mad because Dawn of Ys… is one of the best game in the entire franchise ! (see you in Part 2 to talk about how Hudson managed to bring Ys into new height while leaving little impacts…)
After the troublesome development of Ys III, the development team composed of developer Masaya Hashimoto and scenario writer Tomoyoshi Miyazaki as well as all the other less known employees who worked on the first three titles, decided to leave Falcom for greener pastures by forming an independent studio by the name of “Quintet” under the guise of Enix one of the most prominent gaming publishers at the time responsible for publishing several hit like EVO, Star Ocean and of course the worldwide phenomenon that is the Dragon Quest series. Here they will make a few cult classics on the Super Nintendo such as Actraiser, the “Heaven and Earth Trilogy” (Soul Blazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terranigma) or even Robotrek before slowly fading into obscurity in the middle of the PS1 era with most of its staff never to be seen again after filing for bankruptcy in 2003.
Around the same time, Falcom will know another developers exodus, this time the development team behind the first person dungeon crawler Dinosaur (a game which disappointingly has no actual dinosaurs in it, Dinosaur being the name of the antagonist) left the company to also become a new studio by the name of “Studio Alex” where they’ll make the Lunar Series before filing for bankruptcy after some unfortunate controversy regarding the animation of one of the series third and entry and most of the employees where then forced to move on to Game Arts (the company who co-developed the Lunar Series) where they’ll create the Grandia series before Game Arts started dwindling in the mid 2000’s only now releasing HD ports of their past hits.
Around the end of the 80’s, the work environment at Falcom wasn’t really the best, they went from frontrunners of the RPG industry to second fiddle in a matter of years which is actually fascinating to me because there’s definitely a universe where Falcom did succeed and became a legendary game developers the likes of Squaresoft or even Atlus instead of that one scrimblo company who to this day still struggles for relevance. I mean for crying out loud, Falcom was a studio full of talented people and while the 2 we mentioned earlier made a few bangers before going into a whiff, some of them like Tetsuya Takahashi or later down the line Makoto Shinkai will know fruitful careers after departing from Falcom, one as the genius behind the Xeno Series beloved by all RPG fans who respects themselves a little and one as a successful worldwide known anime filmmaker (can you imagine that there’s a parallel universe where Makoto Shinkai, the director of “Your Name” could’ve been the Tetsuya Nomura of Falcom ? Crazy to think about isn’t it ?).
Suffice to say that with 3⁄4th of their staff gone to the wind and the few remaining members of the A-Team focusing on making games in the ever so expanding Dragon Slayer franchise which wasn’t seeing much success either, the future of Falcom and most topically for this review Ys was in trouble. But Falcom had a few trick up their sleeves but most importantly they had connections, the next game in the Ys series “Ys IV” was already in preparation but without a development team ready to work on it, Falcom had to rely on two of its most reliable ally : Tonkin House and Hudson Soft.
Both companies helped port the Ys franchise on console, Tonkin House was responsible for porting them on Nintendo and Sega’s hardware and Hudson Soft had the rights to publish straight up remakes of these titles to promote their very own console : The PC-Engine.
After being given a design document on what Ys IV was supposed to look like as well as a complete sheet of original composition by Falcom at the time newly formed “Sound JDK” team, both teams set up to create their own version of Ys IV with full creative liberties from Falcom to add or take away anything they wanted as long as they followed the rough outline of the original script and kept the initial gameplay planned for this episode intact.
And that’s how we ended up with two versions of Ys IV which seems similar at first glance as they were released roughly at the same time in 1991 but are vastly different in their execution enough so that they’re completely different games only sharing similar plot beats and characters. These wouldn’t be the only version of Ys IV however, there’s a grand total of 4 version of Ys IV with one developed by Taito in 2005 for the PS2 and which is supposed to be a remake of the SNES version we’re going to talk about today and finally another version this time actually developed by Falcom for the PS Vita roughly 20 years after the release of the first two version of Ys IV.
Since Tonkin House is the first one to release their take on Ys IV, this review will cover “Ys IV : Mask of the Sun”, released exclusively for the Super Famicom and in the second part of this review we’ll take a look at Hudson’s version named “Ys IV : The Dawn of Ys” !
Tonkin House, as previously mentioned is the company which ported the older Ys titles on console but if we take a look at their history with both the franchise and the rest of their catalog, it doesn’t bode well for this game at all. Unlike Hudson Soft which was a renowned game developer and console manufacturer at the time, Tonkin House was a relatively smaller studio even smaller than Falcom was at the time. They’ve released a few titles, mostly sports games which have seen moderate success and helped other companies on other titles in fact their port of Ys III for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo is one of the few rare time when they actually had full-hands on a project and it was for a port and how did that well ?
Bad
Ys III on both the Sega Genesis but especially on the Super Nintendo are really bad and that’s saying a lot considering what I had to say about Ys III in its best version, the SNES version is commonly accepted as the worst version of Ys III with even wankier controls, even wankier collision errors, glitches up the wazoo (but tbf, one allows you to level up instantly to max level so it’s kind of a neat feature lol) and with terrible ear-bleeding renditions of the soundtrack on a console that’s known for having one of the best sound chip in the history of gaming.
You know how people are impressed by Nobuo Uematsu when he manages to compose a 17 minutes long prog-rock symphonic masterpiece on the equivalent of a box of Crayola ? Well I’m similarly impressed at Tonkin House for taking that box of Crayola and just spectacularly set it out on fire ! Fucking up music on the Genesis is one thing, only a few god-like composer like Yuzo Koshiro or Michael Jackson (assuming he was the one doing the music for Sonic 3, I’m never sure) can make something out of the piece of scrap metal that is the YM2612 but the Super Nintendo soundchip ? That’s just insane, just listen and compare to the PC-Engine version. It's wild https://youtu.be/BxkElFJb5zI?si=ERx3kIU64vCZMz4F !
The reason I’m saying this is because the first thing you’re going to realize when booting up Ys IV : Mask of the Sun is how poor the sound quality, in a series that’s mostly known for its excellent soundtrack, Mask of the Sun just doesn’t bring homage to the series legacy on that front. The music themselves aren’t badly composed, in fact like I said earlier, the team was given a full sheet of original composition by the JDK team, it’s almost the exact same soundtrack as Hudson’s version and if you go and listen to the perfect edition of the soundtrack, you’ll realize it’s one of Falcom’s best OST album to date ! If your first experience with Ys IV soundtrack is the Super Famicom version then I’m deeply sorry for you because the way it’s compressed and crunched up is so messy that it will make the snail inside your ear commit seppuku just playing the game for an extended period of time. There’s a few original compositions made specifically for this version of the game and they’re the only stand-out track but even then, the general quality of the arrangements doesn’t help them shine the way they should.
But bad music aside, which already deals a huge blow to the franchise core identity, how does the game or heck even the story hold up ?
Well… not good…
When developing Ys IV, it was decided after the harsh feedback Ys III received for its gameplay system to go back to a more classical top-down adventure and surprisingly although everybody was moving on to the Zelda style of having an attack button which became the norm, it was decided that Ys IV returned to the tried and true bump system from the original 2 games, this return to form for Ys was also shown through the story and most importantly how Ys IV places itself in the continuity, taking place between Ys II and Ys III and as such acting as a direct continuation to Adol’s adventure in Esteria.
While both Mask of The Sun and Hudson follows some rough outlines when it comes to the story, their execution is pretty different, Tonkin House didn’t take any real risk when it comes to the story and decided to follow the guideline of Falcom’s original document but I feel like when it comes to Mask of The Sun at least, they read the synopsis, the concept and roughly the big ideas and set pieces of Ys IV but forgot to actually add… an actually coherent storyline to tie all these conceptual elements together ???
In this version of Ys IV, Adol is wandering on the beach of Esteria thinking back on his adventure in Ys I&II until suddenly he finds a letter in a bottle in a language he doesn’t understand, after getting it translated by Luther (a character from Ys 1) the letter reveals that the distant land of Celceta is in danger ! And someone is asking for a hero to save the day. Adol, hearing the call for adventure once more, decides to hop on his boat to explore Celceta and figure out what’s going on over there…
And then… well…
The story sort of just… happens ?
Yeah that’s probably my main issue with Mask of the Sun storytelling, there’s a few notable high points connected by various steps along the way which didn’t seem all that well thought out and seem to be more of an excuse to pad the game time more than telling a story.
The progression of the story and how you explore Celceta feels very disjointed and while the fan translation of the game courtesy of Aeon Genesis is rather excellent and in fact much better than what a typical localization for a game of this era should be, I don’t necessarily think the actual script at play deserved such premium treatment ! Story beats really just happens at random with the only real narrative arc holding the game together being Dr.Flair accompanying Adol on his quest to find Celceta’s flower to prepare medicine for Lilia until the actual story about Eldeel, Lisa and his three goons starts out of genuinely nowhere leading you on a scavenger quest for a bunch of McGuffin needed to obtain a special sword to defeat the big bad guy of the week and really, don’t even ask me the entire process of behind the plot because I don’t really remember much of what you actually do in the game…
And when I say the actual plot kicks off out of nowhere, I really mean it, Adol goes inside a random forest, gets struck by lightning, taken into a castle and witness a conversation between the villains of the game before being discovered and comedically beaten out to death in gloriously limited Super Nintendo scene direction ! It’s genuinely hysterical how the game goes from 0 to a 100, at some point the characters are like “let’s go back to Esteria !” which is a cool way to let you visit the map from Ys I but it’s terribly limited and done very poorly and also comes out of genuinely nowhere or when Lilia gets randomly kidnapped and die but thanks to some random thingamajig, you’re able to bring her back to life (tho fighting through hordes of enemy while carrying Lilia’s lifeless body is one of the few standout moment of the game !).
The scene direction is pretty hilarious too with people jumping around, spinning, interrupting each others (thankfully the text is colored to follow who says who in this mess of dialogue bubble overlapping each others) but even with those funny SNES limitations, the story in it of itself while not lacking in striking moment or even good idea to extend on the universe of the series comes off as pretty awkward and at the end we’re only left with a confused feeling of having experience only the rough draft of something that could if given the proper care actually be amazing and thankfully we’ll see that in the next review when we’ll talk about Dawn.
Also Adol talks in this game, and he talks a lot more than he did in Ys III, it’s the last time the franchise will attempt at giving Adol somewhat of a personality until Memories of Celceta and I’m glad they dropped the idea quickly. I know there’s some debate on the internet on whether or not silent protagonist are even needed in the gaming sphere anymore but I think everyone would agree that I’d rather Adol being a mute and speaking most of his words through actions rather than just stating some flat platitude about the next step of his quest or random answer to NPC which feels more randomly generated than anything, the gameplay and the general narration sells Adol more than any piece of dialogue ever can in my opinion.
But Ys stories have always pretty much been secondary, most of the time the game excels more at narration and telling a story through gameplay, subtle hints and clues and this more direct approach definitely needed to be perfected to compensate for the abysmal gameplay of Mask of The Sun…
Yeah Tonkin House didn’t really learn anything from how wack their version of Ys III on console were and if they could fuck up a gameplay system which just needed to be adapted imagine the results when you task them to actually make a fun return to bump combat.
Following the harsh criticism of Ys III gameplay, Falcom tasked both developers to create something closer to Ys I&II, so close in fact that virtually speaking almost nothing change, you still have the same bump system, the same magics, the same equipment and accessories and aside from a few oddball novelties which are barely noticeable, it plays… roughly the same as Ys I&II…
Or does it ?
There’s a common criticism of Bump Combat amongst people going back to the older titles. That it feels jank, unpolished, outdated, unfair even, that it’s not natural, that the hitboxes are wack and the system itself has no real qualities to it whatsoever and feels more limiting than anything and for many people Bump Combat is the relic of a bygone era that should never see the light of day again. And while I personally agree that Bump Combat doesn’t necessarily have a place in the modern action-rpg scene, I will disagree with the sometimes harsh and unwarranted criticism toward such a system because one, it’s not without its merits and I went over them in detail in my first review and two because Ys 1&2 doing it so well means that there’s room for fucking it up royally and that’s what Tonkin House managed to do !!!
I want you to take your bias against Ys 1&2 and I’m inviting you to play Mask of The Sun for at least 10 minutes ! Just 10 minutes is enough to realize how good you bunch of ungrateful pricks had it with the original title and now look how they’ve massacred my bumpy boy…
First off, it's still only 4 directional movement, but that’s ok because Ys 1&2 had enemies designed around that limitation and positioning was a core aspect of the combat system but not in Mask of the Sun ! Enemies goes super fast, zooming on the screen erratically, shooting projectiles off center guaranteeing you to take a hit and their hitboxes are out of this world, they are simply no rules to how hitboxes behave in this game, you will systematically at least 7 times out of 10 take a hit and not even understanding why you did take a hit ! Also if you thought bump combat was bad, imagine bump combat but now with STATUS EFFECTS. Because yes, some enemies can inflict you status effects including but not limited to poison !
I repeat, in a game where the ENTIRE POINT is to go in direct contact with the enemies to hurt them, you can randomly get poisoned and how does poison behave in Mask of the Sun ? Well much like every classic JRPG of course ! By losing health with every step when we stated in our first review that the core strength and entire point of the bump system was that it was based on CONSTANTLY MOVING !
There is a special kind of hell for design decisions like this which completely disregard any notion of common sense and goes against the initial main philosophy behind the series core game design philosophy ! It’s really hard to make you understand through text the immediate stark contrast between how it feels to play Ys 1&2 and how it feels to play Mask of the Sun especially if you weren’t particularly convinced by the bump system in the original 2 games and rightfully so since it’s already a pretty acquired taste ! Thankfully magic is back and while it’s ineffective on bosses, it makes a lot of regular combat encounters much smoother to go through and speaking of bosses…
WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE BOSSES ?
I swear, if the combat struggles to function in regular combat encounters, wait until you reach a boss in this mess of a game ! It’s crazy how Ys 1 bosses even in all of their wack sometimes, still managed to play to the strength of the bump system but not here ! There is zero telling on when they’re vulnerable, they’re completely immune to magic which means that it has the opposite balancing issue as Ys II and most of all their patterns just… are not real ! Sometimes they’ll shoot a projectile and you’ll get his when you’re clearly not being hit, one boss in the early game drops the framerate like crazy (oh yeah the game also run terribly btw) and the flames you need to dodge becomes invisible because of SPRITE FLICKERING ! ON THE SUPER NINTENDO !!!! Another boss is so badly designed, that you need to stay in the middle of his two lasers but guess what, staying in the middle gets you hit so the boss is literally a DPS check on whether you can kill him before it kills you !
Grinding is especially obnoxious too, early Ys game always had a bit of an issue with grinding but here, it’s not really good at all and if the battle system would not want to make you want to kill yourself, it’s absolutely the level design !
It’s simple, the level design, is non-existent, it feels like each areas was randomly generated using an RPG maker “generate random dungeon” tool, areas are way too big and the enemy spawn is fucking obnoxious as fuck with the fucked up scrolling and how much of them they are in a single place ! The areas are big and don’t have any striking landmarks to navigate through them and sometimes the themes repeat themselves for no reason later in the game ! However I’ll say that geographically, the world is coherent and cohesive and gives a bigger degree of liberty for explorations compared to Ys II but the actual areas are a nightmare to go through and you will absolutely dread the final dungeon of the game…
It’s 3 part dungeon, one is a fairly straight line, the other is a gigantic maze where you have to go back and forth from places to places in the dark, where rooms have 8 exits but only one of them leads to the rest of the dungeon and the other 7 to dead end but not like you could understand at first glance because the whole thing is in the dark !!! And the last part is the golden tower which is yet another maze but ! WITH TELEPORTERS YEEPEE WHAT A FUN VIDEO GAME !
Mask of the Sun is a shockingly incompetent game and let’s be fair, after the dud that was Ys III, the last thing I wanted to cover was another crappy game but at least Ys III was rushed and was experimenting with what Ys could be. Tonkin House wasn’t and they were tasked to just recreate a game like Ys 1 and 2 which doesn’t sound so impossible to do but yet they did, Tonkin House are genuinely incompetent and it’s no wonder that the company was lost into depth of history and fell off quickly into bankruptcy a little after releasing this awful mess !
The worst part is that since Tonkin House followed the guideline more closely than Hudson, Mask of the Sun was deemed the canonical version of Ys IV for years to come meaning that for how shitty the game is, it left a bigger legacy than Hudson’s game and it makes me mad because Dawn of Ys… is one of the best game in the entire franchise ! (see you in Part 2 to talk about how Hudson managed to bring Ys into new height while leaving little impacts…)