To my deep shame and regret I am a noted Trails Fan like deep like bad like got my hands on the Chinese PC Crossbell games and patched them into English BEFORE the good geofront translations were out bad (other Trails fans DEE ENN EYE) and yet I had never touched an Ys game, Falcom’s other big long franchise – much older and more respected than the modern incarnation of Legend of Heroes, even. This is largely because by the time I became interested I had developed my current brain ailment where putting games in the historical context of their series and their moment in time is deeply important to me and I had no way to access the whole franchise. HOWEVER I’ve recently done some work on my Playstation Vita and with some encouragement from your friend and mine kingbancho here (https://www.backloggd.com/u/wowgoodname/list/hit-me-with-a-game-and-ill-play-and-review-it/), the Ys train has left the station.

And it rocks it just fuckin rips ass dude! I’ll die for bump combat it’s so much fun to just zoom around the maps with Adol’s ludicrous run speed toggled to default and just fucking plow through hapless demons who were minding their business, racking up xp and gold that I will spend on nothing, killing only for the pure joy of the feeling of it. TRULY, This Is What Gaming Is All About. I was worried when I realized that, despite these games being packaged together and rightly so as they very much are the split halves of one story and one gameplay experience, Ys II made some tweaks to the game feel, making enemies more durable and less violent, but it became quickly apparent that nothing had truly changed. There are few joys in all of gaming that measure favorably to Bump Combat. Can’t believe I’ve been missing out on this for so long.

There’s a lot of other joy to found here, though. Ys is a very standard late 80s/early 90s Fantasy Anime in setting and tone, and those just happen to be pretty fun to chill out in. It’s a game with a relaxed vibe, with yeah like mysterious evil towers slowly killing the land and demons making the local mine unworkable, but also giant ancient trees ponderously bequeathing swords and every dude over the age of 35 being identifiable as such by having a mustache. There is absolutely nothing unique on the table here but there is specificity to the character of this world, and the games do a lot to endear themselves to me despite their barebones trappings. Stuff like talking to major characters bringing up a whole separate screen with a lovingly rendered portrait and background to conduct the dialogue in; a notebook cataloguing all of the unique npcs in every town and their relationships with each other, of which there are many and of all whom have unique dialogue that often changes with the circumstances; the often well hidden sidequests and secret interactions that don’t give huge payouts mechanically but do give the guy at the bar or the merchant in one of the item shops a lot more verve that they would otherwise have the opportunity to have, and obviously more than anyone would ever care for them too – these things add up to a game that obviously cares a lot about its setting and wants you to care to, and I do. A thing doesn’t have to be unique or complex to be good or well-made. Sometimes it is enough to care.

And it’s obvious that a lot of care went into both of these worlds in both of these games, even though I don’t particularly enjoy exploring them. Darm Tower, the evil presence that makes up essentially the second half of the first game is a giant, tedious dungeon of simple puzzles padded by a LOT of walking up and down the same hallways. It’s not visually interesting or mechanically interesting, and the enemies aren’t any more challenging to approach than anything else in the game. By the time I was at the tower I had hit that game’s max level and had the best equipment available. There’s no real difficulty to speak of at that point outside of bosses. The combat is, again, and endless parade of blissful death, but trudging through endless identical stairwells and corridors back and forth for an hour and a half isn’t so much. But like everything in Ys, the FLAVOR of the tower is cool as hell, this bizarre place that sucks people into itself and never lets them out, where they are presumed to die but in reality, once you’re in there, you discover that there are a fair number of people eking out a frightened, exploratory living in this evil place, always hunted but carefully clinging to life. There’s nothing as egregiously boring or long in Ys 2 as Darm Tower, even as the maps quickly become more complex in the later game, but the little drips of flavor are always there, the game carefully meting them out over the short runtimes so you’re rarely JUST exploring a shitty cave.

That’s the thing about Ys I & II Chronicles – I remember being like, actively frustrated a lot of the time I was playing these, especially Ys I, but in hindsight, even just a few hours down the road, I am only really thinking of all the cool shit. That’s gotta mean it’s doing something right, yeah?

Also, every single game remake should give me the option to turn on Original PC-88 Music and also make sick PC-88 soundchip covers of their buttrock anime OPs this is Gold Standard Shit people. Gold Standard.