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 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 !

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 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 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 : 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 !

Oh man. What a disappointment.

Not so much a review, but a list of things to try and explain why I didn't like it.

This is probably my third or fourth go at it, but this time I was going to get to the end no matter what.

To get it out of the way: It looks and sounds nice, but I don't think even those aspects are realised as well as I expected.

I really did not get on with the gameplay at all. To an extent where I worry that it soured me on all the other parts of the game too.
I tried so many combinations of effects and everything ended up being the same "Hit for as much as you can, run away for five seconds". It's incredibly unsatisfying, with the most frustrating dash to ever be put in a video game.

I eventually settled on a combo that jumped through enemies, turned them to my side temporarily and did damage over time. This made every fight in the game a joke, so I swung from thinking the combat was bad to pointless.

The final boss just felt bad to play.

On the narrative side, I actually found the narrator gimmick super annoying in this (even though I enjoyed it in Bastion). I didn't really care about anyone in it. I know they were going for a "start in the action" type deal, but I just didn't see why I'd care about anyone or anything.

HowLongToBeat says 6 hours to play through; my total time (including probably an hour's worth of false starts) is 4.7 hours, so maybe I skipped half the game or something.

But that's just, like, my opinion man.