The last time I wrote a review for this site was back in 2021, almost three years ago. I got burnt out from writing reviews, I just got tired of doing it from how mentally draining it was, not to mention there's a lot going on in my real life as is which has led to some serious low points in terms of my mental state.. But I decided to give it one more go because this is a game and a series that I finished a while ago and grew a newfound passion for.

Xenosaga Episode I is far from a flawless masterpiece, in fact there are things that other games do significantly better than it. In fact, Xenosaga as a series is incredibly flawed, but also at the same time is one of the most fascinating trilogies of games I've ever played. This is a franchise that is very overlooked when compared to Tetsuya Takahashi's other works (Xenogears and Xenoblade Chronicles). Xenosaga is considered the black sheep of Xeno, the middle child that is often forgotten about.

There are very few games in this genre that have captivated me like Xenosaga has. By the time I finished Episode III, I felt very sad that this series was never given the love and the attention that it deserves.

For all intents and purposes, Episode III is not only my favorite game in the trilogy, but it is one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, right up there with the likes of Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, it is that good. Episode III is just Episode I but better.

The presentation is stellar, the combat is quicker and more snappy, the soundtrack is one of the greatest I've ever heard period, and being that it's the conclusion to a trilogy, it does not hold its punches when it comes to getting an emotional reaction out of the player.

It has one of the most emotionally powerful endings I've seen in any game. It is unbelievably sad yet hopeful at the same time, it made me cry my ass off almost the entire time, and rarely do I ever cry while playing games.

Episode II on the other hand, while it isn't flat out awful, it's one of the most disappointing sequels I've ever played. Compared to its predecessor and even Episode III, it is a disaster on almost every conceivable level.

It is a game that contains a handful of plot holes, retcons, bad pacing, bad voice acting, undeveloped characters, underwhelming plot twists, and crucial story details that are poorly explained or not explained at all and won't be until Episode III, such as the appearance of the Immigrant Fleet and Shion's past relationship with Febronia, two of the most important details regarding Xenosaga's lore.

There are a bunch of other issues such as the confliction of two different composers resulting in some music that sounds amazing and other tracks terrible which results in a ton of tonal whiplash, the deviation of Episode I’s anime aesthetic and having more realistic looking character models that look god awful, and the battle system is one of my least favorite battle systems I've played in any JRPG.

To summarize, it is insanely drawn out, unnecessarily annoying, stupidly difficult at times, tedious, unbalanced, not explained very well, grindy, and unforgiving towards new players.

But despite all of that, I was willing to finish the game so I could finally move onto Episode III. It wasn't all bad.

The music composed by Yuki Kajira is fantastic, the backstories between Jr., Albedo, Gaignun, and Sakura were very well done, the fight scenes look amazing for the time and were a nice way to show off the game's new graphical engine, and the ending scenes between Jr. and Albedo were genuinely heartbreaking and actually made me hopeful that Episode III would turn everything around. And it did. In spades.

Episode III made it all worth it in the end.

And that is why I wanted to write this review, especially for my best friend SwitSwat. He is currently playing through Episode I and his opinion so far is a bit mixed, his main complaints being the insanely long cutscenes, the lack of music in most dungeons giving the game a bit of a low budget feel, and the cast of characters haven't exactly clicked with him yet.

If you're someone who hasn't finished Episode I for one reason or another, or if you have been thinking about picking it up for the first time, I implore you to give it and this series in general a chance, and I'll do my best to explain why. My ultimate goal of this review is to convince you that this game is worth playing.

Originally this series was supposed to have six games, but because of Episode II and how much it flopped both commercially and with fans, the series had to be cut down to just three games. It is extremely unfortunate that this series is almost doomed to being only playable on the PS2.

Back in 2019 there was a pitch for a Xenosaga HD Collection but it was rejected by Namco Bandai because they said it would be “financially unfeasible”. And that honestly angers me, because you would think that with a company as huge as Namco it would be a pretty easy thing to do. So now Xenosaga is still to this day stuck on a 20 year old console. It's unfair.

Xenosaga walked so that Xenoblade could run, and what we have now is something special.

Episode I is daringly ambitious, with its universe, lore, characters, music, combat, even down to the development of it. I'll give a basic rundown of the plot without any spoilers and talk about the characters, then I'll talk about the game's mechanics among other things.

Plot Summary

Some time in the 21st century in Kenya, an archeological discovery was made that would forever shift the course of mankind. That discovery was the Zohar, a gigantic gold colored monolith that contained an infinite amount of energy. No one knows its true origin, but it seemed to have existed as long as the universe itself.

Fast forward 4000 years in the future and Earth has been abandoned, now known as Lost Jerusalem. Mankind has now colonized space, united under a newfounded government known as the Galaxy Federation, and this federation is bound together by the U.M.N., an interstellar network allowing for faster than light communication and travel.

Despite this insane technology, all is not well in the universe, as it is being overrun by an almost invincible alien species called the Gnosis. No one knows their exact size or origin, so eliminating them is not a simple task whatsoever, and they seem to not be bound by the laws of physics.

In response to this crisis, Vector Industries, the largest tech company in the universe, develops a combat android that is capable of standing up against the Gnosis, who they've named KOS-MOS.

KOS-MOS's designer is the game's protagonist: Shion Uzuki, a very young yet brilliant scientist who leads Vector's First R&D Division. Despite KOS-MOS's incredible combat potential, she still hasn't been fully completed yet, still undergoing simulation training with Shion. And this isn't the first time Shion has been developing KOS-MOS.

A horrible tragedy happened two years prior involving Shion when one day KOS-MOS suddenly goes haywire, which is why Shion has refused to actually finish development resulting in impatient frustration among her co-workers.

The Woglinde, the ship that Shion is boarded on, is suddenly attacked by the Gnosis and with ease starts slaughtering almost everyone, they simply do not stand a chance. KOS-MOS however suddenly activates on her own accord and basically becomes the only thing that can fight back against the Gnosis, as she has an ability called the Hilbert Effect. Essentially, it makes the Gnosis vulnerable to attack.

Shion and her subordinate Allen Ridgley are rescued by KOS-MOS and fend off the Gnosis while the two of them escape. By the end, the entire ship is destroyed by the Gnosis. Shion and Allen inside of their escape pod are again rescued by another ship passing by called the Elsa.

From there on Shion, Allen, KOS-MOS, and the crew of the Elsa are accompanied by even more characters who are all coincidentally going to the same planet: Second Miltia, all for their own reasons, but all come together under one unified goal: the elimination of the Gnosis, led by something known as the Zohar Project.

The first iteration of Militia (Old Miltia) was destroyed 14 years ago in a terrible war called the Miltian Conflict, and a lot of the events that happen in this series traces back to that conflict, as well as how it deeply affected every character, especially Shion. The details of the progenitors of that conflict are also revealed as you keep playing. It's the intrigue, the mystery, and how everyone was involved in one way or another that makes these games that much more interesting to play through.

What I have just written down is only just the bare basics of the plot and even then my explanations won't do it justice. There is a lot to unpack here. If you don't like games with shitloads of worldbuilding, then this might not be your type of game. However, I still say give it a chance because Xenosaga has some of the most incredible worldbuilding I’ve seen in a game, and its cast of characters are among some of the most intricately constructed I've seen in any work of fiction.

I can understand why people may be turned off by this first entry because of the ridiculously long cutscenes, sometimes going over the 10 minute mark. This game is the definition of a slow burn, but it's like that on purpose. It wants to take its time to introduce players to the world and flesh out its characters.

Typically, I loathe insanely long cutscenes in games, as it makes it seem like I am watching the game more than actually playing it, however I can excuse Xenosaga in this aspect because of just how well it fleshes out its lore and characters, and out of the 30 hours it took me to finish my first playthrough, only 7-8 of those hours were cutscenes. There is still plenty of game here. There are even sidequests if that is what you fancy, making this a 50+ hour game.

Many of the cutscenes are driven by said character interactions and dialogue. But what makes this work is that everything is explained naturally to the player, as every scene isn't just a giant text scroll, an awkward narration of what happens, or pointless exposition dumps. Characters will ask questions about something they (and the player) are unfamiliar with. I as a player get more immersed with this method of storytelling.

The game even has a glossary that explains all of the unique terminology that you hear, sometimes explaining in even greater detail than what's in the cutscenes. If you like reading about lore, then you'll definitely love this stuff. But this isn't to say Xenosaga is hard to understand. It's the context clues that makes me appreciate these games that much more.

All of this might seem overwhelming at first, but remember that this game was supposed to be part of a series of six games.

Characters

Sometimes there will just be scenes where nothing substantial happens but instead just have characters talking to each other, both heroes and villains. And you know what, that's okay, because not every scene has to drive the plot forward. The characters have time to breathe and just act like real people, to open up and talk about things other than just saving the world, and therefore you learn why each character is the way that they are.

A world this expansive and with characters this complex needs time and attention to be established properly. Even if your plot is generic, if you have strong characters, they can carry the story. Characterization is one of Xenosaga's biggest strengths just like with games like The Last of Us and Final Fantasy VI. It's not the overall plot that makes them the masterpieces that they are, it's the characters and the writing of each one.

Xenosaga is a series that dives into very dark and sensitive subject matter such as existentialism, nepotism, suicide, and even failure. These games can get really depressing, but there are also lighthearted and funny moments throughout. It has an almost perfect balance between the two.

Even the villains are given insane amounts of screen time and backstory, as there are quite a lot of them and they all belong to certain factions in the universe, which you also get to see the conflicts in between all of these groups of people despite them all sharing a common goal, even often being antagonistic towards each other, and there is no one who embodies this aspect better than Albedo.

Albedo is one of the most memorable villains in the history of RPGs, and I will die on that oath. The man is a total bombastic psychopath even rivaling the likes of Kefka from Final Fantasy VI.

What makes him work so well as a villain is not only the amazing performance done by Crispin Freeman, but this is a guy who literally recites fuckin’ Hamlet while standing in a room full of the corpses of Realians that he just killed, and then proceeds to rip off his own arm and head just for the sole purpose of instilling fear into MOMO, who MOMO has a connection to, and MOMO also plays a huge role in the events that happen later on. But he can do this without killing himself because he has the ability to regenerate his own limbs.

So he literally just does this for his own amusement. What the hell.

And because of Albedo being such a wild card, you never know what he's going to do next and how he's going to interact with the other characters regardless of their moral alignment.

The main characters in this series are all fascinating and are all likable in their own ways, I can't think of a character off the top of my head that I actually dislike. However Episode I doesn't develop them all enough, only until Episodes II and III will you come to fully appreciate just how complex they all are, each having very sad and complicated backstories, Shion being the most tragic out of all of them.

Shion.. is one of my all time favorite protagonists. She is a divisive character to put it mildly, different from most other female JRPG protagonists. She is not a superhero or a fantasy trope. She's just an ordinary person. But that is the reason why she works so well as a protagonist to me.

Despite being a world class scientist working for the largest multinational corporation in the universe, Shion is human. She is also the only human character out of everyone else, and so is bound by the shackles of human suffering. She is someone who has gone through several lifetimes worth of personal trauma and tragedies, and does not do a very good job at all keeping her mental health in check, and everyone around her knows it. Keeping my own mental health in check is something that I don't do a very good job with either.

At first she is very hard to understand as a character. She's very aloof, cold, psychologically distant, dismissive of the details of her past, doesn't have the best relationship with her brother Jin, and uses her work to avoid coming to terms to her profoundly tragic past, being that she is a survivor of the Miltian Conflict.

Shion by all intents and purposes, is a lost in the dark character, and is incredibly flawed and only gets worse as the series goes on.

By Episode III when she learns about who she truly is and what happened to her family and her home, and what caused it to happen, she becomes a completely broken individual who has been beaten down and abused to the point of no return by one of the most despicable human beings I've seen in a game in recent memory which I won't spoil.

Rarely does she ever talk about her feelings, and when she does, she often glosses over a lot of things. Whenever someone asks if there's something wrong with her, she responds like clockwork, saying “it's nothing”.

Ziggy on the other hand is the complete opposite of this, since the player is told immediately who he is and why he is in the position he is in and it is just horrible and very heartbreaking. But even he is more open than Shion ever is.

And compared to other games, Shion doesn't do a whole lot to progress the story and is more passive and reactive to everything that is going on around her. So when she actually does decide to make a more active choice, it's very off-putting. And she doesn't make a whole lot of substantial character growth throughout but there's a reason. It's because she refuses to, and the game itself makes note of this.

Shion resonates with me as a person. I actually do understand and relate to Shion in quite a few ways and maybe that is why I like her so much as a protagonist.

KOS-MOS is also one of my all time favorite characters. Right from the beginning she is a complete badass, annihilating the Gnosis with ease and knowing exactly what to do at all times. From the get go it seems like she could do anything, but being that she is a machine, a manufactured weapon, she is incapable of understanding human emotion.

She is the biggest source of guidance for the party and is the most knowledgeable of the group, but is probably the last person to have a discussion with about personal issues. She is definitely not a therapist.

Very early on, she kills another human in cold blood so that Shion and Allen could escape the Woglinde, and Shion is shocked and horrified as it is reminding her of a similar incident that happened two years ago.

When KOS-MOS gives Shion a detailed explanation as to why she did it because she believes it was the best course of action, Shion snaps at KOS-MOS and asks her how she could say such things and if she even has a conscience.

That right there is the biggest question about KOS-MOS. Can she actually feel human thoughts and feelings knowing that she is the most advanced android in the galaxy? Is she actually capable of change? Does she even have a heart?

She is a machine, just like Realians are machines but they show human emotions like anxiety, fear, and love, even though they don't really understand it. MOMO is also a Realian, but has the appearance and mentality of a child. She shares joy, fear, and grief along with the rest of the party.

Ziggy and Jr. are also not human but share the same thoughts. Jr. also has child-like aspects to him, and Ziggy literally gives off father figure vibes and is very protective of Jr. and MOMO.

chaos, while he isn't a machine, he is not human either, and there is a lot of mystery surrounding him as well, and just like KOS-MOS, has more to him than what he initially leads on. In fact he has a personal connection to KOS-MOS, but we won't get the details of that until Episode III.

So if all of these non-human, otherworldly characters show human thoughts and feelings, why can't KOS-MOS?

That is just something you have to play through these games to get all the answers to, and when you do, she becomes the most fascinating character in the entire trilogy.

She gets some absolutely incredible moments throughout this trilogy, even in Episode II where she plays a significantly smaller role in that game compared to others.

Later on in the game the party see visions of the future in which a terrible calamity will destroy the galaxy, and in that same vision they see KOS-MOS fighting back against said calamity.

So who is KOS-MOS really? Where did she actually come from? And why does it seem like there is much more to her than what she leads on?

I could go on and on about these characters but even all the side characters like Matthews, Hammer, and Tony are all just as memorable.

Matthews, captain of the Elsa, literally likes to call his crewmates morons and wears a goddamn trucker hat that says “Caution I Am a Boozer”. That shit is hilarious.

Commander Cherenkov, even though he is a side character, is just as tragic as any of the main party members. His story is unbelievably sad. But watching him come to terms with how his god awful life turned out for him and finding a place in the world that he can finally feel peaceful in when the world has rejected him so much is so touching that it makes me tear up.

And then there's Allen, the best side character in the entire series, but calling him a side character would be a bit of a disservice. I firmly believe he stands up with the rest of the party even though he never joins it.

To put it mildly, he is a joke character, but a really good one, usually just serving as someone you could laugh at. Second to Shion at Vector's R&D Division, he is the butt of the joke among all of his co-workers, all giving him shit for not being able to tell Shion how he feels about her. In fact it would seem that his most memorable trait is how unremarkable he is.

He can't fight, he can't talk to the girl he likes, and he can barely go a minute without making a fool of himself. Hell, later on in the game there is a beach scene, and the swimsuit he chooses to wear is one of the most ridiculous looking things I’ve ever seen.

But what Allen does have is more powerful than physical prowess and that's a good heart, and that's what matters. Allen is the heart of the party, and without him, none of the party's fighting would matter as much, and he only gets better as the series goes on. In Episode III he gets hands down the most badass scenes in the entire trilogy which again, I won't spoil.

The characters in these games are super strong, they are among some of my most favorite characters in gaming. But what also helps every scene hit that much harder is the game's fantastic presentation and soundtrack.

Presentation and Soundtrack

Xenosaga Episode I has by far one of my most favorite soundtracks in gaming, which is hilarious considering Episode III's is even better.

Although what may be a turn off for some people is that for some reason there is no boss battle music in this game. Instead there are only two battle themes that play throughout the entire game: the standard battle theme and the final boss theme. Even during boss fights, from the beginning to the end of the game, you only get the standard battle theme.

There is also a lack of dungeon music in most areas. But the reason I am fine with this is because not only is the battle theme one of the most addicting pieces of music for me personally, but the dungeon tracks that are in the game are bangers as well, and I actually was shocked that there actually was dungeon music and a final boss theme. I felt like they hit harder in that regard.

And the music that we are left with is also just awesome. The soundtrack for this game was composed by the actual London Philharmonic Orchestra, and it gives the game an epic, sci-fi anime movie appeal. Some of the best moments in the whole game hit harder because of the incredible music. Here is one of my most favorite tracks that perfectly demonstrates the grand epic fantasy sci-fi that is Xenosaga Episode I.

https://youtu.be/iHpvQlYswrA?si=bMctd3Fu6LqyNGDi

And even though the character models are very dated, they still look a lot better than other games at the time. This game came out in 2002, the same year GTA Vice City and Kingdom Hearts I were released.

Hell, Final Fantasy X, GTA III, and Silent Hill 2 all came out the year before, have you seen the character models in those games?

The character models not only have a very nice anime appeal to them, something that Episode II deviates from which I despise because of how everyone looks like plastic blowup dolls, but they also have realistic body movements and proportions, for the time of course. They also have pretty advanced facial expressions for the time. There is a lot more emotion to the characters when you're able to see their facial expressions. It also helps that the voice acting in this game is excellent. Leah Sargent as Shion and Bridget Hoffman as KOS-MOS are the perfect representations of each character, they are irreplaceable in my opinion, they would not be the same without their respective voice actors.

And the battles have some really beautiful particle effects and attack animations, something that the later games lack and something that I miss.

The character models are not perfect, but that's not where the game's presentation shines. It's in the fight scenes. This game has some of the most beautiful looking space battles that still look insane to this day. The CG used pushed the PS2 to its limits and I imagine that's where most of the budget has gone.

The cinematography is excellent, the animations are stellar, and the particle effects and just overall visual flair is complete and utter eye candy. Combined with the amazing music, it is something that is unlike anything else in gaming, and the funny thing is, they look even better in the later games.

Alright so, I have written quite a ton about the characters, the music, etc., and even then I am scratching the surface. It is insane just how much there is to talk about. As I said before, simply just typing it all won't do it justice enough.

So why don't I start talking about the gameplay, since it is a JRPG. Despite its amazing story and characters, a JRPG also needs good gameplay. Episode I has complex mechanics and battles, but I find it really enjoyable. I'll do my best to explain how the gameplay works.

Battles

Xenosaga Episode I doesn't have any random encounters. Instead it's like Chrono Cross where every enemy can be seen on the field and you touch them to initiate the battle. There's even a bit of stealth involved where if there's an enemy you don't want to fight you can just sneak past it, but once it spots you it starts chasing you for a period of time.

You are given a plasma gun and you use this gun to destroy objects lying around, usually containing useful items. There are things like explosive barrels where if you shoot it next to an enemy, it gets stunned, allowing you to either run past it without fighting, or if you do decide to fight you get an advantage in battle since the enemies now have negative status effects.

I'll explain the battles themselves.

Every character starts off the fight with 4 AP with a max of 6, which is how you do actions, think of it like the old Fallout games.

Each attack mapped to the Square and Triangle buttons cost 2 AP, using an item or a magic spell (Ethers) costs 4 AP, and Tech Attacks, more powerful than normal attacks, cost 6 AP.

To get 6 AP you have to Guard, which not only cuts damage given in half but it regenerates 4 AP. You can actually execute Tech Attacks without needing to Guard but I'll get into that.

The command “Move” lets you change the formation of a party member, and moving them to the back row will prevent enemies from attacking them but they can't attack either. This is good for the early game for a character like MOMO because in the beginning she doesn't have a whole lot of utility and is very squishy.

You can also command giant mechs called A.G.W.S. which have their own HP pool and certain attacks. These mechs can be upgraded with stronger weapons and armor at robot shops. Any character except KOS-MOS and Ziggy can pilot one of three A.G.W.S.

However the equipment for these is really expensive and I don't really find them that much more useful than using the characters normally. It also doesn't help that you can play through the whole game without using them even once, because unlike Episodes II and III and even Xenogears, there are no mech dungeons in this game.

Another thing that sucks about the A.G.W.S. is that you can only heal them with items outside of battle. There is something you can buy which will recover 10% HP when Guarding but that's pretty much it.

Also, if a party member dies while piloting an A.G.W.S., they become inactive for the rest of the fight and cannot be revived which is really ass and only gives me even less of a reason to use them.

Then there's the Boost Gauge. Boosting allows a party member to immediately get a turn regardless of the turn order, and timing this correctly can change the tide of battle and even save your life in some cases. Though it fills up depending on what attacks you do. Characters can stack up to three Boosts at once per battle.

However, enemies can also Boost. And they can even Boost after you just activated your own, which is known as Boost Canceling. The shit is, you are never able to Boost Cancel the enemy, and this is the most annoying part about the battles in this game.

I can have a Boost ready and then out of nowhere it gets canceled out and I can't do anything about it. This along with everything I explained about the A.G.W.S. are the biggest downsides to the combat, but it's not game breaking. Most of the time when I lose a fight it is my fault.

There's also the condition icon next to the turn order. Every turn the condition will change and this can be things such as more Criticals for both you and the enemy and extra experience points and ability points after winning a battle.

In order to get money most enemies will drop random loot and junk and then you have to sell it at a shop. In order to recover your party's HP and EP you have to go to a save point and use an item called a Bio Sphere which can be purchased from shops.

To escape from battle you have to either use an item called an Escape Pack or an Ether called Goodbye. Escape Packs are also purchased from a shop and are actually pretty inexpensive.

Tech Attacks

Here's where it gets complex and it's how attacks work. Every attack works differently with each character and with each enemy.

Every attack either does physical or ether damage, some are long and close range. When you have 6 AP you can push Circle to do a Tech Attack but only after you execute a certain two button combo. Stronger Tech Attacks are unlocked as the party levels up.

The game rewards experimentation, figuring out which attacks are effective against each enemy, but it is not advised to spam attacks all willy nilly. Every enemy has a weakness, even the bosses.

You can assign certain Tech Attacks to each of these button combos.

Square, Square
Square, Triangle
Triangle, Triangle
Triangle, Square

However, each slot either has “Near” or “Far” next to it. This means you can only assign “Near” or “Far” Tech Attacks in said slot.

This is what KOS-MOS's slots look like

Square, Square (Near)
Square, Triangle (Near)
Triangle, Triangle (Far)
Triangle, Square (Near)

So in order to use Tech Attacks such as R-BLADE, R-DRILL, and R-HAMMER, they can only be assigned to “Near” slots since all of those attacks are physical close range attacks.

R-CANNON and X-BUSTER are long range attacks and therefore can only be assigned to the Far slot.

However, all of Jr's slots in particular are Far since his primary weapon of choice are guns, and he doesn’t have any close range attacks, which means you can have whatever Tech Attacks you want each slot which makes him an insanely powerful character, one of the best in the game.

Some Tech Attacks can also either attack one enemy or all enemies at once such as MOMO’s Meteor Storm and Jr’s Storm Waltz.

I mentioned earlier that you can actually execute Tech Attacks without needing to spend a turn Guarding to generate the AP, and that's where Tech Points come in.

When you win battles you gain three different types of ability points alongside experience:

Tech Points
Ether Points
Skill Points

I'll talk about Tech Points first. Tech Points are used for upgrading Tech Attacks. There are three different types of upgrades: TECH, SPEED, and WAIT

TECH is for increasing the amount of damage the Tech Attack does.

WAIT means the higher the level, the less time it takes for a character to get another turn after using the Tech Attack.

But SPEED is where it gets really interesting. When you upgrade a Tech Attack's SPEED, you will be able to use it without having to generate 6 AP first. So instead of using up a turn Guarding, and then pushing Square, Square, and Circle to use the Tech Attack, instead you just push Square and Circle in the same turn.

This is very strong and basically crucial for the later portions of the game because you're gonna need to be spamming Tech attacks in order to get through the fights easier, especially the boss fights. They can get really tough.

When you upgrade the Tech Attack's SPEED you then assign it to one of two specific slots, called HI slots. The four other slots are called LW slots and are the ones that require the 6 AP to execute.

Later on in the game KOS-MOS will get her ultimate Tech Attack, the X-BUSTER. It's not only her strongest ether attack, but it's multi-target. It costs a ton of Tech Points to get it to HI SPEED, but it is so worth it. Being able to use it every turn is stupidly powerful, but being that it's her strongest attack, it takes a long time for KOS-MOS to get another turn after using it unless you spend points upgrading the WAIT level.

Another thing you can do with Tech Points is increase your party's stats. As you play through the game you can incrementally spend Tech Points to raise the characters' attributes. Doing this can give you another edge in battle, but I prioritize upgrading Tech Attacks first.

Ethers

Ethers are basically magic spells. Offensive, defensive, healing, etc. Ether Points are used to not only learn new more powerful Ethers via a Skill Tree, but you can also use Ether Points to give a spell to another character. This makes it possible for every character to learn every Ether in the game.

This is what makes Shion very strong in particular since she has an Ether called Medica All. It's the strongest healing magic in the game since it's stronger than other healing Ethers and it heals all party members at once.

However, because Medica All is only learned by Shion, only she can give the Ether to other characters. So she needs to have enough Ether Points to do this.

Another thing to keep in mind is that each character can only equip up to 12 Ethers at once.

Skills

Skills are passive buffs, such as Poison Resistance, Slow Resistance, Physical Defense increases, Search Eyes (displays enemy's HP), etc. To learn Skills you not only need Skill Points but you also have to extract the Skills from accessories. The Skills that can be extracted depend on the accessory, and accessories can be purchased from shops.

Think of it like Final Fantasy IX where abilities are learned from specific weapons and armor.

You are then able to equip up to three Skills at once. And that's basically it. It's very simple, definitely more straightforward than Tech Attacks.

One more thing to keep in mind is that every party member gains experience points and levels up even when they're not fighting in battle which is really nice, however anyone who doesn't fight doesn't gain Tech Points, Ether Points, or Skill Points.

Anything Else To Add?

This might be the longest visual novel type of review I have written thus far and it's been a very long time since I have done so because my mental health has been on a bit of a decline even to this day. Combined with my life taking a drastic change, I was just sick of writing reviews. Though perhaps with this one last hurrah for a game that I love very much it gets the recognition it deserves for anyone who has been on the fence about it.

Give this game a try, you may be surprised. I hate that emulation is the easiest way to play it. I hope that maybe one day things will change. These games deserve an HD Collection, for console and Steam, they should be given the attention that has been given to Xenoblade.

Although considering the ending of Xenoblade Chronicles III's DLC, there is still hope that not only will these games return some day for modern platforms, but we'll finally get Episode IV and beyond, and the saga will get its true conclusion once and for all, since Tetsuya Takahashi himself knows how much love diehard fans like myself have for these games and wish that he would give Xenosaga another go.

If you have a PC and you can run this game, I implore you to play it, or give it another try. You're in for a journey that hopefully won't be forgotten any time soon. If I could rate this game a 9.5/10 on this site I would.

If you actually made it all the way to this end of this, thank you. That means a lot. Stay safe and take care.

PART 1: ←↓↑→

Earlier this year an arcade opened near my apartment that had a Dance Dance Revolution machine on it, out of curiosity, one day I decided to try it out, I fucking sucked at it, but I had the time of my life learning how to play it. This would then trigger a chain reaction in my brain where a sudden obsession for Rhythm games would begin, weeks after, I bought a used Guitar Hero controller and I set up Clone Hero on my PC, hell, I even got into Osu! This fire for rhythm games was always there since I played Elite Beat Agents and Theatrhythm Curtain Call when I was younger, but it was waiting for something to be rekindled. Now that said spark did its thing, now I can't get enough of this genre, and I have to play more of them.

PART 2: Let's break it down
Going through 2023 was impossible without seeing anyone bring up Hi-Fi Rush, and with good reason, no one expected anything from this game because nobody knew it existed until it was dropped after the reveal. When have you heard of a game actually pulling off a stunt like that and being met with overwhelmingly good reception?

Simple, it's because this is a fun ass videogame, it's a fantastic blend of two genres that when you think about them separately, it's difficult to picture them working together as well as they do. Hi-Fi Rush knows its target audience well and plays its cards accordingly, do you want to play it as a traditional action/hack and slash game? You can do that, sure, BUT you would be heavily encouraged to follow the beat to score high rankings and get through encounters as quickly as possible. To be honest, who wouldn't want to chase a high rank while playing at the rhythm of the phenomenal soundtrack?

While the story isn't anything out of the ordinary, HFR follows a very colorful and unique cast of characters lead by Chai, a knuckleheaded and overly ambitious dude that wants to be a rockstar... without even knowing how to play the guitar, (god that's kind of relatable imagine getting into a hobby and not being immediately cracked at it) so he signs up for a program that will replace his broken arm for an enhancement prosthetic that will surely make his dream easier to achieve, however because of an accident, the core of the prosthetic ends up being replaced with his MP3 player, giving him a unique connection to music, and cleverly justifying the way the game is played, since he now perceives the entire world with the BPMs of his playlist. He then proceeds to join a form a group of misfits to take down a company conspiracy, thanks to his severe lack of braincells, his interactions with the group lead to a lot of back and forth banter, giving place to very funny moments, interactions, which work very well thanks to the fact that the game doesn't want to hide away from the fact that it wants to roast him, but at the same time, he's too dumb to realize that he's being roasted. It's like watching the reels of the Voros Twins but made into a videogame character. I would like to get into more detail about the rest of the cast, but I've said enough, I think part of the charm of the game also comes from getting to know them all as you progress through your adventure.

Just like with your usual Hack and Slash games, it is very encouraged to play it even after you've beaten it, so you can develop the muscle memory to pull off an even bigger variety of combos and mixups and to get even better at parries. Thanks to all the Post game content that opens up, I see myself coming back to this game later this year to step up my gameplay, and if I'm mentally insane enough, just like I was with Ultrakill, you'll catch me trying to go for S Ranks on every level.

Sadly, Tango Gameworks might be gone too soon after shining too bright, but I hope people look at Hi-Fi Rush with inspiration to create something as wonderful as it was. That their legacy inspires others to catch that lightning in a bottle they achieved.

PS. If you look like Peppermint my DMs on Discord are open

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The saddest attempt at a live service game that I've ever seen, it's been 2 years and the game is still stuck in early access, still doesn't have co-op and still plays like shit.

The fact they spent most of their budget for this piece of crap on getting an English dub that nobody in the fandom gave a shit about instead of making the game playable or having interesting features that will actually compel people to spend time on their shitty battle pass (because yes, the game isn't finished but putting micro-transaction was an absolute priority).

The main campaign might as well be a placeholder, so little effort has been put into it that it's not worth the grind, you're just playing Muv-Luv Alternative but without its brillant narrative and direction and with shitty gameplay segment which forces you to grind to continue the story.

This game is a pure scam of the highest degree that it died faster than it lived with only 4 active player on the damn thing who probably can't afford a copy of Armored Core 6

Easily one of the worst mecha-game I've ever played and the worst Muv-Luv related title ever released easily

I was listening to a Siivagunner rip of the game because I saw a cute blonde anime girl with something that look like either a facemask or glasses (turns out it was makeup, wtv it's cute) and then I saw it was free on steam and decided to try it.

My fondness for quirky blonde anime girls with facemask aside, the game was actually a surprisingly fun and charming game with a lot of really neat ideas, I mean I never coded in JavaScript and this bitch taught me how to code in JavaScript to play a little puzzle game how neat is that ?

You can feel this is a small project made by a relatively small team on their free time and it's most likely you would've found this on Newgrounds in the late 2000's and in fact that's how the weirdoe forced 2D platforming segments of the game felt like, they're weird, floaty, janky and smells of amateurism, if you can't accept a videogame to not be 200% playable or haven't grow up on the golden age of Flash Games with fucked up physics, these segments will probably make you strike a few nerves.

It doesn't help the fact the game's humour falls into the "quirky for the sake of quirk" category, some jokes landed due to how random they were and some were "hey did you get that reference ?" (often time to other game with a meta element to it, mostly the popular ones like Undertale or DDLC if you ain't tired of them yet) level of low-bro internet humour and sadly this is a significant part of the game since these platforming segment far overstay they're welcome in my opinion.

I kinda wish they pushed the "desktop adventure" aspect further and didn't feel the need to add "an actual videogame" in the middle for all that was worth honestly.

The final boss segment is really creative ! I'm not going to spoil anything but be sure to have a few icons on your desktop for some fun surprises, I dunno how much app the game can detects for that segment but my mind was blown that it was part of the final boss.

And again, Lumi (the main character) is cute enough and the game is dank. It's free anyway so give it a shot and maybe support the devs via donation if you end up enjoying it !

Ys : A forgotten Revolution

The 80's were such a pivotal time for the history of video games. If you think making games is hard now, imagine what it must've been like in an era where pretty much everything had to be invented, you didn't have bricks as much as you had clay to build those bricks before you could even build the house itself. To most people, 80’s gaming is now a distant relics of a long forgotten past, something not worth going back to if only for curiosity sake, it seems impossible to imagine than a game this ancient can even impress anyone nowadays and yet to me, Ys 1&2 did and they did it spectacularly well.

The Action-RPG genre was barely a thought in the minds of many people but a small studio by the name of Falcom was going to launch a revolution within the genre, a revolution that will put them on the map not as icons but as pioneers of a new age of virtual entertainment. Falcom pretty much invented the Action-RPG genre with their old classic such as Dragon Slayer and its sequel Dragon Slayer II : Xanadu (the Dragon Slayer series by itself being the converging point of about 3/4th of Falcom’s entire catalog of franchise) but as much as these games were small revolutions in the mind of many, they were not the cult classic hit and aside from a few turbo-boomer, you hear very little people going back to the original Xanadu in spite of its reputation ! But in 1987, Falcom released what will be known as their core-franchise for a long while (until it was later replaced to my regret by a much more ambitious but ever so frustratingly disappointing series that I’ve already covered in details on this account) and this franchise was Ys ! Originally thought of as one big game, the final draft of the project will end up becoming a two-parters with Ys II releasing a year later in 1988, suffice to say that every port of both titles past 1988 bundled them together into one singular entry which to my surprise flows surprisingly well into one another despite an hard reset at the start of Part II.

One of those legendary ports is of course the version of the game I’m reviewing today, the 1989 PC-Engine edition of Ys 1&2 developed by Hudson Soft, to many it is considered the definitive version of Ys 1&2 even with the existence of Chronicles + which is the more widely available version of this game in the year of our lord 2023 but the reason why I decided to review the PC-Engine version instead is because while Chronicles + is a really competent remake worth experiencing and perhaps more palatable to a newer audience, it also operated a bunch of changes (mostly to Ys 1, Ys 2 is rather faithful to the original game) some goods of course and some that comes in complete contradiction with the spirit of the original game and the main idea behind its game design philosophy which I will develop further down the line.

See the entire idea behind Ys started pretty much on the same basis as those of the original Dragon Quest which was released a year earlier and which is to make a genre as complex and complicated to navigate through as accessible and easy to understand for console and their limited resources to handle complex systems that were seen on computer as well and pen and paper RPG at the time by translating and digesting those systems for newcomers to the genre. And even with the original Dragon Quest succeeding to such an absurd degree that it pretty much invented an entire subgenre of Japanese Role-Playing Game onto itself, some developers namely Masaya Hashimoto (main programmer and director of the original Ys) thought that they could do even better to fulfill that idea of making the RPG genre more welcoming and thus different systems were put into place to elaborate on that philosophy.
One of the main things that will strike most modern player as odd with Ys is its peculiar battle system, it’s true that nowadays pushing a button to attack sounds like a evidence but back in the day it wasn’t really the case and in fact for many years, the action-rpg genre used this so called “bump system” from Tower of Druaga to the original Hydlide, it was just the norm at the time and Ys just elaborated a bit further on this idea. To hurt enemies in Ys you simply have to bump into them until they die, simple, yet effective but Ys added another layer that didn’t exist in previous iterations of this system which is that it’s encouraged to bump into enemies from their sides rather than from the front, in one part to deal more damage to them and in another to avoid getting damages yourself ! The system, though simple, has a rather steep learning curve that might throw people off at the start of the game and in fact, the game pretty much forces you to interact with it head on in order to immediately buy the necessary equipment to advance throughout the story. It doesn’t make the best first impression but once you get a hold of it, you will realize that as archaic as the bump system can seem at first, it’s actually quite a brilliantly elegant system even compared to its contemporaries at the time which used action buttons !

Its elegance is due to one core factor that makes Ys such a satisfying game to play in it that every interaction with the world (aside from occasionally navigating menus to equip items which is also vastly simplified compared to most RPGs) is done through movement ! Combat is based on movement and positioning, interacting with NPC is done by simply bumping into them which triggers their dialogue boxes, what few puzzles the game has are also based on movement and of course all these elements converge together into the fact that all of this contributes to the main gameplay loop of the game which is exploration ! Ys is a game of constant motion, never stopping, always rushing from moment to moment gameplay, it’s a game which demands its player never stop in the pursuit of adventure and this feeling of constant motion is amplified by the absolutely kick-ass soundtrack playing in the back.

The main composer of the game is Yuzo Koshiro, a guy that will later down the line become infamous for his work at Sega and even though he didn’t himself rearrange the tracks for the PC-Engine version, he still did more than an excellent job with establishing Falcom’s future legacy of their games being carried by impressively excellent soundtrack. Ys is the series for which the JDK team was formed after Yuzo Koshiro left and it definitely works with Ys fast-paced constantly moving action that make the series seem like it was Zelda for people who like to rush through corridors to the sound of death metal like a Doom Player !

But the Bump System and movement alone couldn’t fulfill the fantasy of an easily accessible yet fun video game for newcomers of the genre. It’s also how straightforward yet not streamlined the progression of the game is. Ys 1 is composed of 2 very small overworld areas, 2 villages, 2 dungeons and of course the final stretch of the game being the Darm Tower, a final dungeon so ambitious in its scope and scale it represents the second half of the game by itself ! There is no need to go heal at an Inn and there’s very few shops in the game ! In fact if you want to heal while on the overworld, you can just stop and wait for your health bar to fill up, in dungeons however you will either need a special ring or use an item to fill your HP bar to emphasize how dangerous adventuring into dungeons feel compared to the overworld.

This simple yet elegant design in both form and execution is ultimately what made Ys 1 a classic which stood the test of time even more than a lot of its successors !
No line of dialogues is wasted, no step towards completing the quest is too bullshit or cryptic and you can finish the game simply by paying attention to the in-game dialogues and putting one and two together. Of course there’s some side-objectives that could trouble your progression but they’re generally well integrated within the main game. In (dark) fact the final boss of the game has a weakness which is a puzzle to the scale of the entire game with the game even tricking you with an higher tier of equipment that will do fuck all to him !

And even the grinding process is thought in a way to always make the player see the horizon of his progress, at the bottom of the screen, you can see all the information you need which includes how much EXP you need to level up and see in real time how much EXP enemies gives you, which hints towards how much work you have to put into leveling up and also the EXP rate is degressive meaning that eventually power-grinding in an area is rarely worth it past the soft-level cap imposed by the game at certain points (you also gain an automatic level up upon completing certain task which is neat) and even if you do struggle with the game, you can pretty much save whenever and wherever you want which is an impressive technical feat for the time as well as great for accessibility.

And here’s where my issue lies with the Chronicles version of Ys 1 specifically, the shinier graphics, the full-analog movement and remixed soundtrack are all welcome additions but Ys 1 as a remake want to both be faithful to the original but also add a bit too much fluff which somehow make the game more archaic in its progression than the original game, the overworld is now big and full of empty spaces that weren’t present in the original game, the PNJ now update their dialogues for every story moment (an heritage from Falcom’s Legend of Heroes series) which is great for worldbuilding and such but also muddles the actually helpful information for game progression under a ton of fluff that’s not necessary to the game’s progression but I think what kills this remake a bit is how they’ve handled the level progression and the bosses !

The thing with Ys 1&2 on the PC-Engine however is that since it was pretty much two games fused together back to back, the leveling curve was a bit smoother and spread out for the entire duration of the two games which is great ! But the chronicles version of Ys 1 and 2 separates them into different executables which means that Ys 1 had to change up its leveling system to accommodate. Now you’re only capped at Level 10 and each level up is a significant boost to your stats meaning that the difference between owning a boss’s ass or the boss owning yours is arbitrarily be about at which level you enter the boss arena and the entire second half of the game is going to be reliant solely on your own skills in navigating the bump combat system which somehow despite the introduction of diagonal movement is somehow stricter than in the PC-Engine version but also the bosses are also badly coded !

Their patterns, behaviors and sometimes collisions are heavily fucked over for some reasons and don’t get me started on the final boss which is meme’d across the entire community for being a complete RNG fest of projectiles and framerate turboboosting, it’s an hilariously bad boss but one that makes it probably more memorable than its more manageable original counterpart, to give you an idea, it took me 1 try to defeat Dark Fact in the original and probably 12 for the Chronicles version, it’s actually ridiculous. Since Chronicles is the more widely available version, most people will probably get out of Ys 1 thinking it’s actually more outdated and janky than it actually was which definitely isn’t supposed to be the goal of a remake, it’s not game ruining or anything but I do think that it needed to be discussed.
I spent most of the review talking about my love of Ys 1 and I somehow still haven’t talked about Ys II, well it’s because to me Ys 1&2 are part of the same whole and most of the qualities of Ys 1 follows through on Ys 2 but even then I do think that Ys 2 is the lesser of the two halves mostly because of a few unfortunate decisions, it’s still a good game but the way it handles certain parts that Ys 1 nailed so much kinda frustrates me. The game is definitely more streamlined than its predecessor, in Ys 1 if you wanted to do certain things out of order to get some of the best equipments right from the start well nothing was stopping you aside from the enemies which you can easily ignore but in Ys 2 the progression is a bit more linear, instead of exploring a world, it feels like you’re exploring a set of levels which themselves are dungeons with their own navigation puzzle and NPC quest to wrap your head around !

Again this doesn’t constitute a flaw but I think that they could’ve expanded on the non-linearity and exploration aspect of Ys 1 even further, as for the combat while the bump system is still into place, this time the game introduces magic such as fireballs and a spells that lets you turn into a monster to discuss with the local fauna, that second spells is especially fun to use to get some fun tidbit and dialogues with the different monsters you’ve been slaying mindlessly so it’s a neat addition even if a bit gimmicky but the fireballs kinda break the flow of combat since they’re pretty much the safer options all the time and all the bosses asides from the last 2 are immune to bump combat and weak to fireballs turning these confrontations into bullet hell segment and even more so when contrary to the Chronicles version of Ys 2 one shot you if they hit you forcing a perfect run.

The overall navigation can also be a bit more confusing at times even with how segmented the game feels, the final dungeon of the game aka “The Solomon Shrine” is especially known for being a bit of a head scratcher the first way though with all of its floors and layers and weird conditions to progress into it and the story and this is something even the remake couldn’t make smoother.

Again, nothing that makes Ys 2 an unworthy successor to the first game let alone a bad game or a bad sequel, in fact Ys 2 focuses a bit more on its narration contrary to Ys 1 since it’s supposed to be the “answer arc” of the duology and in that way, it’s an amazing send-off to the duology and the series as a whole (well until they decided to make Ys III making the subtitle of Ys II “The Final Chapter” a bit of an oxymoron but oh well).

In fact this is also something that surprised me compared to a lot of RPG’s of its era and its how subtly well told the story of the game is which is definitely helped by the game’s presentation on the PC-Engine adding animated cutscenes and dubbed dialogue which is missing from other versions of the game including you guessed it, the Chronicles Version. I think that despite its age and the relative straightforwardness of its premise (Random adventurer investigate a demon invasion and uncover the truth about an ancient civilization), the way it’s told as well as incorporated inside of the gameplay loop really make the story of the game stand out from the crowd compared to a lot of its contemporaries, it’s definitely helped in part by the excellent character design, I mean Feena and Reah alone are mostly carried by how they than by their dialogues but also by the myriads of little details in dialogue and ofc the different book of Ys you uncover, some characters even manage to pop-off like Dogi who becomes a mainstay of the series as Adol’s life-long partner or even Lilia, the happy go lucky village girl who helps you on your quest throughout all of Ys II.
This is also something for which I’m going to give an edge to the chronicles version, if both versions follow the same throughline, Chronicles adds a lot of additional fluff to the dialogues which makes the setting of the game more alive than ever and even some addition that ties the game to the lore of the rest of the series, the ending was also changed to be more focused and conclusive towards Adol and Feena relationship which is all fine by me because I enjoy this couple far more than the Adol and Lilia pairing that seem to be a more natural and less tragic path for Adol to choose from but is also tremendously boring as a result (even if they do some cool things with it in the two different version of Ys IV which we may or may not talk about in a future review). In fact I did get a bit emotional during the ending of Chronicles especially with its new beautiful rendition of Feena’s theme but if I’m being honest I do miss this game having more animated cutscenes and voiced dialog. To me both versions of the story are complementary to one another and in the end, it’s worth experiencing both versions to see which part of which did you like best and to form your own opinion on the matter.

I also mentioned that the game includes its narration quite well within its gameplay loop which makes me think about Adol and how I think Adol is one of the rare valid mute protagonists. It’s been established later down in the franchise that the meta-narrative surrounding the Ys series is that we don’t actually play as Adol but rather one interpretation of Adol based on what he chronicled in his book, not only does this tie well with all the older titles getting remakes and as such have slight discrepancies between the different version but also because that means we don’t need Adol to talk, there has been a few games that made Adol talk and the more recent entry definitely push towards a more talkative Adol but I also don’t think it’s necessary, Adol is a badass adventure who rushes to the occasion and acts like a hero, he’s brave, fearless, strong and part of about 20 different prophecies ! His date of birth is the “Year 0” of Ys universes calendar and it’s all up to the game to make you feel like you’re playing as an absolute unstoppable unit which as I mentioned earlier, the game succeeds thanks to this constant sense of motion, an excellent sense of pacing (a word modern Falcom seems to have completely forgotten about) and a kick-ass soundtrack which as much the soundtrack of Adol’s life than it is the soundtrack of the environment he visits.

I also mentioned earlier how the game hides a puzzle to the scale of the whole game and that’s because the villain goes around stealing Silver tools from everyone, the more you progress through the game and the more you sense that it’s kinda weird for someone to be stealing such a specific item and it turns out that not only is it because it’s his weakness but also because Silver is another name for Cleria a much more legendary metal which was the cause of Ys’s downfall and the invasion of Darm’s demon army ! In (dark) fact, I actually recommend to watch the two ova adaptations which adds a lot of layer to the villain of Ys 1 and his plan on top of having a kick-ass and metal as fuck interpretation of the some of the games more iconic locale but also for all the cute moments between Adol and Feena.

The game is an epic journey and I did feel a great sense of fulfillment when finishing it, both games are also extremely short (about 10h each) which makes for a big satisfying 20h game experience which to my opinion stood the test of time much more than people gave it credit for.

And that’s pretty much the sad conclusion of Ys, while it is a cult classic, it’s hard to expect a younger audience to be enraptured by its proposition. Ys is a game which sadly got eclipsed by a much more clever and ambitious title at the time : the original Legend of Zelda which single handedly defined how 2D Action RPG should be made for the following decade (and will do so again with OOT for 3D action rpg games).

But I like to believe in the real strength of Ys as a game, I think both games are much better than the original Zelda or even Zelda 2 for that matter as well as better than a lot of contemporaries and imitators and in a world where Zelda didn’t exist, we could’ve probably expected Ys to be the cornerstone of an entire genre, but also this wasn’t the case but that’s ok because now Ys has known a new life and has continued for years to come, always in the shadows of giants but with a boundless sense of wonder which captured the imagination of many children and young adults over the years !

And for that, and that alone, I urge you to experience Ys 1&2 and discover how shockingly competent those games were if you’re willing to accept a few of its rougher edges and how different of a take on an action-rpg it is even by today standard in which it feels more of a curious novelty than the proper evolution of the medium it was meant to be, it’s still excellent and I love these games deeply !

Maybe I’ll make reviews for the other titles cause I feel like being a bit more positive on this account with a franchise I actually like !

Ys III : A Misguided Imitation

Yeah, I’m feeling like doing some sort of Ys retrospective on this account, it might not work as much as my Trails reviews (much to my dismay, Trails is the more popular series of the two) but since I’ve already marathoned these games a while ago and never properly gave my opinion on them, I’d figure why not do it and spread some positivity back into my life !

That’s what I would’ve said if the game we’re going to talk about today wasn’t amongst the worst titles in the series…

Back when I played the Ys franchise, I did them in a peculiarly fucked up order, jumping from eras to eras and chronology from chronology. After playing Oath in Felgahna and loving the ever living fuck out of that game, I was curious to see the original title the game was based on, after all if the remake is this phenomenal it might be because the original game has some strength to it even if it will inevitably be more dated and after playing it, I was kinda shocked that this wasn’t straight up the game that killed the franchise for good because man that game sure is a stinker.

The first version of Ys III was released in 1989, a solid year after the release of the original 2 Ys titles, Ys was never planned to be a full franchise and in fact in all of the 16 games which compose the franchise (including remakes, and additional versions) only Ys II actually takes place in the eponymous floating island of Ys and only 3 games has Ys and its lore as part of its central plot point. I suppose the series kept the title for consistency reason but the initial plan was to end the series at Ys II (ironically subtitled “The Final Chapter”) since Falcom had other plans (like expanding their Dragon Slayer series into one billion subseries which will spawn other subseries like Trails a subseries of Legend of Heroes and a Subseries of the wider Dragon Slayer series).

In fact Ys III didn’t start its development as an Ys title, the team responsible for the game didn’t plan to turn the game into an Ys game but a totally new project but like I said in my previous review, something happened that dramatically changed the trajectory of Ys and Falcom as a studio for the coming decades, the release of a certain title called “The Legend of Zelda”, not only that but in 1989, we’d see the burgeoning of many other games that will define the industry and as much as Ys is considered a cult classic by many, it never truly became a classic, its impact on the industry being snuffed by the Big N corporation. As it’s usually commonplace in the industry whenever a game becomes popular enough to set a standard, lots of people rush to the occasion to imitate its formula and twist it in their own way to make a quick buck and you bet your ass Falcom was going to take a piece of the sweet Zelda pie !

The last Zelda game at the time was Zelda II a start departure from the original game, trading its top down action RPG style for a 2D action platformers with an heavier emphasis on RPG elements (it’s the only Zelda game with anything resembling experience points and a leveling system after all and towns behave pretty much like your typical RPG town) and for many people Ys was already a Zelda imitator, having released a couple of months after the original Zelda game, Ys 1 was already living in Zelda’s shadow but unlike the aforementioned title, Ys shined in other areas such as storytelling, pacing, music and was at least in my opinion a generally more ambitious game.
So Falcom told the development team to change their project midway through development to turn it into an Ys game, the game was still planned to be a 2D action game but now it was decided, Adol will be the Luigi to Zelda’s Mario and Ys was set up to become a long-running franchise (one that will sadly always stay in the shadow of its main rival). The development of Ys III as you could probably guess was rough, changing a bunch of shit last minute to fit the aesthetic of a previous project onto a new almost already finished product wasn’t an easy task and it definitely shows in the final result of the game. Now mind you, back in the day, the gaming industry was a lot more fringe and the standard for what constitutes a “good” or a “bad” game was wildly different than it is today. I must assume that there’s a reason why to this day Ys III still has its fans amongst an older audience of people, if you enjoyed Zelda II and wanted more Zelda II your option was either this or well a whole bunch of action-platformers, it really wasn’t a niche genre at all so it doesn’t really excuse Ys III being this bad and it still makes me confused on how anybody could find this game good enough to make it successful, sometimes the market works in mysterious ways.

Once again, to keep it consistent with my Ys Book 1&2 review, I’m going to mainly talk about the PC-Engine version, it’s easily the best version of the game with the best overall presentation and most importantly for me the best version of the soundtrack only comparable to its modern remake (which is a completely different game we’ll talk about at a later date). However, while all of this is true, one thing you will quickly realize about this version of the game if you’re playing it in English is how noticeably awful the localization for this game is. Ys 1&2’s localization was honestly rather excellent with some exquisitely competent voice acting and a translation that managed to transmit how rich and detailed the world of Ys was and even stand tall against the more fleshed out script of the Chronicles edition of the game. But Ys III sadly did not get such a premium treatment, the voice acting is corny as shit with all the characters speaking like they’re in some sort of Shakespearian play and everything is like 10 times more epic and dramatic than they actually are which I wouldn’t mind if the story of the game wasn’t also kind of a dud…

But the way it’s translated is also so sloppy, some name got changed like there was a big demon dude called Galbalan in the original script but renamed to (I shit you not) FUCKING DEMONICUS ! During the intro of the game, the narrator attributes the sealing of this ancient creature to Adol when it is in fact an entirely different character called Genos… I mean they confused it so hard in fact that Genos is the character depicted on the American release of the game, a choice they’ll correct for the Genesis and SNES port who just has Adol in some sort of old pulp fantasy Conan the Barbarian artstyle supposedly to sell more copies to American children who can’t handle all that anime nonsense they got as the original cover art for the game (it’s not the first time this was done in the series, some ports of Ys 1&2 have some … questionable artstyle change to say the least). The game has some really corny dub but also ADOL TALKS and not just a little, he talks A LOT, it’s the most talkative Adol has ever been and will ever be and thank fuck they later decided to not let him speak cause his character arc is pretty damn dry but also while everyone is fully dubbed, Adol only speaks in speech bubbles which is so awkward in terms of presentation and is as expected very jarring !

But if it was only the localization of the game that was terrible then I wouldn’t be ranking it so low in comparison to other titles… no Ys III is also bad but like really freaking bad as a 2D Action-Game and I will explain why.
As previously stated, Ys III was trying to compete with Zelda II and I want to take your bias against that very divisive title on the side because after playing Ys III you’ll think that Zelda II was a masterpiece (it’s severely underrated and I will stand my ground on those position). Ys III replaces its tried and true bump system in favor of something a little more standard, a 2D side-scrolling action game. And at first, one would believe that it looks like an improvement, Adol has a lot of moves, can stab his swords in multiple directions, crouch, jump and all that jazz but it does not play well at all I’m afraid.

Adol controls like a broom on a stick navigating on a strange planet where gravity and physics seems to be weirdly fucked up, the hitboxes on all of his moves are ridiculously tiny and put you at risk of getting hurt very easily if you just do anything as to approach the enemy, the only move that seems to be consistent is rushing head strong while keeping the attack button on but even like that you will end up receiving unwarranted damages because of how the enemies are coded. Everything moves so chaotically on the screen at all times that it’s hard to avoid anything, tanking your way through the game is going to be your main option that at this point it might’ve as well be a game with bump combat !

It’s really hard to conceptualize but take some of the most basic 2D Action-Platformer you can think of and imagine if everything was moving at 10 times the speed, everything moved super erratically and there’s no invincibility frame so if an enemy follows you, it’s gonna keep siping your blood pool like a goddamn Capri Sun and your character controls like he’s on Mars and there’s no precision in any of your movement and believe me, you will not progress further than maybe the first screen of the first dungeon without a copious amount of grinding because it’s the only way you could physically conceived getting through this shit !

The first dungeon is a cave full of spiders, bees and all sorts of colorful insects and sometimes trolls which are either at feet height forcing you to crouch or up in the air forcing you to jump constantly and they also keep respawning everytime the scrolling goes away from their spawn point like in Megaman only slightly worse and you got a cocktail of issues plaguing this game combat to make it as unpleasant as possible. The level design is also pretty poor on average consisting of straight corridors which sometimes deviate a little for a secret room. We are far from the complex maze-like dungeons of Zelda II with a lot of variety in its challenges even for an NES game and it was released 2 years earlier ! Heck this isn’t even the first time Falcom worked on a title like this ! Faxanadu was released on the Famicom along the same year as Ys III and yet plays way better and has more interesting and intricate level design and a far more interesting world to explore !

So there really is no excuses for Ys III playing this badly and having such uninspired level design but on top of all that jank, there’s also the tedium of all the mechanics and the grinding making the game more of a slog that it actually is, I mean the game is only 6h long but you can at least expect 2 of these hours dedicated to either grinding for money and experience or managing your health by getting out of the dungeon after every boss fight because the people at Falcom had the brilliant idea to make the healing ring cost magic power which you will inevitably need to equip the Attack ring in order to defeat the onslaught of god awful bosses punctuating your adventure.


The bosses in Ys III are certainly the bosses of all time, they certainly have patterns but it’s about as wanky and badly programmed as the rest of the game so equip on your attack ring and pray to all the gods you kill the boss faster than it can kill you making a damageless run simply not happening. There’s also the magic system of the game which has been made worse, instead of cool super power you can unlock and add to Adol’s moveset, you get a set of ring giving you passive boost to your stats like more attack power or more defense at the cost of mana dropping every time they’re active, the only 3 rings which works are the attack, defense and healing ring, there are 2 more rings in the game but they have barely noticeable effects or outright don’t work in most situations ! You can now heal midway through battle with herbs but only one though, meaning that if it runs out, you can get your sorry ass back to the only town in the game to refill on your mana and herbs !

Speaking of which, all the incessant back and forth between the only village of the game, Redmont and the dungeons are also pretty godawful, Redmont is a truly forgettable places, its inhabitant complete no names and the badly translated slew of dialogues will make you bored out of your mind, they are about as helpful as using a spoon to cut a steak and they provide no flavor to the game’s world setting or god forbid the story ! The story is… pretty dry but with the corny ass voice acting and some odd localization choices, it kinda goes into so bad it’s good territory.

3 years after the events of Ys II, Adol leaves Lilia to go on a blowjob brother adventure with Dogi ! As they wander around the world (get it ? cause they’re the wanderers from Ys !) they eventually reach the shores of Felghana, Dogi’s home country. They go to meet Elena and Dogi immediately is a jerk to his childhood friends for no reasons at all but tbf I understand since Elena isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and has the intellect of your stereotypical blonde gal from the late 80’s. In the land of Felghana, there’s a bunch of monsters roaming around the place, rumor talk about the resurrection of Demonicus, an ancient demon which troubled the peace and tranquility of the land a couple of centuries ago and that the tyrannical Lord McGuire is trying to get his hands on the power of Demonicus thanks to the help of a mysterious mage by the name of Garland (no relationship to Jack Garland, the Chaos assweeper from FF1 and strangers of paradise), while exploring, Adol will also get confronted by Chester, Lord McGuire’s right hand man and brother of Elena but he’s working for his own personal agenda on getting revenge on McGuire for killing his parents as a child.

While the story is a bit dry and uneventful making the game progression very arbitrary with Adol getting swooped left and right from places to places on the world map (which is now a level select screen instead of an overworld which is incredibly lame) seemingly for no reasons to pad out the gametime (something Falcom will become champions at doing in the future), the way it's delivered through the dub is simply sublime and sometimes the plot just goes super off the wall like when at the end of the game for no reasons at all Elena who got captured by Demonicus, this eldritch abomination from ancient past, look at her brother trying to save her and telling him straight to his eyes “Chester please, stop this ceaseless cycle of violence, both you and DEMONICUS are living being with feelings !!!” which made me drop my controller and made me freaking hysterical for a solid 10 minutes before facing another shit ass boss to finish this shit ass game !



Suffice to say that I did not enjoyed Ys III, which will probably also prove that I’m not simply a mental boomer gassing up ancient games while shitting on modern ones but that I’m living being capable of critical thinking no matter the era and I will say it, Ys III is not a game worth experiencing in any capacity unless you’re really curious about the history of the franchise and have 6 hours of precious spare time to waste (which you could’ve wasted on better short experiences or filing your taxes which ultimately would be a more fulfilling experience than playing through it !).

It seems that with Ys III, Falcom learned zero lesson on what made the original two titles so beloved by many people. Instead it was a shallow imitation of a much better game and it even pales in comparison to other shallow imitations of Zelda II which were at least mildly competent ! A soulless cash grab which took a toll on the development team, a toll so bad they’ll eventually decide to leave the company to pursue greener pastures at Enix where they’ll operate for a short couple of years as Studio Quintet (one of my favorite gaming studio if you ask me which definitely deserved better than to be forgotten by time) where they’ll make a much better 2D side-scrolling action game combining all of the good elements of their previous titles narratively speaking but spice it up with some new and innovative ideas.

People will remember Actraiser, Illusion of Gaia or even Terranigma but most people will forget Ys III was even a thing and so should you and Falcom agrees since they made a remake of the game in the mid 2000’s which is miles better, changed everything about the original and is considered by many as one of the best Ys title.

So go play Oath in Felghana, I haven’t made a review of it yet but trust me, it’s freaking excellent and well worth experiencing over this piece of doodoo !

The one thing worth celebrating about this blight on the action genre is the music, this time mostly composed by the really talented Mieko Ishikawa successfully managing to hold her ground against Yuzo Koshiro more than excellent soundtrack from the first two game, Valestein Castle especially kicks so much freaking ass and is easily like my favorite track in the whole franchise if you ask me ! The soundtrack definitely captures the spirit of Ys better than everything else in this game !

But without the original development team to work on these titles what does the future hold for Ys as a franchise ? Well it’s a bit complicated, so complicated in fact it might be a two-parter with some additional parts down the line !

Stay tuned as next time, we’ll be talking about Mask of The sun which is… huh… certainly a video game…

Ys IV Part 1 : Mask of the Flop

After the troublesome development of Ys III, the development team composed of developer Masaya Hashimoto and scenario writer Tomoyoshi Miyazaki as well as all the other less known employees who worked on the first three titles, decided to leave Falcom for greener pastures by forming an independent studio by the name of “Quintet” under the guise of Enix one of the most prominent gaming publishers at the time responsible for publishing several hit like EVO, Star Ocean and of course the worldwide phenomenon that is the Dragon Quest series. Here they will make a few cult classics on the Super Nintendo such as Actraiser, the “Heaven and Earth Trilogy” (Soul Blazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terranigma) or even Robotrek before slowly fading into obscurity in the middle of the PS1 era with most of its staff never to be seen again after filing for bankruptcy in 2003.

Around the same time, Falcom will know another developers exodus, this time the development team behind the first person dungeon crawler Dinosaur (a game which disappointingly has no actual dinosaurs in it, Dinosaur being the name of the antagonist) left the company to also become a new studio by the name of “Studio Alex” where they’ll make the Lunar Series before filing for bankruptcy after some unfortunate controversy regarding the animation of one of the series third and entry and most of the employees where then forced to move on to Game Arts (the company who co-developed the Lunar Series) where they’ll create the Grandia series before Game Arts started dwindling in the mid 2000’s only now releasing HD ports of their past hits.

Around the end of the 80’s, the work environment at Falcom wasn’t really the best, they went from frontrunners of the RPG industry to second fiddle in a matter of years which is actually fascinating to me because there’s definitely a universe where Falcom did succeed and became a legendary game developers the likes of Squaresoft or even Atlus instead of that one scrimblo company who to this day still struggles for relevance. I mean for crying out loud, Falcom was a studio full of talented people and while the 2 we mentioned earlier made a few bangers before going into a whiff, some of them like Tetsuya Takahashi or later down the line Makoto Shinkai will know fruitful careers after departing from Falcom, one as the genius behind the Xeno Series beloved by all RPG fans who respects themselves a little and one as a successful worldwide known anime filmmaker (can you imagine that there’s a parallel universe where Makoto Shinkai, the director of “Your Name” could’ve been the Tetsuya Nomura of Falcom ? Crazy to think about isn’t it ?).

Suffice to say that with 3⁄4th of their staff gone to the wind and the few remaining members of the A-Team focusing on making games in the ever so expanding Dragon Slayer franchise which wasn’t seeing much success either, the future of Falcom and most topically for this review Ys was in trouble. But Falcom had a few trick up their sleeves but most importantly they had connections, the next game in the Ys series “Ys IV” was already in preparation but without a development team ready to work on it, Falcom had to rely on two of its most reliable ally : Tonkin House and Hudson Soft.

Both companies helped port the Ys franchise on console, Tonkin House was responsible for porting them on Nintendo and Sega’s hardware and Hudson Soft had the rights to publish straight up remakes of these titles to promote their very own console : The PC-Engine.

After being given a design document on what Ys IV was supposed to look like as well as a complete sheet of original composition by Falcom at the time newly formed “Sound JDK” team, both teams set up to create their own version of Ys IV with full creative liberties from Falcom to add or take away anything they wanted as long as they followed the rough outline of the original script and kept the initial gameplay planned for this episode intact.

And that’s how we ended up with two versions of Ys IV which seems similar at first glance as they were released roughly at the same time in 1991 but are vastly different in their execution enough so that they’re completely different games only sharing similar plot beats and characters. These wouldn’t be the only version of Ys IV however, there’s a grand total of 4 version of Ys IV with one developed by Taito in 2005 for the PS2 and which is supposed to be a remake of the SNES version we’re going to talk about today and finally another version this time actually developed by Falcom for the PS Vita roughly 20 years after the release of the first two version of Ys IV.

Since Tonkin House is the first one to release their take on Ys IV, this review will cover “Ys IV : Mask of the Sun”, released exclusively for the Super Famicom and in the second part of this review we’ll take a look at Hudson’s version named “Ys IV : The Dawn of Ys” !

Tonkin House, as previously mentioned is the company which ported the older Ys titles on console but if we take a look at their history with both the franchise and the rest of their catalog, it doesn’t bode well for this game at all. Unlike Hudson Soft which was a renowned game developer and console manufacturer at the time, Tonkin House was a relatively smaller studio even smaller than Falcom was at the time. They’ve released a few titles, mostly sports games which have seen moderate success and helped other companies on other titles in fact their port of Ys III for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo is one of the few rare time when they actually had full-hands on a project and it was for a port and how did that well ?

Bad

Ys III on both the Sega Genesis but especially on the Super Nintendo are really bad and that’s saying a lot considering what I had to say about Ys III in its best version, the SNES version is commonly accepted as the worst version of Ys III with even wankier controls, even wankier collision errors, glitches up the wazoo (but tbf, one allows you to level up instantly to max level so it’s kind of a neat feature lol) and with terrible ear-bleeding renditions of the soundtrack on a console that’s known for having one of the best sound chip in the history of gaming.

You know how people are impressed by Nobuo Uematsu when he manages to compose a 17 minutes long prog-rock symphonic masterpiece on the equivalent of a box of Crayola ? Well I’m similarly impressed at Tonkin House for taking that box of Crayola and just spectacularly set it out on fire ! Fucking up music on the Genesis is one thing, only a few god-like composer like Yuzo Koshiro or Michael Jackson (assuming he was the one doing the music for Sonic 3, I’m never sure) can make something out of the piece of scrap metal that is the YM2612 but the Super Nintendo soundchip ? That’s just insane, just listen and compare to the PC-Engine version. It's wild https://youtu.be/BxkElFJb5zI?si=ERx3kIU64vCZMz4F !
The reason I’m saying this is because the first thing you’re going to realize when booting up Ys IV : Mask of the Sun is how poor the sound quality, in a series that’s mostly known for its excellent soundtrack, Mask of the Sun just doesn’t bring homage to the series legacy on that front. The music themselves aren’t badly composed, in fact like I said earlier, the team was given a full sheet of original composition by the JDK team, it’s almost the exact same soundtrack as Hudson’s version and if you go and listen to the perfect edition of the soundtrack, you’ll realize it’s one of Falcom’s best OST album to date ! If your first experience with Ys IV soundtrack is the Super Famicom version then I’m deeply sorry for you because the way it’s compressed and crunched up is so messy that it will make the snail inside your ear commit seppuku just playing the game for an extended period of time. There’s a few original compositions made specifically for this version of the game and they’re the only stand-out track but even then, the general quality of the arrangements doesn’t help them shine the way they should.

But bad music aside, which already deals a huge blow to the franchise core identity, how does the game or heck even the story hold up ?

Well… not good…

When developing Ys IV, it was decided after the harsh feedback Ys III received for its gameplay system to go back to a more classical top-down adventure and surprisingly although everybody was moving on to the Zelda style of having an attack button which became the norm, it was decided that Ys IV returned to the tried and true bump system from the original 2 games, this return to form for Ys was also shown through the story and most importantly how Ys IV places itself in the continuity, taking place between Ys II and Ys III and as such acting as a direct continuation to Adol’s adventure in Esteria.

While both Mask of The Sun and Hudson follows some rough outlines when it comes to the story, their execution is pretty different, Tonkin House didn’t take any real risk when it comes to the story and decided to follow the guideline of Falcom’s original document but I feel like when it comes to Mask of The Sun at least, they read the synopsis, the concept and roughly the big ideas and set pieces of Ys IV but forgot to actually add… an actually coherent storyline to tie all these conceptual elements together ???

In this version of Ys IV, Adol is wandering on the beach of Esteria thinking back on his adventure in Ys I&II until suddenly he finds a letter in a bottle in a language he doesn’t understand, after getting it translated by Luther (a character from Ys 1) the letter reveals that the distant land of Celceta is in danger ! And someone is asking for a hero to save the day. Adol, hearing the call for adventure once more, decides to hop on his boat to explore Celceta and figure out what’s going on over there…

And then… well…

The story sort of just… happens ?

Yeah that’s probably my main issue with Mask of the Sun storytelling, there’s a few notable high points connected by various steps along the way which didn’t seem all that well thought out and seem to be more of an excuse to pad the game time more than telling a story.
The progression of the story and how you explore Celceta feels very disjointed and while the fan translation of the game courtesy of Aeon Genesis is rather excellent and in fact much better than what a typical localization for a game of this era should be, I don’t necessarily think the actual script at play deserved such premium treatment ! Story beats really just happens at random with the only real narrative arc holding the game together being Dr.Flair accompanying Adol on his quest to find Celceta’s flower to prepare medicine for Lilia until the actual story about Eldeel, Lisa and his three goons starts out of genuinely nowhere leading you on a scavenger quest for a bunch of McGuffin needed to obtain a special sword to defeat the big bad guy of the week and really, don’t even ask me the entire process of behind the plot because I don’t really remember much of what you actually do in the game…

And when I say the actual plot kicks off out of nowhere, I really mean it, Adol goes inside a random forest, gets struck by lightning, taken into a castle and witness a conversation between the villains of the game before being discovered and comedically beaten out to death in gloriously limited Super Nintendo scene direction ! It’s genuinely hysterical how the game goes from 0 to a 100, at some point the characters are like “let’s go back to Esteria !” which is a cool way to let you visit the map from Ys I but it’s terribly limited and done very poorly and also comes out of genuinely nowhere or when Lilia gets randomly kidnapped and die but thanks to some random thingamajig, you’re able to bring her back to life (tho fighting through hordes of enemy while carrying Lilia’s lifeless body is one of the few standout moment of the game !).

The scene direction is pretty hilarious too with people jumping around, spinning, interrupting each others (thankfully the text is colored to follow who says who in this mess of dialogue bubble overlapping each others) but even with those funny SNES limitations, the story in it of itself while not lacking in striking moment or even good idea to extend on the universe of the series comes off as pretty awkward and at the end we’re only left with a confused feeling of having experience only the rough draft of something that could if given the proper care actually be amazing and thankfully we’ll see that in the next review when we’ll talk about Dawn.

Also Adol talks in this game, and he talks a lot more than he did in Ys III, it’s the last time the franchise will attempt at giving Adol somewhat of a personality until Memories of Celceta and I’m glad they dropped the idea quickly. I know there’s some debate on the internet on whether or not silent protagonist are even needed in the gaming sphere anymore but I think everyone would agree that I’d rather Adol being a mute and speaking most of his words through actions rather than just stating some flat platitude about the next step of his quest or random answer to NPC which feels more randomly generated than anything, the gameplay and the general narration sells Adol more than any piece of dialogue ever can in my opinion.

But Ys stories have always pretty much been secondary, most of the time the game excels more at narration and telling a story through gameplay, subtle hints and clues and this more direct approach definitely needed to be perfected to compensate for the abysmal gameplay of Mask of The Sun…

Yeah Tonkin House didn’t really learn anything from how wack their version of Ys III on console were and if they could fuck up a gameplay system which just needed to be adapted imagine the results when you task them to actually make a fun return to bump combat.
Following the harsh criticism of Ys III gameplay, Falcom tasked both developers to create something closer to Ys I&II, so close in fact that virtually speaking almost nothing change, you still have the same bump system, the same magics, the same equipment and accessories and aside from a few oddball novelties which are barely noticeable, it plays… roughly the same as Ys I&II…

Or does it ?

There’s a common criticism of Bump Combat amongst people going back to the older titles. That it feels jank, unpolished, outdated, unfair even, that it’s not natural, that the hitboxes are wack and the system itself has no real qualities to it whatsoever and feels more limiting than anything and for many people Bump Combat is the relic of a bygone era that should never see the light of day again. And while I personally agree that Bump Combat doesn’t necessarily have a place in the modern action-rpg scene, I will disagree with the sometimes harsh and unwarranted criticism toward such a system because one, it’s not without its merits and I went over them in detail in my first review and two because Ys 1&2 doing it so well means that there’s room for fucking it up royally and that’s what Tonkin House managed to do !!!

I want you to take your bias against Ys 1&2 and I’m inviting you to play Mask of The Sun for at least 10 minutes ! Just 10 minutes is enough to realize how good you bunch of ungrateful pricks had it with the original title and now look how they’ve massacred my bumpy boy…

First off, it's still only 4 directional movement, but that’s ok because Ys 1&2 had enemies designed around that limitation and positioning was a core aspect of the combat system but not in Mask of the Sun ! Enemies goes super fast, zooming on the screen erratically, shooting projectiles off center guaranteeing you to take a hit and their hitboxes are out of this world, they are simply no rules to how hitboxes behave in this game, you will systematically at least 7 times out of 10 take a hit and not even understanding why you did take a hit ! Also if you thought bump combat was bad, imagine bump combat but now with STATUS EFFECTS. Because yes, some enemies can inflict you status effects including but not limited to poison !

I repeat, in a game where the ENTIRE POINT is to go in direct contact with the enemies to hurt them, you can randomly get poisoned and how does poison behave in Mask of the Sun ? Well much like every classic JRPG of course ! By losing health with every step when we stated in our first review that the core strength and entire point of the bump system was that it was based on CONSTANTLY MOVING !

There is a special kind of hell for design decisions like this which completely disregard any notion of common sense and goes against the initial main philosophy behind the series core game design philosophy ! It’s really hard to make you understand through text the immediate stark contrast between how it feels to play Ys 1&2 and how it feels to play Mask of the Sun especially if you weren’t particularly convinced by the bump system in the original 2 games and rightfully so since it’s already a pretty acquired taste ! Thankfully magic is back and while it’s ineffective on bosses, it makes a lot of regular combat encounters much smoother to go through and speaking of bosses…

WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE BOSSES ?

I swear, if the combat struggles to function in regular combat encounters, wait until you reach a boss in this mess of a game ! It’s crazy how Ys 1 bosses even in all of their wack sometimes, still managed to play to the strength of the bump system but not here ! There is zero telling on when they’re vulnerable, they’re completely immune to magic which means that it has the opposite balancing issue as Ys II and most of all their patterns just… are not real ! Sometimes they’ll shoot a projectile and you’ll get his when you’re clearly not being hit, one boss in the early game drops the framerate like crazy (oh yeah the game also run terribly btw) and the flames you need to dodge becomes invisible because of SPRITE FLICKERING ! ON THE SUPER NINTENDO !!!! Another boss is so badly designed, that you need to stay in the middle of his two lasers but guess what, staying in the middle gets you hit so the boss is literally a DPS check on whether you can kill him before it kills you !

Grinding is especially obnoxious too, early Ys game always had a bit of an issue with grinding but here, it’s not really good at all and if the battle system would not want to make you want to kill yourself, it’s absolutely the level design !

It’s simple, the level design, is non-existent, it feels like each areas was randomly generated using an RPG maker “generate random dungeon” tool, areas are way too big and the enemy spawn is fucking obnoxious as fuck with the fucked up scrolling and how much of them they are in a single place ! The areas are big and don’t have any striking landmarks to navigate through them and sometimes the themes repeat themselves for no reason later in the game ! However I’ll say that geographically, the world is coherent and cohesive and gives a bigger degree of liberty for explorations compared to Ys II but the actual areas are a nightmare to go through and you will absolutely dread the final dungeon of the game…

It’s 3 part dungeon, one is a fairly straight line, the other is a gigantic maze where you have to go back and forth from places to places in the dark, where rooms have 8 exits but only one of them leads to the rest of the dungeon and the other 7 to dead end but not like you could understand at first glance because the whole thing is in the dark !!! And the last part is the golden tower which is yet another maze but ! WITH TELEPORTERS YEEPEE WHAT A FUN VIDEO GAME !

Mask of the Sun is a shockingly incompetent game and let’s be fair, after the dud that was Ys III, the last thing I wanted to cover was another crappy game but at least Ys III was rushed and was experimenting with what Ys could be. Tonkin House wasn’t and they were tasked to just recreate a game like Ys 1 and 2 which doesn’t sound so impossible to do but yet they did, Tonkin House are genuinely incompetent and it’s no wonder that the company was lost into depth of history and fell off quickly into bankruptcy a little after releasing this awful mess !

The worst part is that since Tonkin House followed the guideline more closely than Hudson, Mask of the Sun was deemed the canonical version of Ys IV for years to come meaning that for how shitty the game is, it left a bigger legacy than Hudson’s game and it makes me mad because Dawn of Ys… is one of the best game in the entire franchise ! (see you in Part 2 to talk about how Hudson managed to bring Ys into new height while leaving little impacts…)

Ys IV Part II : The Dawn of Peak Fiction

In the 80’s there were few developers who actually knew what they were doing more than Hudson Soft, these guys are probably single handedly responsible for Nintendo opening itself to third party developers to make the NES/Famicom the legendary console we know today. Hudson Soft first and foremost were people who didn’t just like video games as a way to make money on a newly expanding market, these guys were very passionate about new technology and the wonders of gaming as a whole.

But eventually, when you enjoy making games so much, you start to become ambitious and soon Hudson Soft will partner with NEC the prime micro-computer manufacturer (and creator of the famous “porn game machine” known as the PC-98) under a share common interest of building the game console of the future : The PC-Engine otherwise known as the Turbografx 16 outside of Japan. The PCE was a really impressive machine for the time and even today, I’m still kind of blown away by the technical capabilities of the console which only has an 8 bit processor but packs a lot of punch otherwise especially with the CD Add-on that they’ve adopted earlier than many other companies at the time.

However, they were releasing a new console on an highly competitive market, Sega and Nintendo were fiercely competing for domination and other companies who dared venture on hardware territory knew that it was complicated to stand out amongst the crowd and that’s when Hudson had a brilliant idea, they will partner with Falcom to port their classic Ys title to their console. Ys 1 and Ys 2 were already considered classic of NEC micro-computers system and they have already existed many ports of the game to pretty much all available platforms at the time including the NES and the Master System but Hudson’s version on their PC-Engine was going to be different, it wasn’t just going to be a port, it was going to be a full-on REMAKE !

Ys Book 1&2 took the first two games in the series and combined them together into a single one like it was originally planned for the first time and the game will receive the most premium treatment imaginable ! A graphical overhaul which put new life into the game, touched up gameplay that made the experience smoother to play, smoother leveling curves which mitigated the grinding, new tracks to accompany certain important moment with new remixes on the absurdly insane sounding PCE soundchip which was able to make freaking miracle happened, it had animated cutscenes and full fucking voice-acting for a game released in 1989 and they did it both in Japanese and in English as this was the first game in the series to be shipped internationally (not counting the weird European port of Ys 1 on the Master System) !

Everyone’s mind was freaking blown away by how much love and care was put into this new iteration, gamers who were alive to see it happen before their very eyes as children couldn’t believe their eyes ! It was a true epic adventure with all the proper care put into its presentation to heightened that sense of wonder. It’s clear that probably the reason why Ys even got so popular in the first place and managed to stay relevant was because of this port right there, the game was well received pretty much everywhere and magazines sang the tales of how Hudson made Ys 1 & 2 a legendary game going beyond its simple ambition !

And all of this before Zelda or any other company was able to release their next-gen titles !
The PC-Engine version of Ys 1&2 was a massive success and single-handedly was enough of a reason for people to even buy a PC-Engine in the first place. It was clear that Hudson Soft didn’t just enjoy Ys, they didn’t just like Ys heck they didn’t even love Ys ! THEY WERE TRULY PASSIONATE ABOUT YS ! So much so that Hudson was allowed to port Ys III for the PC-Engine too with the same level of care and polish as what they did for Ys 1&2 even tho no amount of polish managed to make the game any good in the end and they botched the localization of it but oh well…

So when Falcom couldn’t make Ys IV themselves, Hudson seemed like the obvious choice to direct and create a new entry in their series ! But making a game from scratch with only a design document full of concept arts, a few guidelines and no lines of code or any prototype was a vastly different task than just taking an already existing game and polishing it to completion but unlike Tonkin House who was this small no-name company playing with their turds trying to make a barely playable game to satisfy the guideline, Hudson had something that they didn’t, they had experiences with making successful cult classic games but most importantly they had PASSION

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCmsS8eD_XY

From the moment you boot up the game you understand that the level of production value here is through the fucking roof ! You ain’t playing some dinky ass, poopy ass, budget ass, Tonkin Ass, Cold Steel Era Falcom ass “product” ! YOU ARE PLAYING A REAL VIDEOGAME ! MADE BY REAL DEVELOPERS ! WITH REAL TALENT ! REAL PASSION AND A REAL BUDGET TO GIVE THEM THE MEAN TO PRODUCE A MASTERPIECE AND YOU BET YOUR ASS THEY WERE GONNA TAKE THE CHANCE ! THERE IS NO BRAKE ON THIS TRAIN ! DAWN OF YS IS A GAME THAT’S GOING TO SHOW MODERN FALCOM PLAYERS HOW WE USED TO DO IT BACK IN THE 9 TO THE TIES ! A PRODUCT MOLD IN THE VOLCANO OF LOVE AND FORGED BY THE FINEST SOUL-MAKER IN THE INDUSTRY !

What made Ys 1&2 so legendary already was the visual presentation of it all, it made the original script of those games popped even more than they originally did in spite of the limited presentation and the added animated character portrait, voice acting and even cutscenes really added a lot of flair to the original two games. But Ys 1&2 Hudson was merely adding on top of the original game. With Dawn of Ys, they had full control over the game's presentation and how it would fit inside of the game ! And I’m happy to report they did a phenomenal job on just the visual presentation and scene direction level !

The first few minutes of Dawn of Ys already introduce the game in a much better way than Tonkin's version did. After coming back from one of their travels, Adol and Dogi stop by Esteria. It's been 2 years since the event of their adventure there and everyone is waiting for them ! A lot of things have changed already, Goban has opened a shop, Lilia now lives among the people of Esteria and is constantly waiting for Adol’s return and her health got better too ! Sarah is alive and managed to survive the assault of Dark Fact and his army after mysteriously disappearing in Ys 1 ! As you walk toward the city, the title of the game fades on top of the screen, everyone is celebrating Adol’s return ! This section feels like a genuine victory lap and a great way to welcome us back to the world of Ys after so long and I love every single minute of it and it’s all done really well !
One thing that’s clear from the game’s visual presentation is that the game will put more of an emphasis on its narration and especially how it’s going to be told through its visuals, you have much more scripted events the likes of other RPGs at the time where you lose control of Adol’s character for a moment to witness dialogues and scenes ! The general artstyle of the game oozes of that timeless 90’s anime charm, the character design is pretty damn excellent and on par with the striking designs of the original game, many characters from the first two games even got a face lift for the occasion, each of the game’s portrait and cutscenes are superbly animated and full of details ! That recreation of Ys II final battle is only a technical flex before the game bombards you with an avalanche of colors which pops out of your screen and invites you to live the adventure of a lifetime !

While the in-game graphics might be less impressive than the anime style portrait, cg’s and animation I just love how colorful the game looks which complimented by the extremely varied environments the game make you go through from lush forest to snowy mountains to a creepy abandoned mansion and even more, the visuals manage sometimes to pull off some really cool things with the environment and it definitely make the journey feel more alive than ever !

One particularly impressive thing about Dawn of Ys is that while text boxes are still the norm for dialogues with regular NPC’s most of the big story scene are entirely dubbed with animated character portraits popping on the screen and sometimes even CG’s much like in visual novel to highlight some of the more important moments, the original Japanese performance is honestly pretty stellar and I’m still shocked at how cleanly the voice acting sound on such an old hardware.

However this raised an issue when it came to the availability of the game for the longest time as much like Mask of the Sun, Dawn of Ys remained a Japanese exclusive and in the case of Dawn while an english fan translation already existed for a while most of the important dialogue remained untranslated simply because they couldn’t display subtitles during the game numerous voiced only segments. Thankfully nowadays this is no longer an issue thanks to a group of talented but amateurish voice actors who banded together with the goal to bring a fandub of the entire game !

While it’s not quite as professionally well made as the official dub of Ys 1&2 with the only professional voice actor here being Alan Oppenheimer, third cousin of THE Oppenheimer and voice of Skeletor in the He-Man series giving his voice to Darm in the intro of the game. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the crew delivered a hack job and I think that on average, they did manage to at least capture the feel of that era of voice-acting. I think it was probably something the dubbing team wanted to transmit with their performance, something that sound like it was recorded by a bunch of voice actors going off way too much in a at times goofy, at times overly serious and badass tone and I just think it works really well and definitely feel like the game actually did came out in the west. The only issue with the English Dub however is that the general audio mixing is rather poor, you can feel each member of the team had different mike quality and the voice acting can sometimes be a bit muffled by the music or sound effect playing in the background and with no option to arrange the audio mixing yourself in the settings you’ll have to sometimes open your ear wide to understand what the hell are they saying. Be sure to check their website at : https://www.ysutopia.net/downloads/ys4/Ys%20IV%20Dub%20Readme/readme.html
But back to the story, as Adol is celebrating with his friends, Sara the local fortune teller tells him about the distant land of Celceta. While she was escaping the forces of Dark Fact she discovered a connection between the black pearl and some ruins recently found on the mainland and she asked Adol to investigate it ! Without losing a single minute, Adol answered the call to adventure and in the dark of night set out to Celceta the mysteries of this ancient land ! But in the shadows, a sinister group of individual are trying to perform a dark ritual shown in a metal as fuck way too fucking gory for this franchise animated cutscenes before the game starts off with this absolute BANGER !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK9JTh0gAXs

GODDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN MY DUDE THESE SAXOPHONES ARE MAKING MY ASS WETTER THAN A FOUNTAIN ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON JESUS CHRIST !

One of the strongest aspect of the Ys series ever since its infancy has always been its amazing soundtrack, baring some exceptions, you know that an Ys game is going to own several asses just going by the soundtrack alone and I must report that the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys is once again completely out of this world ! For the first time in the history of the franchise, it’s the Falcom Sound JDK team handling the soundtrack. The Falcom JDK team is Falcom's very own personal rock-band. Composed of many prominent members joining in and out as the company evolve with time, the JDK team was originally founded to make CD quality audio version of Falcom’s soundtrack to sell them as promotional material but eventually, the JDK team took a more prominent role in development and as the advent of technology and sound quality went on, the JDK team now started actually composing for Ys as well as other Falcom titles.

Ys IV soundtrack was composed before the game ever began development and most of the music were made on CD’s that were later released as the “Ys IV Perfect Collection” but while the original album is freaking phenomenal on its own, that doesn’t take away the excellent instrumentalisation that went into translating the original composition into something that could be played by the PCE absolutely insane sound chip ! It’s simple, the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys might be my favorite soundtrack in the entire series ! While Yuzo Koshiro’s soundtrack for the original 2 Ys games was already an absolute joy for the ear, his departure didn’t mean that the JDK team couldn’t up the ante and provide a soundtrack which tells a million words with only a few notes !

The synths, the guitars, the FREAKING SAXOPHONE in the intro of the game, everything about this OST oozes from pure 90’s funk and pop with a lot variety in the composition, of course you get your adventure tracks that make you pump to rush into battle like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWYZDs0ARqg but you also get more ambient music that makes you feel like you’re adventuring in a scary yet sacred place and you don’t belong there with ominous sound reverberating through the room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QRx_ZBoSrE then you fight a boss and the music goes : https://youtu.be/4HNEPXbNEK4?si=oaBREVaNcJIG7zqj !


There is so much variety and energy to the soundtrack that to me it easily rivals some of the greats like Final Fantasy, Megaman, Castlevania or even Donkey Kong Country with which Dawn of Ys shares its sense of harmony and insane instrumentalisation which seems impossible to do on such ancient hardware but yet it does !

And I even like a lot of the creative choice they make when remaking old tracks, Fountain of Love, Tears of Sylph and the Syonin for example is composed with an instrumentalisation closer to that of the PC-98 instead of how it was in the PCE version of Ys 1 to clearly separate the homely, familiar and old-school feeling of Adol’s quasi home-town which contrasts with the rest of the adventures which uses more elaborate instrumentalisation as Adol dives into the unknown, the same way Adol evolves and his adventure get more grandiose and epic, the soundtrack get crazier and more complex in return !

Heck at some point in the game, you return to Darm Tower which is about to crumble and fall, they could’ve done some weird melancholic version of the tune but nah, your return to Darm Tower is accompanied by some funky, jazzy upbeat version of the original tune, what once used to be the base of operation of a great evil and Adol’s greatest challenge yet is now a freaking dance party !!! You’re dancing to the beat of your old enemies main theme and desecrate their corpses because that’s how strong and confident Adol became through his adventure and to him the Darm Tower isn’t a place of challenge to him but a leisurely walk to the DANCEFLOOR BABY : https://youtu.be/hMnq4RSmZtI?si=mxLh4IP0a_1t2QcR

Theme of Adol 1993, Field, A Great Ordeal, Temple of The Sun, Karna, A Kiss from Eldeel, so many great tracks henched into my brain thanks to Ryo Yonemitsu exquisite arrangements of the JDK’s masterclass of a soundtrack for the PC-Engine ! I’m not a music theorist so I can’t really explain with technical terms how and why these tracks work for me but the vibes are genuinely immaculate !

The Ys franchise is first and foremost about adventure, about this intoxicating feeling of wanting to give everything up, grab our bags and journey to places unknown ! Pushing with relentless motion through the different places Adol visits on his journey and a soundtrack this energetic and varied only emphasize that feeling even more !

But fear not my friend because Dawn of Ys isn’t just a really cool aesthetic served on silver platter of banger tracks, it’s also first and foremost an EXCELLENT videogame ! Once again, we’re back to Bump Combat and I know that after everything I’ve just said that might’ve gotten you a little bit too excited you’ll probably say something of the likes of : “Oh really ? We’re doing this ancient ass, clunky ass, stupid ass bump system again ?” and ladies and gentle straw men who live in my head, I’ve heard your plight !

After all, Bump Combat is such an acquired taste that I had to spend two whole reviews talking about the strengths of a well executed version of such a system as well as its merits when it comes to the flow and the momentum of the game and the cracks that shows when this balance isn’t respected by badly coded hitboxes, stilted movement, terrible boss design and so forth. But Ok I know this can be a turn-off to some people but once again put your bias aside because Dawn of Ys took Bump Combat and made it EXCELLENT ! It’s easily the best game featuring bump combat in the entire series (it’s also the last one if we don’t count all of the countless ports of Ys 1&2 for modern platforms).
Dawn of Ys, much like Mask of The Sun, decides to take the same basic moveset as Ys II, with the same sets of magic to unlock too. One might think of this decision as lazy since the game doesn’t really offer much novelty from a strict gameplay sense but while your toolkit may be the same, the way Hudson uses that toolkit is much more different and the game is full of surprises at every turn. The only real difference now is that you now possess the power of DIAGONAL movement which is an actual god sent for fighting enemies or just traversing the map and offers a greater degree of freedom when it comes to positioning and even puzzles !

Unlike Tonkin House who understood so little of the appeal of the bump combat system they implemented elements of game design which came in contradiction to it, Hudson decided to play with that element of constant motion with sometimes really clever movement based puzzle making almost each dungeon in the game pop with creativity and flair they couldn’t really achieve back then. Like I said in my first review, the secret of the early Ys games was their simplicity and ease of access but also its constant sense of motion which made you rush into battle to the tunes of power metal ! But while simplicity is indeed charming, ambition is definitely more enthralling !

While Ys II chose the route of streamlining the game to be more accessible and focus more greatly on its narration by designing their game in a more linear fashion, Hudson decided to take the freedom of Ys 1 and the varied setpieces of Ys 2 to create the perfect synthesis of the Ys formula imaginable. Dawn of Ys is a game which never stops going and always comes up with new and exciting ideas for your adventure !

When you arrive on the mainland to start your adventure, boom you’re confronted by the Romun Empire and sent to prison where they take your cool ass equipment from your adventures in Ys II and you’re mad as shit about this but you break-out with the help of cool characters such as Durgen and Karna and you realize that sometimes the game will make you fight with ally who also deals with enemies the same as you ! One time you’re on a raft and have to survive an onslaught of enemies, one time you’re in a volcano ! One time you’re turned into a monster and have to find a way to turn back to normal ! One time you’re in Esher Space and the gravity is flipped upside down and so much more !

What about the bosses tho ? Well Hudson also pushed themselves on that front, Dawn of Ys possesses more than 15 bosses compared to Mask of The Sun mere 9 and it’s one more boss than both Ys 1&2 combined (proving once again that Dawn of Ys is the true Ys II if the first two games are combined into one complete experience). With bump combat and magic available much like in Ys II we can imagine that there would be an imbalance between the two mechanics but nope, each boss of Dawn of Ys is extremely well designed and fun to fight !

All of the bosses strike a good balance between having to use bump combat and magic to defeat them and when it comes to pattern and all, I have absolutely nothing to complain about here, some of the later bosses are true marvel of boss design which fully plays into the strength of the somewhat simple yet effective battle system of the series so far ! A friend of mine once told me that the Twin Head boss in Ys 1 was the best they could do with Bump Combat and he was immediately proven wrong upon playing Dawn of Ys for the first time and realizing that even the first boss of that games tops any boss from either Ys 1 or Ys 2. Dawn of Ys is a game of constant wonder that always finds a way to surprise you at every turn with its setpieces, and each one of them go by so fast that you don’t get to see the time pass ! This game's sense of flow and pacing is so immaculate that not a single moment of it is boring and you feel like you’re living a really epic adventure with twists and turns and revelations at every corner ! The game may be short, it can be completed in a little over 10 h but these 10h are so intense and filled with stuff that you feel like the adventure is 10 times more epic and grand than what you can imagine !

And this proves that a game can make us feel and experience many things with more intensity no matter the actual game time, something that Falcom seems to have forgotten with time ! It’s not about how long and how stuffed with content a game is, it’s not about how much you can pad out a game to give the illusion of something richer, deeper and more interesting. It’s about making the most of what the content you have to truly impact the minds of the player who experiences your art ! And if length and only length was a determining factor some medium like films wouldn’t be so successful and Hudson understood it perfectly.

The story of Dawn of Ys is also one that I wanted to give a lot of credit towards. While Mask of The Sun followed the guideline of the design document to a T without attempting anything fancy (and with how awkwardly the story was told here, they didn’t attempt to even follow it right imo), Hudson took the idea of a direct sequel to Ys 1&2 further and did a lot of really cool things with the continuity and the established lore at the time ! The game is called “The Dawn of Ys” because more than just a new adventure in a brand new land, Adol was about to discover the secret of what he went through in the first two games ! It seems that Celceta holds the answers to all the events that lead to the corruption of the Black Pearl and the fall of Ys before Adol’s arrival in the first game and as you explore Celceta, you find yourself uncovering these answers and I absolutely love the connections they made here !

From the relationship the twin goddesses had with the inhabitant of Celceta, to the origins of Darm and the Black Pearl, to how certain things in Esteria and Ys relate to things in Celceta and how everything played into one another. One of my absolute favorite moment of the game is when during one of the game many info-dump flashbacks, you not only learn the real name of Dark Fact but also it’s revealed to you that one of the items you’ve been using in Ys 1 is actually a super important item in the global lore of the series ! Meaning that you now have to depart for Esteria and revisit the map of Ys 1 now free of all the demons ! Can you imagine the absolute flex that it is ? They didn’t have to do this and yet they did ! And it’s so good seeing all the characters from the first two games but also the different places and what they became after Adol’s departure, Ys 1 which used to be so simple, is now relegated to a small chapter inside of a much more ambitious whole ! Sure, it’s not on the level of say, the second half of DQ3 or the Kanto reveal in Pokemon Gold and Silver to name a similar exemple but man I’m a sucker for that type of stuff !

Everything about Dawn of Ys to its presentation, to its music, to its story, to level design, to the way the game builds on the basis of Ys 1&2 and plays with its continuity make the game feel like a non-stop constantly moving grand epic to which we never see the time passes ! They took everything that made Ys 1&2 so iconic and perfected it, Hudson didn’t just want to create yet another title in the prestigious Ys saga, they wanted to create the Ultimate Ys game !

The game is a love letter to the series and what Masaya Hashimoto and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, now too busy to work on their own project accomplished years ago and in many ways they managed to surpass them (well at least as far as making a Ys game goes !) and I believe that no one understood the appeal of Ys more than the team at Hudson Soft.

However, Falcom had other plans for the franchises and didn’t want to let go of Adol and the series and with Hudson hopping a bit too much above the initial guidelines to make a conclusion to the series instead of yet another episode, they decided that the game would now be considered not canon and Mask of The Sun will therefore be the version of reference for every subsequent Ys title. On one hand, I get it, this isn’t Hudson’s series, it was Falcom’s and if they wanted to continue with this series they just couldn’t let something like the ending of Dawn of Ys happen and give the series the proper closure it deserves.

Personally speaking, while what Hudson Soft did can be compared to mere fanfiction, it’s really good fanfiction and aside from coming into conflicts with the modern lore of the series and offering an epilogue that could have easily been acknowledged by Falcom without actually hurting the continuity, I think that what Hudson did here is phenomenal, the ending of Dawn of Ys is perhaps my favorite ending in the series despite and never fail to make me emotional. So many of Hudson’s ideas for the lore and continuity of the series at least in my opinion could’ve been reworked into the main timeline as I do think that some ideas here are actually better than what Falcom will eventually do with them !

Much to my dismay, that means that for how excellent Dawn of Ys is, its legacy is now forgotten, even Falcom seems to be really keen on ignoring the game’s existence or any influence Hudson might’ve had on the franchise (in fact : in the modern port of the older titles, you can play every OST’s of each version of Ys 1,2 and 3 but not the PC-Engine version but I bet it’s due to copyright issues rather than pettiness) and I think this is a great injustice.

I really do implore you, if you enjoy Ys especially Ys 1&2, I urge yourself to try out Dawn of Ys even more so if you were disappointed by Falcom’s own take on the game they did 20 years later with “Memories of Celceta” (but that will be a story for another time !). It’s really a masterpiece and easily amongst the best the series has to offer, a true labor of love and passion made by people who probably loved and understood Ys more than its original creators.

The next game in the series will be handled by Falcom themselves and who knows, maybe they won’t fuck it up… right ?

See you next time, as we take a look at “Ys V” the game, the game which almost killed the Ys franchise !

Ys V : The Forgettable One

The 90’s was perhaps Falcom’s roughest era. Not necessarily because the company wasn’t releasing good games, in fact they were still productive, but less so than they used to back in the 80’s. But as the years and years went on more and more of Falcom’s old staff started leaving the company to move to greener pastures and eventually Yoshio Kiya, creator of the Dragon Slayer series and last remaining member of Falcom founding staff left the company after releasing his last title : “The Legend of Xanadu'' yet another subseries of his ever expanding Dragon Slayer saga and a spin-off of the Xanadu subseries (yes, I know following the release of this franchise is highly complicated when looking at it retrospectively) over creative differences with Masayuki Kato the then CEO of Falcom.

Falcom wasn’t quite in its flop era yet but they were definitely heading towards it, all the problems the company accumulated both creatively and financially were starting to catch up to them. Falcom decided to focus entirely on working on their existing IP’s instead of creating new ones with the dungeon crawling series Brandish receiving 2 new sequels, Legend of Xanadu receiving one sequel without Masayuki Kato at its head and they even started a brand new arc for the Legend of Heroes franchise with the release of “Legend of Heroes 3 : Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch” the first episode of the Gagharv trilogy which started Falcom’s now titular brand of highly detailed continuous storytelling with games focusing on different parts of a singular world (and if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because that’s eventually what’s going lead up to Trails later down the line).

In the midst of all this chaos, the company shifted between continuing developing games for the PC-98 and the PC-Engine but were also shifting to more popular home console, even getting a partnership with Sega which never quite took off as only the Sega CD version of Popful Mail ever came out of that partnership, heck we were even supposed to get a Sega made version of Ys IV for the same platform but it never happened. After developing yet another port of Popful Mail for the Super Famicom however, Falcom was starting to be a bit more confident with developing games on console and it was then decided that the next, this time Falcom-made, title of the Ys franchise would be launching exclusively for the Super Famicom and thus : Ys V was born and was pretty much the final nail in Falcom’s metaphorical coffin.

Now, remember what I said about Ys III ? The reason for Ys III’s failure as a game was because Falcom was trying to compete with Zelda II and thus released a shallow imitation of the formula built on the corpse of a completely unrelated project turned into an Ys title at the last possible minute. But now we’re in the year 1995, the Playstation just came out in Japan a whole year ago and was heading towards international shores and while the Super Nintendo was still going strong, it wasn’t going as strong as it used to be. Lots of developers were still releasing games for the platforms for the few poor people who couldn’t afford Sony’s new wonder machine (and the PS1 really only took off by 1996 if you ask me) but now if you wanted to find success on the platform you had to stand out from the crowd and even then, you were competing with a fierce competition.

The SNES was the golden land of JRPG’s, a highly competitive market where only the strong could survive and the rest would be buried into the depth of history. How will Falcom fare in this jungle after seeing fluctuating success on the PC-Market ?
Well… not great…

One thing we can observe when looking at the history of Falcom even in the modern age is that it’s a company who pushes all the buttons on high alarm when they’re faced with a shift in the industry or when their own failures comes creeping in on their finances and what better way to secure the bag than to imitate the competition once again ? To abandon all sense of identity to pursue the road of stagnation ? That’s pretty much what Ys V is at its core.

When looking at Ys V, you might get confused at what you’re seeing. None of it feels like an Ys game or heck even a classic Falcom title ! The colors are darker, the tone of the game is edgier and more melodramatic and aside from Adol’s titular red hair who actually has some sort of prevalence within the story of the game this time around, you’d never guess that you were playing a game from the Ys series.

Ys V isn’t a particularly bad game, far from it but quickly you realize how derivative it feels not only from its own franchise (with a setting eerily similar to Ys 1&2 to the point of self plagiarizing) but also from other works of the industry at the time as the game could easily be mistaken for a Squaresoft release with a lot of similar effects, graphical assets, menus and presentation. From the ways the in-game menus looks like those of Final Fantasy, to those pixelated transition effect, to the color palette looking like FFVI or Chrono Trigger (except less vibrant) to even some mechanical similarities like a worse version of Secret of Mana rotating menu system and even a gauge that you need to wait to fill up to launch magic attack.

Heck at times it feels like a Quintet game, the studio which staff created the first 3 Ys games, even the music bares a lot of similarities to Quintet’s output or even Nobuo Uematsu’s and sound nothing like something that would come out of the Falcom Sound JDK team but yet it does !

One could be critical of games like Ys III or Mask of the Sun for being genuinely bad games but one thing but even with Ys III trying to imitate Zelda II, the whole package was unmistakably Falcom if only for their soundtrack alone but also the ways menus were arranged and the way the stories were told. But do all of these similarities make Ys V a bad game ?

Not exactly in my opinion but the answer is more complicated than a simple Yes or No. Ys V starts off with Adol going on yet another adventure this time in the land of Xandria where it’s been told that an ancient city which had disappeared 500 ago has started to reappear in the middle of the Kefin desert, a couple of years before the event of the game a team of researcher were investigating the area and found a little girl who lost her memories. Stein, one of the researchers, decided to adopt the little girl and name her Nienna but as time passed and Nienna grew, Stein became obsessed with the lost city of Kefin and one day disappeared into the night never to be seen again. As Adol arrives in Xandria, he’s contracted by a rich merchant by the name of Dorman to collect crystals for him, these crystals seemingly hold the secrets to unlocking the doors of the ancient city from which it has been told that they discovered alchemy.

The premise is pretty much a retelling of Ys 1 and 2 but with somewhat of a darker tone, the way the story is told is a bit weird however. The game is pretty much split into two parts, the quest for the crystals and everything happening in Kefin and let’s just say that the main quest isn’t really the most thrilling thing in the universe, gathering a bunch of crystals in a JRPG is already such a derivative storytelling device that it’s kind of impressive Falcom was never called out for it back in the day but also because pretty much nothing really happens during that time aside from the Crystal Quest.

The story does sets up some interesting mysteries tho, we learn that Darman’s intention aren’t quite noble, we get to meet Nienna one of the more forgettable heroine of the franchise, we start confronting with a family of bandits and most of all a village fears us as a prophecy foretold than a man with fiery haircut will bring despair upon the land which is then followed by Adol meeting the ghost of some Goth Guy who lost his fiancé years ago and is now accompanying Adol through the adventure in a subplot that seems so disconnected from the rest that it’s a bit awkwardly put together and by the end involves FUCKING TIME TRAVEL.

The story of Ys V, though derivative of what the series already did in the past, isn’t devoid of interesting or intriguing ideas but it’s the way everything is presented and paced together that makes it superbly unimpressive. But honestly, the later half of the story does come up together surprisingly well, with a lot of fascinating lore, lots of neat twists and great plot ideas. I honestly think that last third is amongst the best Falcom as ever put for the series in terms of finale, the atmosphere is really on-point and I kinda dig the darker atmosphere of the game when we reach that point and everything surrounding alchemy and how it works just begs to be expanded upon in future titles or even a remake.

What clearly doesn’t help the pacing of the game however is the new gameplay system which is kind of sluggish. The game retained the top-down perspective of the older titles but finally decided to forego bump combat in favor of a more traditional style of action combat and exploration. However, while I do welcome the change as the series needs to evolve with its time, I do think the execution of it leaves a lot to be desired. Adol sword swings are slow and enemies take a lot of hits before dying no matter the level which isn’t helped by the fact that attacking in this game locks you into place even when attacking and jumping at the same time. Because yes ! You now have a jump button and you know what that means ? Platforming ! And is the platforming good in this game ? Take a wild guess ! Thankfully the platforming heavy moments are few and far between but when they do come up, they’re as awkward to manoeuver as you may think (which isn’t helped by the way the game handles elevation and gravity…).

Eventually though, you do get a feel for how slow and mechanical the combat is so it’s not bad or unplayable, it’s just… terribly boring ? The game isn’t all that challenging either and rarely if ever will you find yourself in front of the game over screen. And I know what you’re going to say : “But Cani isn’t being accessible the whole point of Ys ?”, but you need to understand that there’s a vast difference to what was considered an accessible game back and what an accessible game was in 1995.


Back then being accessible was about cutting down the middle-man of complex mechanics and needless mechanical fluff so that anyone can jump on a game, it didn’t mean that the game needed to be braindead easy, a bit of challenge never really killed anyone after all but in 1995, being easy just resulted in a less interesting title and while you can still understand the appeal of a mechanically simple game like the original two Ys title, you can’t really be all that accepting of such a lack of challenge in a more complex game like Ys V (which is also the first game to allow you to use more than 1 healing items per battle but requires a lot of cumbersome menuing which halts the pacing of the game even more).

Speaking of needlessly complicated and cumbersome game mechanics, I have not talked about one of the game's central mechanics that’s heavily pushed by the game : the magic system ! This time around, Adol can wield the power of the elements to cast a variety of devastating and impressive looking spells ranging from simple projectile to powerful screen nukes. In order to obtain these spells, you must first find elements scattered across the world, sometimes in really well hidden places and fuse them in specific combinations to create flux stones, you can equip up to 3 flux stones giving you access to three spells you can switch back and forth at leisure. There are over 18 possible combinations of elements and thus 18 different spells ! That sounds like an ambitious, interesting and fun mechanic but then you realize that for how complex the system is, it’s completely and utterly pointless to use any of it.

To cast a spell, you need to spend both MP and something call Charge Point, you can only send a spell if you have enough MP but also only when your charge point are at max percentage, to recharge your charge point, you need to wait in place and rapidly tap the R button to fill it up so you can get a go at shooting another spell ! This limitation already slows down the momentum of the game to a crawl but their utility is also limited by how slow the animation for these spells can be, everytime you cast them Adol needs to do some little dance before shooting a projectile or launching a screen nuke which locks him into place and at the mercy of any potential threats ! On top of that, most bosses are unaffected by magic for Story reasons when those big magic attacks were pretty much made to be used on them. The only spell in the game which is of any use is the basic fireball spell you get in the tutorial area which fires quickly, doesn’t require much MP, doesn’t require a long charge period and shoots instantly out of your sword like in the older titles. Now.. after hearing all of this…

WHY WOULD ANYONE ENGAGE WITH THIS MECHANIC OUTSIDE OF THE 2 TIMES THE GAME FORCES YOU TO USE IT ?

The game is already slow as it is while simply swinging your sword at enemies so asking the player to do something that seems so cumbersome and unintuitive is kind of beyond me. It’s probably the reason why regular takes so much time to kill the regular way but killing them the regular way is still more effective and doesn’t kill the flow of combat and exploration. I do commend the team for coming up with the idea and it is rather fun to try and find what types of combination work to get what type of spells, I do get the appeal of experimenting with it but it seems like a lot of effort was put into that singular part of the game that could’ve been put elsewhere like making the adventure more interesting, fleshing out the story, make the main combat better or optimize the game a little bit because it also runs like shit with constant slowdown and slow “loading” time when entering new areas or houses.
A quick word on the dungeon design and bosses while we’re at it because that’s also part of the course for this type of game. I found the dungeon design to be serviceable, not amazing but serviceable, they get the job done and they’re not too annoying or confusing to navigate with a few clever puzzles and some nice atmosphere to boot. Shoutouts especially to the last dungeon of the game which is perhaps the best in the series up to that point and carries the last third of the game while making it slightly more interesting to play through. The bosses however are all rather forgettable, the dominant strategy for most of them is to find a safe spot and continuously swing your sword at them, they take really long to kill and aren’t all that exciting but none of them struck me as particularly bullshit.

One thing that’s also strange is the fact that unlike other titles, you can only save at Inn’s which is such a needlessly punitive system especially if you happen to die in the later half and have to do a lot of that stuff again, again another weird design choice to make the game slower.

Now it’s time to talk about the music and here’s where it gets a bit interesting. When I first played Ys V, I must admit, I found the music to be serviceable at best. Nothing really memorable outside of that one track that was literally an SNES rendition of “A boy who got wings” mixed with “Theme of Adol” from previous titles. But upon re-listening to it in isolation for the sake of this review, I realized that I should be giving more credit to this soundtrack than I initially thought.

First of all, while some sonorities are unmistakably SNES sounding, the general instrumentalisation is really good and at times approaches CD Quality audio. You can feel that this game was released late into the console where composers understood the hardware a little better but it definitely holds its own ground against contemporaries of its era in that aspect. The compositions aren’t bad either and while the general tempo is definitely slower than in other titles in the series, I think it fits the game's general vibe and slower gameplay style.

But I also think that much like the rest of the game, it feels really derivative and nothing like you come to expect from the Ys series let alone a Falcom title which even with their calmer tracks has a style unique to the JDK team and the different composers who work in it. There’s this feeling that the team didn’t really wanted to go too crazy with the soundtrack and went for something that would more easily fit the SNES hardware while taking a lot of inspirations from other places, mainly square titles but some tracks here borderline sounds like some stuff you’d find in Quintet games like Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma (which released a year later).

The music really sounds like every single SNES RPG you’ve likely ever played and lacks a bit of that flair or that punch you’d hear from Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura, Koji Kondo, Yasunori Mitsuda or other prominent game composers of that era and as such can come off as less memorable and catchy as the work of these creators. That’s a shame because Ys V soundtrack will eternally stand out as the odd one, the one that’s too basic for the rest of Falcom’s catalog when it really isn’t a bad soundtrack at all or even a mid one, just kind of unremarkable and lacking of that classic Ys flair that’s so characteristic of the series and a soundtrack which doesn’t really stick into your mind after pushing off the power button. Another problem is how often the music switches meaning you rarely ever hear the full track.
And that pretty much sums up Ys V as a videogame, not a terrible or even bad game by any stretch of the imagination but a terribly middling one which doesn’t leave much of an impact and is over before you know it. I’ve complained about the slower pace of the game but really the game is pretty short by itself, it can be completed in about 5h which is less than all the other titles up to that point but these 5h feels kind of endless, sluggish and pretty unrewarding. It’s not really the change of space that’s an issue, after all why not experiment with a slower more atmospheric take on Adol’s adventure but it’s how it’s executed that bothers me.

The game is also way too easy but in a boring kind of way to the point the team had to release an extended release of the game a year later known as “Ys V Expert” which ups the challenge a little bit, make the enemies more reactive, tweak a few things here and there and add an entire optional dungeon. But by that point, in 1996 no less, no one really gave much of a shit about Ys V and it’s not the rise in difficulty that was gonna turn the public opinion on this game around. You’ve likely played other games like Ys V on the same platform, games which are far more polished, creative and unique than Ys V could ever hope to be.

If you really wanted to experience something closer to an evolution of the Ys formula made by the actual creators of Ys, look no further than Quintet Studio and their titular “Heaven and Earth” trilogy especially Terranigma which came the same year as Ys V and even if it stayed relatively obscure is look fondly upon by many people who tried it for being a genuine masterpiece of the Action-RPG genre on the console. With a fun, fast-paced combat system, a superbly well written and well told story with a lot of twists and turns, full of surprises and clear passion put behind it. To me these were the developers worth looking at when you wanted to experience the future of the Ys series.

It seems that Falcom by themselves never quite understood Ys and its appeal when it first released back in 1987, all of their attempts at coming back to it were misguided attempt to fundamentally change what Ys was without trying to evolve the formula to greater height and always taking the series in the wrong direction to fit with current trend. It’s no wonder then that aside from Hudson Soft's phenomenal attempt at reviving the series, people weren’t really confident in Falcom delivering an Ys title that will make them dream of adventure anymore !

Ys III wasn’t Ys it was Zelda II, Ys V wasn’t Ys it was every Squaresoft game under the sun. And with how short, easy, derivative and disappointing the game ended up being for many people, Ys V became the final nail in the coffin for the series which will lay dormant for the next 8 years skipping a whole generation of consoles with Falcom only releasing new remakes and ports of Ys 1&2 as if the franchise was cursed to only thrive through the legacy of these two titles. Even to this day, Ys V has not received a single modern remake aside from the PS2 version which isn’t even canon and Falcom has yet to integrate Adol’s adventure in Xandria into the modern canon (even if they seem to be more and more interested by the prospect.)

What Falcom needed was a renaissance, a new vision, something that will bring the company back into the game ! And all of this will eventually happen at the turn of the millennium ! Next time, we’ll be talking about Ys VI the game which redefined and saved Ys !

Ys VI : A New Hope

After the release of Ys V and the mixed reception that it received, Falcom entered a bit of a creative slump not just when it came to the series but their general output as a company. None of the founding members were left at the company and the Falcom of the mid-90’s and onward was a vastly different studio than it was back then. Aside from releasing the next two games of the Gagharv trilogy which saw great success both in Japan and especially in South Korea, the company just wasn’t able to make new IP’s or even new games for that matter.

This was the start of a long era of Falcom just porting their old classics on newer hardware instead of making new games. During that time however, Falcom launched a lot of recruitment campaigns, boasting how great it was to work at Falcom (it was not, just for the record, there’s a reason literally all of the creative staff left the company and I’m pretty sure that even to this day it’s not a very pleasant work environment). These campaigns managed to bring on board a couple of really talented people notably two persons, one was Makoto Shinkai which we already mentioned in a previous review who did some stunning job animating and directing animated cutscenes for Falcom’s recent releases at the time.

Shinkai will leave the company shortly after the release of the PS2 version of Ys 1&2 to become the famous movie director that we know today but the other big guy Falcom recruited and perhaps the most important one was Toshihiro Kondo. Kondo was, like most of Falcom’s new recruit at the time, a massive fan of Falcom’s early output but he wasn’t just a mere fan, he was THE Falcom fan ! Ever since he was a child, Kondo loved playing RPGs such as Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy and while he has heard about Ys 1&2 through some of his friends talking about it at school, it’s when he picked up Ys III at a friends house that the trajectory of his life changed forever.

After the release of “Legend of Heroes 3 : Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch” which became his favorite game of all time, Kondo who was at university at the time decided to launch a website for Falcom fans to gather, discuss on-going news about the company and sharing tips and tricks for the different games. Kondo got enough of a reputation with his fan website that working at Falcom wasn’t a pipe-dream anymore but a tangible reality and so he applied at Falcom as an accountant. Falcom however knew about his activities online and how he managed his fansite and since he was the only guy at the time who knew anything about the Internet, he was tasked to code websites to promote the different new releases of the company.

But at the same time, the younger staff at Falcom including Kondo were starting to get fed up with just releasing ports of old games and localizing South Korean RPG’s, they wanted more, they were getting ambitious and thus they stopped working on yet another port of Ys III to ask the CEO if they could start working on new games. Masayuki Kato was skeptical about the process, it’s been a while since Falcom hasn’t released a genuinely ambitious banger and Falcom didn’t have any sort of brand recognition anymore so he wasn’t sure any new release would take off. But against all odds, he accepted, splitting the company in two to make a subsidiary entirely dedicated to the development of new games.



First order of business was releasing the first new Falcom IP since 1994 ending up in the release of “Zwei : The Arges Adventure '' in 2001 releasing alongside the latest release of Ys 1&2 which inspired the team to do one crazy thing. It was time to bring Ys back, it was time for Adol to set out for a new adventure, an adventure that could very well be its last if the game couldn’t meet sales potential and proof that people were still interested in the franchise. For Falcom, it was about going big or going home… and they went big !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zcI5-bhVyk

Released for PC in 2003 and in 2005 on the PS2 for the rest of the world (the first time a new entry in the series was released in the west since Ys III all the way back in the 80’s btw), this new entry served both as a continuation of Adol’s Adventure in Ys V (tho chronologically it is now placed after Ys VIII) but also a sort of soft-reboot for the series. The game dev division at Falcom was composed of a small number of employees so you can definitely guess that Ys VI wasn’t going to compete with the rest of the industry. In 2003 and especially in 2005, there were a lot of good or even great JRPG’s on the market, especially of the action variety.

The philosophy of Falcom at the time (and something that has just barely changed ever since) was that they were fully aware they were making cheap games of smaller technical ambition but what they didn’t had in graphical or game design prowess, they were compensating with original and experimental ideas and a fuck lot of generosity even in their smaller less ambitious titles ! And while Ys VI definitely is starting to show its age in some areas, it nonetheless follows that line of logic.

For Ys VI, Falcom decided to built an entirely new engine that will retrospectively be known as the “Ark Engine” in reference to Ys VI subtitle : “The Ark of Napishtim”, an engine they will use for a grand majority of both their Ys and Trails line-up of games until 2012. And with a new engine comes a brand new artstyle, the series abandon its traditional top-down view in favor of a blend of pre-rendered 2D sprites (not unlike those of Donkey Kong Country to make a comparison) and 3D environment with fixed camera angle, a style reminiscent of many games of the mid 90’s such as Grandia or Xenogears.

But a new engine also meant a drastic change in the gameplay department. Bump combat was already a thing of the past the series desperately clinged onto and couldn’t fully transition from in 1995 and even with the release of Ys 1&2 Eternal a year earlier which reboosted interest in Ys and its peculiar mechanics, it was time for change ! Big Changes ! Ys VI is for all intents and purposes an extension of what was done with Ys V.

Adol now swings his sword with an actual attack button and can jump for some good old platforming but contrary to Ys V which had very slow deliberate control putting Adol at a full stop each time he wants to attack, here in Ys VI, Adol rushes to the enemies with a fast 3 hit combo that can sometimes be completed by a different finisher based on which sword you currently have equipped. On top of that, you can do an aerial attack as well as a very effective down trust but also a weird kind of situational plunge attack with a very weird and strict activation process (you need to move, wait, then move and attack at the same time it’s really weird).

Later in your adventure you will be able to find 3 different elemental swords which are going to be your main arsenal for the adventure. Each of them changes your playstyle, the water sword keeps your regular moveset but adds a circular attack at the end of your combo, the flame sword makes your attack stronger at the cost of the combo being slower and the thunder sword allows you to attack faster at the cost of power. On top of that and replacing the cumbersome magic system of Ys V, your sword can unleash a powerful magic attack once their magic gauge is filled up, adding a bit more tool to your already new arsenal.

All of this results in a much more dynamic and fun battle system which captures the fast momentum of the older bump-style game while also adding more complexities to the different enemy encounters in the game who now have a vast array of different behaviors that isn't just “walking randomly on the map, aggroing you and sometimes launching a very easily dodgeable attack”. With the added platforming and the 3rd dimension, the level design is also much more complex and interesting than in the other titles and Ys VI boasts some of the best dungeon and overworld area design the series has seen up to that point which is definitely helped by the setting of this game.

In this new adventure, Adol is wanted by the Romun Empire who chases after him and Dogi as they are chilling at a bar. They’re saved in the nick of time by Terra, one of the pirate bandit girls from Ys V who was following Adol after reconciling herself with her father, a famous pirate by the name of Adoc. Adoc is searching for a treasure that seems to be found on an Island inside of something known as the vortex of Canaan in what could be this universe equivalent of the Bermudan Triangle. Dogi thought that it was crazy to attempt such an expedition as no ship has ever survived the Vortex but Adol is still interested by the process and accepts to cross the Vortex. As they approached the Vortex however, they’re attacked by the Romun empire once again and Adol ends up shipwrecked on the island of Canaan when 2 Elf-Like girls by the name of Isha an Olha find him and bring him to the village of the Redha, the indigenous species native to the island.

At first, Adol isn’t welcomed as the Redha are in some sort of a conflict with humans as some of the castaways built a human settlement near the village which has sparked up conflict between the two villages and created many tensions over ressources and such but as you progress through the came and find a common ground between the two factions, he starts warming up to you ! So you’re off on your adventure, trying to find a way out of the island, find your friends and uncover the mysteries which inhabit it.

Ys VI definitely makes a drastic shift towards a more narratively driven story than its predecessor, whereas the old games will sometimes just have a short intro to contextualize your adventure before immediately sending you off, here the game takes his time to establish the setting, the characters and the overall mystery of the Island. The Island of Canaan by itself is the most complex and thoroughly interesting setting in the entire setting up to that point not only from a gameplay level as the layout of the area is pretty open and let you go pretty much anywhere with the only limit being how much hit can you take from stronger enemies but also a ton of small secrets, puzzles and platforming challenges to participate in which makes the Canaan Island the most fun place to visit in the series this far.



But also in terms of its lore, Ys VI serves as some sort of semi-reboot of the series and pretty much serve the same purpose as “Dawn of Ys” when it comes to fleshing out the universe of the series by finding connections to older titles and re-contextualize certain parts of Adol’s previous adventure with some clever and pretty interesting retcons. In fact, some elements from Ys IV were kept to explain the origins of the two goddesses of Ys and their relationship to the Eldeen but instead of being a race of gods, you discover that the Eldeen was instead a technologically advanced civilization who managed to put their souls inside of artificial bodies made of Emelas, the new super metal the franchise has introduced to explain pretty much everything in the franchise.

During your exploration of the Island, you will meet with Geis, a mercenary in search of his brother Ernst and investigating the titular “Ark of Napishtim” the game story is centered around, I mention him because the guy becomes kind of a rival character to Adol, showing up in a couple of entries after this game. I like Geis, the dude’s cool and he has 3 homonculus fairies showing that Falcom isn’t fully erasing the possibility of revisiting Ys V in the future (and boy are they teasing that Ys V remake…). Overall, I really enjoyed the story in this one, it’s fun, it calls for your sense of wonder and adventures. It doesn’t fail to have a few really cool symbolic moments the likes of Ys 1&2 and I’d say that as far as reimagining the series lore for the modern age goes, this one does plenty of cool stuff with the established continuity while still being an excellent jumping point for newcomers.

But as much as I can praise Ys VI for reviving the franchise and mostly succeeding in the process, Ys VI definitely suffers from “1st game syndrome” at times which makes a lot of the execution of these ideas leaving a lot to be desired. For starters while the game is around the same length as your average Ys title at the time (around 10h I’d say) making it a somewhat short and sweet experience, the game suffers from a lot of padding mostly coming from gameplay decisions which can grind on your nerves over time. I mentioned that Ys VI was perhaps one of the more “free” Ys games to date because of all the exploration you can do and how the game allows you to visit certain areas before you can reasonably go there but the way the game gates your progression is a bit wack at times.

Ys has always put an emphasis on its leveling system, with levels pretty much serving both as a difficulty slider and a way to gate keep progress, except that Ys VI will ask of you to do a lot of grinding much more so than any titles. In fact not being at the appropriate level for an area means you’re going to do 0 damages to enemies and while you could be avoiding them just to reach a chest with a neat piece of equipment or a cool accessory or items earlier on, oftentimes the trouble isn’t really worth the effort which I can say for another annoying mechanic…

Dash Jumping…

Dash Jumping isn’t required to beat the game but if you’re like me and want to explore every nook and cranny of the world, you WILL have to master the ancient technique of Dash Jumping. Dash Jumping is a secret mechanic the game doesn’t actually tell you about and at first when I looked it up online, I thought it was just some weird speedrun tech but nope, it’s an actual mechanic that the developers intended you to interact with. To do a Dash Jump you have to move the stick to the direction you want, wait approximately a second, move the stick again while simultaneously pressing the attack and jump button.
I didn’t lie when I said this looks like some ancient speedrun tech because how is anyone supposed to figure that shit out ! Just mastering the damn technique took me a solid hour of training but then the game expects you to do some insanely precise platforming with it, and when I say precise, I mean, jumping from tiny platform to tiny platform, expecting the game slippery as fuck physics to bend to your will and doing so multiple times in a row.

There is another issue with the general platforming of this game though. I’m a big platforming guy and can handle the shittiest of platforming (I’ve become a master at navigating Deep Jungle in KH1 as a kid after all) but the main issue with platforming in Ys VI is that everytime you fall, you don’t simply fall to your doom and respawn with less health like in most games. Instead you get transported to a lower floor area and have to make the trip back to retry again which almost made me wish I played the PS2 version of the game with savestate (even if it looks uglier). This can make you waste tons of time if you’re not good with 3D platforming in a somewhat isometric view and the game is full of those. It’s a problem that’s common to most entries in the Ark Engine trilogy but at least they provide options for staying in the air longer and make platforming less tedious but here, screw double jumping and say hello to DASH JUMPING.

I will also say that as far as the combat system goes, Ys VI can still feel a little rough. While it’s still definitely more fast-paced and fun than Ys V, you quickly realize that the slow methodical approach to combat of that game isn’t fully gone yet. Enemies are brutal in this game and collisions and hitboxes combined with the traditional absence of invincibility frame in this series means you can get ganged to death by a bunch of smaller ennemies working together to fuck you in the ass ! I wouldn’t mind if the game provided enough tools for crowd control but sadly the closest it gets is the down thrust which deals multiple hits and as a hitbox that reaches wider than intended and well… you can guess how awkward that is to just jump and down trust everywhere to progress.

And don’t expect to rely on magic to save yourself either ! While I think the new magic system is definitely more on-point with the energy of the game than Ys V, I still think the way it’s used leaves a lot to be desired. Each sword can unleash a single big magic attack once their bars are filled up but just one time ! Then it’s back to charging it by killing enemies, heck there’s even a boss midway through the game which has an entire gimmick based on that mechanic and it’s easily the worst boss in the entire Ark Engine trilogy, not so much because it’s a hard boss but because it’s BORING.

Other than that, bosses usually are pretty good, the boss design clearly had a step-up in reactivity and there’s even a few humanoid bosses this time around. The patterns are pretty fun to learn but the main issue comes with the difficulty of them being on average quite easy. Ys VI allows you to equip healing items before entering the boss arena and for the record there’s a grand total of 9 tiers of healing items which is way too overkill, it also makes dungeon exploration a bit smoother with access to the inventory being unlimited. Ys VI, keeps a lot of its older RPG roots but I don’t really think it benefits the experience.

However for those still looking for a challenge, this game was the first game in the series (and the first game in Falcom’s catalog) to introduce various 4 difficulty options ranging from Easy to Nightmare and exclusive to this game is the catastrophe mode which prevents you from healing midway through battle and make every enemy drop less money in general.
Another personal opinion of mine also comes with the music, while I can’t pretend the soundtrack is bad, it’s definitely a bit different that what we’re used with the series, the OST is calmer and more atmospheric, sometimes keeping the high energy octane stuff for bosses and action segments. I don’t dislike it and there’s a few bangers here and there but it’s not the soundtrack I go back to the most imo.

You can feel Ys VI being a transitional episode between two eras of Ys (if we forgot about Ys III and V which were the odd ones of the bunch) and while a lot of things about Ys VI still holds up, I do wish that by the time they had re-released that one, they actually retroactively added a lot of the elements introduced in the later two games (which spoilers are amongst my favorite in the series and I’m really excited to talk about them !).

However the game still retains a lot of charm and soul and that trademark sense of Falcom storytelling they experimented with the Gagharv trilogy slowly creeping its way into their other properties. For a modern gamer today, Ys VI feels like a rough transition but to the people who got to witness the grand return of Adol and his friend on PC and home console, it was pretty much a revolution which somehow manages to stand out amongst the crowd.

Ys VI marked the grand return of both Ys and Falcom in the realms of game development and while Falcom isn’t the prestigious and genre defining company that they used to be in the 80’s, the new team made sure to live up to the studio’s legacy by delivering varied, original and surprisingly charming titles for years to the coming decade and the advent of a certain platform is gonna help Falcom stuck out of the niche and approach the realms of the hidden gems mine.

But for now, Ys is going to take a break from advancing its continuity as the next title in the series will be none other than a remake of one of the least revered game in the franchise up to that point, it’s time to go back to the past, to go back to Felghana !

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

Ys Origins : A Blast from the Past

2006 marked the 20th anniversary of the Ys franchise, since then the series has gone through a lot, sometimes succeeding in living up to the legacy left by the first game and sometimes failing miserably at doing so. Nonetheless, in the minds of many Ys only really exist through the prism of its first 2 original entries, in fact, you could easily say that the only two games in the franchise worthy of the title of “Ys” were the first two games. Not only were these the only games actually set in the land of Ys and its surrounding area of Esteria but Ys II also happened to be “the final chapter” as if out of all of Adol’s Adventure and in spite this one being the first, it was the single most important adventure, the one which defined Ys as a franchise and the one where all things return to in the end.

In the Falcom community there seem to be this common consensus that Trails is the “story and lore” focused franchise while Ys is the “gameplay and action” franchise boiling down Ys as nothing more than just a simple past-time between two big episodes of the Trails series which have more meat to their bones while Ys has this much “rawer” approach to storytelling which doesn’t speak to the common youth of today. Ys stories aren’t worth analyzing because they’re not wordy enough, they’re not deep enough and they’re quite derivative of each other. In fact, the main storyline set by Ys 1 and 2 has been reused countless times throughout the series. Adol crashes on some island, has some adventure involving one or two girls with blue hair and it always ends up with him uncovering the mystery of an ancient civilization which fell to ruin because of the folly of man.

But why ? Why has Falcom tried to recapture the magic of Ys 1 and 2’s story either through re-releases or new games with similar premises if the story in those games were only meant to be a “motivator” for your quest and nothing more ? Well maybe it’s because Ys 1 and 2 in all of their 80’s sensibilities had something to stand out from the crowd and that something was its rich and interesting story as well as its lore ! Back in the first review, I said that Ys 1’s main objective was to make an accessible RPG for newcomers and while it was successfully done through its game mechanics, I also want to believe this was achieved through its storytelling even in the older version which had less memory for text and all that jazz.

In the 80’s most RPG’s would only have maybe like a text scroll to establish the setting and maybe some NPC trying to talk about some prophecies or wtv, Final Fantasy I will try to have more ambitious storytelling with the whole time-traveling which as iconic of a twist this was, it was a rather messy attempt even for the standard of the era. Falcom were different however, as far as Dragon Slayer and Xanadu they wanted to tell stories through the complex medium of video games and integrate that story inside of the game design loop. That’s how you end up with Ys which became the culmination of that philosophy, where by exploring the world, talking to NPC’s, reading the manual and watching the various attempts at cutscenes even in the older versions you would be experiencing a story and a world worth giving a shit about.

In the original Zelda for exemple, everything was very mechanical, there were no towns, only caves full of old men giving cryptic hint and monsters offering you rubies, the wonder of Zelda came mostly from its freeform explorative approach to game design while in comparison Ys was much more restrictive in the areas you explored and in which order you were supposed to explore them.
Ys 1 and 2 told a story, much more developed than those of the era, it had books that you can read and learn about the lore of this world, it had an on-going storyline about some guy stealing silver which culminated in a puzzle to the scale of the entire game and was the key to defeat the final boss, it had iconic characters with arcs some of which returned in the other titles.

Feena and Rheah from their design to the way you speak and interact with them have this aura of mystery surrounding them that makes you want to learn more about their circumstances and how tragic their fate ends up being in the end. It also had cutscenes to introduce the plot of the two half and Lillia fucking tilt her head in glorious 80’s animation and made every 10 year old boy wet their pants at how fucking impressive that was at the time that Lillia became the icon of the series all throughout the 80’s (she even had her own freaking song !!!!).

Everything about the original Ys 1 and 2 were iconic, for today’s standard it might be hard to understand the appeal or the magic of these few elements but combined together and you have a game with some of the most effective storytelling in the medium. It’s so iconic that Ys 1&2 iconography and characters are pretty much the one thing Falcom keeps reusing in all of the series promotional material. It even had an anime, a manga adaptation, an extended Korean remake of the 2nd game (that I wish I could play because it makes me very curious but alas I don’t speak Korean) and even to this very day when you look up at Ys tags on various websites, Feena is the one character to pop up the most in fanarts while you’d think more recent heroines from games which sold much better like Dana would dominate the leaderboard on the waifu wars.

With such cult classic status, it’s only natural that the new team at Falcom wanted to take their piece of the Ys pies by adding their own flavor and their own interpretation of it much like Hudson did in the 90’s when they got the opportunity to work on an original entry for the franchise. This started with “Ys 1&2 Eternal”, the latest version of the game at the time which set out to completely overhaul the script to fit Falcom’s modern standard of storytelling set by the Gagharv trilogy. A bigger emphasis was put on fleshing out the characters and especially fleshing out Adol and Feena relationship (Lillia was always kinda mid and Kondo basically erasing her relevance in the modern canon was the right decision imo) but also make the towns more alive and the world bigger much like they did with Oath in Felghana later down the line.

This was a first step towards (war) the modernization of the classic Ys tale with the new team releasing Ys VI two years later in 2003 which set out to do what Dawn did 10 years ago by creating a new yet familiar story set in a distant land which holds the answer to many of the unanswered mysteries of Ys 1&2 and whether or not you might prefer Hudson’s take or this one, today Ys VI and its story of ancient technologically advanced civilization and magic reality warping metal is now the current canon of the franchise even if we could be regretting that it kind of takes away a lot of the “mystic” of Feena’s and Rheah’s origins. Oath tied Ys III to the wider lore of the franchise and now to solidify the new lore once and for all, Falcom was going to go back to the origins of the franchise, for the first time in over 20 years, Ys was going back to Ys to explore the origins of this legendary tale in a game set 700 years before the event of the first game and that game which will end up as one of the most popular entry in the franchise for a while will be simply known as Ys Origins !
Ys Origins released in 2006 set to re-explore the mythical Origins of Ys, the game takes place roughly after the ancient city of Ys took off into the sky and the demons born from the Black Pearl built a Tower in order to try and reach it. The two Goddesses worried about what might be happening on the surface one day disappeared and thus an investigation team was set on the surface to retrieve them and explore the Demon Tower. Since the game takes place roughly 700 years before Adol’s birth you obviously won’t be playing as him for this adventure (though two different version of him is playable in the game boss rush mode) but rather as 3 different protagonists each taking turns in climbing the wretched tower each with their own gameplay style and differing storylines.

This is the main difference between this game and Oath when it comes to mechanics, since Oath pretty much perfected the Ark style of gameplay this one simply just builds on top of it by proposing different playable characters as its central main gimmick. The only real change from Oath to Origins is the addition of a shop in which you can spend points in order to buy upgrades for your equipment or helpful permanent perks for your character. So let’s go around and take a look at each of these characters, see how they play and analyze their storyline because for once, Origins script actually has a lot more meat to it than previous entries thanks in no small part to not having a mute protagonist as the main lead this time around.

Yunica Tovah is the daughter of Sage Tovah, every citizen of Ys have some affinity for magic but Yunica was born without any magical power which ostracized her from the rest of society and gave her severe anxiety over not being able to live up to her prestigious lineage. However she shared a deep friendship with the Twin Goddesses who pretty much served as close friend and surrogate mother to them and in spite of her inaptitude in wielding magic she still took the pledge to protect the two goddess by becoming a knight and likely lifting up massive amount of weight because this tiny woman sure can wield a big ass ax as her main weapon. When she heard that the goddesses left for the surface, she immediately joined the investigation team to find them and bring them back on the floating island to fulfill her promise to the two of them.

Yunica is the closest this game gets from classic Adol gameplay, she pretty much has almost all of the same moveset as Adol and her wielding an ax doesn’t seem to affect her swinging speed whatsoever, Yunica doesn’t have many options to deal with enemies at a distance and only gets a projectile near the end of the game with the trade-off being that she has to switch from using her ax to using a flaming greatsword making her damage output bigger but slowing down her movement significantly, this stance only slightly being compensated by being able to finally shoot projectiles.

Yunica is a character which doesn’t really stray away too far from classic Ys gameplay, even her two additional elemental magic power are a circular wind attack vaguely similar to the ones found in Oath, the fire spell we mentioned works like the fire sword in Napishtim and only her thunder spell is slightly different being a slam on the ground which create a vertical shockwave in front of her. However I still had fun playing as her because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and that’s how Yunica feels like as far as gameplay goes but what about her storyline ?


As you climb Darm’s Tower, Yunica comes to question her own abilities and even her reasons for going into the tower in the first place. She experiences self doubt and there’s some really touching moment where she wonders if she’s even fit to be a knight or be the goddesses protector when everyone around her is seemingly more capable than her at dealing with this situation. You can feel that Yunica’s reason for getting up the tower is mostly a personal one, it’s a reason for her to confront her fear and insecurities as well as reinforce her devotion to her cause ! I personally really love Yunica, I feel she’s pretty underrated as far as Ys heroine goes and it’s a shame she’s not talked about that much in the wider Falcom community as the only character equal to her in my mind is Estelle from Trails in the Sky and that’s high praise coming from me.

However, I do understand why most people don’t really feel for Yunica that much, it’s a classic journey of self discovery with the tower being a metaphor for overcoming a big obstacle in her life, it’s the classic shonen anime story of a character starting weak and full of insecurities but through trials and tribulation rise up from her condition to become a badass. It’s the type of story that works well in the context of an RPG or even a videogame because as much as you the player get stronger and become better at the game so does Yunica in her story, it’s a very easy way to have a bit of ludo-narrative in the game without thinking too much. But it’s also a story you’ve likely seen somewhere else, it’s still effective, it’s still well executed but it isn’t exactly novel either and whether you’ll find yourself inspired by Yunica or just think of it as just another story in the pile is really up to you.

The bigger issue with Yunica’s story other than its lack of originality is just that it’s super disconnected from the rest of the game for reasons we’ll get into when discussing the other two characters which happen to have a deeper relationship and to one another as far as the wider story goes. Yunica’s story just kinda feel isolated and probably the least canon or least worth experiencing if you’re here to mainly experience the story of the game (even if it’s not likely the reason why you’re playing an Ys game in the first place, but this one is kind of an exception to the rule and also deeply tied to the lore of the franchise). Combine that with her play style being really similar to Adol and the redundancy and irrelevance of the character becomes quite hard to ignore as much as it pains me to say this because Yunica is a pretty cool gal all things considered and my second favorite character to play as in the game.

But enough about women wielding axes, it’s time to talk about the man, the myth, the legend, mister Sigma Male incarnate himself Hugo Fact. Hugo is a descendent of the house of Fact, a prestigious family of mages which excels in all things magical and accept nothing less than perfection when it comes to their teaching. Each member of the Fact family is molded from birth to always strive to be better than everyone else even sacrificing your humanity if it means achieving greater power. As such Hugo is the polar opposite of Yunica, he’s confident to a fault, cocky, ambitious, abrasive, egotistical, he thinks of himself as better, smarter, stronger and superior to everyone else and he’s also the CEO of misogyny (seriously this guy level of women disrespect is OFF THE CHART). Heck, the guy really hasn’t any personal reason to join the investigation, he doesn’t do it out of moral obligation and he couldn’t care less about the well-being of the two goddesses which he has some r/atheism opinion about (despite them literally existing within the canon). The reason he decided to climb the tower was because he was given a mission to find and kill a man who happens to be on the surface on behalf of his father and he just sees this mission as just another fun way to pass the time and flex his skills.
And you will be flexing a lot because Hugo Fact is fucking BROKEN AS SHIT. Unlike Yunica, Hugo plays very differently from your typical Ys game. His gameplay mostly focus on shooting projectiles than dealing with enemies with close combat, it makes the gameplay of the game feel closer to that of a shmup than that of a typical action RPG, and by the end of his run you start to feel like someone who just got an absurdly good pool of power ups with the most perfect synergies in the Binding of Isaac.Instead of attacking with a regular weapon, Hugo has two orbiting artifacts known as the Eyes of Fact which constantly shoot little pellets as long as you keep mashing that attack button. To compensate with the absurd advantages of shooting a shit load of projectile at an incredibly fast rate, Hugo has to stop in his tracks whenever he’s shooting which makes it harder to dodge upcoming attacks, assuming the enemies would even get the luxury of counter attacking you (and even then, his lunge attack is a big fuck you thunder with a wider range and which even debuffs any enemies it touches like wow !).

And his three spells you obtain throughout the course of the game are nothing to shy on about either : His wind spell produce a shield around him which slows down his descend to clear huge gaps but most importantly can tank one or multiple hits before breaking depending on whether you charged it or not and even grants you the power of bump combat in case you missed that shit since 1993 ! His thunder spell are remote bombs which when fully charged deal so much fucking damage it kills pretty much any ennemies in one hit even when you’re underleveled, the charge time isn’t even that long actually so you can pretty melt freaking bosses faster than climate change melts the artics. And lastly his fire spell produce two orbiting fire orbs dealing damage around hugo at a really hit rate and when charged can even launch two big fuck you lasers. Add to this the fact that his boost mode doubles his fire rate by adding a second pair of Eyes and you have a recipe for disaster.

Look as much as I can see the fun in going “random bullshit go” and “Press X to win” type of gameplay, I feel Hugo is a bit fucking overkill in that department, you’re literally a freaking unstoppable god, even on higher difficulties Hugo’s run is a freaking walk in the park to the point that I found his gameplay to be mostly boring rather than fun. When the game presents to you any form of challenge it kinda goes against the purposes of an action rpg where you have to properly use your toolset to handle different situation and maxing your combat efficiency, here everything usually die so fast and your bonus gauge make you so strong and tanky that the gameplay becomes a formality and you really shouldn’t be feeling that when playing an Ys game. It’s one thing to make you feel powerful through the gameplay, but simply making you broken beyond belief isn’t really gonna cut it buster.

To compensate for his relatively lackluster gameplay, Hugo’s story is actually pretty damn good, I think I started to got a knack for absolutely chaotic protagonist which are the embodiment of problematic, an entire life-time of being raised on anime and manga where protagonist archetypes aren’t the most varied will do that to you but Hugo’s story feel like you’re playing as that rival character who succumbs to darkness before eventually getting his shit together and help the heroes. Hugo’s interaction with the rest of the cast whether they’re allies or foes are so thoroughly entertaining thanks to his snarky ass behavior and some well delivered punchline which will either make you scream “yoooo” or will make you punch his fucking face and I think it makes for some really interesting dynamics. He even has some sort of a will-they won’t-they romance with one of the antagonists and it’s pretty fun and strangely wholesome to see that relationship evolve and sadly end in tragedy…
Because the path to power comes with many sacrifices mostly of your own humanity, whereas Yunica’s quest is all about overcoming her shortcomings, Hugo’s quest is to learn how to empathize with other people again and breaking from the conditioning left by his father and become his own man free from the ambitions of the house of Fact. As you progress through the game Hugo loses himself more and more getting drunk on all the power he’s been accumulating until he realizes that he’s turning into more of a demon than the demons he’s fighting. Hugo’s story is really damn cool, if only to see a second more unique perspective on the different story segment covered in Yunica’s route but I have two issues with it imo.

One and this is linked to Yunica, I do think that both characters should’ve had more of a confrontation which is the entire purpose of a dual narrative like this. But sadly, it’s never the case, when you’re playing as Hugo, Yunica is a tertiary character at best and vice-versa and instead of their arc paralleling each other, they’re treated as just separate interpretations of the same events. And while I guess that works for the main series where the story is based on Adol’s diaries, here the story is just “how they remember it” and none of the two tales are even that canon.

My other problem with Hugo’s campaign is how it ends. I don’t think giving a last minute redemption arc to the guy was the best course of action. Everything in Hugo’s route leads me to believe the initial plan for his character was to completely lose himself to the power of his demon essence and become Dark Fact, the antagonist of the first game and with this game being a prequel it only makes sense that this was a possibility. Heck even one of his leitmotiv shares some similarities to Dark Fact’s theme so what was all that bait and switch all about. I would’ve absolutely pog out of my damn mind if they turned Hugo into Dark Fact and make him some sort of tragic victim of his own hubris as he was close to regaining his humanity and break from his father’s will, it would’ve make for quite the amazing tie to the first game in my opinion.

If you consider the wider story however it’s even messier. Because as cool and kino Hugo’s entire arc in this game is and it’s still a relatively ok conclusion in the end, making the entire point of Hugo’s story about breaking the traditional thirst for power of the house of Fact only for his direct descendent 700 years down the line to just undo all of his ancestor’s effort and just be a generic Dark Lord McDoucheBag is pretty freaking lame. Especially since now it leaves Dark Fact as this iconic villain but one which has no real layers to him, I mean his name is literally Dark Fact (not Sieg like in Dawn) probably because his parents fucking hated him or something and since the OVA’s aren’t canon, he doesn’t have the tragic villain schtick of that version of his story either. Dark Fact will forever remain dark and I do think it’s a fact that this entire thing is just a huge missed opportunity that could’ve given both Hugo and the main antagonist of Ys 1 a lot more layers even if retrospectively (à la Jack Garland from FF Strangers of Paradise).

But while Hugo doesn’t have much parallel to Yunica within the story, he has with the man he came to kill in the first place : Claw which will reveal to Hugo that the House of Fact definitely needs counseling more than any sage family on this goddamn island. Once you finish the story of both Yunica and Hugo, the surprise plot twist of the game is that a third playable character unlocks and this time it’s the actual main canon storyline of the game which ties deeper into the worldbuilding, lore and continuity with Ys 1&2.
The mysterious Claw is a recurring antagonist you fight throughout the course of Yunica and Hugo’s campaign but definitely has more ties to Hugo than he does Yunica (who sure as hell is starting to feel like a filler character the more lines I type). He used to be a man but chose the path of becoming a demon joining the Darklings a mysterious organization that you may or may have not heard of from a little game known as Ys VI but are also for the most part the generals of Darm from Ys II which is pretty neat. Now Claw’s story is perhaps the best part of this entire anthology story and there’s so many cool things they do with him and his connections to the goddess, specifically Rheah, who gets much more development in this game than she ever did originally. It’s also the only story chapter with a unique intro featuring our two favorite goddesses explaining why they’ve descended upon the surface in the first place.

Gameplay wise, Claw is pretty much a glass cannon, he hits hard but also takes a lot more of a beating. To compensate for his demonic power somehow giving him glass bones syndrome, he’s probably the most fast and agile character of the three in fact very early on his first spell is literally a dash that gives him a bit of invincibility and allows you to quickly get out of tough situations. In fact because he is the third playable character you’re probably familiar with the overall structure and level design of the game by now and the dash makes clearing areas much faster so Claws campaign is about half as short as the other two. But outside of his dash spell, the other two leaves kind of a lot to be desired : The Thunder spell is a powerful thunder punch which locks you into place and has a miserably small hitbox and the fire spell is just a tornado jump and let’s just that in a game where it’s impossible to juggle enemies into the air, it’s only situationally useful in terms of combat.

Claw is probably the character I like to play as the most out of all 3 characters mostly because dashing through the corridors of the Darm tower at Super speed dealing with enemies along the way brings that constant exhilarating sense of motion which has become titular of the Ys series core identity. And even tho the rest of his toolkit leaves a lot to be desired, I was more than satisfied with his base moveset as well as his boost mode which fully turns him into a demon dealing a truck load of damage but making you even more prone to ass-beating, an interesting risk vs reward mechanic in my opinion.

But the icing on the cake for me is definitely the story of Claw, if you played Hugo’s campaign there isn’t any mystery towards his identity as it is revealed right from the onset that he is Hugo’s brother who mysteriously disappeared after the demon invasion on Ys a couple of years before the events of the game. What led this man to shun his previous identity, his weapon and the pledge he gave to the goddess to join the demons in their relentless assault against the city of Ys ? And how does his story tie to the wider lore of the franchise up to that point ?

Well that’s for you to discover, I think Toal is perhaps one of the only story worth experiencing blind in this game especially if you’re familiar with the original two titles as its doing some pretty interesting thing with the continuity and tying up what you’re doing to stuff Adol will eventually interact with in the future game. The ending of that route is the type of ending to give a complete boomer who got hooked on playing Ys as a kid a complete full hard-on at how everything comes back together in the end and even though I’m not a boomer who played these games as a kid (I only discovered them in 2022), the ending of that route and the game as a whole gave so many fucking chills god I love Ys OG setting.
As you can probably guess by now, I think Ys Origins is one of the few Ys games with a remarkably well told and interesting story thanks in no small part to its tie to the original two games to which I have a lot of appreciation for especially its lore. The game often throws retro-active reference to the first two games either through its story moments, puzzles or even the items you come across which are artifacts Adol eventually uses himself in Ys 1&2 which just has a nice bit of continuity which reminded me a lot of what Dawn of Ys did. But whereas Dawn, as awesome as it was, could seem like fanfiction in the way it retcons a lot of stuff into its own plot, here the team at Falcom did a valiant effort to respect the sanctity and the mystic of the original game essence.

So many times prequel mostly exist to ruin the magic of the original title of which they’re supposed to pay homage to but not Ys Origins, Ys Origins is a fantastic companion piece to Ys 1&2, you could imagine they would’ve shoved more of the modern canon stuff into the main storyline but I’m glad they didn’t push it too hard especially if some people are just interested in these games. While the side-cast is kinda there for the ride with not many of them standing out, Feena and Rheah got some much needed amount of extra characterization and background added to them and It’s done in a way which only reinforced my love for these iconic characters rather than ruining them with pointless details or some stupidly subversive plot twist like it’s often the case in way too many productions. I should give a special shoutout to Rheah in particular who didn’t really have much as far as character goes in the original 2 games but here got a lot more presence in the narrative and even a pretty cute romance story with Claw which was surprising to see.

Setting the entire story inside of Darm’s Tower might probably sound like a bad idea as far as visual variety goes especially in a series which thrived on exploring varied and mysterious environments but I found that they did a really solid job reimagining one of the most iconic location in the series for the modern age. Which makes me realize that in all of my fanboyism, I forgot to talk about the overall level design of the game as well as the different bosses you confront throughout your ascension of the Darm Tower.

In my Oath in Felghana review, I’ve mentioned that one of the unfortunate side-effects of basing the game on a game which had a more rigid level-based structure kinda took away from the feeling of adventure and freedom that the previous game offered ! However, I’ve also said that such a level design had its place in the Ark Engine system which had more of an arcade vibe with the combo meters and the general faster flow of the game and that it wasn’t bad as much as it was restrictive. Well Ys Origins kinda falls right into those same trappings, diving head straight into them like an olympic swimmer. The game does have an upgrade system giving you new abilities and tool for your move set but unlike Oath in which it gave the world a sort of Metroidvania feel to it as it was often advised to go back to old areas to get items and complete side quest here in Ys Origins, these new abilities only serves as keys to open locks in the areas you got them with very little incentive to actually go back to previous areas.

Some people might think that it’s a good thing actually as it doesn’t needlessly waste your time with pointless detour but some people might also miss the pleasure of exploration the franchise is known for and thus while I don’t think it’s a flaw of the game, I could potentially understand how divisive this could be. But, on the other hand, Ys Origins was the most popular title series for a reason and its level design is perhaps the best in the entire series.
You may think that an entire game set in one place will eventually become boring but thankfully, this is a vastly overhauled version of the Tower from Ys 1&2 with each floor serving as its own dungeon so to speak complete with unique combat encounters, puzzles, platforming challenges, level design gimmick and themes to each of the 7 floors which compose your ascension of the wretched tower ! And I think they did a more than fantastic job with each of them in my opinion. Unlike Oath which felt the need to incorporate a lot of frankly questionable 2.5D sections to parallel the original Ys III, here the level designers took their stick out of their asses and made the most of the game 3D nature and the verticality that comes with setting your game inside a goddamn tower.

While none of the areas in the game reaches the same heights as Valestein Castle from Oath in my opinion, I think the level design here is a lot more consistent and a lot more creative with even some neat reinterpretation of Ys 1 plot beat like the demon corridor or the hall of mirror the later of which definitely is one of the highlights of the game in terms of set pieces. There’s a deeper sense of cinematography and flow to each dungeon and even if they all share some similar assets to keep the visuals consistent, the game always keep surprising us with some neat obstacles, also falling in this game rarely end up in you having to reclimb an entire area like in Ys VI or Oath to a lesser extend, making platformer that much more smoother in my opinion.

The only area I’m not too big on is the big desert area in the middle because while “Silent Sands” is a banger track I do think that the area by itself far overstays its welcome which isn’t helped by this being the area with most plot shit and backtracking happening slowing the game pace to a crawl for the duration of the floor especially in between two relatively good areas (one of which is an actual fun water level, I know crazy). Another issue that came to my attention while I was playing the game is that in the Swamp floor, the game stop having a natural level curve, the game isn’t super reliant on grinding as long as you don’t avoid enemies but once you reach the Mantis I always happened to be underleveled and doing piss damage to it and had to two a second run of the area to grind a bit, an unfortunate oversight which doesn’t ruin the game for me but is worth noting.

So the general level design is excellent and perhaps some of the best Falcom has ever put out but how about the bosses, well…

THEY’RE FREAKING AWESOME

Ys Origins easily has the best selection of bosses in the entire series only rivaled by Dawn of Ys in my opinion. They really nailed the balance this time between not having too long or annoying patterns while still giving the player the freedom to fight them on equal footing. The only “bad” boss is the plant in the desert area (yeah this area again… told you it was the black spot of the game) and maybe the final boss of Hugo and Yunica’s route for being way too damn easy but even then, they far outclass the selection of bosses seen in previous titles.

And I also think that’s quite amazing that each bosses you fight in this are for the most part reimagining of the ones from Ys 1&2 with even some continuity between how they look there and how they’ll eventually look in those games (like the big zombie head from II but this time it’s a big fire giant that’s not a putrefied corpse at all until you fuck his shit up).
On top of being really mechanically solid, the bosses this time around are also quite spectacular, much more than what Falcom is usually willing to do on their limited budget. The Centipede fight (perhaps THE most iconic boss of the game) is a great example of this, you might even confuse it for an Ys Origins original because of how lame its original incarnation was but here it’s such a freaking amazing set piece.

Your character enters the room and the Centipede is hiding in the wall then fucking boom it comes out and the arena is this Crash Bandicoot style circular arena and you have on top of the Centipede to break all of its individual parts or trying to get him from the ground with your thunder attack while dodging a million projectile which gets increasingly more and more overwhelming as the fight progresses. It’s so fucking kino and most of the big bosses in this game operates on the same logic like the Mantis which is this really cool boss which changes the game camera angle as he jumps and fucks around summoning a thousand minions. Suffice to say that the bosses in this game are not only super cool to figure out as boss fights but also freaking cool as just spectacle bosses in general. Like I said, while there’s one or two bosses that are weaker than others, most of them are actually quite excellent and superbly reimagine mechanics of the first game in the Ark Engine.

But the game doesn’t just have big bosses, it also has a lot of smaller bosses mostly against human opponents. I feel like Falcom saw the generally positive reception people had on the 2 Chester Fights in Oath in Felghana and wanted to capitalize on the hype it created. Mechanically speaking, I’d say that these are some of the most interesting bosses, mostly because you’re pretty much on equal footing with them and they feel less “Mario Bossy” if that makes sense ? Much like you they don’t have invincibility frames and can be hurt at any time, they have a burst mode and spells of their own, some of them are actually pretty damn challenging.

However, while I commend the effort, none of them reaches the climatic epicness of Chester 2 in terms of complexity or just raw hype because a lot of those boss fights are against pretty random and forgettable side-characters, I wish they kept the human bosses solely for rival fights between the three characters only, there’s a huge missed opportunity there for some pretty cool stuff but it’s not the main bulk of these human fights (you don’t get a single fight against Yunica like wow she’s so left out that’s crazy…).

So that’s it right ? We pretty much found the perfect Ys game? Excellent level design, excellent bosses, excellent variety in gameplay thanks to different playable characters and a deep respect for the series legacy that can be felt all throughout the work (did I also mention the game has great music too ?? I mean at this point it’s kinda redundant since they’ve been chaining home runs on that front for quite some time and I’m not really good at explaining why music is good, call my man MB for that, I’m sure he can cook up a better video essay on the subject than me !). So what’s the catch ?

Well, I think it’s time to address the big elephant in the room, which is this game's strange structure and how it affects its pacing. Because for how much good content there is there and even with the different characters switching up the gameplay…

You still have to play the game 3 separate times in order to get a full grasp on the story, and witnessing its true ending and to me that’s a big fucking issue !
See you don’t actually switch up characters, those are essentially 3 different routes much like Resident Evil with its Leon A, Clair B, Tofu Guy bullshit. And look, on one hand, can I really complain about the repeated playthroughs ? One of my favorite games of all time is Mega Man X4 which is the first time in the series that you can either play as X or Zero and in order to experience the full game, you essentially have to play it two times. It’s the same stages, mostly the same bosses but instead of playing as a guy who shoots lemons, you play as the hottest laser sword wielding robot the world has ever seen and he plays like a charm.

So technically speaking, I don’t fundamentally have an issue with but many people within the community do, if there’s one thing that Origins is unanimously criticized for is the 3 required playthroughs to reach the true ending, it was such a massive complain that on PC and on PC only, you only have to do 2 of the 3 routes and I mean by that point, you might as well do the third one amirite ?

But see, the main difference between MMX4, Resident Evil 2 and this game is the time commitment. Oath in Felghana and pretty much any Ys game up to that point except III an V last for about 10 to 12h and even if Falcom and their fans might disagree, this is the ideal length for an Ys game. Just a short, intense 10h adventure to occupy an afternoon and that’s what makes them so compelling and replayable because you can put it down and come back to it later on higher difficulty if you feel like killing some times. They might have a decent enough story to get interested in or at least an interesting narration to motivate yourself to keep going but once you experienced everything the game has to offer once, it’s not gonna change the second time through for your pretty eyes ! And it’s not a “change in perspective” or a slightly different gameplay that’s gonna change your mind about it.

And that 10 to 12h time commitment is alright for a single game… but what if I told you that it was also the average length of one route of this game ! And that’s when you slowly start to realize… oh shit really ? Look, I’m definitely making a mountain out of a molehill, but the reason why I love Oath so much is that it’s a one and done deal, all banger no filler game, but here it’s a bit more difficult to defend that position. A single run of RE2 will last you maybe 6 to 7h, a single run of MMX4 will last you like 4 to 5h and that game also doesn’t have like a huge amount of dialogues you have to sit through which interrupts the flow of the game.

And look as much as I’ve praised the story so far and it’s cool to see different perspectives, the main structure of it all stays the same ! You go through the same obstacles, the desert area is a slog for all characters with a shit load of cutscenes and dialogue slowing it down to a crawl, the same 2nd run of the swamp to get properly leveled for the mantis boss. All of them have to have a talk with Yunica’s ghost dad for some goddamn reasons when the dude only has any sort of relevance in her route. You may say that you could just play one of the routes and leave the rest for later but then you won’t be experiencing the full story which I believe is worth a damn this time around even though one is essentially filler (sorry Yunica…). I still think the actual content is good mind you, but it’s an odd-case of having so little of it that they have to spread it thin to make the most of it, I would’ve liked just a tad bit more variety in the level design and structure to accommodate to each character skills and arc to not make the entire process as redundant but hey, game is still fun in the end but I can definitely see how playing the same game 3 times would be a deal breaker to some people.
Asides from that and a couple of smaller complaint, I do think that Ys Origins deserves the cult status that it has today, it’s a fantastic companion piece to the original game that will greatly please fans of the original game without losing the initial magic of the duology and it’s also a fantastic entry point for anyone wanting to get into the series and who knows maybe the ending will make some who were more reluctant to try out the original two games as well as the rest of the franchise.

The New Team at Falcom has succeeded in creating a modern cult classic which many people remember as fondly as the original two games, adding to its legacy and ending the Ark Engine trilogy on a bang. The entire project just oozes from the passion of its developers composed mostly of older fans of Falcom finally getting the chance to finally have their piece of the puzzle and I think that Ys couldn’t dream of a better game to pay homage to its 20 years of legacy.

But all good things must come to an end and the developers weren’t going to keep improving on the formula, after all they already perfected it and as much as I enjoy the Ark Engine games, the series needs to move forward and diversify itself. Even if it was a pretty short lived but intense era, next time, we’re properly continuing Adol’s adventure and this adventure is about to be a party (system !) !

Ys Seven : The Odd Duck

During the late 2000’s and early 2010’s Falcom pretty much found a new home with the PSP, it was the perfect niche to set in and be the small but surprising developer people were following out of cult following rather than because they broke new ground. And while we’ll be getting that era of Falcom a bit later over here in the west (mostly through word of mouth and the success of the Cold Steel titles) in Japan, Falcom was still going strong releasing new games and experimenting a lot with them.

Ys will be taking a bit of a backseat in the two years following Ys Origins release, most likely to try and come up with a way to bring Ys to new heights and shake the formula of the franchise so as to not make it redundant. With Felghana and Origins, it was clear to many that Ys had found what is essentially its best formula yet but after Origins already tried to spice things up with additional character to play and a bigger emphasis on lore, worldbuilding and narration, the Ark System was pretty much perfected and Falcom was ready to move on from it as to not make the series redundant.

Ys Seven released in 2009 was in fact the first game since Ys VI in 2006 to actually propel the story of Adol forward in time instead of going back in time and explore other unexplored parts of Adol’s life and in fact it would be the last until Ys IX in 2019 ! But Ys Seven was a big step for Ys for two other reasons, first of all it’s the first fully 3D Ys games ! While the series has dabbled in 3D in the past with the Ark Engine, here the entire game is in 3D, 3D Towns, 3D characters, 3D enemies, 3D environments !

This does give the game a significant boost when it comes to its presentation in my opinion, of course it’s still a dinky ass looking PSP game made on a sandwich budget but for once I can commend the general artstyle of the game hard-carrying the entire package. The game is colorful and full of life and the region of Altago is surprisingly pretty to look at and really varied in its environments taking place in this world equivalent to North Africa, there’s a lot of different locales and inspirations from the fauna and floras of the African continent as a whole from rocky mountainous mountains to huge plains and savannah and I personally just enjoy how much everything pops ! The game has some pretty stunning looking environments at times (but I mean, I like low poly games and old games in general so it doesn’t bother me, just throw pretty colors at me and I’m game !) and even the character models are pretty cool looking, I especially like Adol’s design in Ys Seven, it’s easily my favorite Adol design in the series and I think the scarf really does add a lot to his character.

But the other big change about Ys Seven is the gameplay system which is just so much more than a simple gameplay change but also a change in game design philosophy and narrative interpretation of Adol’s character because for the first time Adol wasn’t going to explore the land of Altago alone but alongside a couple of other characters tagging along the line. As expected it’s a change that was received quite coldly at first and in fact still divides the fandom to this very day much like how some people think that bump combat was the core identity of the series and they should’ve kept it and experimented on it.

See, the entire meta-narrative of the franchise is that we follow Adol on his journey through an interpretation of him rather than an actual person and every game design decision made for the series up to that point actually matched that philosophy.
Personally and even if I got used to it after 4 games, I still feel iffy about the party system not just mechanically speaking but also in terms of consistency and just overall “vibe” so to speak. Adol in the previous game was a mute protagonist and he still is to some degree in the modern titles which gives him dialogue option even if giving dialogue option to a mute character has never been a substitute for proper characterization in my opinion. In fact most of his characterization (outside of the two oddball titles that were Mask and III) was done mostly through the prism of the gameplay and overall presentation of the game !

As early as Ys 1, Adol is presented as a brave adventurer thirsty for freedom and curious about all things. The manual tells you how you’re looking at him through the different travel diaries he left throughout his lifetime until he died at the age of 63 while trying to reach the North Pole which at least set like a “plan” for Adol’s adventure. As such Ys 1 was all about imitating that flow and over the years, the series has had the reputation of just being a faster take on Zelda. Adol in all the previous games is represented as this absolute unstoppable unit of man ready to storm a castle and rush through its corridors, jumping and slashing his way to the tune of death metal ! Adol was a one-man-unit, he was the man of the situation and even if he met a lot of people along the way like his trusted companion Dogi most of his most notable feats were done through his hand alone.

There’s no reason to imagine that Adol would travel the world with a party of people, it’ll just slow him down and really if Adol isn’t capable of doing all the cool shit he can usually pull off on his own, is he still as awesome of a character as he used to be ? Of course, Adol isn’t a loner but he’s first and foremost a machine built for exploring ancient ruins and uncovering secrets, it’s hard to imagine him being the main character of a party where he’ll just be the main swordsman dealing most of the DPS and doing most of the leg work. Also due to his nature as a mute protagonist which was only previously characterized by his action, he is the perfect narrative vessel for projecting your own fantasy of being a cool adventurer !

And that’s to me the core of the issue, because by being part of a party of characters that means that Adol need to transform and become more of an actual character, he needs not to be an avatar, nor an idealized representation of his adventure where he may or may not over-exaggerate certain points, he needs to be a proper human being. And that’s where the party system game to me falls a bit flat when it comes to Adol because he now falls in all the trappings of the “mute protagonist” people like to complain about.

Because he is a mute protagonist with only a couple of dialogue choices that means that his arc is going to be by default very flat and his interactions with the rest of his crewmates are going to be flatter too with no meaningful character conflicts between him and the rest of his crewmate who are going to either worship him like a god or just have a slight aversion to him that’s gonna be solved in no time by Adol doing something cool. The reason mute protagonists are often frowned upon outside of the lack of direct characterization through text is also because they don’t really add much to the overall dynamic of the cast and mostly serve to gas up the players. When it comes to video games, I don’t think you want to be told to be awesome, you want to feel awesome ! You can tell a lot about a mute character through the things unique to the medium of video games and that’s what a lot of older Ys titles did but the modern discourse surrounding mute protagonists changed because the purpose and how they are integrated changed and not always for the best in my opinion.

However, I’m also not entirely against the party system or the idea of Ys games being about a party of characters rather than a single man unit and I think I understand why this change was made in the end. Adol is a guy with a sword and he’ll always be a guy with a sword so to spice things up, adding new characters with different playstyle isn’t really a bad idea and Origins already experimented with the idea of alternate characters so it’s just in the natural continuity of what that game did. On the other hand, JRPG and Action-RPG as a genre has evolved and even the Ys franchise has evolved since the 80’s and that means that now the franchise is on hardware powerful enough to display more text and create deeper more fully structured stories instead of just telling a story through the prism of gameplay alone.

So now, the Ys franchise is trying to appeal more to the wider JRPG crowds which are all used to big adventures where your main characters are joined by a variety of party members each with their own desire, dreams and goals which oftentimes guides the story of the game more than said main protagonist. Heck the Ys franchise was already starting to get deeper more involved story with Ys Origins where the story was more than just a pretext to climb a big tower and was a big part of my and many people appreciation of that game. With this decision, Falcom tried to tie the Ys franchise deeper to the JRPG genre as a whole, not trying to live in the shadow of Zelda or other big franchises for too long and thus these changes while controversial I felt were necessary to make Ys standout a bit more in an highly competitive market. Some people will say that the series has lost its identity since that change but so did many people who thought the same when bump combat wasn’t a thing anymore.

With that bit of ranting out of the way, how does Ys Seven fair up with these changes in mind, well for that we’ll first have to talk about how the Party System even works mechanically speaking. On a surface level, Ys Seven is still your classic Ys game, the combat is fast and frantic with an exciting sense of flow to it. Each blow and attack comes out quick with very little lag and I feel that at least for this game, it’s one of the “faster” feeling games in the franchise. Unfortunately despite the game being fully 3D this time around, the game has removed the option to jump, likely a response to many people complaining about platforming in the Ark Engine titles (skill issues imo). Therefore the game definitely has more of an hack’n’slash Diablo like feel to it which is completed by the combat now adding skills on top of your regular combos.

Instead of switching to different types of magic adding to your base moveset, here Adol and his teammates can learn a variety of skills they can attribute to 4 skill slots, each of these skills cost SP which can be regained by attacking or blocking enemies. You can also charge your regular attacks to deal a more powerful strike which does more damage but also gives you more SP. On top of all of this there’s also another meter on the right which fills up with attack and guarding, once full you can unleash an EX-Skill which is essentially a big super attack which deals tons of damage at the cost of your entire EX-Bar. It’s a system which on surface isn’t too dissimilar to other action RPG’s you might’ve played such as the Tales Of Series with the only difference here compared to that franchise is that everything happens in real time on the field rather than taking you to a separate battle arena each time you encounter a monster. Enemies now also have a stunt meter on top of their health, most regular enemies will die shortly before reaching that point but bosses won’t and once that meter is full they’ll be vulnerable to attack for a short time while being completely stunt, another system we’ve seen far too often in post 2010’s JRPG if I’m being honest.
And this is where the different party members come into play, during regular gameplay, 3 party members can be active on the field, and different party members deal different types of damage : Slash, Strikes and Pierce. Slashers are fast attackers which deals moderate damage and mostly use swords as their main means of attacking (it’s the main damage type of Adol), Strikers are heavy hitters which does a lot of damage but are very slow, Piercers are mostly ranged attackers which attacks from a distance by shooting projectiles (in later games, some non-projectile based characters are added and they’re just super-fast fencers which deals low damage). The main reason why you’d want to switch between party members however is because certain enemies are weak to certain types of attack and thus switching between them becomes essential to claiming victory over some of the tougher enemies.

Overall, Ys Seven version of this system is actually quite decent but a lot of balancing and gameplay issues kinda sours the fun of the system and definitely shows a severe case of “first game syndrome”. For starters, while Adol is still pretty fun to use, I found a lot of the additional characters to be a bit lacking in the fun department. Heavy characters are too slow for me to consider using them for too long and ranged attackers don’t actually have combo and unleash projectile not unlike Hugo from Origins and thus I didn’t find them that exciting to use in the long run. Also the way the game makes characters available is a bit weird, during the first half only Adol, Dogi and Aisha are available with some guest characters joining for the duration of their attributed dungeon before leaving your party. Some of these playable characters join your party permanently in the second half, but by that point your main party is so stacked that there’s no real incentive to use the other characters (keep that in mind, I’m gonna quizz you later) especially when some of them serve similar roles as your main three. I’ve mainly stick to an Adol only playthrough with the only other character other I found fun to use being Geis (a character from Ys VI making its grand return here as a playable character) so let’s just say that the rest of my party was lacking behind in stats and skills since updating them cost a lot of resources (again, keep that in mind).

The characters in question also aren’t the most interesting ones from a storytelling perspective. I found the team of characters in Ys Seven to be thoroughly unmemorable outside of Dogi, Aisha and Geis (two of which are returning characters with long-established roles in the series). Most of them are just random tribesmen associated with the different temples you visit throughout the game and they don’t really stand out more than that storywise except for maybe Cruxie who replaces her brother Mustafa after some story event happened to her. I like Aisha as a character too but she fits into the typical tomboyish princess role you’ve likely seen in many other JRPG’s over the years and thus your appreciation of her will really depend on your fondness for such tropes.

Other gameplay issues come from guarding, guarding in Ys Seven is a bit wack and unreliable mostly because of how loose the game is compared to other titles, dodge rolling makes you travel half the goddamn screen each time you use it and thus placement can be a bit wanky. While you’re not playing as them, the other party members are controlled via AI and let’s say the AI in this game gets pretty wack. From the auto-harvest not activating on ressources points, to them falling off of platforms and cliffs (which wouldn’t be an issue if switching to them didn’t also mean switching places with them !) or ruining your combos with bad attack choices and targeting the wrong enemies. The AI in this game is up to a lot of shenanigans and aside from being spare HP bags and being good at dodging its not great.
Last but not least, the way you learn abilities in this game is quite wack, each equipment you buy has a skill attached to them and to permanently keep those skills you have to farm AP on the enemies, a system not too dissimilar to how FFIX does it. I didn’t mind it in that game since most of the skills were passive abilities but here not sticking to outdated weapon and armor for longer than necessary locks you from having a complete moveset for each your characters and since AP can only be earned by active party members, they will inevitably lack behind for the late game (again more on that later).

But alright that’s the gameplay change but how’s the game itself ? This time around, Adol gets to explore the Kingdom of Altago on the Afrocan continent, a vast place with many different types of biomes and a bunch of tribes trying to survive out there in the wild to take care of each of their Dragon temples. A long-time ago, the 5 Dragons of Altago breathed new life onto the land, their goal being to keep the balance of their elements in check and if that balance had to be broken, the Wind of Destruction might destroy the land to reset the flow of Energy. To stop this, the prophecy talks about a legendary Dragon Hero who will one day make a pilgrimage to the 5 dragon shrines and receive a blessing from each of its dragons in order to stop the upcoming calamity. As Adol and Dogi land in the capital city, they come into contact with two herb sellers by the name of Tia and Maya getting harassed by the Dragon Knights, the elite soldiers of Altago. After a brief altercation, Adol gets thrown in jail, however having heard of his many adventures, the King of Altago tasks him with investigating the local shrines after a couple of earthquakes has been happening throughout the land. Upon visiting the first shine, Adol learns that he is in fact the chosen Dragon Hero who needs to seek the blessing of each of the dragons to stop the upcoming calamity.

As you can see the story of Ys Seven is overall a pretty basic “save the world by gathering 5 McGuffin” plot line seen in a lot of JRPG. Adol and his friends will go to different regions to explore each of the shrines, encounter the tribe's people, team-up with their local hero and defeat a boss at the end. If anything, the story of Ys Seven isn’t that amazing, it’s cliché, quite predictable and at point even boring and with the party members not having much depth it's really hard to think of this story as anything but serviceable (even if the series rarely shined in that department past Ys 1, 2 and Dawn). You can see the twists coming from a mile away and to top it all of the game is divided into two parts which doesn’t help the game’s pacing.

Because yes, after visiting the 5 shrines, some plot shenanigans happens and Adol gets thrown into jail again, gets to revisit all of the shrines to get blessings from the dragons again and… Yeah I don’t think I need to draw a picture here, this game is a bit too long (20h which is twice as long as your average Ys Game) and stretched out for how basic of a storyline it is. It’s also not helped that all of the quick travel points in the second half get deactivated forcing you to re-explore the entire map once again on foot. Sure the game does open some new areas to make the journey back less tedious but it’s such obvious padding that I’m shocked it got past the development phase. Despite my complaints about the story however, I do enjoy the Kingdom of Altago and its lore and some of the ecological and even political elements weave together to spice this pretty basic plot line into something far more enjoyable than expected. Tia for exemple without spoiling too much on what her deal is turns out to be one of my favorite heroines of the franchise and the end of her storyline did manage to make me emotional. What little actual story there is is good but it’s a shame that the whole Dragon Quest™ takes up 80% of the actual runtime of the game to be appreciated.
Since you’re mostly going to spend the grand majority of the game exploring the overworld as well as the different shrines (twice with other dungeons past the actual dungeons in the second half) how do they fare up ? Well this is where the game kinda suffers from its shift in gameplay and the lack of platforming elements, since the game removed the ability to jump a lot of the dungeons are pretty straightforward in design with one path leading to an item which unlocks the path to the boss. That’s not to say they’re not fun to explore or have fun gimmicks and obstacles, but they’re a far-cry from how the Ark Engine games were designed and I even must admit that they have a hard time even comparing to some of the best areas from Dawn of Ys.

The actual overworld connecting each of the towns and shrine fairs a bit better in the level design department with lots of interesting ways all the areas connect to one another and the monsters you fight there being pretty fun to fight with even some world bosses to take on if you feel especially spicy today. I’d say that in general the level design of each area and dungeons while not being able to compete on the same level as the ones from the Ys Engine era definitely compensate with some ideas and they’re overall pretty fun to go through nonetheless. I think the music alone carries the level design here, Ys Seven music is especially good even amongst the high standard of the series and if I’m being frank it’s at least in my Top 5 in terms of Soundtrack for the series.

So everything about this game is stuff that I just enjoy in an OK way but now I want to talk about the bosses…

They kinda… exist… or flat-out sucks…

With the party system, you now pretty much have 3 Health Bar instead of one and much like Ys VI we’re back to consumables items you can use mid-battle, I’m going to be honest, the party-system game kinda drop the balls hard on the bosses just for that reason alone since the challenge becomes quite nonexistent (which is why I advised playing these games on higher difficulties to have some semblance of a challenge). Because you have so much health and resources to manage that health the developers thought it was a good idea to turn every bosses into big fucking HP sponges which take fucking forever to die, I swear some of these bosses probably last up to 25 or even 30 minutes just to deplete their health bar. This isn’t really hard, it’s just incredibly long, boring and tedious for nothing and only a rare few of them have patterns worth giving a shit about. The only boss that I somehow remember is the first one you fight, which actually had some patterns to work with and some fun counters you can pull but other than that and in spite of the designs being pretty clean it’s not glorious.

Which now leads me to talk about the absolute fucking cancer cell that is the final boss of this game.

I failed to mention it until now but this game introduces a crafting system, with resources to gather in order to make better equipment. Some ressources fall naturally from enemies and some are harvested in certain spots in the game forcing you to stop your forward momentum to pick up some flowers and you better gather these resources because you sure as hell gonna need them. Why do I only mention this now ? Well remember when I said that the game had multiple party members but the game rarely if ever encourages you to use them ? Well, I hope you’ve actually been using them and keeping their equipment in check because they’re all going to participate in the fight ! All of them ! So if some of them are behind the curve, you can bet your ass the final boss is gonna whoop the floor with your ass. This is where the game which so far has avoided the sin of being too grindy becomes an infernal fucking grind fest.
To defeat the final boss, you need to have perfect equipment and everyone’s ultimate weapons, otherwise you simply won’t defeat him. To get those, you will have to grind ressources a lot ! And the worst part is that the game actually doesn’t tell you where to find specific resources, there’s not a compendium where that info can be found so if you’re somehow missing an ingredient for a recipe you’re shit out of luck except if you have a guide. I swear on top of having to farm levels and skills and resources for equipment you actually have to fight the damn boss. If you’re underprepared the boss is straight impossible but even with all the appropriate preparation he’s still a pain in the goddamn ass.

He has 3 phases, the first one being the longest since he’s only vulnerable for a set period of time and you have to dodge the rest of his attacks and attack his head before doing proper damage. The second will test your ability to guard and counter something that is almost never needed in the rest of the game and the third phase is a solo fight where Adol finishes the boss. Each phase has an ungodly amount of HP much like every boss in the game and if you fail at any of them, it’s back to the first phase (there’s also an easy humanoid boss fight before fighting him just adding to the frustration.

I guess I could give props to this boss actually having patterns and stuff to care about but god it’s such a pain in the ass. It’s easily the worst final boss in the entire series and perhaps one of the worst bosses in the entire franchise (yes even worse than Dark Fact in Chronicles and worse than any bosses in Mask of The Sun). This single element kinda sours a lot of the impact during the ending which without really spoiling all that much actually managed to get me a bit emotional despite the game’s many flaws.

After everything I’ve just said, you may think that my opinion on Ys Seven is less than favorable but on the contrary, I do actually enjoy the game maybe a tad bit more than most people. I like the setting, the lore, the music, the dungeons while more straightforward are still lots of fun to explore and the story although kind of non-existent for most of it manages to hit with some truly memorable moments which stuck in my mind whenever I think about this game (SHIRTLESS ADOL DAMN SON).

But it’s also fair to admit that Ys Seven isn’t all that remarkable of an entry especially after the home-run the previous two entries in the series were, much like Ys VI it’s a rough transitional period with some well executed ideas mixed with a lot of less than optimal ones. Ys Seven is a game I like a lot, maybe a tad bit more than Ys VI if only for the fact Ys Seven is just simply a lot more fast-paced and fun than that game and also doesn’t have any sort of weird esoteric mechanic such as dash jumping. Ys Seven sadly is just kinda there and just kind of exists and while I may enjoy it more than most, thinking back on it while writing this review almost made me draw a blank on what I can even say about this one.

Ys Seven is a game I don’t have any strong opinion about, either positive or negative, it’s the most quintessential 7/10 ARPG possible with mechanics you’ve likely seen executed better somewhere else, a story which is cliché, basic and quite predictable especially for Ys standard. The game also has sidequests and the fact I’m only mentioning them now during the conclusion shows you how much care was put into them. Overall, Ys Seven is solid, I’m in conflict with some of its ideas, starting with the party system I have some level of apprehension for and it’s not helped that it’s not executed at its best here.

Next time however, I’ll promise you some salt, we’re going to talk about a game I enjoy much less than Ys Seven, the actual version of Ys IV delivered by Falcom… and… thing’s aren’t pretty.

Xenosaga : A Fine Enough Introduction

My history with the Xeno Series is a bit skewed up, during Operation Rainfall, I obviously heard about and played the first Xenoblade game and absolutely loved it like many people at the time but it’s been so long a replay might be needed to refresh my memory of it. I’ve then played Xenoblade X and enjoyed it a lot too and then Xenoblade 2 which is a game I had to learn to love since it was kind of hard game to sit through with all the aesthetic changes that I wasn’t a fan of and the humor and tone which was a bit hit or miss for me (and don’t get me started on the gacha mechanics or just the overall game system taking literal years before becoming interesting or fun). I still think Xenoblade 2 is a bit too long for its own good with a somewhat strong ending that while it may have come out of nowhere with its last minute connection to Xenoblade 1 was nonetheless really good and the cast was solid enough for me to care about it in the end, I realize it’s a much smarter game now than I gave it credit for back in the day.

And while I do enjoy the Xenoblade games and think they are fully deserving of the praises they got over the years (probably one of the rare cases of a modern RPG franchise actually delivering on its promises), they never really stuck to me, only Xenoblade X did funnily enough because of its deeply interesting and detailed sci-fi world that I only wish the story could’ve explored more, it had a lot of interesting stuff to it but I also think it’s the one with the best gameplay in the franchise, exploring around this planet and eventually unlocking the mechs was a freaking magical experience and the few story bits there was really intrigued me and I hope a sequel is on the way.

But none of them stuck to me more than Xenogears when I eventually got around to it in 2020 or something (my memory is really bad I should really journal my games more lmao). I obviously knew about the other Xenogames, I knew about how Xenogears was this highly regarded masterpiece and I knew Xenosaga mainly because of Kos-Mos appearance in the Namco x Capcom (Project x Zone) series where her design immediately caught my attention.

Xenogears to put it lightly is one of my favorite games of all time now and is now actually sitting comfortably in my top 10 best games I’ve ever played (which is constantly shifting anyway depending on my mood and if I happen to find a game excellent enough to deserve such placement), it’s not without its flaws, it’s the product of a botched development cycle which ended up in a somewhat incomplete product with a combat system which is really fun but gets shallow very fast and some of the more questionable dungeon design in the medium to the point that I was actually happy the second half pretty much was a visual novel. But gosh darn it if everything else from the music, the aesthetic, the plot, the characters, the mystery, the lore, this game is a goddamn juggernaut of an art piece like no other which somehow managed to turn its biggest weakness into its biggest strength by tying the plot directly to its own existence as an incomplete part of a never to be completed whole.

There are very few games I can 100% praise for their raw storytelling value alone but Xenogears stands tall amongst the crowd with some of the most beautifully poignant, spectacular and at times cerebral scenarios in the whole medium of video games. It’s constantly bombarding you with stuff to get fascinated about, it’s an endless well of reflexion in which you can find more and more meaning the more you dig it’s simply put a masterpiece
One day I’ll make a proper review about Xenogears. I really want to talk about how special that game is for me and the entire RPG genre as a whole someday, but today isn’t that day. Seeing as awesome as Xenogears was and how happy I still am for how it turned out, I can’t help but still feel frustrated that Takahashi was never able to fulfill his vision and kickstart the Xenogears franchise. There are many reasons why this wasn’t possible, Square didn’t plan to have another juggernaut of highly ambitious mega-series alongside Final Fantasy and Xenogears by itself was already taking a bit too much time.

While 90’s Square was great at giving small directors their time on the spotlight, they were not the best at supporting them financially in the long run because to Square all of these other games were just distractions in-between big releases of Final Fantasy, and the flop caused by the FF movie at the turn of the medium pretty much doomed the Xenogears franchise from ever existing. It is really so sad to read Perfect Works and realize that in another reality Xenogears would be Square’s very own MGS series, a series of highly acclaimed titles made by a visionary author with a strong vision for videogames and sci-fi stories.

But while that day might never come for Xenogears that doesn’t mean Takahashi was about to give up on the idea of his grand sci-fi epic just yet. Shortly after the release of Xenogears and the realization they could never brought forth their visions onto the world, Takahashi and his team quit Squaresoft to form Monolith Software and with the help of Bandai Namco they will try to revive Xenogears into the epic saga it was meant to be and this next entry in the now meta “Xeno” franchise will be appropriately called : Xenosaga.

Xenosaga was released on the PS2 in 2003, now mind you, one thing that’s great about me is that I am an expert at not spoiling myself on stuff so I knew pretty much nothing going into Xenosaga, therefore I was surprised to see Takahashi giving zero fuck when dropping the Zohar right on minute one and continuing on reusing character design from Xenogears into this game to pretty much tilt people with connections that may or may not be there. Very early on, you get to see a character looking awfully similar to Elly and there’s a lot of mystery surrounding that mysterious figure even as the game eventually caps off.

The story takes place in the distant future as you start of on a space-station, you play as Shion Uzuki resident glasses girl and chief of engineering on the Kos-Mos project on behalf of Vector industry, a private weapon manufacturer who manages these artificial super soldiers called “Realians'' which are artificial humans created for the purpose of fighting in wars and serve different position. The Kos-Mos project was meant to see if humanity could build an entirely artificial humanoid weapon (Realians are biologicals, they’re pretty much tube babies with machine stuff into them, I’m honestly not sure).

After a quick training session in VR and Shion getting some sort of hallucination of Elly from Xenogears, she is called on deck to report on the experimentation but suddenly these weird interdimensional aliens called Gnosis starts attacking the ship looking for the Zohar found inside of it and now the game becomes Dead Space for a minute ! After the space station gets blown off, Shion, Kos-Mos and Allen end up on a random merchant ship and are now heading to Second Miltia to find refuge there and report back to Vector after witnessing Kos-Mos starting to disobey her order a little bit.

At the same time, Ziggy, a soldier brought back to life as a cyborg, is tasked by some government people of the galactic federation to retrieve an important realian by the name of Momo from the hands of U-TIC, a shady terrorist organization with plans to do evil terrorist organization stuff yet not developed in this game but seems to be like a cult thing ? Momo is a Series 100 who was created by a certain Joachim Mizrahi, a crazy scientist which caused the disappearance of Old Miltia and the apparition of the Gnosises 14 years ago. During the mission, Ziggy ends up being chased by the terrorist and as they find an escape pod, they’re now heading to Second Miltia too to report on the mission and will soon meet up with our main party.

Meanwhile, Jr, a badass shotacon with guns that is clearly not the secret Yaoi lovechild of Bart and Billy from Xenogears is trying to investigate the sudden disappearance of a planet by the name of Ariadne with the help of his ship called the Durandal and his crew composed of hot babes on behalf of the Kukai Foundation, a private militia turned independent nation trying to stop U-Tic from doing their shady evil terrorist stuff. Jr is probably the coolest character in this game and by the second act pretty much overtakes the plot by himself as he is closely related to Albedo a mysterious freakish guy who’s trying to get his hands on Momo to obtain informations found in her head in order to… spread chaos across the Cosmos on behalf of U-DO which is some higher entity I have still fuck all idea what it even looks like.

Eventually all of these characters' paths will cross and they’ll eventually try to stop Evil Mc Immortal Interdimensional Demi-God from causing too much trouble. This is my personal recollection of the plot and that’s already a lot to summarize and to uncover, Xenosaga is a victim of “batshit insane sci-fi rpg plot syndrome”. It introduces tons of concepts and in-universe terms with some religious symbolism thrown into the mix, a fuck lot of yet to be resolved mysteries and tons of moving parts with factions left and right with their own goal and agenda. It’s probably even more hard sci-fi than even Xenogears was at times and I must admit that it’s at times a bit harder to follow than this game was.

Xenosaga is less of a story with some main drive or even an apparent main theme, with Xenogears you could be confused by some of the deeper plot elements but in the end you could at least parse the intentions of the story but here, not so much and I think it was done on purpose. Xenosaga 1 is only the first episode of a trilogy and it shows, it pretty much feels like how it would be to end Xenogears at the end of Disc 1 and having to wait a solid year or two to get the stuff from Disc 2 which yes would’ve probably made Disc 2 more complete but at the same time would Xenogears be as memorable as it is if it really just cutted off to Disc 1 ? I don’t think so.

As such it’s hard to parse or even criticize the story of the game when it clearly is here to establish everything but you can’t help but feel that at least the first half of the game is kind of a slog. The story just sorts of happen, you go from one set pieces to the next, from one perspective switch to the other and while the end goal of most of the protagonists is the reach Second Miltia, by the time you get there a lot of stuff happens that you clearly have trouble understanding the implications of and then the credits play to a beautiful vocal song as it is tradition in the franchise and you’re left wanting more. While I’m cautious calling the story “good”, I can’t deny that it is interesting and thoroughly engaging past the midway point but you can definitely feel that the plot is begging to unleash its full sauce in the sequels.
What I understood of the story is that 14 years ago, a war was fought on some distant planet called Miltia over an artifact called the Zohar retrieved here by the researchers in the intro (or maybe that part is completely unrelated) and all of the characters are somewhat linked to the events that took place on that fateful day and all of the implications which ensued from this conflict. While the story can be confusing and at times struggle to make its point clear, I can deny that the whole thing is really well presented. Xenogears was mostly a visual novel in disguise, with a lot of reading and dialogue scenes that were superbly directed for what the PS1 could allow at the time combined with the occasional anime FMV cutscene punctuating the bigger moments of the narrative.

Here Xenosaga pushes that envelop even further and what I’ve played of the Xenoblade series showed me that what Monolith really is into is directing awesome story cutscenes that can be a tad bit too long but also quite spectacular and you can sense that this passion for cinematography above all else started all the way back with this game. Of course, it’s easy to dismiss the effort brought here in the cutscene department as it’s a dinky old 2003 PS2 game but for the standard of that era I’d say they did more than a decent enough job with them.

The direction during the dialogues scenes can be a bit awkward and stiff which is definitely not helped by the artstyle having trouble dealing with facial expression (except for Albedo that guy’s fucking great everytime he’s one screen) but the big action set pieces like space battles and others are done surprisingly well. There are tons of really iconic moments of great direction during those and especially some of the more “horror oriented” segments which this game is full of, the scene of Kos-Mos awakening for the first time is one of the most iconic shit I’ve ever seen and gives me chills everytime (and so does the Albedo limb ripping scene like holy shit, they even managed to made it more terrifying in the English version). All the scenes in the encephalon were pretty damn great too and you can definitely feel in those segments the continued influence of Xenogears style of bizarre imagerie and philosophical rambling which is the closest video games has ever been from trying to be Evangelion and succeeding in my opinion.

The Artstyle of the game is a bit hit or miss however, it’s still the character designer from Xenogears but much like Xenoblade X, I thought the style kind of transitioned pretty awkwardly to 3D, all the characters feel like dolls with fish eyes, they have a definitive plastic feel to them but honestly, I think it kinda works in the games favor at times since most of the characters are meant to be artificial humans anyway and this style translate that impression well even if it probably wasn’t the intended result. It’s still charming however in a nostalgic 2000’s era anime way and it gives the game a real sense of identity which kinda gets lost from what I’ve seen of the sequels.

I think the problem with those character design like I said is that combined with the obvious datedness of trying to be a cinematographic game in 2003, they don’t convey emotion all too strongly and it feels awkward, Momo doesn’t look cute or peppy, she looks tired and sleepy all the time when it clearly wasn’t the intention but I’m nitpicking, I’d say the game somewhat holds up graphically nowadays if you’re not particularly allergic to anime artstyle. I mean you better enjoy these cutscenes anyway because pretty much 50% of the whole runtime of the game is spent watching cutscenes, sometimes long uninterrupted stretches of them to the point they have to pause the game to let you save through them much like Disc 2 of XG did.
As for the voice acting, I had to play this game with the original Japanese dub, nothing against the English cast from what I heard the performances are really good especially for that era where English Voice acting for weird esoteric Japanese games weren’t at its best and English Albedo really fucking kills it during one of the big moments. I had to play it in Japanese because of glitch which also exists on real hardware (played on emulator cause I ain’t losing my mortgage over this shit) where the game can just randomly crash while trying to save the game regularly, this is quite the heavy oversight and I’m not sure what the reception of it was when the game came out but this sucks.

Anyway back to voice acting, the Japanese voice acting fairs pretty well, Kos-Mos in particular really nails the robot voice, they really did a solid job making her appearance as iconic as possible from the design, to her scenes to her voice acting. I’d say on average it was a distant voice cast and I’m actually shocked to see a non-ear grating loli character for a change ? Momo actually sounds like a damn child for a change and with her whole schtick being a magical girl (???) For some reasons, I was definitely expecting the voice acting to go in the overly moe territory Jun Maeda seems to be weirdly fond of (I really ain’t a fan of Jun Maeda’s fetish for girl talking like goddamn Pokemon). I think the English Performance from what I heard is a bit better but the Japanese one is no slouch either and in the end I didn’t miss out on much in my opinion.

Since the game is mostly cutscenes one might think that the general pacing of the game gets hurt as a result and you’d be right, it takes a bit of time before the game actually goes anywhere and there are several instances of players getting control for 5 min before being embarked to another slew of cutscenes. I’m an MGS fan so that style of storytelling doesn’t bother me much and the game is 30h long so it’s not that bad in the grand scheme of things.

Speaking of gameplay, while there might not be that many instances of them, it’s still a significant part of the game and we’re gonna talk about it. Xenosaga’s battle system is pretty much an evolution of the one found in Xenogears, while Xenogears gameplay was fun it did start to get a bit dry by the end game to the point that I had to resolve to using game exploit to get through some of the more important fights in the second half of the game, this game mostly solves that issues by expanding greatly on what Gears did. During battle, you can use either Square or Triangle to deal different types of damage with specific combinations leading to other moves.

The main difference here is the way you deal death blows, death blows (called : “techniques”) here must be activated by first using a hit and then canceling the second to charge up your AP meter which then allows you to use one of your death blows, at first I wasn’t a fan of this as I felt it needlessly dragged fights for longer than they should but compared to Xenogears there’s a greater variety of death blows and ways to include them within attack sequences that I didn’t mind it by the end (and later down, you can upgrade certain death blow to remove that limitation on them and use them as regular attack).

On top of that, much like Xenogears, characters can have access to Ether attacks which are magic attacks requiring MP to be used. However? I found most of the offensive ones in this game to be a bit lacking in power to be used effectively in battle (except for a few of them that we’ll talk about a bit later…) as well as costing too much HP but the support spells truly makes up for it in comparison as buffing your party becomes an essential part of battles.
Another cool thing about Xenosaga however is the fact that for any battle scenario, you can just call your mechs. In Xenogears, mech fights were only allowed for certain specific parts of the game but here, some characters can summon their mechs in battle at any time which is freaking awesome and gives you a second health bar to protect you. The upgrade in firepower is pretty significant but the Gears kinda loses their utility near the end where your main on-foot party gets fully decked out with useful spells and deathblows and the cost associated with upgrading your mechs (which are surprisingly customizable) can be a bit much especially with how stingy the game is with giving you money that you’d rather spend on utility items and equipments for your main party but I’m sure the investment is worth it.

That’s all of your battle options but there’s still 2 other subtleties about fighting that I need to mention which are the different bonuses that can happen at every turn and the boost meter. For each successful deathblow, your boost meter fills up, one unit of boost allows you to bypass the turn order and chain attacks with characters, when used properly, this can be a devastating tool to chain enemies and not let them fight. Enemies can also boost too, mostly in retaliation from attacking them but what bothers me a bit more about that is that for some reasons some enemies can boost over your boost which is something you yourself can’t do at any points, I get that it’s to make the game a bit more challenging and battles a bit more spectacular but honestly I just felt that it was cheap and I didn’t like it very much.

Where Xenosaga gets a bit more complicated however is in its progression systems, level ups do happen and upgrade your stats but on top of EXP you also get three different types of additional points which are Ether point, Tech Points and Skill points all of which have different uses that I will be explaining here.

Ether points allows you to learn new Ether abilities through a skill tree of sorts, each character as their own magic skill tree but what I really enjoyed about this system is how versatile it is. On top of learning new magics, you can actually transfer skills from one character to the next. Want all of your characters to learn the powerful spell buffs of Ziggy for exemple ? Just spend a couple of points and you can transfer that skill from one character to the next. Very quickly did I use this feature to let my characters be even stronger, the one caveat of this is that you can’t equip all of your spells at all time, you have to select them on a list and you can only have a certain amount since they all have a different cost).

Tech Points are used primarily for two things : Upgrading your deathblows (and thus removing their limitations) and being spent to upgrade certain specific stats of your characters on top of what levels up already does. Skill Points can allow you to learn the passive abilities of accessories you gather throughout your adventure, up to tree slots. It’s a feature I haven’t used much but could’ve been beneficial but I didn’t understand the whole “skill level” thing associated with assimilating certain accessories so I didn’t bother.

Overall I’d say the system is a good evolution of Xenogears but does the game itself support that system enough to make it fun ? Well, kinda but also not really. By the mid-point of the game I was kinda confused at how tanky the enemies were and how little damage I was actually doing to them, combine that with the general slowness of battle and the fact that enemies respawn with each room transitions (this game doesn’t have random encounters thank god, since Xenogears was bad with this) and you can’t escape fights unless you use a consumable item or use a specific spell, the game unfortunately drags after a while.
There are several informations that are withheld from you, tons of accessories and exploit that are tied to obscure minigames that can only be accessed through specific save points by using a specific item, I didn’t bother much with said mini-games as they were kind of ass but some people might be into them. They could’ve made my life a bit easier but fortunately as soon as I was getting bored of the battle system of the game, the game just said “Hey, have you heard about Megazords ?” and I was like “Ok hit me up”.

The game has only one major sidequest which are tied to red doors and red keys that you can find throughout the game world, while most of them give you random accessories you may or may not use, some give you “robot parts”. These robot parts are tied to a pretty funny side quest where you help this crazy scientist build a giant robot, each part of said robot turns into a summon that Shion can use and these summons while costing a lot in MP are really powerful and can pretty much trivialize most random encounters in the game. The final summon you obtain for completing the sidequest is “Erde Kaiser” , a GaoGaiGar type MegaZord who deals 9999 damage to every enemy in the game including bosses.

You can bet your ass that when I got him around the last dungeon of the game, I’ve abused the fuck out of it because I was more invested in the story than the gameplay aspect of it and look… if you give a monkey a bazooka with a banana shaped button, you won’t be able to convince it not to press it right ? Well I am a sad monkey but replace the banana with cool giant robots, man I just love when serious ass setting just have the most wacky out of place stuff out of nowhere for no reasons other than to be silly and reminding us this is indeed a silly Japanese RPG in the end (shoutouts to the freakin Ace Combat 4 ad you get by mail too btw !)

One thing that made the gameplay drag a bit further to me was the exploration or lack thereof. The game is pretty straightforward and linear in its progression but the areas you explore are pretty big and while they don’t lack in puzzles and neat level design at times, the general slow movement of the game and the constant backtracking the game asks of you at certain points can be a bit annoying. They’re definitely less a chore to go through than some of the dungeons from Xenogears (thank fuck they forgot about platforming) but the overall game suffers from a lack of variety in its environments. I know it’s for story reasons but aside from the Encephalon and the Gnosis Cathedral, most of the environments are dry looking sci-fi space stations, you go from one spaceship to the next and it’s really hard to distinguish them.

The game has this very cold and claustrophobic atmosphere to it, not helped by the lack of soundtrack. Yeah contrary to other games in the franchise, Xenosaga is a very quiet game, most of what you’re going to hear during explorations are the different sound effects and the battle theme which is the only battle theme in the whole game aside from the last fight. I’m still struggling to understand if this was done on purpose to give a more eerie vibe to the already pretty eerie and survival-horror-esque vibe by making you feel the emptiness of space or if it’s due to a lack of planning or budget. You can forget about budget because the game literally has the London Philharmonic Orchestra itself to accompany Yasunori’s Matsuda’s composition during the cutscenes. The Soundtrack is generally pretty good for the most part and accompanies the cutscenes well enough but the contrast between the heavy spectacular like moment of the narrative and the more quiet gameplay section doesn’t help the soundtrack leaving a lasting impression on me aside from a few really solid tracks.
One thing about this game mechanics kinda confused me and it’s the distribution of resources which is a bit weird. Money in this game comes around quite rarely, some enemies drops money but it’s a ridiculously low amount of them for the most part you’re meant to either sell barter items that enemies drop (and I’ll never understand the appeal of adding an additional step to “getting money” but here they couldn’t even make their mind about it) our use the money you find just exploring and exploding stuff with your phone laser. At first I thought “hmmm, that’s interesting” because the game clearly wants to have a sort of survival horror vibe to it and what better ways to do this than limiting the number of resources available and forcing you to rely on the loots you find in chest which are here replaced by destructible parts of the environments you can shoot down with a laser app on your phone which is … a bit weird but ok ?

And I wouldn’t mind that but then, it turns out the game does asks a lot of money to keep your equipment up to speed and especially to upgrade your mechs which because of a lack of funds start becoming useless by the second half in favor of your playable characters (especially with Shion’s Power Rangers summon). There’s a point in the game, where you receive an e-mail telling you about investing in stocks but when this mail arrived I couldn’t invest in them at all as I lacked the basic funds to purchase said stocks and I was like “Well Ok, I’ll just wait” but the thing is that you have to do it at this specific moment or else you can say goodbye to tons of money down on the line which would’ve been helpful in order to purchase new mech shit. There’s also a hidden “hacker side-quest” which gives you 200 000 golds, mind you that the most expensive shit in this game is a mech suit that cost 300 000 golds which is an amount of money I don’t think is even possible to achieve playing this game regularly without grinding.

Speaking of grinding, this game does have residual exp for other party members but not residual everything else, this means that while the characters does level up accordingly with the flow of the story, their stats and capabilities didn’t which isn’t helped by this game giving you a pitifully small amount of each point categories per battle which makes half of your party members fall behind in power and prevent you from actually experimenting more with party composition. I know there are some equipments which mitigates the grind and there’s an hidden point multiplier system that I didn’t know how to take advantage of but why should I care about when by the midway point of the game and especially the last dungeon I could just go “Go Go Power Rangers” and trivialize most combat encounter which seem a bit more fun than dealing with the hassle of the game balance crumbling onto itself midway through the game and making every fight a drag.

While I don’t think the gameplay part of Xenosaga is bad per say, it’s clearly not the most exciting part of the game, much like Xenogears Monolith Software still had a lot to learn before finally arriving at a battle system which is thoroughly engaging on top of Takahashi’s wacky plot ideas. My hypothesis is also that Baiten Kaitos another game by Monolith released the same year and had a much more ambitious and experimental battle system and maybe it’s a case of putting too much fruit in the same basket, not to say Xenosaga wasn’t the most ambitious project of the two but the priorities here where lowkey different. I still did enjoy and had fun with the game in the grand scheme of things and much like Xenogears compensated a lot of its shortcomings by one of the greatest script ever written for a videogame, Xenosaga compensated its weakness with stunning cinematography (at the time), an intriguing sci-fi setting and tons of iconic characters to get invested into.
Where Xenosaga falls short is that Xenogears in how incomplete the game was still ended up being a story that told a satisfying tale, one that leaves a lot to the interpretation of its players but still nonetheless concluded in a somewhat satisfying way while delivering on all the themes it wanted to explore. In comparison it’s hard to not think of Xenosaga as a shallower take on similar ideas since the game doesn’t hold a candle to Xenogears in terms of raw artistry and emotion, most of Xenosaga 1 exists to establish the wider setting that the series will explore in more details in other episode but maybe it’s a bit too cryptic and a bit too complex for its own good at times. I ultimately really enjoyed the story but I still have trouble understanding what Takahashi wanted to tell me with all that techy sci-fi mambo jumbo religious nonsense this time around and I ultimately had trouble parsing what the story was even about.

Yes I admit that the game story kicked my ass a little bit, it’s not easy to 100% pay attention to cutscenes and dialogues especially since the game is just teasing you with so much lore. However I do like the cohesion of the entire vision at play here, at first I thought the main twist of the narrative would be that there is no remaining planet in the galaxy since you spend most of your time on space stations, VR simulations and inside a giant space whale but it was to make the ending of the game feel that much more special when after 30h of cold sci-fi looking environments and horror stuff, you end up on a beautiful sunset on some lively planets while some really good vocal track plays out like at the end of Xenogears or the Xenoblade games which seems to follow in its footsteps. It’s such an iconic yet liberating imagery that I really enjoyed it and of course Shion welcoming back Kos-Mos was really cute (yes I love Shion Uzuki, Yes I’m mad about her design change in the other games).

I’d say the cast heavily carries the story for me, I pretty much loved all of them even though I still have trouble understanding what’s the deal with Chaos (the dude might be an Angel or something since it's heavily teased in his deathblows) but he’s still a chill dude. Kos-Mos in particular surprised me because of how much they play out the whole “robot” thing with her. Most stories will usually go with the “robot learn to be human” thing but Kos-Mos is 100% a machine and the few human traits that she displays are very assholish at times which is freaking fantastic, I love how much of a bad bitch she can be while Shion is trying desperately to tame her, I mean ffs, Kos-Mos kills a dude at the start of the game in cold Blood because it was the most optimal solution and I was always on the edge about her doing things. But my favorite character is definitely Jr. AKA Rubedo who completely steals the show by the second half and has the most personal stake in the conflict by the second half of the game especially with the main antagonist being his… brother ? evil clone ? I’m still not quite sure. He combines the best out of both Bart and Billy from Xenogears and most of his deathblows and spells are the coolest in the game and yes I also need a ship full of cute babes to follow me everywhere and be my yes-woman, Jr. really be on that sigma grindset for real.

In conclusion, I enjoyed my time with Xenosaga, it’s a game I won’t ranking super high for the moment but I can definitely change my mind about it after the other two episodes.If anything the game pretty much suffers from being an obvious intro titles and sadly cannot stand on its own like Xenogears or even the first Xenoblade game can, but as far as intro titles are, I’m glad that this one at least doesn’t ask me to spend 90h of nothing with shallow characters and an hamfisted worldbuilding with no flares put behind it, even if the gameplay aspect leaves a lot to be desired, I’m thoroughly on board for Takahashi’s wild ride !