Ys V : The Forgettable One
The 90’s was perhaps Falcom’s roughest era. Not necessarily because the company wasn’t releasing good games, in fact they were still productive, but less so than they used to back in the 80’s. But as the years and years went on more and more of Falcom’s old staff started leaving the company to move to greener pastures and eventually Yoshio Kiya, creator of the Dragon Slayer series and last remaining member of Falcom founding staff left the company after releasing his last title : “The Legend of Xanadu'' yet another subseries of his ever expanding Dragon Slayer saga and a spin-off of the Xanadu subseries (yes, I know following the release of this franchise is highly complicated when looking at it retrospectively) over creative differences with Masayuki Kato the then CEO of Falcom.
Falcom wasn’t quite in its flop era yet but they were definitely heading towards it, all the problems the company accumulated both creatively and financially were starting to catch up to them. Falcom decided to focus entirely on working on their existing IP’s instead of creating new ones with the dungeon crawling series Brandish receiving 2 new sequels, Legend of Xanadu receiving one sequel without Masayuki Kato at its head and they even started a brand new arc for the Legend of Heroes franchise with the release of “Legend of Heroes 3 : Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch” the first episode of the Gagharv trilogy which started Falcom’s now titular brand of highly detailed continuous storytelling with games focusing on different parts of a singular world (and if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because that’s eventually what’s going lead up to Trails later down the line).
In the midst of all this chaos, the company shifted between continuing developing games for the PC-98 and the PC-Engine but were also shifting to more popular home console, even getting a partnership with Sega which never quite took off as only the Sega CD version of Popful Mail ever came out of that partnership, heck we were even supposed to get a Sega made version of Ys IV for the same platform but it never happened. After developing yet another port of Popful Mail for the Super Famicom however, Falcom was starting to be a bit more confident with developing games on console and it was then decided that the next, this time Falcom-made, title of the Ys franchise would be launching exclusively for the Super Famicom and thus : Ys V was born and was pretty much the final nail in Falcom’s metaphorical coffin.
Now, remember what I said about Ys III ? The reason for Ys III’s failure as a game was because Falcom was trying to compete with Zelda II and thus released a shallow imitation of the formula built on the corpse of a completely unrelated project turned into an Ys title at the last possible minute. But now we’re in the year 1995, the Playstation just came out in Japan a whole year ago and was heading towards international shores and while the Super Nintendo was still going strong, it wasn’t going as strong as it used to be. Lots of developers were still releasing games for the platforms for the few poor people who couldn’t afford Sony’s new wonder machine (and the PS1 really only took off by 1996 if you ask me) but now if you wanted to find success on the platform you had to stand out from the crowd and even then, you were competing with a fierce competition.
The SNES was the golden land of JRPG’s, a highly competitive market where only the strong could survive and the rest would be buried into the depth of history. How will Falcom fare in this jungle after seeing fluctuating success on the PC-Market ?
Well… not great…
One thing we can observe when looking at the history of Falcom even in the modern age is that it’s a company who pushes all the buttons on high alarm when they’re faced with a shift in the industry or when their own failures comes creeping in on their finances and what better way to secure the bag than to imitate the competition once again ? To abandon all sense of identity to pursue the road of stagnation ? That’s pretty much what Ys V is at its core.
When looking at Ys V, you might get confused at what you’re seeing. None of it feels like an Ys game or heck even a classic Falcom title ! The colors are darker, the tone of the game is edgier and more melodramatic and aside from Adol’s titular red hair who actually has some sort of prevalence within the story of the game this time around, you’d never guess that you were playing a game from the Ys series.
Ys V isn’t a particularly bad game, far from it but quickly you realize how derivative it feels not only from its own franchise (with a setting eerily similar to Ys 1&2 to the point of self plagiarizing) but also from other works of the industry at the time as the game could easily be mistaken for a Squaresoft release with a lot of similar effects, graphical assets, menus and presentation. From the ways the in-game menus looks like those of Final Fantasy, to those pixelated transition effect, to the color palette looking like FFVI or Chrono Trigger (except less vibrant) to even some mechanical similarities like a worse version of Secret of Mana rotating menu system and even a gauge that you need to wait to fill up to launch magic attack.
Heck at times it feels like a Quintet game, the studio which staff created the first 3 Ys games, even the music bares a lot of similarities to Quintet’s output or even Nobuo Uematsu’s and sound nothing like something that would come out of the Falcom Sound JDK team but yet it does !
One could be critical of games like Ys III or Mask of the Sun for being genuinely bad games but one thing but even with Ys III trying to imitate Zelda II, the whole package was unmistakably Falcom if only for their soundtrack alone but also the ways menus were arranged and the way the stories were told. But do all of these similarities make Ys V a bad game ?
Not exactly in my opinion but the answer is more complicated than a simple Yes or No. Ys V starts off with Adol going on yet another adventure this time in the land of Xandria where it’s been told that an ancient city which had disappeared 500 ago has started to reappear in the middle of the Kefin desert, a couple of years before the event of the game a team of researcher were investigating the area and found a little girl who lost her memories. Stein, one of the researchers, decided to adopt the little girl and name her Nienna but as time passed and Nienna grew, Stein became obsessed with the lost city of Kefin and one day disappeared into the night never to be seen again. As Adol arrives in Xandria, he’s contracted by a rich merchant by the name of Dorman to collect crystals for him, these crystals seemingly hold the secrets to unlocking the doors of the ancient city from which it has been told that they discovered alchemy.
The premise is pretty much a retelling of Ys 1 and 2 but with somewhat of a darker tone, the way the story is told is a bit weird however. The game is pretty much split into two parts, the quest for the crystals and everything happening in Kefin and let’s just say that the main quest isn’t really the most thrilling thing in the universe, gathering a bunch of crystals in a JRPG is already such a derivative storytelling device that it’s kind of impressive Falcom was never called out for it back in the day but also because pretty much nothing really happens during that time aside from the Crystal Quest.
The story does sets up some interesting mysteries tho, we learn that Darman’s intention aren’t quite noble, we get to meet Nienna one of the more forgettable heroine of the franchise, we start confronting with a family of bandits and most of all a village fears us as a prophecy foretold than a man with fiery haircut will bring despair upon the land which is then followed by Adol meeting the ghost of some Goth Guy who lost his fiancé years ago and is now accompanying Adol through the adventure in a subplot that seems so disconnected from the rest that it’s a bit awkwardly put together and by the end involves FUCKING TIME TRAVEL.
The story of Ys V, though derivative of what the series already did in the past, isn’t devoid of interesting or intriguing ideas but it’s the way everything is presented and paced together that makes it superbly unimpressive. But honestly, the later half of the story does come up together surprisingly well, with a lot of fascinating lore, lots of neat twists and great plot ideas. I honestly think that last third is amongst the best Falcom as ever put for the series in terms of finale, the atmosphere is really on-point and I kinda dig the darker atmosphere of the game when we reach that point and everything surrounding alchemy and how it works just begs to be expanded upon in future titles or even a remake.
What clearly doesn’t help the pacing of the game however is the new gameplay system which is kind of sluggish. The game retained the top-down perspective of the older titles but finally decided to forego bump combat in favor of a more traditional style of action combat and exploration. However, while I do welcome the change as the series needs to evolve with its time, I do think the execution of it leaves a lot to be desired. Adol sword swings are slow and enemies take a lot of hits before dying no matter the level which isn’t helped by the fact that attacking in this game locks you into place even when attacking and jumping at the same time. Because yes ! You now have a jump button and you know what that means ? Platforming ! And is the platforming good in this game ? Take a wild guess ! Thankfully the platforming heavy moments are few and far between but when they do come up, they’re as awkward to manoeuver as you may think (which isn’t helped by the way the game handles elevation and gravity…).
Eventually though, you do get a feel for how slow and mechanical the combat is so it’s not bad or unplayable, it’s just… terribly boring ? The game isn’t all that challenging either and rarely if ever will you find yourself in front of the game over screen. And I know what you’re going to say : “But Cani isn’t being accessible the whole point of Ys ?”, but you need to understand that there’s a vast difference to what was considered an accessible game back and what an accessible game was in 1995.
Back then being accessible was about cutting down the middle-man of complex mechanics and needless mechanical fluff so that anyone can jump on a game, it didn’t mean that the game needed to be braindead easy, a bit of challenge never really killed anyone after all but in 1995, being easy just resulted in a less interesting title and while you can still understand the appeal of a mechanically simple game like the original two Ys title, you can’t really be all that accepting of such a lack of challenge in a more complex game like Ys V (which is also the first game to allow you to use more than 1 healing items per battle but requires a lot of cumbersome menuing which halts the pacing of the game even more).
Speaking of needlessly complicated and cumbersome game mechanics, I have not talked about one of the game's central mechanics that’s heavily pushed by the game : the magic system ! This time around, Adol can wield the power of the elements to cast a variety of devastating and impressive looking spells ranging from simple projectile to powerful screen nukes. In order to obtain these spells, you must first find elements scattered across the world, sometimes in really well hidden places and fuse them in specific combinations to create flux stones, you can equip up to 3 flux stones giving you access to three spells you can switch back and forth at leisure. There are over 18 possible combinations of elements and thus 18 different spells ! That sounds like an ambitious, interesting and fun mechanic but then you realize that for how complex the system is, it’s completely and utterly pointless to use any of it.
To cast a spell, you need to spend both MP and something call Charge Point, you can only send a spell if you have enough MP but also only when your charge point are at max percentage, to recharge your charge point, you need to wait in place and rapidly tap the R button to fill it up so you can get a go at shooting another spell ! This limitation already slows down the momentum of the game to a crawl but their utility is also limited by how slow the animation for these spells can be, everytime you cast them Adol needs to do some little dance before shooting a projectile or launching a screen nuke which locks him into place and at the mercy of any potential threats ! On top of that, most bosses are unaffected by magic for Story reasons when those big magic attacks were pretty much made to be used on them. The only spell in the game which is of any use is the basic fireball spell you get in the tutorial area which fires quickly, doesn’t require much MP, doesn’t require a long charge period and shoots instantly out of your sword like in the older titles. Now.. after hearing all of this…
WHY WOULD ANYONE ENGAGE WITH THIS MECHANIC OUTSIDE OF THE 2 TIMES THE GAME FORCES YOU TO USE IT ?
The game is already slow as it is while simply swinging your sword at enemies so asking the player to do something that seems so cumbersome and unintuitive is kind of beyond me. It’s probably the reason why regular takes so much time to kill the regular way but killing them the regular way is still more effective and doesn’t kill the flow of combat and exploration. I do commend the team for coming up with the idea and it is rather fun to try and find what types of combination work to get what type of spells, I do get the appeal of experimenting with it but it seems like a lot of effort was put into that singular part of the game that could’ve been put elsewhere like making the adventure more interesting, fleshing out the story, make the main combat better or optimize the game a little bit because it also runs like shit with constant slowdown and slow “loading” time when entering new areas or houses.
A quick word on the dungeon design and bosses while we’re at it because that’s also part of the course for this type of game. I found the dungeon design to be serviceable, not amazing but serviceable, they get the job done and they’re not too annoying or confusing to navigate with a few clever puzzles and some nice atmosphere to boot. Shoutouts especially to the last dungeon of the game which is perhaps the best in the series up to that point and carries the last third of the game while making it slightly more interesting to play through. The bosses however are all rather forgettable, the dominant strategy for most of them is to find a safe spot and continuously swing your sword at them, they take really long to kill and aren’t all that exciting but none of them struck me as particularly bullshit.
One thing that’s also strange is the fact that unlike other titles, you can only save at Inn’s which is such a needlessly punitive system especially if you happen to die in the later half and have to do a lot of that stuff again, again another weird design choice to make the game slower.
Now it’s time to talk about the music and here’s where it gets a bit interesting. When I first played Ys V, I must admit, I found the music to be serviceable at best. Nothing really memorable outside of that one track that was literally an SNES rendition of “A boy who got wings” mixed with “Theme of Adol” from previous titles. But upon re-listening to it in isolation for the sake of this review, I realized that I should be giving more credit to this soundtrack than I initially thought.
First of all, while some sonorities are unmistakably SNES sounding, the general instrumentalisation is really good and at times approaches CD Quality audio. You can feel that this game was released late into the console where composers understood the hardware a little better but it definitely holds its own ground against contemporaries of its era in that aspect. The compositions aren’t bad either and while the general tempo is definitely slower than in other titles in the series, I think it fits the game's general vibe and slower gameplay style.
But I also think that much like the rest of the game, it feels really derivative and nothing like you come to expect from the Ys series let alone a Falcom title which even with their calmer tracks has a style unique to the JDK team and the different composers who work in it. There’s this feeling that the team didn’t really wanted to go too crazy with the soundtrack and went for something that would more easily fit the SNES hardware while taking a lot of inspirations from other places, mainly square titles but some tracks here borderline sounds like some stuff you’d find in Quintet games like Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma (which released a year later).
The music really sounds like every single SNES RPG you’ve likely ever played and lacks a bit of that flair or that punch you’d hear from Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura, Koji Kondo, Yasunori Mitsuda or other prominent game composers of that era and as such can come off as less memorable and catchy as the work of these creators. That’s a shame because Ys V soundtrack will eternally stand out as the odd one, the one that’s too basic for the rest of Falcom’s catalog when it really isn’t a bad soundtrack at all or even a mid one, just kind of unremarkable and lacking of that classic Ys flair that’s so characteristic of the series and a soundtrack which doesn’t really stick into your mind after pushing off the power button. Another problem is how often the music switches meaning you rarely ever hear the full track.
And that pretty much sums up Ys V as a videogame, not a terrible or even bad game by any stretch of the imagination but a terribly middling one which doesn’t leave much of an impact and is over before you know it. I’ve complained about the slower pace of the game but really the game is pretty short by itself, it can be completed in about 5h which is less than all the other titles up to that point but these 5h feels kind of endless, sluggish and pretty unrewarding. It’s not really the change of space that’s an issue, after all why not experiment with a slower more atmospheric take on Adol’s adventure but it’s how it’s executed that bothers me.
The game is also way too easy but in a boring kind of way to the point the team had to release an extended release of the game a year later known as “Ys V Expert” which ups the challenge a little bit, make the enemies more reactive, tweak a few things here and there and add an entire optional dungeon. But by that point, in 1996 no less, no one really gave much of a shit about Ys V and it’s not the rise in difficulty that was gonna turn the public opinion on this game around. You’ve likely played other games like Ys V on the same platform, games which are far more polished, creative and unique than Ys V could ever hope to be.
If you really wanted to experience something closer to an evolution of the Ys formula made by the actual creators of Ys, look no further than Quintet Studio and their titular “Heaven and Earth” trilogy especially Terranigma which came the same year as Ys V and even if it stayed relatively obscure is look fondly upon by many people who tried it for being a genuine masterpiece of the Action-RPG genre on the console. With a fun, fast-paced combat system, a superbly well written and well told story with a lot of twists and turns, full of surprises and clear passion put behind it. To me these were the developers worth looking at when you wanted to experience the future of the Ys series.
It seems that Falcom by themselves never quite understood Ys and its appeal when it first released back in 1987, all of their attempts at coming back to it were misguided attempt to fundamentally change what Ys was without trying to evolve the formula to greater height and always taking the series in the wrong direction to fit with current trend. It’s no wonder then that aside from Hudson Soft's phenomenal attempt at reviving the series, people weren’t really confident in Falcom delivering an Ys title that will make them dream of adventure anymore !
Ys III wasn’t Ys it was Zelda II, Ys V wasn’t Ys it was every Squaresoft game under the sun. And with how short, easy, derivative and disappointing the game ended up being for many people, Ys V became the final nail in the coffin for the series which will lay dormant for the next 8 years skipping a whole generation of consoles with Falcom only releasing new remakes and ports of Ys 1&2 as if the franchise was cursed to only thrive through the legacy of these two titles. Even to this day, Ys V has not received a single modern remake aside from the PS2 version which isn’t even canon and Falcom has yet to integrate Adol’s adventure in Xandria into the modern canon (even if they seem to be more and more interested by the prospect.)
What Falcom needed was a renaissance, a new vision, something that will bring the company back into the game ! And all of this will eventually happen at the turn of the millennium ! Next time, we’ll be talking about Ys VI the game which redefined and saved Ys !
The 90’s was perhaps Falcom’s roughest era. Not necessarily because the company wasn’t releasing good games, in fact they were still productive, but less so than they used to back in the 80’s. But as the years and years went on more and more of Falcom’s old staff started leaving the company to move to greener pastures and eventually Yoshio Kiya, creator of the Dragon Slayer series and last remaining member of Falcom founding staff left the company after releasing his last title : “The Legend of Xanadu'' yet another subseries of his ever expanding Dragon Slayer saga and a spin-off of the Xanadu subseries (yes, I know following the release of this franchise is highly complicated when looking at it retrospectively) over creative differences with Masayuki Kato the then CEO of Falcom.
Falcom wasn’t quite in its flop era yet but they were definitely heading towards it, all the problems the company accumulated both creatively and financially were starting to catch up to them. Falcom decided to focus entirely on working on their existing IP’s instead of creating new ones with the dungeon crawling series Brandish receiving 2 new sequels, Legend of Xanadu receiving one sequel without Masayuki Kato at its head and they even started a brand new arc for the Legend of Heroes franchise with the release of “Legend of Heroes 3 : Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch” the first episode of the Gagharv trilogy which started Falcom’s now titular brand of highly detailed continuous storytelling with games focusing on different parts of a singular world (and if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because that’s eventually what’s going lead up to Trails later down the line).
In the midst of all this chaos, the company shifted between continuing developing games for the PC-98 and the PC-Engine but were also shifting to more popular home console, even getting a partnership with Sega which never quite took off as only the Sega CD version of Popful Mail ever came out of that partnership, heck we were even supposed to get a Sega made version of Ys IV for the same platform but it never happened. After developing yet another port of Popful Mail for the Super Famicom however, Falcom was starting to be a bit more confident with developing games on console and it was then decided that the next, this time Falcom-made, title of the Ys franchise would be launching exclusively for the Super Famicom and thus : Ys V was born and was pretty much the final nail in Falcom’s metaphorical coffin.
Now, remember what I said about Ys III ? The reason for Ys III’s failure as a game was because Falcom was trying to compete with Zelda II and thus released a shallow imitation of the formula built on the corpse of a completely unrelated project turned into an Ys title at the last possible minute. But now we’re in the year 1995, the Playstation just came out in Japan a whole year ago and was heading towards international shores and while the Super Nintendo was still going strong, it wasn’t going as strong as it used to be. Lots of developers were still releasing games for the platforms for the few poor people who couldn’t afford Sony’s new wonder machine (and the PS1 really only took off by 1996 if you ask me) but now if you wanted to find success on the platform you had to stand out from the crowd and even then, you were competing with a fierce competition.
The SNES was the golden land of JRPG’s, a highly competitive market where only the strong could survive and the rest would be buried into the depth of history. How will Falcom fare in this jungle after seeing fluctuating success on the PC-Market ?
Well… not great…
One thing we can observe when looking at the history of Falcom even in the modern age is that it’s a company who pushes all the buttons on high alarm when they’re faced with a shift in the industry or when their own failures comes creeping in on their finances and what better way to secure the bag than to imitate the competition once again ? To abandon all sense of identity to pursue the road of stagnation ? That’s pretty much what Ys V is at its core.
When looking at Ys V, you might get confused at what you’re seeing. None of it feels like an Ys game or heck even a classic Falcom title ! The colors are darker, the tone of the game is edgier and more melodramatic and aside from Adol’s titular red hair who actually has some sort of prevalence within the story of the game this time around, you’d never guess that you were playing a game from the Ys series.
Ys V isn’t a particularly bad game, far from it but quickly you realize how derivative it feels not only from its own franchise (with a setting eerily similar to Ys 1&2 to the point of self plagiarizing) but also from other works of the industry at the time as the game could easily be mistaken for a Squaresoft release with a lot of similar effects, graphical assets, menus and presentation. From the ways the in-game menus looks like those of Final Fantasy, to those pixelated transition effect, to the color palette looking like FFVI or Chrono Trigger (except less vibrant) to even some mechanical similarities like a worse version of Secret of Mana rotating menu system and even a gauge that you need to wait to fill up to launch magic attack.
Heck at times it feels like a Quintet game, the studio which staff created the first 3 Ys games, even the music bares a lot of similarities to Quintet’s output or even Nobuo Uematsu’s and sound nothing like something that would come out of the Falcom Sound JDK team but yet it does !
One could be critical of games like Ys III or Mask of the Sun for being genuinely bad games but one thing but even with Ys III trying to imitate Zelda II, the whole package was unmistakably Falcom if only for their soundtrack alone but also the ways menus were arranged and the way the stories were told. But do all of these similarities make Ys V a bad game ?
Not exactly in my opinion but the answer is more complicated than a simple Yes or No. Ys V starts off with Adol going on yet another adventure this time in the land of Xandria where it’s been told that an ancient city which had disappeared 500 ago has started to reappear in the middle of the Kefin desert, a couple of years before the event of the game a team of researcher were investigating the area and found a little girl who lost her memories. Stein, one of the researchers, decided to adopt the little girl and name her Nienna but as time passed and Nienna grew, Stein became obsessed with the lost city of Kefin and one day disappeared into the night never to be seen again. As Adol arrives in Xandria, he’s contracted by a rich merchant by the name of Dorman to collect crystals for him, these crystals seemingly hold the secrets to unlocking the doors of the ancient city from which it has been told that they discovered alchemy.
The premise is pretty much a retelling of Ys 1 and 2 but with somewhat of a darker tone, the way the story is told is a bit weird however. The game is pretty much split into two parts, the quest for the crystals and everything happening in Kefin and let’s just say that the main quest isn’t really the most thrilling thing in the universe, gathering a bunch of crystals in a JRPG is already such a derivative storytelling device that it’s kind of impressive Falcom was never called out for it back in the day but also because pretty much nothing really happens during that time aside from the Crystal Quest.
The story does sets up some interesting mysteries tho, we learn that Darman’s intention aren’t quite noble, we get to meet Nienna one of the more forgettable heroine of the franchise, we start confronting with a family of bandits and most of all a village fears us as a prophecy foretold than a man with fiery haircut will bring despair upon the land which is then followed by Adol meeting the ghost of some Goth Guy who lost his fiancé years ago and is now accompanying Adol through the adventure in a subplot that seems so disconnected from the rest that it’s a bit awkwardly put together and by the end involves FUCKING TIME TRAVEL.
The story of Ys V, though derivative of what the series already did in the past, isn’t devoid of interesting or intriguing ideas but it’s the way everything is presented and paced together that makes it superbly unimpressive. But honestly, the later half of the story does come up together surprisingly well, with a lot of fascinating lore, lots of neat twists and great plot ideas. I honestly think that last third is amongst the best Falcom as ever put for the series in terms of finale, the atmosphere is really on-point and I kinda dig the darker atmosphere of the game when we reach that point and everything surrounding alchemy and how it works just begs to be expanded upon in future titles or even a remake.
What clearly doesn’t help the pacing of the game however is the new gameplay system which is kind of sluggish. The game retained the top-down perspective of the older titles but finally decided to forego bump combat in favor of a more traditional style of action combat and exploration. However, while I do welcome the change as the series needs to evolve with its time, I do think the execution of it leaves a lot to be desired. Adol sword swings are slow and enemies take a lot of hits before dying no matter the level which isn’t helped by the fact that attacking in this game locks you into place even when attacking and jumping at the same time. Because yes ! You now have a jump button and you know what that means ? Platforming ! And is the platforming good in this game ? Take a wild guess ! Thankfully the platforming heavy moments are few and far between but when they do come up, they’re as awkward to manoeuver as you may think (which isn’t helped by the way the game handles elevation and gravity…).
Eventually though, you do get a feel for how slow and mechanical the combat is so it’s not bad or unplayable, it’s just… terribly boring ? The game isn’t all that challenging either and rarely if ever will you find yourself in front of the game over screen. And I know what you’re going to say : “But Cani isn’t being accessible the whole point of Ys ?”, but you need to understand that there’s a vast difference to what was considered an accessible game back and what an accessible game was in 1995.
Back then being accessible was about cutting down the middle-man of complex mechanics and needless mechanical fluff so that anyone can jump on a game, it didn’t mean that the game needed to be braindead easy, a bit of challenge never really killed anyone after all but in 1995, being easy just resulted in a less interesting title and while you can still understand the appeal of a mechanically simple game like the original two Ys title, you can’t really be all that accepting of such a lack of challenge in a more complex game like Ys V (which is also the first game to allow you to use more than 1 healing items per battle but requires a lot of cumbersome menuing which halts the pacing of the game even more).
Speaking of needlessly complicated and cumbersome game mechanics, I have not talked about one of the game's central mechanics that’s heavily pushed by the game : the magic system ! This time around, Adol can wield the power of the elements to cast a variety of devastating and impressive looking spells ranging from simple projectile to powerful screen nukes. In order to obtain these spells, you must first find elements scattered across the world, sometimes in really well hidden places and fuse them in specific combinations to create flux stones, you can equip up to 3 flux stones giving you access to three spells you can switch back and forth at leisure. There are over 18 possible combinations of elements and thus 18 different spells ! That sounds like an ambitious, interesting and fun mechanic but then you realize that for how complex the system is, it’s completely and utterly pointless to use any of it.
To cast a spell, you need to spend both MP and something call Charge Point, you can only send a spell if you have enough MP but also only when your charge point are at max percentage, to recharge your charge point, you need to wait in place and rapidly tap the R button to fill it up so you can get a go at shooting another spell ! This limitation already slows down the momentum of the game to a crawl but their utility is also limited by how slow the animation for these spells can be, everytime you cast them Adol needs to do some little dance before shooting a projectile or launching a screen nuke which locks him into place and at the mercy of any potential threats ! On top of that, most bosses are unaffected by magic for Story reasons when those big magic attacks were pretty much made to be used on them. The only spell in the game which is of any use is the basic fireball spell you get in the tutorial area which fires quickly, doesn’t require much MP, doesn’t require a long charge period and shoots instantly out of your sword like in the older titles. Now.. after hearing all of this…
WHY WOULD ANYONE ENGAGE WITH THIS MECHANIC OUTSIDE OF THE 2 TIMES THE GAME FORCES YOU TO USE IT ?
The game is already slow as it is while simply swinging your sword at enemies so asking the player to do something that seems so cumbersome and unintuitive is kind of beyond me. It’s probably the reason why regular takes so much time to kill the regular way but killing them the regular way is still more effective and doesn’t kill the flow of combat and exploration. I do commend the team for coming up with the idea and it is rather fun to try and find what types of combination work to get what type of spells, I do get the appeal of experimenting with it but it seems like a lot of effort was put into that singular part of the game that could’ve been put elsewhere like making the adventure more interesting, fleshing out the story, make the main combat better or optimize the game a little bit because it also runs like shit with constant slowdown and slow “loading” time when entering new areas or houses.
A quick word on the dungeon design and bosses while we’re at it because that’s also part of the course for this type of game. I found the dungeon design to be serviceable, not amazing but serviceable, they get the job done and they’re not too annoying or confusing to navigate with a few clever puzzles and some nice atmosphere to boot. Shoutouts especially to the last dungeon of the game which is perhaps the best in the series up to that point and carries the last third of the game while making it slightly more interesting to play through. The bosses however are all rather forgettable, the dominant strategy for most of them is to find a safe spot and continuously swing your sword at them, they take really long to kill and aren’t all that exciting but none of them struck me as particularly bullshit.
One thing that’s also strange is the fact that unlike other titles, you can only save at Inn’s which is such a needlessly punitive system especially if you happen to die in the later half and have to do a lot of that stuff again, again another weird design choice to make the game slower.
Now it’s time to talk about the music and here’s where it gets a bit interesting. When I first played Ys V, I must admit, I found the music to be serviceable at best. Nothing really memorable outside of that one track that was literally an SNES rendition of “A boy who got wings” mixed with “Theme of Adol” from previous titles. But upon re-listening to it in isolation for the sake of this review, I realized that I should be giving more credit to this soundtrack than I initially thought.
First of all, while some sonorities are unmistakably SNES sounding, the general instrumentalisation is really good and at times approaches CD Quality audio. You can feel that this game was released late into the console where composers understood the hardware a little better but it definitely holds its own ground against contemporaries of its era in that aspect. The compositions aren’t bad either and while the general tempo is definitely slower than in other titles in the series, I think it fits the game's general vibe and slower gameplay style.
But I also think that much like the rest of the game, it feels really derivative and nothing like you come to expect from the Ys series let alone a Falcom title which even with their calmer tracks has a style unique to the JDK team and the different composers who work in it. There’s this feeling that the team didn’t really wanted to go too crazy with the soundtrack and went for something that would more easily fit the SNES hardware while taking a lot of inspirations from other places, mainly square titles but some tracks here borderline sounds like some stuff you’d find in Quintet games like Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma (which released a year later).
The music really sounds like every single SNES RPG you’ve likely ever played and lacks a bit of that flair or that punch you’d hear from Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura, Koji Kondo, Yasunori Mitsuda or other prominent game composers of that era and as such can come off as less memorable and catchy as the work of these creators. That’s a shame because Ys V soundtrack will eternally stand out as the odd one, the one that’s too basic for the rest of Falcom’s catalog when it really isn’t a bad soundtrack at all or even a mid one, just kind of unremarkable and lacking of that classic Ys flair that’s so characteristic of the series and a soundtrack which doesn’t really stick into your mind after pushing off the power button. Another problem is how often the music switches meaning you rarely ever hear the full track.
And that pretty much sums up Ys V as a videogame, not a terrible or even bad game by any stretch of the imagination but a terribly middling one which doesn’t leave much of an impact and is over before you know it. I’ve complained about the slower pace of the game but really the game is pretty short by itself, it can be completed in about 5h which is less than all the other titles up to that point but these 5h feels kind of endless, sluggish and pretty unrewarding. It’s not really the change of space that’s an issue, after all why not experiment with a slower more atmospheric take on Adol’s adventure but it’s how it’s executed that bothers me.
The game is also way too easy but in a boring kind of way to the point the team had to release an extended release of the game a year later known as “Ys V Expert” which ups the challenge a little bit, make the enemies more reactive, tweak a few things here and there and add an entire optional dungeon. But by that point, in 1996 no less, no one really gave much of a shit about Ys V and it’s not the rise in difficulty that was gonna turn the public opinion on this game around. You’ve likely played other games like Ys V on the same platform, games which are far more polished, creative and unique than Ys V could ever hope to be.
If you really wanted to experience something closer to an evolution of the Ys formula made by the actual creators of Ys, look no further than Quintet Studio and their titular “Heaven and Earth” trilogy especially Terranigma which came the same year as Ys V and even if it stayed relatively obscure is look fondly upon by many people who tried it for being a genuine masterpiece of the Action-RPG genre on the console. With a fun, fast-paced combat system, a superbly well written and well told story with a lot of twists and turns, full of surprises and clear passion put behind it. To me these were the developers worth looking at when you wanted to experience the future of the Ys series.
It seems that Falcom by themselves never quite understood Ys and its appeal when it first released back in 1987, all of their attempts at coming back to it were misguided attempt to fundamentally change what Ys was without trying to evolve the formula to greater height and always taking the series in the wrong direction to fit with current trend. It’s no wonder then that aside from Hudson Soft's phenomenal attempt at reviving the series, people weren’t really confident in Falcom delivering an Ys title that will make them dream of adventure anymore !
Ys III wasn’t Ys it was Zelda II, Ys V wasn’t Ys it was every Squaresoft game under the sun. And with how short, easy, derivative and disappointing the game ended up being for many people, Ys V became the final nail in the coffin for the series which will lay dormant for the next 8 years skipping a whole generation of consoles with Falcom only releasing new remakes and ports of Ys 1&2 as if the franchise was cursed to only thrive through the legacy of these two titles. Even to this day, Ys V has not received a single modern remake aside from the PS2 version which isn’t even canon and Falcom has yet to integrate Adol’s adventure in Xandria into the modern canon (even if they seem to be more and more interested by the prospect.)
What Falcom needed was a renaissance, a new vision, something that will bring the company back into the game ! And all of this will eventually happen at the turn of the millennium ! Next time, we’ll be talking about Ys VI the game which redefined and saved Ys !