Oath In Felghana : Ys perfected ?
If there’s one game so far that we constantly bashed over perhaps unfairly it’s Ys III : Wanderers from Ys ! And look, I’m sorry to all the people who enjoy the original iteration of Adol’s third adventure, after all why would they keep re-releasing the game later down the line if it was that much of a failure ? Well suffice to say that Ys III marked the end of Ys presence in the west for a long while, only returning to western shores with Ys VI in the 2000’s thanks to the help of Konami porting the game on consoles which was only a brief return but something was about to change within Falcom after the release of this game.
See, initially after releasing Ys 1&2 Eternal (the semi-complete remake of Ys 1&2 on which the Chronicles version available on steam is based on) the natural next course of action for the company was to do something similar with Ys III, pretty much taking the base game of Ys III and give it a graphical overhaul as well as some slight gameplay and progression adjustment. But the younger staff at Falcom were tired of releasing ports and remakes and decided to take things into their own hand, this led of course to the creation of 2 new franchises (Zwei and Gurumin), a new episode of the Ys franchise as well as the start of a new legend of Heroes subseries : Trails in the Sky.
All these projects will see moderate but significant enough success in Japan where the PC market wasn’t quite dead yet at the turn of the millennium and later down the line a small console was about to push Falcom even deeply into the top of its niche : The Playstation Portable. It’s simple every early 2000’s releases of Falcom will see ports and re-release on the PSP and thanks to many western publishers being interested in Falcom’s output and some good old word of mouth, Falcom went from a company struggling to revive from its ashes to a company somewhat recognized for their low budget but full of heart title.
But the idea of remaking Ys III was still in the mind of Falcom and thus, they decided that instead of making yet another overhauled port of Ys III since it was kind of the series blacksheep, they decided instead on completely remaking Ys III from the ground up. And thus, Ys : The Oath in Felghana was born !
There’s a belief I have when it comes to game remakes that I think should be widely more considered in this industry. Our society has commonly accepted videogames to be an art form as valid as cinema or literature and yet the consumerist nature of gaming and its tie to the evolution of technology forces us to always seek to upgrade our games to current standard. This leads to either a completely original product based on the original and only borrowing its rough plot outline and iconography, an enhanced version of the same game with different graphics and slight gameplay rebalancing (which would be closer to a remaster than a so called remake) or the more rare occurrence like FF VII Remake to be some sort of a meta-sequel and an extension to the original made first and foremost for people already familiar with the original (but still sell itself as something a newcomer can jump into no problem which is schizophrenia as fuck).
However, my issue with this lies in the fact that we mostly do that to good games, games that are considered classics of the medium and that’s where I’m really confused because if those games are classics ? Why do we feel like replacing them in the modern discourse with a new shinier version stripped of its context and mechanics ? Is there a point really ?
And this led me to another reflection. If the core idea of remaking something is to upgrade a videogame to be more palatable to modern audiences, why do that with good games ? Of course, the reason is oftentime “Money” but there’s also this deeper sense of hypocrisy in the gaming community that we wish the games we used to love could be as good as we remember them being ? If they made us feel something back then, they could make us feel something now but also we don’t want to be reminded of the rougher reality that games technically and mechanically ages. But if games can be good enough to become classics, why remake them in the first place ? That means they’re technically timeless, technically they’re a piece of history worth going back to and maybe modernizing it will make it lose its meaning rather than add to it ?
As you can probably tell, I’m not a big fan of remakes, but there’s one thing that I’m open to, remakes of games that never got that chance to shine under the spotlight. In our childhood we all had these games which we enjoyed but can’t really be called “all-time classics” and personally I think it’s much more interesting to see a game which had the potential to be great actually being given the chance to prove itself with a second take on the same ideas. I believe Ys III despite my virulent review of it was that kind of game for many people. In an era where the selection of games were pretty limited and accessibility was even worse than it is now, people just used to cherish what little games they could actually get their hands on and if that game happened to be Ys III well… You could be playing better but you could be playing worse really.
But Ys Oath in Felghana doesn’t just remake one of the series most infamous titles, it takes that blight upon the series legacy and literally turns a pile of shit into diamond because Oath in Felghana might be the best Ys game we’ve covered so far and I mean it !
Oath in Felghana is a remake of Ys III but first and foremost it’s the second game in the Ark Engine trilogy. Following the advance and game design prowess of its predecessors, Oath in Felghana sets out to literally perfect the formula left by its forefather. As such the gameplay segment of this review will be shorter than usual because most of what Adol can do in Ys VI, he can do here and yes even the Dash Jump which is still possible to do but not required anymore to clear certain gap or explore, it’s now just a speedrun tech like god intended.
However that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t change anything because on top of Ys VI’s mechanics a couple of new things have been added which greatly enhances the flow and overall dynamism of the game. Now the game has a sort of combo meter which doubles as an EXP multiplier, the more combo you make and the higher the multiplier is which can raise the EXP gain up to 2x the normal amount as long as you keep the combo going but that’s not all.
As you mash through enemies some of them will drop stat enhancing bonuses which works similarly to the combo meter whereas if you keep collecting said bonus the multiplier gets bigger and bigger as long as you don’t break out the chain. These bonuses can range from strength, defense and MP regeneration speed and once all of them are maxed out, you truly feel like an unstoppable god tearing and shredding through monsters which all comes back to that old comment I made about the Ys series pretty much being “Zelda for Doom-brained people”. This single addition to the gameplay really changes everything, whereas Ys VI was a slower more methodical game, this game wastes no time and the game feel is immaculate.
Another thing which pushes the players to do well is the boost meter, once full Adol can rush towards his enemies with doubled strength and speed which is very satisfying to activate.
Magic also makes a return, no more sword style changes this time around unfortunately but a selection of magic rings adding new moves to Adol arsenal which replaces the terrible magic ring system of the original game while making shoutouts to them. A grand total of 3 Magic Rings can be found throughout the game, one is a fire ring which allows you to throw fireballs in rapid succession or charge it for a bigger blast, the other is a wind ring giving Adol a circular attack which can be used both on the ground and in the air to cover long distances and last longer and is wider as you charge it (easily one of the best addition to Adol’s toolkit) and last but not least a thunder ring which allows you to punch through wall with a big fist which gives you a couple seconds of invincibility frames while doing so.
And those invincibility frames are gonna come useful because the game seriously doesn’t fuck around, this might actually be one of the more challenging Ys games in terms of difficulty even on Normal Mode, one of the reasons to this difficulty switch is the fact that you can’t stack up on healing items anymore, in fact you can’t use healing items period. The only way to heal is to get healing herbs dropping from enemies which automatically heals a set amount or rest at one of the game's various save points. On top of that most of the enemies especially in the later stage of the games are much more aggressive and can easily overwhelm you if you’re not careful combine that with the level design having a bit more hazard than Ys VI did and you get a game which doesn’t fuck around.
Of course this means that this time around you actually have to master bosses pattern and defeat them without a get out of jail free card that can heal you mid-battles and when it comes to bosses I will say that Oath in Felghana has quite a lot of hit and miss in that department. Of course, all of them are better than their original counterparts and I will even say that most of them are actually better than the ones in Ys VI but one thing that kinda bothers me about some of them is just the sheer length of their pattern. Most bosses in Oath have a very small window in which you can actually attack them, the first boss in the game in fact is a prime example of this and is a bit too steep of a difficulty curve if you ask me for being so soon in the game. Some bosses like the Bird, the Fire Dragon and the Ice Dragon just plain don’t fucking work with how the colisions are handled in that game.
The bird and his goddamn flipping panel still gives me nightmare to this day because of how annoying it is to fight, the Fire Dragon just happens to be really tanky for no discernable reasons which makes the fight drag for longer than it should be and the Ice Dragon isn’t difficult per say but you can feel that this boss was designed so you can make heavy use of the thunder ring invincibility frames which isn’t all that natural of a solution and his patters are kind of all over the damn place.
But other than these few bad apples, I found the good boss to be especially good, shoutouts to your second encounter with Chester which might actually be my favorite boss fight in the entire series. Ys isn’t really known for having boss fights against human opponents but the Ark Engine had more of them and Chester II is an excellent example of an epic showdown between two swordsmen, his patterns are fast but fair and overpowering him is very satisfying. I wish more bosses in the series were designed like the Chester fight cause it’s pretty damn good in my opinion.
I also really liked the other non-human bosses aside from the ones I’ve mentioned, on average I’d say the boss design can range from either annoying or really good but all of them are especially challenging for the reasons I’ve mentioned earlier.
As far as the gameplay goes, Oath in Felghana managed to fully understand what it means to be an Ys title in the modern age, the gameplay is a constantly flowing, never-stopping pumping action game which feels fresh, modern and exciting to play the whole way through. Every element of the gameplay just works and even if some people might still complain about minor things such as platforming not being that great once again, I can’t deny that the gameplay here is simply superb and easily the best the series has to offer.
But it wouldn’t be that amazing of a title if it didn’t also have something Ys has been known for since its first entry aka a solid story to motivate the player to uncover the mysteries of the lands. Much like the original game, the story here is rather straightforward and at first not really that interesting. The game follows the rough outline set by the original to a T, Dogi and Adol arrives in Felghana and meets up with Elena the local Adol James Bond Girl of the week, some tyrannical king is messing around trying to claim a bunch of artifact which could potentially awaken an ancient demon and Adol is on a wild goose chase to stop them while encountering his right-hand man Chester along the way.
It was a simple and basic story in 1989 and it’s still relatively as basic and simple in 2005 when the game came out, however I will say that the actual script of the game this time around isn’t nearly as hilariously bad as it was in the original. This is due in part to a much better localization work (courtesy of XSeed) but also a significantly enhanced and upgraded script to give the entire story a bit more flavor. One area in which we can see this improvement is with the main hub town of the game Redmont. Redmont in the original was a place you had to go back to from time to time to progress the story but as a place it wasn’t particularly interesting, NPC’s were forgettable and most of its iconic nature was due to its rather catchy music but here, the town got expanded significantly and is much more alive than in the original.
The game was released a solid year after the release of Trails in the Sky, the first game in the Trails series and it shows ! It’s in this game that the two series started to mutually influence each other and I will say that in the case of Oath in Felghana it’s definitely for the better here. What Felghana took from the Trails franchise is its intricate sense of detail within its script, each NPCs have their own name, their own life, their own routine and their dialogue changes for every advancement in the plot encouraging the player to check-in on them from time to time to experience micro-level story arcs or participate in side-quest.
However because the setting of the game is much smaller in scale, I think it works especially better here than in the Trails franchise, sure Trails has a more ambitious setting but if there’s one thing that I learned from playing those game is that the “Falcom Formula” tends to work better in the context of a small hub you come back to rather than an entire country which inhabitants kinda come and go and most thing they say enters one ear and come out the other. Another thing which reinforces this sentiment is the fact that each character has their own character portraits and even their own bit of voice acting which definitely helps imprinting Redmont as one of the more memorable Falcom towns in their catalog.
One thing I’m happy the game hasn’t taken from Trails (yet) is the way it handled side-quest, I haven’t really gone too deeply about side-content in this review but Ys Oath in Felghana kinda retains a very 90’s approach to going about side-content. From time to time as you check out on NPC or find new trinkets in dungeon, you can find side-quest none of which are particularly memorable (aside from one about an old lady losing her son and which was already a quest in the original game but much more developed here) but they add some cool content and some nice incentive to go explore and interact with the world as much as possible. While it’s true that it results it some content being missable, I never really truly mind that as it just feels more natural than putting those on a quest board which make side-content feels like chores instead of something you want to properly engage with and feel like a nice surprise when you find out about them.
I did mention that the game has voice acting which I will comment on, the game has both Japanese and English dubs, I went with both and I must admit that as much as the Japanese dub is excellent, I do like the somewhat goofier tone of the English voice acting which reminds me of how even goofier the original script was but one thing I think definitely sells it for me is the British Narrator !
See since Adol doesn’t talk, all of his interactions are written in green-text describing what he’s doing or saying but some genius at Xseed thought that it was worth adding voice acting over and it’s done through some Stanley Parable-esque narrator sarcastically reading the lines and I just find that fucking hilarious. The idea that everywhere Adol goes there’s an out-of-bound British dude hiding in the bushes narrating his entire life is just so perfect and so in-line with the idea we’re experiencing Adol story through his travel diaries that I wonder why it didn’t immediately became a mainstay of the franchise after this point.
As for the actual story however, I think it’s just simply told better, with more characters and more details to flesh out the setting and several other subtle things to tie it better to the rest of the franchise which started with Ys VI but continues here. Ys III was never meant to be an Ys game originally and so its story couldn’t really connect to the wider lore of the franchise and for the longest time it remained pretty separated from the rest as a standalone product. Here the game puts much more of an emphasis on its central prophecy and lore while putting Adol and Chester in the forefront of the story which is handled way better this time around. Even Dogi’s relationship with Elena and Chester is fleshed out more and it definitely feels like there’s an actual level of care and importance here.
Chester isn’t as goofy or as one note of an antagonist as he was in the original, he’s a goal oriented, cold as fuck motherfucker who’s ready to do anything to fulfill the prophecy in order to avenge his sister and his village. And it’s done with much more subtlety and finesse this time around, with climactic confrontation in the form of 2 boss fights which weren’t present in the original but also a lot of subtle foreshadowing about his true intentions as well as his doubts in carrying said plan. Even Elena is much better written this time around, she’s a sassy tomboy who cares deeply about her brother and Dogi’s well-being and is ready to pack a punch when deemed necessary.
Elena from Oath is one of the most underrated heroine in the franchise in my opinion and my only real regret is that all of these cool fanarts of her carrying Chester’s sword and armor isn’t an actual thing in the plot but some weird inside joke of the developers who likes to dress her up in many different outfits from across the series as a reward for completing boss rush mode in set difficulties (canonical cosplayer girl yippee !).
Even the progression of the story is slightly touched upon with some things arriving out of order from the original which lead me to talk about the overall structure and level design of the game which I think is one of the game's biggest strengths as well as its weakness. While the game is completely remade in 3D with that classic isometric view it is nonetheless mostly based on a 2D Action game which were separated in levels rather than a big world to explore. And even thought the game does a lot of effort to make the world feels less segmented (with the addition of a central overworld allowing you to listen to : “The Boys who had Wings” for more than 10 seconds), it nonetheless feels like a succession of random set pieces than a natural world which you can explore freely with tons of secrets to find.
Unlike Ys VI which took place on an Island and therefore could allow itself to be a bit more exploratory, here the exploration is kept to a minimum in favor of focusing on environments which feels more like levels than proper dungeon. This isn’t to say that it’s bad though, the game has definitely more of an arcadey feel than its predecessors already with the additions of all these combo meters to fill up and this structure definitely doesn’t feel at odds with the rest of the game. What does bother just a tad bit with the level design is that sometimes the game has troubles between being a 3D action game and wanting to pay homage to the original level design. While some areas take full advantage of the game being 3D, some areas definitely don’t have as much depth and are closer to 2.5 D than fully 3D environment, I like the attention to detail and you can point out some areas to how they were made in the original but it does create a bit of issues when it comes to the freedom of player movement.
The Ice Cave in particular is probably the worst area of the game, with lots of slipping surfaces, enemies that take way too much space and are way too aggressive which doesn’t mesh well with the 2.5d environments and a lot of pits you can fall into which brings you to a lower level and reminding you of the worse of Ys VI level design. But when the game hits, oh boy it does hit because now I need to talk about Valestein Castle !!!!
Valestein Castle was already the most iconic location of the original, featuring multiple paths, a spike in difficulty, multiple traps and hazards and literally the best fucking music in the entire goddamn franchise. But here everything about it screams pure fucking ludokino ! It’s easily to this day the best dungeon ever created by Falcom. When people tell me that Falcom can’t do good level design or even good dungeon design after witnessing their more modern output, I always point at this fucking dungeon in particular because it shows that back in the day Falcom was actually stacked with semi-competent level design which were able to put their whole pussy into making great and amazing dungeons to explore.
Valestein Castle has everything you could ask for, challenging combat encounters, a vast and open-ended structure, multiple subsections within it, a somewhat metroidvania style structure, memorable locales and set pieces with various traps, platforming challenges and lots of story events to keep you on your toe and of course that banging fucking soundtrack.
The Sight of Adol, this badass adventurer rushing to assault the castle of the local tyrannical king, jumping and slashing his way through countless corridors filled with traps and deadly enemies while rescuing the villagers you came to know and grew an attachment to and stopping Chester’s revenge plot from claiming more lives than necessary ending with a climatic climb on top of a clocktower, multiple boss encounters one of the best fight in the game with Chester and even the rare good instances of a good twist villain in Falcom’s history is truly awe inspiring and truly hype.
Valestein Castle is so massive and iconic that it feels like it could’ve easily been the climax of the game if it wasn’t for the aforementioned last minute twist which exist to tie the remake to the plotline of the original in some pretty clever way in my opinion at least, and while the final dungeon isn’t bad per say, it definitely pales in comparison to Valestein Castle in terms of how iconic the entire thing is and much like the original, the game ends on a somewhat less bombastic note but the final boss is actually pretty fun if I’m being honest so It’s aight.
I’ve praised the music of Valestein Castle, but the rest of the OST is also rather fantastic, one of the rare saving grace of the original was its soundtrack (to which you can listen to multiple version of it by switching it out in the pause menu) and here it’s still one of the best Falcom OST. Originally composed by Mieko Ishikawa which succeeded Yuzo Koshiro after its departure, the new arrangement were handled by Yukihiro Jindo and his team which did a fantastic job breeding new life into these tracks, in fact I’d say this is some of Falcom’s best arrangement work they’ve ever done when it comes to remaking a game. I also like the fact they didn’t play it safe and weren’t afraid to deviate from the original composition, Redmont theme is calmer and more whimsical, Boys had wings now has violins and Valestein Castle feels like the same track was put on steroid but even some of the less notable tracks were given a lot of care and if anything I just like the sheer variety of the composition here.
Oath in Felghana is what I personally consider to be the platonic ideal of the perfect Ys title, it’s a game which is short and to the point while remaining intense through on through. It’s a game which breathes with an air of adventure and freedom, it’s a game of constant motion rarely stopping to smell the roses, an all banger no filler affair which is fun, exciting, and amazing to play or even replay. Oath in Felghana is a game I often replay for fun because it’s simply just too damn fun and not wasting your time in doing so ! It has great level designs, amazing music and the most fun gameplay in the series yet !
The only real thing that stops Oath in Felghana from being a true JRPG classic much like its forefather is the things it unfortunately had to carry out of the original like a pretty barebone and unoriginal story which was modified to be better but only ends up as being serviceable. The setting of Felghana isn’t the most interesting one in the franchise either and I would even dare to say it’s a bit too vanilla for my taste despite the many improvements that were made to the script and overall direction to make it feel more lived in. It’s not a bad story but it’s clear that the gameplay, the level design, the music and just the general experience of playing the game does a lot of the heavy lifting to make it work.
But as it stands, it’s one of my favorite titles in the franchise and I even consider it to be one of its peak. But this isn’t the end of our journey with the Ark Engine as we still have one more game to cover, the 10th anniversary of the Ys franchise was arriving soon and as such it was time to go back in time ! Back to Ys’s Origins !! See you next time for another Falcom banger
If there’s one game so far that we constantly bashed over perhaps unfairly it’s Ys III : Wanderers from Ys ! And look, I’m sorry to all the people who enjoy the original iteration of Adol’s third adventure, after all why would they keep re-releasing the game later down the line if it was that much of a failure ? Well suffice to say that Ys III marked the end of Ys presence in the west for a long while, only returning to western shores with Ys VI in the 2000’s thanks to the help of Konami porting the game on consoles which was only a brief return but something was about to change within Falcom after the release of this game.
See, initially after releasing Ys 1&2 Eternal (the semi-complete remake of Ys 1&2 on which the Chronicles version available on steam is based on) the natural next course of action for the company was to do something similar with Ys III, pretty much taking the base game of Ys III and give it a graphical overhaul as well as some slight gameplay and progression adjustment. But the younger staff at Falcom were tired of releasing ports and remakes and decided to take things into their own hand, this led of course to the creation of 2 new franchises (Zwei and Gurumin), a new episode of the Ys franchise as well as the start of a new legend of Heroes subseries : Trails in the Sky.
All these projects will see moderate but significant enough success in Japan where the PC market wasn’t quite dead yet at the turn of the millennium and later down the line a small console was about to push Falcom even deeply into the top of its niche : The Playstation Portable. It’s simple every early 2000’s releases of Falcom will see ports and re-release on the PSP and thanks to many western publishers being interested in Falcom’s output and some good old word of mouth, Falcom went from a company struggling to revive from its ashes to a company somewhat recognized for their low budget but full of heart title.
But the idea of remaking Ys III was still in the mind of Falcom and thus, they decided that instead of making yet another overhauled port of Ys III since it was kind of the series blacksheep, they decided instead on completely remaking Ys III from the ground up. And thus, Ys : The Oath in Felghana was born !
There’s a belief I have when it comes to game remakes that I think should be widely more considered in this industry. Our society has commonly accepted videogames to be an art form as valid as cinema or literature and yet the consumerist nature of gaming and its tie to the evolution of technology forces us to always seek to upgrade our games to current standard. This leads to either a completely original product based on the original and only borrowing its rough plot outline and iconography, an enhanced version of the same game with different graphics and slight gameplay rebalancing (which would be closer to a remaster than a so called remake) or the more rare occurrence like FF VII Remake to be some sort of a meta-sequel and an extension to the original made first and foremost for people already familiar with the original (but still sell itself as something a newcomer can jump into no problem which is schizophrenia as fuck).
However, my issue with this lies in the fact that we mostly do that to good games, games that are considered classics of the medium and that’s where I’m really confused because if those games are classics ? Why do we feel like replacing them in the modern discourse with a new shinier version stripped of its context and mechanics ? Is there a point really ?
And this led me to another reflection. If the core idea of remaking something is to upgrade a videogame to be more palatable to modern audiences, why do that with good games ? Of course, the reason is oftentime “Money” but there’s also this deeper sense of hypocrisy in the gaming community that we wish the games we used to love could be as good as we remember them being ? If they made us feel something back then, they could make us feel something now but also we don’t want to be reminded of the rougher reality that games technically and mechanically ages. But if games can be good enough to become classics, why remake them in the first place ? That means they’re technically timeless, technically they’re a piece of history worth going back to and maybe modernizing it will make it lose its meaning rather than add to it ?
As you can probably tell, I’m not a big fan of remakes, but there’s one thing that I’m open to, remakes of games that never got that chance to shine under the spotlight. In our childhood we all had these games which we enjoyed but can’t really be called “all-time classics” and personally I think it’s much more interesting to see a game which had the potential to be great actually being given the chance to prove itself with a second take on the same ideas. I believe Ys III despite my virulent review of it was that kind of game for many people. In an era where the selection of games were pretty limited and accessibility was even worse than it is now, people just used to cherish what little games they could actually get their hands on and if that game happened to be Ys III well… You could be playing better but you could be playing worse really.
But Ys Oath in Felghana doesn’t just remake one of the series most infamous titles, it takes that blight upon the series legacy and literally turns a pile of shit into diamond because Oath in Felghana might be the best Ys game we’ve covered so far and I mean it !
Oath in Felghana is a remake of Ys III but first and foremost it’s the second game in the Ark Engine trilogy. Following the advance and game design prowess of its predecessors, Oath in Felghana sets out to literally perfect the formula left by its forefather. As such the gameplay segment of this review will be shorter than usual because most of what Adol can do in Ys VI, he can do here and yes even the Dash Jump which is still possible to do but not required anymore to clear certain gap or explore, it’s now just a speedrun tech like god intended.
However that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t change anything because on top of Ys VI’s mechanics a couple of new things have been added which greatly enhances the flow and overall dynamism of the game. Now the game has a sort of combo meter which doubles as an EXP multiplier, the more combo you make and the higher the multiplier is which can raise the EXP gain up to 2x the normal amount as long as you keep the combo going but that’s not all.
As you mash through enemies some of them will drop stat enhancing bonuses which works similarly to the combo meter whereas if you keep collecting said bonus the multiplier gets bigger and bigger as long as you don’t break out the chain. These bonuses can range from strength, defense and MP regeneration speed and once all of them are maxed out, you truly feel like an unstoppable god tearing and shredding through monsters which all comes back to that old comment I made about the Ys series pretty much being “Zelda for Doom-brained people”. This single addition to the gameplay really changes everything, whereas Ys VI was a slower more methodical game, this game wastes no time and the game feel is immaculate.
Another thing which pushes the players to do well is the boost meter, once full Adol can rush towards his enemies with doubled strength and speed which is very satisfying to activate.
Magic also makes a return, no more sword style changes this time around unfortunately but a selection of magic rings adding new moves to Adol arsenal which replaces the terrible magic ring system of the original game while making shoutouts to them. A grand total of 3 Magic Rings can be found throughout the game, one is a fire ring which allows you to throw fireballs in rapid succession or charge it for a bigger blast, the other is a wind ring giving Adol a circular attack which can be used both on the ground and in the air to cover long distances and last longer and is wider as you charge it (easily one of the best addition to Adol’s toolkit) and last but not least a thunder ring which allows you to punch through wall with a big fist which gives you a couple seconds of invincibility frames while doing so.
And those invincibility frames are gonna come useful because the game seriously doesn’t fuck around, this might actually be one of the more challenging Ys games in terms of difficulty even on Normal Mode, one of the reasons to this difficulty switch is the fact that you can’t stack up on healing items anymore, in fact you can’t use healing items period. The only way to heal is to get healing herbs dropping from enemies which automatically heals a set amount or rest at one of the game's various save points. On top of that most of the enemies especially in the later stage of the games are much more aggressive and can easily overwhelm you if you’re not careful combine that with the level design having a bit more hazard than Ys VI did and you get a game which doesn’t fuck around.
Of course this means that this time around you actually have to master bosses pattern and defeat them without a get out of jail free card that can heal you mid-battles and when it comes to bosses I will say that Oath in Felghana has quite a lot of hit and miss in that department. Of course, all of them are better than their original counterparts and I will even say that most of them are actually better than the ones in Ys VI but one thing that kinda bothers me about some of them is just the sheer length of their pattern. Most bosses in Oath have a very small window in which you can actually attack them, the first boss in the game in fact is a prime example of this and is a bit too steep of a difficulty curve if you ask me for being so soon in the game. Some bosses like the Bird, the Fire Dragon and the Ice Dragon just plain don’t fucking work with how the colisions are handled in that game.
The bird and his goddamn flipping panel still gives me nightmare to this day because of how annoying it is to fight, the Fire Dragon just happens to be really tanky for no discernable reasons which makes the fight drag for longer than it should be and the Ice Dragon isn’t difficult per say but you can feel that this boss was designed so you can make heavy use of the thunder ring invincibility frames which isn’t all that natural of a solution and his patters are kind of all over the damn place.
But other than these few bad apples, I found the good boss to be especially good, shoutouts to your second encounter with Chester which might actually be my favorite boss fight in the entire series. Ys isn’t really known for having boss fights against human opponents but the Ark Engine had more of them and Chester II is an excellent example of an epic showdown between two swordsmen, his patterns are fast but fair and overpowering him is very satisfying. I wish more bosses in the series were designed like the Chester fight cause it’s pretty damn good in my opinion.
I also really liked the other non-human bosses aside from the ones I’ve mentioned, on average I’d say the boss design can range from either annoying or really good but all of them are especially challenging for the reasons I’ve mentioned earlier.
As far as the gameplay goes, Oath in Felghana managed to fully understand what it means to be an Ys title in the modern age, the gameplay is a constantly flowing, never-stopping pumping action game which feels fresh, modern and exciting to play the whole way through. Every element of the gameplay just works and even if some people might still complain about minor things such as platforming not being that great once again, I can’t deny that the gameplay here is simply superb and easily the best the series has to offer.
But it wouldn’t be that amazing of a title if it didn’t also have something Ys has been known for since its first entry aka a solid story to motivate the player to uncover the mysteries of the lands. Much like the original game, the story here is rather straightforward and at first not really that interesting. The game follows the rough outline set by the original to a T, Dogi and Adol arrives in Felghana and meets up with Elena the local Adol James Bond Girl of the week, some tyrannical king is messing around trying to claim a bunch of artifact which could potentially awaken an ancient demon and Adol is on a wild goose chase to stop them while encountering his right-hand man Chester along the way.
It was a simple and basic story in 1989 and it’s still relatively as basic and simple in 2005 when the game came out, however I will say that the actual script of the game this time around isn’t nearly as hilariously bad as it was in the original. This is due in part to a much better localization work (courtesy of XSeed) but also a significantly enhanced and upgraded script to give the entire story a bit more flavor. One area in which we can see this improvement is with the main hub town of the game Redmont. Redmont in the original was a place you had to go back to from time to time to progress the story but as a place it wasn’t particularly interesting, NPC’s were forgettable and most of its iconic nature was due to its rather catchy music but here, the town got expanded significantly and is much more alive than in the original.
The game was released a solid year after the release of Trails in the Sky, the first game in the Trails series and it shows ! It’s in this game that the two series started to mutually influence each other and I will say that in the case of Oath in Felghana it’s definitely for the better here. What Felghana took from the Trails franchise is its intricate sense of detail within its script, each NPCs have their own name, their own life, their own routine and their dialogue changes for every advancement in the plot encouraging the player to check-in on them from time to time to experience micro-level story arcs or participate in side-quest.
However because the setting of the game is much smaller in scale, I think it works especially better here than in the Trails franchise, sure Trails has a more ambitious setting but if there’s one thing that I learned from playing those game is that the “Falcom Formula” tends to work better in the context of a small hub you come back to rather than an entire country which inhabitants kinda come and go and most thing they say enters one ear and come out the other. Another thing which reinforces this sentiment is the fact that each character has their own character portraits and even their own bit of voice acting which definitely helps imprinting Redmont as one of the more memorable Falcom towns in their catalog.
One thing I’m happy the game hasn’t taken from Trails (yet) is the way it handled side-quest, I haven’t really gone too deeply about side-content in this review but Ys Oath in Felghana kinda retains a very 90’s approach to going about side-content. From time to time as you check out on NPC or find new trinkets in dungeon, you can find side-quest none of which are particularly memorable (aside from one about an old lady losing her son and which was already a quest in the original game but much more developed here) but they add some cool content and some nice incentive to go explore and interact with the world as much as possible. While it’s true that it results it some content being missable, I never really truly mind that as it just feels more natural than putting those on a quest board which make side-content feels like chores instead of something you want to properly engage with and feel like a nice surprise when you find out about them.
I did mention that the game has voice acting which I will comment on, the game has both Japanese and English dubs, I went with both and I must admit that as much as the Japanese dub is excellent, I do like the somewhat goofier tone of the English voice acting which reminds me of how even goofier the original script was but one thing I think definitely sells it for me is the British Narrator !
See since Adol doesn’t talk, all of his interactions are written in green-text describing what he’s doing or saying but some genius at Xseed thought that it was worth adding voice acting over and it’s done through some Stanley Parable-esque narrator sarcastically reading the lines and I just find that fucking hilarious. The idea that everywhere Adol goes there’s an out-of-bound British dude hiding in the bushes narrating his entire life is just so perfect and so in-line with the idea we’re experiencing Adol story through his travel diaries that I wonder why it didn’t immediately became a mainstay of the franchise after this point.
As for the actual story however, I think it’s just simply told better, with more characters and more details to flesh out the setting and several other subtle things to tie it better to the rest of the franchise which started with Ys VI but continues here. Ys III was never meant to be an Ys game originally and so its story couldn’t really connect to the wider lore of the franchise and for the longest time it remained pretty separated from the rest as a standalone product. Here the game puts much more of an emphasis on its central prophecy and lore while putting Adol and Chester in the forefront of the story which is handled way better this time around. Even Dogi’s relationship with Elena and Chester is fleshed out more and it definitely feels like there’s an actual level of care and importance here.
Chester isn’t as goofy or as one note of an antagonist as he was in the original, he’s a goal oriented, cold as fuck motherfucker who’s ready to do anything to fulfill the prophecy in order to avenge his sister and his village. And it’s done with much more subtlety and finesse this time around, with climactic confrontation in the form of 2 boss fights which weren’t present in the original but also a lot of subtle foreshadowing about his true intentions as well as his doubts in carrying said plan. Even Elena is much better written this time around, she’s a sassy tomboy who cares deeply about her brother and Dogi’s well-being and is ready to pack a punch when deemed necessary.
Elena from Oath is one of the most underrated heroine in the franchise in my opinion and my only real regret is that all of these cool fanarts of her carrying Chester’s sword and armor isn’t an actual thing in the plot but some weird inside joke of the developers who likes to dress her up in many different outfits from across the series as a reward for completing boss rush mode in set difficulties (canonical cosplayer girl yippee !).
Even the progression of the story is slightly touched upon with some things arriving out of order from the original which lead me to talk about the overall structure and level design of the game which I think is one of the game's biggest strengths as well as its weakness. While the game is completely remade in 3D with that classic isometric view it is nonetheless mostly based on a 2D Action game which were separated in levels rather than a big world to explore. And even thought the game does a lot of effort to make the world feels less segmented (with the addition of a central overworld allowing you to listen to : “The Boys who had Wings” for more than 10 seconds), it nonetheless feels like a succession of random set pieces than a natural world which you can explore freely with tons of secrets to find.
Unlike Ys VI which took place on an Island and therefore could allow itself to be a bit more exploratory, here the exploration is kept to a minimum in favor of focusing on environments which feels more like levels than proper dungeon. This isn’t to say that it’s bad though, the game has definitely more of an arcadey feel than its predecessors already with the additions of all these combo meters to fill up and this structure definitely doesn’t feel at odds with the rest of the game. What does bother just a tad bit with the level design is that sometimes the game has troubles between being a 3D action game and wanting to pay homage to the original level design. While some areas take full advantage of the game being 3D, some areas definitely don’t have as much depth and are closer to 2.5 D than fully 3D environment, I like the attention to detail and you can point out some areas to how they were made in the original but it does create a bit of issues when it comes to the freedom of player movement.
The Ice Cave in particular is probably the worst area of the game, with lots of slipping surfaces, enemies that take way too much space and are way too aggressive which doesn’t mesh well with the 2.5d environments and a lot of pits you can fall into which brings you to a lower level and reminding you of the worse of Ys VI level design. But when the game hits, oh boy it does hit because now I need to talk about Valestein Castle !!!!
Valestein Castle was already the most iconic location of the original, featuring multiple paths, a spike in difficulty, multiple traps and hazards and literally the best fucking music in the entire goddamn franchise. But here everything about it screams pure fucking ludokino ! It’s easily to this day the best dungeon ever created by Falcom. When people tell me that Falcom can’t do good level design or even good dungeon design after witnessing their more modern output, I always point at this fucking dungeon in particular because it shows that back in the day Falcom was actually stacked with semi-competent level design which were able to put their whole pussy into making great and amazing dungeons to explore.
Valestein Castle has everything you could ask for, challenging combat encounters, a vast and open-ended structure, multiple subsections within it, a somewhat metroidvania style structure, memorable locales and set pieces with various traps, platforming challenges and lots of story events to keep you on your toe and of course that banging fucking soundtrack.
The Sight of Adol, this badass adventurer rushing to assault the castle of the local tyrannical king, jumping and slashing his way through countless corridors filled with traps and deadly enemies while rescuing the villagers you came to know and grew an attachment to and stopping Chester’s revenge plot from claiming more lives than necessary ending with a climatic climb on top of a clocktower, multiple boss encounters one of the best fight in the game with Chester and even the rare good instances of a good twist villain in Falcom’s history is truly awe inspiring and truly hype.
Valestein Castle is so massive and iconic that it feels like it could’ve easily been the climax of the game if it wasn’t for the aforementioned last minute twist which exist to tie the remake to the plotline of the original in some pretty clever way in my opinion at least, and while the final dungeon isn’t bad per say, it definitely pales in comparison to Valestein Castle in terms of how iconic the entire thing is and much like the original, the game ends on a somewhat less bombastic note but the final boss is actually pretty fun if I’m being honest so It’s aight.
I’ve praised the music of Valestein Castle, but the rest of the OST is also rather fantastic, one of the rare saving grace of the original was its soundtrack (to which you can listen to multiple version of it by switching it out in the pause menu) and here it’s still one of the best Falcom OST. Originally composed by Mieko Ishikawa which succeeded Yuzo Koshiro after its departure, the new arrangement were handled by Yukihiro Jindo and his team which did a fantastic job breeding new life into these tracks, in fact I’d say this is some of Falcom’s best arrangement work they’ve ever done when it comes to remaking a game. I also like the fact they didn’t play it safe and weren’t afraid to deviate from the original composition, Redmont theme is calmer and more whimsical, Boys had wings now has violins and Valestein Castle feels like the same track was put on steroid but even some of the less notable tracks were given a lot of care and if anything I just like the sheer variety of the composition here.
Oath in Felghana is what I personally consider to be the platonic ideal of the perfect Ys title, it’s a game which is short and to the point while remaining intense through on through. It’s a game which breathes with an air of adventure and freedom, it’s a game of constant motion rarely stopping to smell the roses, an all banger no filler affair which is fun, exciting, and amazing to play or even replay. Oath in Felghana is a game I often replay for fun because it’s simply just too damn fun and not wasting your time in doing so ! It has great level designs, amazing music and the most fun gameplay in the series yet !
The only real thing that stops Oath in Felghana from being a true JRPG classic much like its forefather is the things it unfortunately had to carry out of the original like a pretty barebone and unoriginal story which was modified to be better but only ends up as being serviceable. The setting of Felghana isn’t the most interesting one in the franchise either and I would even dare to say it’s a bit too vanilla for my taste despite the many improvements that were made to the script and overall direction to make it feel more lived in. It’s not a bad story but it’s clear that the gameplay, the level design, the music and just the general experience of playing the game does a lot of the heavy lifting to make it work.
But as it stands, it’s one of my favorite titles in the franchise and I even consider it to be one of its peak. But this isn’t the end of our journey with the Ark Engine as we still have one more game to cover, the 10th anniversary of the Ys franchise was arriving soon and as such it was time to go back in time ! Back to Ys’s Origins !! See you next time for another Falcom banger