This is a game I’d been told was worth checking out way back when I first got my PC Engine Mini, and it’s a game I’ve been meaning to check out for just as long. Back when I first got the Mini and was playing through a ton of stuff on it, I very briefly booted this up, but decided I just wasn’t in the mood for something like this at the moment. I actually did that once again a couple weeks back after I hooked the PCE Mini back up to play through Ys I & II XD. However, while I still had the PCE Mini all hooked up, I resolved to finally give a genuine attempt to get through this clunky old RPG, and this Golden Week weekend I finally did it~. It took me around 30 to 40 hours (neither the game nor the Mini keep any kind of record of play time, so that’s my best guess) to beat the Japanese version of the game via emulated hardware only abusing save states a little bit (for reasons that will soon become very clear).

The war between gods and demons has raged since the dawn of time. In the endless eons since their battle began, the gods in their desperation created a weapon powerful enough to fight with the strength of a demon to fight back against those demons: The Necromancer. Eventually, worlds between the heavenly realm and demonic realm formed, with the Makai forming closer to the demons, and the overworld (where humans live) forming closer to the heavens. In that overworld where you dwell, things have slowly been getting more and more dire. Monsters increase in number every day, kings and knights have done nothing but get slain trying to contain it, and the world cries out for a hero to stop the madness. That hero is YOU, fair player, and the story begins as you set out to be the hero the world needs to save it from destruction.

As you probably gathered from me relating the contents of the game’s opening text crawl in the previous paragraph, the story is an extremely typical “save the world” fantasy story for early 1988 when this game came out. The game marketed itself as a horror experience, with commercials warning players against playing it too late at night and such, but that stuff is largely contained in the game’s aesthetics. HudsonSoft and NEC clearly knew that they needed a Dragon Quest for their console coming out in late ’87, and this was the Dragon Quest equivalent they created for their new console (and DQIII actually released a whole month after this, in fact). They’re not trying anything too daring in the narrative, and it works just fine for what it is. While it may’ve been entertainingly novel for them to have tried a horror narrative alongside their scary monsters, the story is more than competent enough to stand comfortably among its contemporaries, even if it’s certainly nothing impressive now.

The gameplay is similarly very Dragon Quest for both better and worse in a lot of ways. It’s a turn-based RPG with an overworld and dungeons, you level up as you kill enemies, etc. I’m not encyclopedic enough on the full breadth of Japanese RPGs by late ’87 to say for certain how actually innovative much of this is, and it’s otherwise so derivative I’ve basically assumed just about nothing truly is. That said, there are a few important things that differentiate it from its contemporaries in ways that I feel are worth mentioning (particularly compared to DQI and II, the games that this begs the most obvious comparisons to).

You have a party of three including your main hero, but you actually get to pick your other two companions from a group of five right at the start. Whom you choose is a very big decision, as you’ll never get to take back that choice, and some party members are sadly much worse than others. I went for Maito the black mage and Romina the female warrior, as the guide I used quite heavily recommended them as two of the best choices. While this is cool, I certainly have trouble calling it an outright benefit, as some characters like Kaosu the white mage are simply downgrades from others, and some like Baron the male warrior are just awful choices, full stop. While it’s certainly different from several other big games at the time, it’s hard to praise it that much because it’s just so clumsily handled.

The game’s balance is also quite interesting, albeit far from atypical of the time. It has very little in the way of dungeons, for starters. Most dungeons are just caves with only a couple floors, and the only reason they’re difficult is due to the strength of the monsters inside as well as how dark they are, so your visibility is very limited. Additionally, as I’m sure will be a surprise to no one, this very DQ-inspired game has a crap ton of grinding in it, and frankly grinding makes up around 70%+ of your playtime by the end of it (provided you’re using a guide to tell you where to go next, because if not, you very well may end up spending a lot more time wandering around trying to wade through hordes of enemies trying to find out where to go next). It’s certainly something that makes the game more difficult to play these days, but it’s also extremely common for the time, so I can’t bash the game too heavily for it, ultimately.

I also can’t be too harsh on the game for that stuff because it does have some pretty nice quality of life features as well. Much like many games of the time, certain characters can only use certain magic and spells (you buy spells Final Fantasy-style instead of learning them with level ups like Dragon Quest). However, unlike a lot of games up until that point, going into a magic or equipment shop actually tells you which things can be used by which party members! It’s a really nice quality of life features that makes the game just that much easier to play, even if the weapon limitations for some characters will still probably be quite annoying regardless x3.

Additionally, just like Dragon Quest, if you die, it’s not a game over. You’re just sent back to town with half your money. The money grind in this game is pretty damn brutal, so that’s still quite the penalty, but at least it’s a reason to keep grinding for levels, which you’ll always need anyhow XD. This is also something of a necessity as well, really, as this is a HuCard game. HuCards can’t fit a button battery for saves inside them, and the CD add-on for the PCE didn’t exist yet, so no saving using that thing’s save battery either. This game, therefore, saves progress the only way it possibly could have: Passwords. Going to an inn gives you a 45(!!!) character password composed of hiragana, katakana, and alphabet characters that you’ll need to write down if you want to restart from that point after you turn off the console. Thankfully, modern conveniences make it so you can just use save states instead, but this is a REALLY big pain in the butt compared to contemporary Famicom games which at least would’ve had save features. It’s hard to get too terribly upset at the game for doing this, as it was literally the only choice the developers had, but it’s still a monstrous obstacle for anyone planning to play this game these days if you’re trying to do it on original hardware.

All that said, I really do have to praise the game’s balance for the time. There were many times I felt like I was just really stuck, and while it was difficult, braving the journey to the next town to grind at instead and buy better equipment was always a worthwhile investment. Bosses are also quite fair and reasonable (what few there are) and having enemies that you can go up against and beat without needing to just pray to the RNG gods is a really nice an unexpected feature for 1988. The biggest part of this, frankly, is due to the handling of one very important mechanic: Instant death magic.

Anyone familiar with the subject will be very keenly aware that RPGs of this era (from Japan or otherwise) LOVE instant death. Dragon Quest II, in particular (which would’ve been the most recent DQ when this came out) has lots of end game enemies AND bosses that will fling instant death spells at you, and your only real solution is to just pray you get lucky enough to survive them. Necromancer, on the other hand, while it DOES have an instant death spell, it has zero enemies OR bosses that know or use it. This was frankly shocking to me, and I was waiting the whole game for some new wretched enemy or late game boss to start hurling instant death magic at me, but the moment never came. More than anything else it does, I think that resisting the temptation to follow contemporary convention and pack itself with RNG-based fun-killing mechanics like this is something that Necromancer deserves a lot of praise and respect for, as it’s something that certainly makes it an appealing alternative to most other 80’s RPGs for me, at least (despite its hell-password system XD).

The aesthetics of Necromancer are certainly nothing impressive compared to later 16-bit offerings, of course, but they’re nonetheless quite nice looking, especially the monsters. Sure, the overworld and such are nothing special, and the few music tracks the game has are all pretty forgettable. That said, they clearly put all their focus on making the monsters, and the game has some pretty stellar and very creepy monster designs. Even right outside the first town your first two enemies are some pretty inoffensive giant moths alongside the much creepier looking vaguely humanoid figures being pulled around by their intestines. The Special Thanks part of the credits has a special cut out to thank H.R. Giger, and it’s frankly not hard to see why XD. While I do stand by my earlier statement that the game marketing itself as a “horror RPG” feels a bit dishonest (especially by modern standards), the horror content it does have is easily one of the coolest and most memorable aspects of its design.

Verdict: Not Recommended. While I spilled a lot more ink here talking about how the game is actually quite good for the time than I did actively complaining about it, this is in no way a game I think anyone should be playing these days. I really do stand by my opinion that, for the time, this was a very competent RPG that (other than its password system) stands very comfortably next to what the Famicom was boasting. That said, as is the case with nearly any 8-bit or 80’s RPG I’ve played, gameplay sensibilities have changed a LOT since back then, and even a well-executed game like this is still an absolutely brutal slog of grinding and roughly signposted puzzles. If you’re a super-duper-ultra fan of the Famicom Dragon Quest games, then you might have a lot of fun with Necromancer, but for anyone who doesn’t like their RPGs as grinding-focused time-wasting machines, Necromancer is a game you should stay far, far away from XD.

This is a game I’d been told was worth checking out way back when I first got my PC Engine Mini, and it’s a game I’ve been meaning to check out for just as long. Back when I first got the Mini and was playing through a ton of stuff on it, I very briefly booted this up, but decided I just wasn’t in the mood for something like this at the moment. I actually did that once again a couple weeks back after I hooked the PCE Mini back up to play through Ys I & II XD. However, while I still had the PCE Mini all hooked up, I resolved to finally give a genuine attempt to get through this clunky old RPG, and this Golden Week weekend I finally did it~. It took me around 30 to 40 hours (neither the game nor the Mini keep any kind of record of play time, so that’s my best guess) to beat the Japanese version of the game via emulated hardware only abusing save states a little bit (for reasons that will soon become very clear).

The war between gods and demons has raged since the dawn of time. In the endless eons since their battle began, the gods in their desperation created a weapon powerful enough to fight with the strength of a demon to fight back against those demons: The Necromancer. Eventually, worlds between the heavenly realm and demonic realm formed, with the Makai forming closer to the demons, and the overworld (where humans live) forming closer to the heavens. In that overworld where you dwell, things have slowly been getting more and more dire. Monsters increase in number every day, kings and knights have done nothing but get slain trying to contain it, and the world cries out for a hero to stop the madness. That hero is YOU, fair player, and the story begins as you set out to be the hero the world needs to save it from destruction.

As you probably gathered from me relating the contents of the game’s opening text crawl in the previous paragraph, the story is an extremely typical “save the world” fantasy story for early 1988 when this game came out. The game marketed itself as a horror experience, with commercials warning players against playing it too late at night and such, but that stuff is largely contained in the game’s aesthetics. HudsonSoft and NEC clearly knew that they needed a Dragon Quest for their console coming out in late ’87, and this was the Dragon Quest equivalent they created for their new console (and DQIII actually released a whole month after this, in fact). They’re not trying anything too daring in the narrative, and it works just fine for what it is. While it may’ve been entertainingly novel for them to have tried a horror narrative alongside their scary monsters, the story is more than competent enough to stand comfortably among its contemporaries, even if it’s certainly nothing impressive now.

The gameplay is similarly very Dragon Quest for both better and worse in a lot of ways. It’s a turn-based RPG with an overworld and dungeons, you level up as you kill enemies, etc. I’m not encyclopedic enough on the full breadth of Japanese RPGs by late ’87 to say for certain how actually innovative much of this is, and it’s otherwise so derivative I’ve basically assumed just about nothing truly is. That said, there are a few important things that differentiate it from its contemporaries in ways that I feel are worth mentioning (particularly compared to DQI and II, the games that this begs the most obvious comparisons to).

You have a party of three including your main hero, but you actually get to pick your other two companions from a group of five right at the start. Whom you choose is a very big decision, as you’ll never get to take back that choice, and some party members are sadly much worse than others. I went for Maito the black mage and Romina the female warrior, as the guide I used quite heavily recommended them as two of the best choices. While this is cool, I certainly have trouble calling it an outright benefit, as some characters like Kaosu the white mage are simply downgrades from others, and some like Baron the male warrior are just awful choices, full stop. While it’s certainly different from several other big games at the time, it’s hard to praise it that much because it’s just so clumsily handled.

The game’s balance is also quite interesting, albeit far from atypical of the time. It has very little in the way of dungeons, for starters. Most dungeons are just caves with only a couple floors, and the only reason they’re difficult is due to the strength of the monsters inside as well as how dark they are, so your visibility is very limited. Additionally, as I’m sure will be a surprise to no one, this very DQ-inspired game has a crap ton of grinding in it, and frankly grinding makes up around 70%+ of your playtime by the end of it (provided you’re using a guide to tell you where to go next, because if not, you very well may end up spending a lot more time wandering around trying to wade through hordes of enemies trying to find out where to go next). It’s certainly something that makes the game more difficult to play these days, but it’s also extremely common for the time, so I can’t bash the game too heavily for it, ultimately.

I also can’t be too harsh on the game for that stuff because it does have some pretty nice quality of life features as well. Much like many games of the time, certain characters can only use certain magic and spells (you buy spells Final Fantasy-style instead of learning them with level ups like Dragon Quest). However, unlike a lot of games up until that point, going into a magic or equipment shop actually tells you which things can be used by which party members! It’s a really nice quality of life features that makes the game just that much easier to play, even if the weapon limitations for some characters will still probably be quite annoying regardless x3.

Additionally, just like Dragon Quest, if you die, it’s not a game over. You’re just sent back to town with half your money. The money grind in this game is pretty damn brutal, so that’s still quite the penalty, but at least it’s a reason to keep grinding for levels, which you’ll always need anyhow XD. This is also something of a necessity as well, really, as this is a HuCard game. HuCards can’t fit a button battery for saves inside them, and the CD add-on for the PCE didn’t exist yet, so no saving using that thing’s save battery either. This game, therefore, saves progress the only way it possibly could have: Passwords. Going to an inn gives you a 45(!!!) character password composed of hiragana, katakana, and alphabet characters that you’ll need to write down if you want to restart from that point after you turn off the console. Thankfully, modern conveniences make it so you can just use save states instead, but this is a REALLY big pain in the butt compared to contemporary Famicom games which at least would’ve had save features. It’s hard to get too terribly upset at the game for doing this, as it was literally the only choice the developers had, but it’s still a monstrous obstacle for anyone planning to play this game these days if you’re trying to do it on original hardware.

All that said, I really do have to praise the game’s balance for the time. There were many times I felt like I was just really stuck, and while it was difficult, braving the journey to the next town to grind at instead and buy better equipment was always a worthwhile investment. Bosses are also quite fair and reasonable (what few there are) and having enemies that you can go up against and beat without needing to just pray to the RNG gods is a really nice an unexpected feature for 1988. The biggest part of this, frankly, is due to the handling of one very important mechanic: Instant death magic.

Anyone familiar with the subject will be very keenly aware that RPGs of this era (from Japan or otherwise) LOVE instant death. Dragon Quest II, in particular (which would’ve been the most recent DQ when this came out) has lots of end game enemies AND bosses that will fling instant death spells at you, and your only real solution is to just pray you get lucky enough to survive them. Necromancer, on the other hand, while it DOES have an instant death spell, it has zero enemies OR bosses that know or use it. This was frankly shocking to me, and I was waiting the whole game for some new wretched enemy or late game boss to start hurling instant death magic at me, but the moment never came. More than anything else it does, I think that resisting the temptation to follow contemporary convention and pack itself with RNG-based fun-killing mechanics like this is something that Necromancer deserves a lot of praise and respect for, as it’s something that certainly makes it an appealing alternative to most other 80’s RPGs for me, at least (despite its hell-password system XD).

The aesthetics of Necromancer are certainly nothing impressive compared to later 16-bit offerings, of course, but they’re nonetheless quite nice looking, especially the monsters. Sure, the overworld and such are nothing special, and the few music tracks the game has are all pretty forgettable. That said, they clearly put all their focus on making the monsters, and the game has some pretty stellar and very creepy monster designs. Even right outside the first town your first two enemies are some pretty inoffensive giant moths alongside the much creepier looking vaguely humanoid figures being pulled around by their intestines. The Special Thanks part of the credits has a special cut out to thank H.R. Giger, and it’s frankly not hard to see why XD. While I do stand by my earlier statement that the game marketing itself as a “horror RPG” feels a bit dishonest (especially by modern standards), the horror content it does have is easily one of the coolest and most memorable aspects of its design.

Verdict: Not Recommended. While I spilled a lot more ink here talking about how the game is actually quite good for the time than I did actively complaining about it, this is in no way a game I think anyone should be playing these days. I really do stand by my opinion that, for the time, this was a very competent RPG that (other than its password system) stands very comfortably next to what the Famicom was boasting. That said, as is the case with nearly any 8-bit or 80’s RPG I’ve played, gameplay sensibilities have changed a LOT since back then, and even a well-executed game like this is still an absolutely brutal slog of grinding and roughly signposted puzzles. If you’re a super-duper-ultra fan of the Famicom Dragon Quest games, then you might have a lot of fun with Necromancer, but for anyone who doesn’t like their RPGs as grinding-focused time-wasting machines, Necromancer is a game you should stay far, far away from XD.

It took me a few days to get through it, but I have finally reached the end of my journey through the 16-bit Ys games. I wouldn’t have originally played this version, honestly, but a partner of mine told me that the original version of Ys V was so easy that it had a reputation for feeling pointless, so I erred on the side of caution and picked the harder of the two to go through instead. Some research afterwards revealed that that may have been just as much of a mistake as it was the correct decision, but we’ll get into that later XD. It took me around 10.5 hours to make it through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or rewinds.

Ys V finds our hero Adol getting off a ship in a new land as usual (though oddly enough without Dogi, who went sailing off with him at the end of the last game). In this mysterious new land, there’s a legend of a lost, legendary city of gold called Kefin. In his usual fashion, he sets out to find it, helping out the local moneybags in a crystal hunt that’ll see him ultimately saving the world! (as if that’s a surprise to anyone). Narratively, this is the best Ys has been up to this point (though that’s hardly a high bar to cross). Ys had managed to be this funny and this functionally well put together as a narrative before, but this is the first time that we’d managed to rise beyond that. Though its pacing is a bit rougher than Ys IV (SFC) and its narrative in many ways a fairly direct retread of Ys I & II, it manages to have actual themes and messaging in its story in a way that none of those games ever managed to.

Granted, it’s hardly the biggest achievement of storytelling on the console. Heck, it’s not even the best written action/adventure game on the SFC. That said, I’d still say it’s one of the better written action/adventure games on the system, and it certainly manages to be better put together than a mess like Terranigma and more interesting than something a bit more typical and uncinematic like Brain Lord. The narrative is hardly a reason to rush out to play the game at once, but it being better put together than a lot of its contemporaries is certainly something worthy of praise in my book.

It's good that the narrative is decent and fun, because the gameplay is decidedly not. In a significant departure from both versions of Ys IV, we’ve once again abandoned bump combat in favor of pressing a button to swing our sword! What’s more, you can even press another button to actively put out your shield, and you’ve even got a jump button! We also have a magic system that revolves around collecting elemental stones and taking them to merchants to combine into alchemy stones (which you can affix to your equipped weapon (permanently) to give it the ability to do various magics). It’s a relatively linear adventure with some quite good signposting, but it’s got a pretty tough balancing act to manage with getting all of those new mechanics to work in harmony, and it’s a balancing act it fails hard.

The most glaring and obvious issue that cannot go without elaborating on is that the hit detection is absolutely dreadful. Swinging your sword at things is a constant gamble on if you’re actually going to harm them at all, as enemys’ sprites very rarely actually indicate where their hit box is in relation to your sword. This goes even more so for bosses, who are naturally the most difficult things you’ll usually be facing (even though you can actually carry around tons of healing items if you want, which does trivialize a fair bit of combat). There’s even a stat that makes enemies move faster (as you are “slower”) as you equip better armor and weapons!. All of this results in combat routinely struggling to be tolerable, let alone fun, and it's miserable. You could theoretically use magic to fight things instead, of course, but Ys V goes out of its way to make that an extremely unappealing alternative with one of the most poorly implemented magic systems I’ve seen in a while.

Unlike other Ys titles with magic systems up to this point, there is no dedicated magic button. Instead, you hold the R button down until a gauge hits 100, and then pressing your sword swinging button launches the magic attack and depletes that gauge a bit, meaning you can’t spam magic (you need to wait for the gauge to hit 100 again before firing another shot). This is already very awkward, but to make matters even more awkward, those elemental stones you combine into spells are almost universally hidden in invisible hiding places around the game. You’ll randomly be hugging a wall and suddenly find one, and it happens all the time, particularly in the late game. As if that didn’t make magic annoying enough to use, there are not only a limited amount of these stones in the game, but you also have no idea what spell you’re even making at the alchemy merchants until you just make it and then test it out. This means that you’re going to be doing a ton of save-loading looking for decent spells if you’re keen to use magic a lot, not that you really have much reason to use magic all that much.

The most farcical thing about magic isn’t just that it seemingly can’t harm bosses at all. That’s bad enough all on its own. What’s most absurd of all is that magic actually has an entirely separate experience tree! You gain one kind of experience for killing things with your sword, and another type for killing with magic. While this is a pretty typical Ys game in that there’s a fair bit of grinding, this makes the game have a truly unforgiveable amount if you want to use magic meaningfully at all. Never mind that you get magic late enough in the game (compared to your sword) that it’s a rough choice to start grinding magic in the first place, or that killing things with magic gives you NO money from kills. That’s just all insult to injury. Ultimately, a lot of this just doesn’t matter, as you basically never really need magic to fight enemies even a little, but it is truly baffling just how poorly put together the magic system is in a game with already miserable combat.

And the bad combat is a real death blow in an action/adventure game of this kind. It doesn’t matter that dungeons are nicely put together (if a bit puzzle-barren and small) or that bosses are varied in their designs. It’s honestly barely worth mentioning that the jumping puzzles aren’t too bad, that different swords almost pointlessly have different kinds of attacking (as there are only like 5 swords in the whole game), or that they removed the earlier games’ save anywhere feature in favor of quick saving anywhere and only being able to perma-save at inns (which is indeed a baffling change that just makes the game worse). Like Trials of Mana that I played earlier this year, there’s barely any point in praising or slagging off other aspects of the design in an action game like this if fighting basically anything always sucks.

The boss design isn’t that well done in the first place, frankly, with a lot of them (particularly later in the game) being really easy to just mulch down with barely any strategy at all. The combat is so bad, of course, that a lot of later “harder” fights being so simple is a small blessing, and even if you’re having a bit of trouble, you can always dip into that huge stockpile of healing items you can carry around.

The strangest part of it all is that this is Ys V – “Expert”. This is purposefully the harder version of the game, and my research actually shows that a decent amount of these are features, not bugs (as it were). The number one surprising thing I learned in looking into differences between the original version and this game is that the poor hit detection (on top of shielded enemies just blocking more) actually was added for the Expert version to make it harder! They certainly accomplished that, I’ve got to say, as enemies that not only hit harder but are harder to hit certainly does make for a harder experience, though I’d struggle to say it makes for a very fun one. The thing is, it’s weird to even describe this game as “harder” in a lot of ways due to the only real changes being worse hit detection and higher enemy stats. Bosses and such still aren’t that hard because you can bring so many healing items with you, especially later in the game. The changes Expert brings to the table largely just make the game more frustrating and grindy than they actually do to make it any more of a fun challenge, and it’s a damn shame.

Tragically (and ironically), it’s not even much of a way out to play the original instead, as site after site on the Japanese internet bemoaned just what a constantly freezing buggy mess the original release of Ys V was and just how far Expert went in fixing those issues (I can confirm I never hit a single freeze during my 10-ish hours with it). Expert may be the “better” version in that it doesn’t crash anymore and has a little bit of extra content, but the overall experience has been made so much worse that either version frankly sounds like a big waste of your time.

Thankfully, the presentation does manage to at least hold its own for what you’d expect for an Ys game. The music is excellent, with Falcom’s music team once again putting out a game packed with good music. Additionally, where Mask of the Sun didn’t really impress for a mid-life SFC game, Ys V really does look like a game released in ’95, as it’s absolutely beautiful. You’ve got a bit of slowdown here and there, and there are some weird graphical hiccups and flashes (though nothing nearly as bad as the flashing in Mask of the Sun) which honestly seemed to be the game trying not to crash, but it all at least runs pretty darn well for how good it looks, and that’s a nice silver lining to everything else, I suppose.

Verdict: Not Recommended. If you can get past how often the original version of Ys V apparently crashes, then perhaps the better hit detection and less grinding in that version makes it a better time. As it is, Expert may be less boringly easy than the first one (if its reputation is to be believed), but it’s worse in so many ways that I cannot in good conscience possibly recommend it to even a big fan of the genre. The combat is something to trudge through the whole way through, and it only gets easier when you’ve finally done enough grinding to be able to easily plow through (or safely ignore) the enemies that give you so much grief. There is no shortage of far better action/adventure games on this console, so you are far better off experiencing the story and aesthetics through a lets play on Youtube than wasting your valuable time banging your head against something as clumsily and poorly put together as this frustrating mess of a late-life SFC game.

The second half of the story of the Dark Hunter game that my partner and I played last week. We played the first half, and it ends quite unceremoniously, so we obviously had to carry on to finish the second half as well. Just as with the first one, she played on emulated hardware and I watched her, but the actual “gameplay” is so simple that I felt it more than adequate to call this one “beaten” for myself as well once we hit credits, and it took us a little over 2 hours to do it (as this game is a fair bit shorter than the first half for reasons we’ll get into later).

The second half of the story of our three unlikely heroes (the school girl, the vengeful loner, and the secret agent) fighting against the interdimensional invaders trying to take over the world via a remote Japanese high school. While I do say second “half”, that’s not strictly true. As our playtime implies, this chunk of the story has dramatically less content than the first part, though only part of that is gameplay related. This would more accurately be described as the last third, or even the third act of the story, and it honestly suffers for being so short. We really exhaust most of our narrative momentum in the first part, and this part of things mostly just feels like a long walk to the end. Granted, we do get some hilarious moments here and there with certain action scenes and the performances of the actors, but we found it overall less entertaining than the first half.

The gameplay is still more or less the same, though there are still some very notable changes. So far as things being similar go, we still have our English-language education-focused presentation. You can still switch between Japanese and English for your subtitles and voiceover, and you can still also rewind things however you like. The actual value of this as an educational tool remains just as dubious as I felt it was in the first part, but at least it hasn’t gotten any worse XD.

There are still some video game-y parts as well, but they have mercifully been tuned down significantly compared to the last one. The dreadfully long and poorly constructed first-person adventure sections, in particular, are thankfully completely absent from this game (and that’s another big reason for this being so much shorter than the first game to go through). We still have the non-light gun sections, a bit of outright English practice, and some reaction time tests, but it’s all inoffensive and pretty quick to get through. Strangely enough, a large amount of the fights that happen aren’t even mini games you get to partake in. While I wouldn’t call the fights “fun”, per se, it’s yet another thing that robs the ending of its climactic nature because you don’t even get to do the fights against our big foe we finally meet up with. Would it have massively improved the game had we gotten to do those fights? Absolutely not. However, I think it would’ve at least made the climax more memorable rather than the wet thud we’re left with in the version we have.

The presentation is just as amusing and funny as the first game. Japanese VA continues to be quite good while the English VA continues to be hilarious. The translation also continues to be good while the animation continues to look very uncanny (and very funny). The music (of what there is) is very forgettable, and the 3D animations also look about as rough as you’d expect for ’97.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you played and enjoyed the first half, then you’ll find this half worth playing through as well. Despite the worst of the mini games taken out, I still find this one underwhelming compared to the first game, however. While I certainly would’ve preferred a better put together conclusion to the game, it’s at least short enough that you can treat it as a slightly interactive B-movie to laugh at with a friend, and at least in that regard, I think that’s the least you could ask of it.

It took me a few days to get through it, but I have finally reached the end of my journey through the 16-bit Ys games. I wouldn’t have originally played this version, honestly, but a partner of mine told me that the original version of Ys V was so easy that it had a reputation for feeling pointless, so I erred on the side of caution and picked the harder of the two to go through instead. Some research afterwards revealed that that may have been just as much of a mistake as it was the correct decision, but we’ll get into that later XD. It took me around 10.5 hours to make it through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or rewinds.

Ys V finds our hero Adol getting off a ship in a new land as usual (though oddly enough without Dogi, who went sailing off with him at the end of the last game). In this mysterious new land, there’s a legend of a lost, legendary city of gold called Kefin. In his usual fashion, he sets out to find it, helping out the local moneybags in a crystal hunt that’ll see him ultimately saving the world! (as if that’s a surprise to anyone). Narratively, this is the best Ys has been up to this point (though that’s hardly a high bar to cross). Ys had managed to be this funny and this functionally well put together as a narrative before, but this is the first time that we’d managed to rise beyond that. Though its pacing is a bit rougher than Ys IV (SFC) and its narrative in many ways a fairly direct retread of Ys I & II, it manages to have actual themes and messaging in its story in a way that none of those games ever managed to.

Granted, it’s hardly the biggest achievement of storytelling on the console. Heck, it’s not even the best written action/adventure game on the SFC. That said, I’d still say it’s one of the better written action/adventure games on the system, and it certainly manages to be better put together than a mess like Terranigma and more interesting than something a bit more typical and uncinematic like Brain Lord. The narrative is hardly a reason to rush out to play the game at once, but it being better put together than a lot of its contemporaries is certainly something worthy of praise in my book.

It's good that the narrative is decent and fun, because the gameplay is decidedly not. In a significant departure from both versions of Ys IV, we’ve once again abandoned bump combat in favor of pressing a button to swing our sword! What’s more, you can even press another button to actively put out your shield, and you’ve even got a jump button! We also have a magic system that revolves around collecting elemental stones and taking them to merchants to combine into alchemy stones (which you can affix to your equipped weapon (permanently) to give it the ability to do various magics). It’s a relatively linear adventure with some quite good signposting, but it’s got a pretty tough balancing act to manage with getting all of those new mechanics to work in harmony, and it’s a balancing act it fails hard.

The most glaring and obvious issue that cannot go without elaborating on is that the hit detection is absolutely dreadful. Swinging your sword at things is a constant gamble on if you’re actually going to harm them at all, as enemys’ sprites very rarely actually indicate where their hit box is in relation to your sword. This goes even more so for bosses, who are naturally the most difficult things you’ll usually be facing (even though you can actually carry around tons of healing items if you want, which does trivialize a fair bit of combat). There’s even a stat that makes enemies move faster (as you are “slower”) as you equip better armor and weapons!. All of this results in combat routinely struggling to be tolerable, let alone fun, and it's miserable. You could theoretically use magic to fight things instead, of course, but Ys V goes out of its way to make that an extremely unappealing alternative with one of the most poorly implemented magic systems I’ve seen in a while.

Unlike other Ys titles with magic systems up to this point, there is no dedicated magic button. Instead, you hold the R button down until a gauge hits 100, and then pressing your sword swinging button launches the magic attack and depletes that gauge a bit, meaning you can’t spam magic (you need to wait for the gauge to hit 100 again before firing another shot). This is already very awkward, but to make matters even more awkward, those elemental stones you combine into spells are almost universally hidden in invisible hiding places around the game. You’ll randomly be hugging a wall and suddenly find one, and it happens all the time, particularly in the late game. As if that didn’t make magic annoying enough to use, there are not only a limited amount of these stones in the game, but you also have no idea what spell you’re even making at the alchemy merchants until you just make it and then test it out. This means that you’re going to be doing a ton of save-loading looking for decent spells if you’re keen to use magic a lot, not that you really have much reason to use magic all that much.

The most farcical thing about magic isn’t just that it seemingly can’t harm bosses at all. That’s bad enough all on its own. What’s most absurd of all is that magic actually has an entirely separate experience tree! You gain one kind of experience for killing things with your sword, and another type for killing with magic. While this is a pretty typical Ys game in that there’s a fair bit of grinding, this makes the game have a truly unforgiveable amount if you want to use magic meaningfully at all. Never mind that you get magic late enough in the game (compared to your sword) that it’s a rough choice to start grinding magic in the first place, or that killing things with magic gives you NO money from kills. That’s just all insult to injury. Ultimately, a lot of this just doesn’t matter, as you basically never really need magic to fight enemies even a little, but it is truly baffling just how poorly put together the magic system is in a game with already miserable combat.

And the bad combat is a real death blow in an action/adventure game of this kind. It doesn’t matter that dungeons are nicely put together (if a bit puzzle-barren and small) or that bosses are varied in their designs. It’s honestly barely worth mentioning that the jumping puzzles aren’t too bad, that different swords almost pointlessly have different kinds of attacking (as there are only like 5 swords in the whole game), or that they removed the earlier games’ save anywhere feature in favor of quick saving anywhere and only being able to perma-save at inns (which is indeed a baffling change that just makes the game worse). Like Trials of Mana that I played earlier this year, there’s barely any point in praising or slagging off other aspects of the design in an action game like this if fighting basically anything always sucks.

The boss design isn’t that well done in the first place, frankly, with a lot of them (particularly later in the game) being really easy to just mulch down with barely any strategy at all. The combat is so bad, of course, that a lot of later “harder” fights being so simple is a small blessing, and even if you’re having a bit of trouble, you can always dip into that huge stockpile of healing items you can carry around.

The strangest part of it all is that this is Ys V – “Expert”. This is purposefully the harder version of the game, and my research actually shows that a decent amount of these are features, not bugs (as it were). The number one surprising thing I learned in looking into differences between the original version and this game is that the poor hit detection (on top of shielded enemies just blocking more) actually was added for the Expert version to make it harder! They certainly accomplished that, I’ve got to say, as enemies that not only hit harder but are harder to hit certainly does make for a harder experience, though I’d struggle to say it makes for a very fun one. The thing is, it’s weird to even describe this game as “harder” in a lot of ways due to the only real changes being worse hit detection and higher enemy stats. Bosses and such still aren’t that hard because you can bring so many healing items with you, especially later in the game. The changes Expert brings to the table largely just make the game more frustrating and grindy than they actually do to make it any more of a fun challenge, and it’s a damn shame.

Tragically (and ironically), it’s not even much of a way out to play the original instead, as site after site on the Japanese internet bemoaned just what a constantly freezing buggy mess the original release of Ys V was and just how far Expert went in fixing those issues (I can confirm I never hit a single freeze during my 10-ish hours with it). Expert may be the “better” version in that it doesn’t crash anymore and has a little bit of extra content, but the overall experience has been made so much worse that either version frankly sounds like a big waste of your time.

Thankfully, the presentation does manage to at least hold its own for what you’d expect for an Ys game. The music is excellent, with Falcom’s music team once again putting out a game packed with good music. Additionally, where Mask of the Sun didn’t really impress for a mid-life SFC game, Ys V really does look like a game released in ’95, as it’s absolutely beautiful. You’ve got a bit of slowdown here and there, and there are some weird graphical hiccups and flashes (though nothing nearly as bad as the flashing in Mask of the Sun) which honestly seemed to be the game trying not to crash, but it all at least runs pretty darn well for how good it looks, and that’s a nice silver lining to everything else, I suppose.

Verdict: Not Recommended. If you can get past how often the original version of Ys V apparently crashes, then perhaps the better hit detection and less grinding in that version makes it a better time. As it is, Expert may be less boringly easy than the first one (if its reputation is to be believed), but it’s worse in so many ways that I cannot in good conscience possibly recommend it to even a big fan of the genre. The combat is something to trudge through the whole way through, and it only gets easier when you’ve finally done enough grinding to be able to easily plow through (or safely ignore) the enemies that give you so much grief. There is no shortage of far better action/adventure games on this console, so you are far better off experiencing the story and aesthetics through a lets play on Youtube than wasting your valuable time banging your head against something as clumsily and poorly put together as this frustrating mess of a late-life SFC game.

The second half of the story of the Dark Hunter game that my partner and I played last week. We played the first half, and it ends quite unceremoniously, so we obviously had to carry on to finish the second half as well. Just as with the first one, she played on emulated hardware and I watched her, but the actual “gameplay” is so simple that I felt it more than adequate to call this one “beaten” for myself as well once we hit credits, and it took us a little over 2 hours to do it (as this game is a fair bit shorter than the first half for reasons we’ll get into later).

The second half of the story of our three unlikely heroes (the school girl, the vengeful loner, and the secret agent) fighting against the interdimensional invaders trying to take over the world via a remote Japanese high school. While I do say second “half”, that’s not strictly true. As our playtime implies, this chunk of the story has dramatically less content than the first part, though only part of that is gameplay related. This would more accurately be described as the last third, or even the third act of the story, and it honestly suffers for being so short. We really exhaust most of our narrative momentum in the first part, and this part of things mostly just feels like a long walk to the end. Granted, we do get some hilarious moments here and there with certain action scenes and the performances of the actors, but we found it overall less entertaining than the first half.

The gameplay is still more or less the same, though there are still some very notable changes. So far as things being similar go, we still have our English-language education-focused presentation. You can still switch between Japanese and English for your subtitles and voiceover, and you can still also rewind things however you like. The actual value of this as an educational tool remains just as dubious as I felt it was in the first part, but at least it hasn’t gotten any worse XD.

There are still some video game-y parts as well, but they have mercifully been tuned down significantly compared to the last one. The dreadfully long and poorly constructed first-person adventure sections, in particular, are thankfully completely absent from this game (and that’s another big reason for this being so much shorter than the first game to go through). We still have the non-light gun sections, a bit of outright English practice, and some reaction time tests, but it’s all inoffensive and pretty quick to get through. Strangely enough, a large amount of the fights that happen aren’t even mini games you get to partake in. While I wouldn’t call the fights “fun”, per se, it’s yet another thing that robs the ending of its climactic nature because you don’t even get to do the fights against our big foe we finally meet up with. Would it have massively improved the game had we gotten to do those fights? Absolutely not. However, I think it would’ve at least made the climax more memorable rather than the wet thud we’re left with in the version we have.

The presentation is just as amusing and funny as the first game. Japanese VA continues to be quite good while the English VA continues to be hilarious. The translation also continues to be good while the animation continues to look very uncanny (and very funny). The music (of what there is) is very forgettable, and the 3D animations also look about as rough as you’d expect for ’97.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you played and enjoyed the first half, then you’ll find this half worth playing through as well. Despite the worst of the mini games taken out, I still find this one underwhelming compared to the first game, however. While I certainly would’ve preferred a better put together conclusion to the game, it’s at least short enough that you can treat it as a slightly interactive B-movie to laugh at with a friend, and at least in that regard, I think that’s the least you could ask of it.

Continuing my journey through the 16-bit Ys games, next on the list was IV, a game I knew next to nothing about outside of it getting a remake on the Vita some decades later. Before even starting it, I was made very aware that this is one of two versions of the game, with the PC Engine version being developed by Hudson Soft and being completely different outside of sharing some similar plot beats, but this was the version I chose to play (if only because I already had all the stuff set up to play it and couldn’t be bothered to do the same for the PCE version X3). It took me about 8.5 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states.

Mask of the Sun begins with Adol, our hero of Ys, finding a message in a bottle on the beach one day. The unfamiliar language inside, once translated for him by a friend, simply reads as a message to save a far-off land named “Celceta”. Adol quickly hops on a ship and sets off towards adventure in this land that apparently so badly needs saving. As was the case with Ys III, this is yet another good step forward in story writing for the series (despite effectively being written by completely different people). We have a more tightly paced story with better developed characters, and though I’d say we’re not quite at the level yet where we’re telling a story with deeper themes and messaging, we’re very nearly there! Granted, some of the messages you can read into Ys IV are less than positive in some respects, but they’re unintentional to the point that I don’t think they hurt the overall story too much ^^;. Oddly enough, even though this game has a ton of connective tissue to Ys I & II, it never mentions Ys III’s story at all. This isn’t really a problem, of course, but it was something that made me giggle nonetheless, especially with just how much this story so easily reads like an actual narrative sequel to Ys II, far more than Ys III ever did XD.

This goes beyond narrative as well, for Ys IV actually has a ton of connective tissue to I & II in its mechanics as well: Bump combat is back! I’ll admit, I was pretty bummed to see the return of bump combat, as I didn’t particularly enjoy it in Ys I & II, but I actually enjoyed it here a fair bit more than I did in those games. I understand that the overall premise (hitting enemies not dead-on deals damage where dealing direct bumps tends to just get yourself hurt) is basically the exact same way that bump combat works in I & II as well, but I noticed it far FAR more here than I ever did in those games. It’s an element of this game’s combat that’s far more unignorable than it ever was in those games due to how this game is balanced, and it makes for a much more challenging and interesting version of bump combat as a result. I found myself actually enjoying normal combat far more than I ever had in I & II, and it made combat feel a lot less overall pointless as a result.

Honestly, the mechanics overall are much stronger than I & II’s were, which I was very happy to see. Though there’s still some rough signposting here and there, it was never anything nearly so bad as plagued the far earlier adventure game designs of I & II. Though there were some things I had to look up in a guide at some points, they were almost always things that had just totally slipped my mind rather than things that I’d had no way of knowing the way those earlier games struggle with signposting. Level design on the whole was something I found markedly improved from the first two bump combat games, and the same goes for boss design as well.

These bosses felt far more actually designed than the first two games’ bosses usually did, and there was always some meaningful element of figuring out the strategy I needed rather than the old bump combat strategy I’d gotten used to where I just charged forward, hoped for the best, and usually won almost instantly. Magic is also back, and it depends on the sword you’re using instead of having bespoke spells you’re choosing from. I never found it super useful, as bump combat on its own was generally more than enough, but it was nice to have the option at least. I’m not sure this is going to convert anyone who already hated bump combat, and this game is certainly just as grindy as those old games were for having the right levels to take on the challenges you’re facing, but it was at least nice to see Ys return to that old formula and improve on it so significantly (despite the dev team being completely different x3).

The presentation is a bit simple for a mid-/late-life SFC game, but I still liked it quite a bit. Enemy, especially boss sprites, are well designed and cool looking, and the cutscene animations are very fun despite the relatively simple character and environment sprites. There’s a charm to things much like RPG Maker games would later have, with characters spinning on the spot or running around to indicate emotions in a way that I found very delightful, and some bespoke animations for certain cutscenes that had me giggling like a madman in my seat (like when Adol gets struck by lightning XD). The music is also unsurprisingly excellent. There were a lot of times where it almost felt like I’d stepped into a Mega Man X soundtrack all of a sudden, and I absolutely mean that as a compliment. An Ys game through and through, this game is packed with good and rockin’ tracks to fight monsters and witness drama, and that’s about all you could hope for, even in an Ys game not developed by Falcom themselves.

Verdict: Recommended. This is one that is very borderline between a hesitant and a normal recommendation, but I think it’s overall solid enough that I’d recommend it about as much as I would other less-than-perfect 16-bit action/adventure games I’ve played recently. Combat is quick and fun, boss battles are great, music is awesome, and the signposting is usually right on point. It’s honestly very confusing to me that this game has such a negative reputation. While I’d certainly believe the PCE version of Ys IV may indeed be better, I’d have a very hard time listing basically any way that the PCE version of Ys I & II is better than this game outside of that game’s CD-quality audio. This may not be the best of the Ys series, but I think that’s something you can really safely say about any of the Ys games made before Ys Origins. This game is good fun! Even if, as I said before, this probably won’t convert anyone who was already a non-believer in bump combat, I can still say with a good degree of confidence that, if you liked Ys I & II, I think you’ll probably really like this game too~.

Continuing my journey through the 16-bit Ys games, next on the list was IV, a game I knew next to nothing about outside of it getting a remake on the Vita some decades later. Before even starting it, I was made very aware that this is one of two versions of the game, with the PC Engine version being developed by Hudson Soft and being completely different outside of sharing some similar plot beats, but this was the version I chose to play (if only because I already had all the stuff set up to play it and couldn’t be bothered to do the same for the PCE version X3). It took me about 8.5 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states.

Mask of the Sun begins with Adol, our hero of Ys, finding a message in a bottle on the beach one day. The unfamiliar language inside, once translated for him by a friend, simply reads as a message to save a far-off land named “Celceta”. Adol quickly hops on a ship and sets off towards adventure in this land that apparently so badly needs saving. As was the case with Ys III, this is yet another good step forward in story writing for the series (despite effectively being written by completely different people). We have a more tightly paced story with better developed characters, and though I’d say we’re not quite at the level yet where we’re telling a story with deeper themes and messaging, we’re very nearly there! Granted, some of the messages you can read into Ys IV are less than positive in some respects, but they’re unintentional to the point that I don’t think they hurt the overall story too much ^^;. Oddly enough, even though this game has a ton of connective tissue to Ys I & II, it never mentions Ys III’s story at all. This isn’t really a problem, of course, but it was something that made me giggle nonetheless, especially with just how much this story so easily reads like an actual narrative sequel to Ys II, far more than Ys III ever did XD.

This goes beyond narrative as well, for Ys IV actually has a ton of connective tissue to I & II in its mechanics as well: Bump combat is back! I’ll admit, I was pretty bummed to see the return of bump combat, as I didn’t particularly enjoy it in Ys I & II, but I actually enjoyed it here a fair bit more than I did in those games. I understand that the overall premise (hitting enemies not dead-on deals damage where dealing direct bumps tends to just get yourself hurt) is basically the exact same way that bump combat works in I & II as well, but I noticed it far FAR more here than I ever did in those games. It’s an element of this game’s combat that’s far more unignorable than it ever was in those games due to how this game is balanced, and it makes for a much more challenging and interesting version of bump combat as a result. I found myself actually enjoying normal combat far more than I ever had in I & II, and it made combat feel a lot less overall pointless as a result.

Honestly, the mechanics overall are much stronger than I & II’s were, which I was very happy to see. Though there’s still some rough signposting here and there, it was never anything nearly so bad as plagued the far earlier adventure game designs of I & II. Though there were some things I had to look up in a guide at some points, they were almost always things that had just totally slipped my mind rather than things that I’d had no way of knowing the way those earlier games struggle with signposting. Level design on the whole was something I found markedly improved from the first two bump combat games, and the same goes for boss design as well.

These bosses felt far more actually designed than the first two games’ bosses usually did, and there was always some meaningful element of figuring out the strategy I needed rather than the old bump combat strategy I’d gotten used to where I just charged forward, hoped for the best, and usually won almost instantly. Magic is also back, and it depends on the sword you’re using instead of having bespoke spells you’re choosing from. I never found it super useful, as bump combat on its own was generally more than enough, but it was nice to have the option at least. I’m not sure this is going to convert anyone who already hated bump combat, and this game is certainly just as grindy as those old games were for having the right levels to take on the challenges you’re facing, but it was at least nice to see Ys return to that old formula and improve on it so significantly (despite the dev team being completely different x3).

The presentation is a bit simple for a mid-/late-life SFC game, but I still liked it quite a bit. Enemy, especially boss sprites, are well designed and cool looking, and the cutscene animations are very fun despite the relatively simple character and environment sprites. There’s a charm to things much like RPG Maker games would later have, with characters spinning on the spot or running around to indicate emotions in a way that I found very delightful, and some bespoke animations for certain cutscenes that had me giggling like a madman in my seat (like when Adol gets struck by lightning XD). The music is also unsurprisingly excellent. There were a lot of times where it almost felt like I’d stepped into a Mega Man X soundtrack all of a sudden, and I absolutely mean that as a compliment. An Ys game through and through, this game is packed with good and rockin’ tracks to fight monsters and witness drama, and that’s about all you could hope for, even in an Ys game not developed by Falcom themselves.

Verdict: Recommended. This is one that is very borderline between a hesitant and a normal recommendation, but I think it’s overall solid enough that I’d recommend it about as much as I would other less-than-perfect 16-bit action/adventure games I’ve played recently. Combat is quick and fun, boss battles are great, music is awesome, and the signposting is usually right on point. It’s honestly very confusing to me that this game has such a negative reputation. While I’d certainly believe the PCE version of Ys IV may indeed be better, I’d have a very hard time listing basically any way that the PCE version of Ys I & II is better than this game outside of that game’s CD-quality audio. This may not be the best of the Ys series, but I think that’s something you can really safely say about any of the Ys games made before Ys Origins. This game is good fun! Even if, as I said before, this probably won’t convert anyone who was already a non-believer in bump combat, I can still say with a good degree of confidence that, if you liked Ys I & II, I think you’ll probably really like this game too~.