Two years after defeating Darm and bringing peace to Esteria, Adol returns to the town of Minea with his companion in adventure, Dogi. Everything seems fine as friends are reunited and the people hail their hero, but there’s an unseen evil looming in the air. As Adol goes to the seer Sara, she tells him of an even greater darkness in the land of Celceta and asks the red-haired swordsman to go there and seek the truth behind this mystery. Thus, Adol steals away unnoticed in the middle of the night to embark on his next adventure. In Celceta, Adol will learn of the Romun Empire’s ambitions, fight the mysterious Clan of Darkness that seeks to ressurect their long dead leader, and discover the ancient history of Celceta itself as well as its connection to the land of Ys. The last survivor of a forgotten race of winged beings holds the power that may bring back darkness to the land, and only Adol will be able to stop it.
Released on
Genres
Reviews View More
I agree that this one is certainly more likable than Mask of the Sun. The cutscenes are very well done and the art for inside homes is very lovely
That being said, certain areas like the final area and the sanctuary are annoying due to the area design and enemies that do too much damage. Most of the boss fights are fair and fun, and you are actually able to level up if they're too challenging as well. It's solid
That being said, certain areas like the final area and the sanctuary are annoying due to the area design and enemies that do too much damage. Most of the boss fights are fair and fun, and you are actually able to level up if they're too challenging as well. It's solid
Peak of the classic games for me. None of the boss fights miss, both magic and bump combat get their fair share of use. Soundtrack is nuts and the game looks gorgeous. A shame it never came west.
Game Review - originally written by (wraith)
After the dreadful, dreadful Ys III, it would appear that Falcom has gone back to the tried-and-true style of the first two Ys games: overhead view game play with Adol running at demons kamikaze-like. Seriously, it’s Ys. Aside from Ys III, Nihon has never really deviated from the same basic formula.
Now I know this is kind of confusing, but there are two Ys IV games. In addition to this one, there was also Ys IV: Mask of the Sun for SNES, which was released just about a month before this game came out. Strangely, Nihon, perhaps in a step to protect the innocent, pulled some kind of Bizarro-Dragnet stunt. They kept the names and the places fairly identical in the two games, but they changed the plots. Both games are Ys IV, however, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Now, in the various gaming circles of the INTERWEB, the argument of which game is better has raged for quite awhile, and I choose not to address that here. Most of the people who engage in such arguments most likely do not speak Japanese. Watching such things unfold on forums and IRC is kind of like watching a bunch of Canadians discussing American politics: nobody really knows what’s going on, so everyone involved looks like a [redacted].
In conclusion, this is a cool game. But so is Mask of the Sun. I just wish there more English in it at the moment.
After the dreadful, dreadful Ys III, it would appear that Falcom has gone back to the tried-and-true style of the first two Ys games: overhead view game play with Adol running at demons kamikaze-like. Seriously, it’s Ys. Aside from Ys III, Nihon has never really deviated from the same basic formula.
Now I know this is kind of confusing, but there are two Ys IV games. In addition to this one, there was also Ys IV: Mask of the Sun for SNES, which was released just about a month before this game came out. Strangely, Nihon, perhaps in a step to protect the innocent, pulled some kind of Bizarro-Dragnet stunt. They kept the names and the places fairly identical in the two games, but they changed the plots. Both games are Ys IV, however, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Now, in the various gaming circles of the INTERWEB, the argument of which game is better has raged for quite awhile, and I choose not to address that here. Most of the people who engage in such arguments most likely do not speak Japanese. Watching such things unfold on forums and IRC is kind of like watching a bunch of Canadians discussing American politics: nobody really knows what’s going on, so everyone involved looks like a [redacted].
In conclusion, this is a cool game. But so is Mask of the Sun. I just wish there more English in it at the moment.
There is an amazing fandub of this game. The only fan translation I can think of with an English dub.
Ys IV Part II : The Dawn of Peak Fiction
In the 80’s there were few developers who actually knew what they were doing more than Hudson Soft, these guys are probably single handedly responsible for Nintendo opening itself to third party developers to make the NES/Famicom the legendary console we know today. Hudson Soft first and foremost were people who didn’t just like video games as a way to make money on a newly expanding market, these guys were very passionate about new technology and the wonders of gaming as a whole.
But eventually, when you enjoy making games so much, you start to become ambitious and soon Hudson Soft will partner with NEC the prime micro-computer manufacturer (and creator of the famous “porn game machine” known as the PC-98) under a share common interest of building the game console of the future : The PC-Engine otherwise known as the Turbografx 16 outside of Japan. The PCE was a really impressive machine for the time and even today, I’m still kind of blown away by the technical capabilities of the console which only has an 8 bit processor but packs a lot of punch otherwise especially with the CD Add-on that they’ve adopted earlier than many other companies at the time.
However, they were releasing a new console on an highly competitive market, Sega and Nintendo were fiercely competing for domination and other companies who dared venture on hardware territory knew that it was complicated to stand out amongst the crowd and that’s when Hudson had a brilliant idea, they will partner with Falcom to port their classic Ys title to their console. Ys 1 and Ys 2 were already considered classic of NEC micro-computers system and they have already existed many ports of the game to pretty much all available platforms at the time including the NES and the Master System but Hudson’s version on their PC-Engine was going to be different, it wasn’t just going to be a port, it was going to be a full-on REMAKE !
Ys Book 1&2 took the first two games in the series and combined them together into a single one like it was originally planned for the first time and the game will receive the most premium treatment imaginable ! A graphical overhaul which put new life into the game, touched up gameplay that made the experience smoother to play, smoother leveling curves which mitigated the grinding, new tracks to accompany certain important moment with new remixes on the absurdly insane sounding PCE soundchip which was able to make freaking miracle happened, it had animated cutscenes and full fucking voice-acting for a game released in 1989 and they did it both in Japanese and in English as this was the first game in the series to be shipped internationally (not counting the weird European port of Ys 1 on the Master System) !
Everyone’s mind was freaking blown away by how much love and care was put into this new iteration, gamers who were alive to see it happen before their very eyes as children couldn’t believe their eyes ! It was a true epic adventure with all the proper care put into its presentation to heightened that sense of wonder. It’s clear that probably the reason why Ys even got so popular in the first place and managed to stay relevant was because of this port right there, the game was well received pretty much everywhere and magazines sang the tales of how Hudson made Ys 1 & 2 a legendary game going beyond its simple ambition !
And all of this before Zelda or any other company was able to release their next-gen titles !
The PC-Engine version of Ys 1&2 was a massive success and single-handedly was enough of a reason for people to even buy a PC-Engine in the first place. It was clear that Hudson Soft didn’t just enjoy Ys, they didn’t just like Ys heck they didn’t even love Ys ! THEY WERE TRULY PASSIONATE ABOUT YS ! So much so that Hudson was allowed to port Ys III for the PC-Engine too with the same level of care and polish as what they did for Ys 1&2 even tho no amount of polish managed to make the game any good in the end and they botched the localization of it but oh well…
So when Falcom couldn’t make Ys IV themselves, Hudson seemed like the obvious choice to direct and create a new entry in their series ! But making a game from scratch with only a design document full of concept arts, a few guidelines and no lines of code or any prototype was a vastly different task than just taking an already existing game and polishing it to completion but unlike Tonkin House who was this small no-name company playing with their turds trying to make a barely playable game to satisfy the guideline, Hudson had something that they didn’t, they had experiences with making successful cult classic games but most importantly they had PASSION
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCmsS8eD_XY
From the moment you boot up the game you understand that the level of production value here is through the fucking roof ! You ain’t playing some dinky ass, poopy ass, budget ass, Tonkin Ass, Cold Steel Era Falcom ass “product” ! YOU ARE PLAYING A REAL VIDEOGAME ! MADE BY REAL DEVELOPERS ! WITH REAL TALENT ! REAL PASSION AND A REAL BUDGET TO GIVE THEM THE MEAN TO PRODUCE A MASTERPIECE AND YOU BET YOUR ASS THEY WERE GONNA TAKE THE CHANCE ! THERE IS NO BRAKE ON THIS TRAIN ! DAWN OF YS IS A GAME THAT’S GOING TO SHOW MODERN FALCOM PLAYERS HOW WE USED TO DO IT BACK IN THE 9 TO THE TIES ! A PRODUCT MOLD IN THE VOLCANO OF LOVE AND FORGED BY THE FINEST SOUL-MAKER IN THE INDUSTRY !
What made Ys 1&2 so legendary already was the visual presentation of it all, it made the original script of those games popped even more than they originally did in spite of the limited presentation and the added animated character portrait, voice acting and even cutscenes really added a lot of flair to the original two games. But Ys 1&2 Hudson was merely adding on top of the original game. With Dawn of Ys, they had full control over the game's presentation and how it would fit inside of the game ! And I’m happy to report they did a phenomenal job on just the visual presentation and scene direction level !
The first few minutes of Dawn of Ys already introduce the game in a much better way than Tonkin's version did. After coming back from one of their travels, Adol and Dogi stop by Esteria. It's been 2 years since the event of their adventure there and everyone is waiting for them ! A lot of things have changed already, Goban has opened a shop, Lilia now lives among the people of Esteria and is constantly waiting for Adol’s return and her health got better too ! Sarah is alive and managed to survive the assault of Dark Fact and his army after mysteriously disappearing in Ys 1 ! As you walk toward the city, the title of the game fades on top of the screen, everyone is celebrating Adol’s return ! This section feels like a genuine victory lap and a great way to welcome us back to the world of Ys after so long and I love every single minute of it and it’s all done really well !
One thing that’s clear from the game’s visual presentation is that the game will put more of an emphasis on its narration and especially how it’s going to be told through its visuals, you have much more scripted events the likes of other RPGs at the time where you lose control of Adol’s character for a moment to witness dialogues and scenes ! The general artstyle of the game oozes of that timeless 90’s anime charm, the character design is pretty damn excellent and on par with the striking designs of the original game, many characters from the first two games even got a face lift for the occasion, each of the game’s portrait and cutscenes are superbly animated and full of details ! That recreation of Ys II final battle is only a technical flex before the game bombards you with an avalanche of colors which pops out of your screen and invites you to live the adventure of a lifetime !
While the in-game graphics might be less impressive than the anime style portrait, cg’s and animation I just love how colorful the game looks which complimented by the extremely varied environments the game make you go through from lush forest to snowy mountains to a creepy abandoned mansion and even more, the visuals manage sometimes to pull off some really cool things with the environment and it definitely make the journey feel more alive than ever !
One particularly impressive thing about Dawn of Ys is that while text boxes are still the norm for dialogues with regular NPC’s most of the big story scene are entirely dubbed with animated character portraits popping on the screen and sometimes even CG’s much like in visual novel to highlight some of the more important moments, the original Japanese performance is honestly pretty stellar and I’m still shocked at how cleanly the voice acting sound on such an old hardware.
However this raised an issue when it came to the availability of the game for the longest time as much like Mask of the Sun, Dawn of Ys remained a Japanese exclusive and in the case of Dawn while an english fan translation already existed for a while most of the important dialogue remained untranslated simply because they couldn’t display subtitles during the game numerous voiced only segments. Thankfully nowadays this is no longer an issue thanks to a group of talented but amateurish voice actors who banded together with the goal to bring a fandub of the entire game !
While it’s not quite as professionally well made as the official dub of Ys 1&2 with the only professional voice actor here being Alan Oppenheimer, third cousin of THE Oppenheimer and voice of Skeletor in the He-Man series giving his voice to Darm in the intro of the game. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the crew delivered a hack job and I think that on average, they did manage to at least capture the feel of that era of voice-acting. I think it was probably something the dubbing team wanted to transmit with their performance, something that sound like it was recorded by a bunch of voice actors going off way too much in a at times goofy, at times overly serious and badass tone and I just think it works really well and definitely feel like the game actually did came out in the west. The only issue with the English Dub however is that the general audio mixing is rather poor, you can feel each member of the team had different mike quality and the voice acting can sometimes be a bit muffled by the music or sound effect playing in the background and with no option to arrange the audio mixing yourself in the settings you’ll have to sometimes open your ear wide to understand what the hell are they saying. Be sure to check their website at : https://www.ysutopia.net/downloads/ys4/Ys%20IV%20Dub%20Readme/readme.html
But back to the story, as Adol is celebrating with his friends, Sara the local fortune teller tells him about the distant land of Celceta. While she was escaping the forces of Dark Fact she discovered a connection between the black pearl and some ruins recently found on the mainland and she asked Adol to investigate it ! Without losing a single minute, Adol answered the call to adventure and in the dark of night set out to Celceta the mysteries of this ancient land ! But in the shadows, a sinister group of individual are trying to perform a dark ritual shown in a metal as fuck way too fucking gory for this franchise animated cutscenes before the game starts off with this absolute BANGER !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK9JTh0gAXs
GODDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN MY DUDE THESE SAXOPHONES ARE MAKING MY ASS WETTER THAN A FOUNTAIN ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON JESUS CHRIST !
One of the strongest aspect of the Ys series ever since its infancy has always been its amazing soundtrack, baring some exceptions, you know that an Ys game is going to own several asses just going by the soundtrack alone and I must report that the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys is once again completely out of this world ! For the first time in the history of the franchise, it’s the Falcom Sound JDK team handling the soundtrack. The Falcom JDK team is Falcom's very own personal rock-band. Composed of many prominent members joining in and out as the company evolve with time, the JDK team was originally founded to make CD quality audio version of Falcom’s soundtrack to sell them as promotional material but eventually, the JDK team took a more prominent role in development and as the advent of technology and sound quality went on, the JDK team now started actually composing for Ys as well as other Falcom titles.
Ys IV soundtrack was composed before the game ever began development and most of the music were made on CD’s that were later released as the “Ys IV Perfect Collection” but while the original album is freaking phenomenal on its own, that doesn’t take away the excellent instrumentalisation that went into translating the original composition into something that could be played by the PCE absolutely insane sound chip ! It’s simple, the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys might be my favorite soundtrack in the entire series ! While Yuzo Koshiro’s soundtrack for the original 2 Ys games was already an absolute joy for the ear, his departure didn’t mean that the JDK team couldn’t up the ante and provide a soundtrack which tells a million words with only a few notes !
The synths, the guitars, the FREAKING SAXOPHONE in the intro of the game, everything about this OST oozes from pure 90’s funk and pop with a lot variety in the composition, of course you get your adventure tracks that make you pump to rush into battle like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWYZDs0ARqg but you also get more ambient music that makes you feel like you’re adventuring in a scary yet sacred place and you don’t belong there with ominous sound reverberating through the room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QRx_ZBoSrE then you fight a boss and the music goes : https://youtu.be/4HNEPXbNEK4?si=oaBREVaNcJIG7zqj !
There is so much variety and energy to the soundtrack that to me it easily rivals some of the greats like Final Fantasy, Megaman, Castlevania or even Donkey Kong Country with which Dawn of Ys shares its sense of harmony and insane instrumentalisation which seems impossible to do on such ancient hardware but yet it does !
And I even like a lot of the creative choice they make when remaking old tracks, Fountain of Love, Tears of Sylph and the Syonin for example is composed with an instrumentalisation closer to that of the PC-98 instead of how it was in the PCE version of Ys 1 to clearly separate the homely, familiar and old-school feeling of Adol’s quasi home-town which contrasts with the rest of the adventures which uses more elaborate instrumentalisation as Adol dives into the unknown, the same way Adol evolves and his adventure get more grandiose and epic, the soundtrack get crazier and more complex in return !
Heck at some point in the game, you return to Darm Tower which is about to crumble and fall, they could’ve done some weird melancholic version of the tune but nah, your return to Darm Tower is accompanied by some funky, jazzy upbeat version of the original tune, what once used to be the base of operation of a great evil and Adol’s greatest challenge yet is now a freaking dance party !!! You’re dancing to the beat of your old enemies main theme and desecrate their corpses because that’s how strong and confident Adol became through his adventure and to him the Darm Tower isn’t a place of challenge to him but a leisurely walk to the DANCEFLOOR BABY : https://youtu.be/hMnq4RSmZtI?si=mxLh4IP0a_1t2QcR
Theme of Adol 1993, Field, A Great Ordeal, Temple of The Sun, Karna, A Kiss from Eldeel, so many great tracks henched into my brain thanks to Ryo Yonemitsu exquisite arrangements of the JDK’s masterclass of a soundtrack for the PC-Engine ! I’m not a music theorist so I can’t really explain with technical terms how and why these tracks work for me but the vibes are genuinely immaculate !
The Ys franchise is first and foremost about adventure, about this intoxicating feeling of wanting to give everything up, grab our bags and journey to places unknown ! Pushing with relentless motion through the different places Adol visits on his journey and a soundtrack this energetic and varied only emphasize that feeling even more !
But fear not my friend because Dawn of Ys isn’t just a really cool aesthetic served on silver platter of banger tracks, it’s also first and foremost an EXCELLENT videogame ! Once again, we’re back to Bump Combat and I know that after everything I’ve just said that might’ve gotten you a little bit too excited you’ll probably say something of the likes of : “Oh really ? We’re doing this ancient ass, clunky ass, stupid ass bump system again ?” and ladies and gentle straw men who live in my head, I’ve heard your plight !
After all, Bump Combat is such an acquired taste that I had to spend two whole reviews talking about the strengths of a well executed version of such a system as well as its merits when it comes to the flow and the momentum of the game and the cracks that shows when this balance isn’t respected by badly coded hitboxes, stilted movement, terrible boss design and so forth. But Ok I know this can be a turn-off to some people but once again put your bias aside because Dawn of Ys took Bump Combat and made it EXCELLENT ! It’s easily the best game featuring bump combat in the entire series (it’s also the last one if we don’t count all of the countless ports of Ys 1&2 for modern platforms).
Dawn of Ys, much like Mask of The Sun, decides to take the same basic moveset as Ys II, with the same sets of magic to unlock too. One might think of this decision as lazy since the game doesn’t really offer much novelty from a strict gameplay sense but while your toolkit may be the same, the way Hudson uses that toolkit is much more different and the game is full of surprises at every turn. The only real difference now is that you now possess the power of DIAGONAL movement which is an actual god sent for fighting enemies or just traversing the map and offers a greater degree of freedom when it comes to positioning and even puzzles !
Unlike Tonkin House who understood so little of the appeal of the bump combat system they implemented elements of game design which came in contradiction to it, Hudson decided to play with that element of constant motion with sometimes really clever movement based puzzle making almost each dungeon in the game pop with creativity and flair they couldn’t really achieve back then. Like I said in my first review, the secret of the early Ys games was their simplicity and ease of access but also its constant sense of motion which made you rush into battle to the tunes of power metal ! But while simplicity is indeed charming, ambition is definitely more enthralling !
While Ys II chose the route of streamlining the game to be more accessible and focus more greatly on its narration by designing their game in a more linear fashion, Hudson decided to take the freedom of Ys 1 and the varied setpieces of Ys 2 to create the perfect synthesis of the Ys formula imaginable. Dawn of Ys is a game which never stops going and always comes up with new and exciting ideas for your adventure !
When you arrive on the mainland to start your adventure, boom you’re confronted by the Romun Empire and sent to prison where they take your cool ass equipment from your adventures in Ys II and you’re mad as shit about this but you break-out with the help of cool characters such as Durgen and Karna and you realize that sometimes the game will make you fight with ally who also deals with enemies the same as you ! One time you’re on a raft and have to survive an onslaught of enemies, one time you’re in a volcano ! One time you’re turned into a monster and have to find a way to turn back to normal ! One time you’re in Esher Space and the gravity is flipped upside down and so much more !
What about the bosses tho ? Well Hudson also pushed themselves on that front, Dawn of Ys possesses more than 15 bosses compared to Mask of The Sun mere 9 and it’s one more boss than both Ys 1&2 combined (proving once again that Dawn of Ys is the true Ys II if the first two games are combined into one complete experience). With bump combat and magic available much like in Ys II we can imagine that there would be an imbalance between the two mechanics but nope, each boss of Dawn of Ys is extremely well designed and fun to fight !
All of the bosses strike a good balance between having to use bump combat and magic to defeat them and when it comes to pattern and all, I have absolutely nothing to complain about here, some of the later bosses are true marvel of boss design which fully plays into the strength of the somewhat simple yet effective battle system of the series so far ! A friend of mine once told me that the Twin Head boss in Ys 1 was the best they could do with Bump Combat and he was immediately proven wrong upon playing Dawn of Ys for the first time and realizing that even the first boss of that games tops any boss from either Ys 1 or Ys 2. Dawn of Ys is a game of constant wonder that always finds a way to surprise you at every turn with its setpieces, and each one of them go by so fast that you don’t get to see the time pass ! This game's sense of flow and pacing is so immaculate that not a single moment of it is boring and you feel like you’re living a really epic adventure with twists and turns and revelations at every corner ! The game may be short, it can be completed in a little over 10 h but these 10h are so intense and filled with stuff that you feel like the adventure is 10 times more epic and grand than what you can imagine !
And this proves that a game can make us feel and experience many things with more intensity no matter the actual game time, something that Falcom seems to have forgotten with time ! It’s not about how long and how stuffed with content a game is, it’s not about how much you can pad out a game to give the illusion of something richer, deeper and more interesting. It’s about making the most of what the content you have to truly impact the minds of the player who experiences your art ! And if length and only length was a determining factor some medium like films wouldn’t be so successful and Hudson understood it perfectly.
The story of Dawn of Ys is also one that I wanted to give a lot of credit towards. While Mask of The Sun followed the guideline of the design document to a T without attempting anything fancy (and with how awkwardly the story was told here, they didn’t attempt to even follow it right imo), Hudson took the idea of a direct sequel to Ys 1&2 further and did a lot of really cool things with the continuity and the established lore at the time ! The game is called “The Dawn of Ys” because more than just a new adventure in a brand new land, Adol was about to discover the secret of what he went through in the first two games ! It seems that Celceta holds the answers to all the events that lead to the corruption of the Black Pearl and the fall of Ys before Adol’s arrival in the first game and as you explore Celceta, you find yourself uncovering these answers and I absolutely love the connections they made here !
From the relationship the twin goddesses had with the inhabitant of Celceta, to the origins of Darm and the Black Pearl, to how certain things in Esteria and Ys relate to things in Celceta and how everything played into one another. One of my absolute favorite moment of the game is when during one of the game many info-dump flashbacks, you not only learn the real name of Dark Fact but also it’s revealed to you that one of the items you’ve been using in Ys 1 is actually a super important item in the global lore of the series ! Meaning that you now have to depart for Esteria and revisit the map of Ys 1 now free of all the demons ! Can you imagine the absolute flex that it is ? They didn’t have to do this and yet they did ! And it’s so good seeing all the characters from the first two games but also the different places and what they became after Adol’s departure, Ys 1 which used to be so simple, is now relegated to a small chapter inside of a much more ambitious whole ! Sure, it’s not on the level of say, the second half of DQ3 or the Kanto reveal in Pokemon Gold and Silver to name a similar exemple but man I’m a sucker for that type of stuff !
Everything about Dawn of Ys to its presentation, to its music, to its story, to level design, to the way the game builds on the basis of Ys 1&2 and plays with its continuity make the game feel like a non-stop constantly moving grand epic to which we never see the time passes ! They took everything that made Ys 1&2 so iconic and perfected it, Hudson didn’t just want to create yet another title in the prestigious Ys saga, they wanted to create the Ultimate Ys game !
The game is a love letter to the series and what Masaya Hashimoto and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, now too busy to work on their own project accomplished years ago and in many ways they managed to surpass them (well at least as far as making a Ys game goes !) and I believe that no one understood the appeal of Ys more than the team at Hudson Soft.
However, Falcom had other plans for the franchises and didn’t want to let go of Adol and the series and with Hudson hopping a bit too much above the initial guidelines to make a conclusion to the series instead of yet another episode, they decided that the game would now be considered not canon and Mask of The Sun will therefore be the version of reference for every subsequent Ys title. On one hand, I get it, this isn’t Hudson’s series, it was Falcom’s and if they wanted to continue with this series they just couldn’t let something like the ending of Dawn of Ys happen and give the series the proper closure it deserves.
Personally speaking, while what Hudson Soft did can be compared to mere fanfiction, it’s really good fanfiction and aside from coming into conflicts with the modern lore of the series and offering an epilogue that could have easily been acknowledged by Falcom without actually hurting the continuity, I think that what Hudson did here is phenomenal, the ending of Dawn of Ys is perhaps my favorite ending in the series despite and never fail to make me emotional. So many of Hudson’s ideas for the lore and continuity of the series at least in my opinion could’ve been reworked into the main timeline as I do think that some ideas here are actually better than what Falcom will eventually do with them !
Much to my dismay, that means that for how excellent Dawn of Ys is, its legacy is now forgotten, even Falcom seems to be really keen on ignoring the game’s existence or any influence Hudson might’ve had on the franchise (in fact : in the modern port of the older titles, you can play every OST’s of each version of Ys 1,2 and 3 but not the PC-Engine version but I bet it’s due to copyright issues rather than pettiness) and I think this is a great injustice.
I really do implore you, if you enjoy Ys especially Ys 1&2, I urge yourself to try out Dawn of Ys even more so if you were disappointed by Falcom’s own take on the game they did 20 years later with “Memories of Celceta” (but that will be a story for another time !). It’s really a masterpiece and easily amongst the best the series has to offer, a true labor of love and passion made by people who probably loved and understood Ys more than its original creators.
The next game in the series will be handled by Falcom themselves and who knows, maybe they won’t fuck it up… right ?
See you next time, as we take a look at “Ys V” the game, the game which almost killed the Ys franchise !
In the 80’s there were few developers who actually knew what they were doing more than Hudson Soft, these guys are probably single handedly responsible for Nintendo opening itself to third party developers to make the NES/Famicom the legendary console we know today. Hudson Soft first and foremost were people who didn’t just like video games as a way to make money on a newly expanding market, these guys were very passionate about new technology and the wonders of gaming as a whole.
But eventually, when you enjoy making games so much, you start to become ambitious and soon Hudson Soft will partner with NEC the prime micro-computer manufacturer (and creator of the famous “porn game machine” known as the PC-98) under a share common interest of building the game console of the future : The PC-Engine otherwise known as the Turbografx 16 outside of Japan. The PCE was a really impressive machine for the time and even today, I’m still kind of blown away by the technical capabilities of the console which only has an 8 bit processor but packs a lot of punch otherwise especially with the CD Add-on that they’ve adopted earlier than many other companies at the time.
However, they were releasing a new console on an highly competitive market, Sega and Nintendo were fiercely competing for domination and other companies who dared venture on hardware territory knew that it was complicated to stand out amongst the crowd and that’s when Hudson had a brilliant idea, they will partner with Falcom to port their classic Ys title to their console. Ys 1 and Ys 2 were already considered classic of NEC micro-computers system and they have already existed many ports of the game to pretty much all available platforms at the time including the NES and the Master System but Hudson’s version on their PC-Engine was going to be different, it wasn’t just going to be a port, it was going to be a full-on REMAKE !
Ys Book 1&2 took the first two games in the series and combined them together into a single one like it was originally planned for the first time and the game will receive the most premium treatment imaginable ! A graphical overhaul which put new life into the game, touched up gameplay that made the experience smoother to play, smoother leveling curves which mitigated the grinding, new tracks to accompany certain important moment with new remixes on the absurdly insane sounding PCE soundchip which was able to make freaking miracle happened, it had animated cutscenes and full fucking voice-acting for a game released in 1989 and they did it both in Japanese and in English as this was the first game in the series to be shipped internationally (not counting the weird European port of Ys 1 on the Master System) !
Everyone’s mind was freaking blown away by how much love and care was put into this new iteration, gamers who were alive to see it happen before their very eyes as children couldn’t believe their eyes ! It was a true epic adventure with all the proper care put into its presentation to heightened that sense of wonder. It’s clear that probably the reason why Ys even got so popular in the first place and managed to stay relevant was because of this port right there, the game was well received pretty much everywhere and magazines sang the tales of how Hudson made Ys 1 & 2 a legendary game going beyond its simple ambition !
And all of this before Zelda or any other company was able to release their next-gen titles !
The PC-Engine version of Ys 1&2 was a massive success and single-handedly was enough of a reason for people to even buy a PC-Engine in the first place. It was clear that Hudson Soft didn’t just enjoy Ys, they didn’t just like Ys heck they didn’t even love Ys ! THEY WERE TRULY PASSIONATE ABOUT YS ! So much so that Hudson was allowed to port Ys III for the PC-Engine too with the same level of care and polish as what they did for Ys 1&2 even tho no amount of polish managed to make the game any good in the end and they botched the localization of it but oh well…
So when Falcom couldn’t make Ys IV themselves, Hudson seemed like the obvious choice to direct and create a new entry in their series ! But making a game from scratch with only a design document full of concept arts, a few guidelines and no lines of code or any prototype was a vastly different task than just taking an already existing game and polishing it to completion but unlike Tonkin House who was this small no-name company playing with their turds trying to make a barely playable game to satisfy the guideline, Hudson had something that they didn’t, they had experiences with making successful cult classic games but most importantly they had PASSION
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCmsS8eD_XY
From the moment you boot up the game you understand that the level of production value here is through the fucking roof ! You ain’t playing some dinky ass, poopy ass, budget ass, Tonkin Ass, Cold Steel Era Falcom ass “product” ! YOU ARE PLAYING A REAL VIDEOGAME ! MADE BY REAL DEVELOPERS ! WITH REAL TALENT ! REAL PASSION AND A REAL BUDGET TO GIVE THEM THE MEAN TO PRODUCE A MASTERPIECE AND YOU BET YOUR ASS THEY WERE GONNA TAKE THE CHANCE ! THERE IS NO BRAKE ON THIS TRAIN ! DAWN OF YS IS A GAME THAT’S GOING TO SHOW MODERN FALCOM PLAYERS HOW WE USED TO DO IT BACK IN THE 9 TO THE TIES ! A PRODUCT MOLD IN THE VOLCANO OF LOVE AND FORGED BY THE FINEST SOUL-MAKER IN THE INDUSTRY !
What made Ys 1&2 so legendary already was the visual presentation of it all, it made the original script of those games popped even more than they originally did in spite of the limited presentation and the added animated character portrait, voice acting and even cutscenes really added a lot of flair to the original two games. But Ys 1&2 Hudson was merely adding on top of the original game. With Dawn of Ys, they had full control over the game's presentation and how it would fit inside of the game ! And I’m happy to report they did a phenomenal job on just the visual presentation and scene direction level !
The first few minutes of Dawn of Ys already introduce the game in a much better way than Tonkin's version did. After coming back from one of their travels, Adol and Dogi stop by Esteria. It's been 2 years since the event of their adventure there and everyone is waiting for them ! A lot of things have changed already, Goban has opened a shop, Lilia now lives among the people of Esteria and is constantly waiting for Adol’s return and her health got better too ! Sarah is alive and managed to survive the assault of Dark Fact and his army after mysteriously disappearing in Ys 1 ! As you walk toward the city, the title of the game fades on top of the screen, everyone is celebrating Adol’s return ! This section feels like a genuine victory lap and a great way to welcome us back to the world of Ys after so long and I love every single minute of it and it’s all done really well !
One thing that’s clear from the game’s visual presentation is that the game will put more of an emphasis on its narration and especially how it’s going to be told through its visuals, you have much more scripted events the likes of other RPGs at the time where you lose control of Adol’s character for a moment to witness dialogues and scenes ! The general artstyle of the game oozes of that timeless 90’s anime charm, the character design is pretty damn excellent and on par with the striking designs of the original game, many characters from the first two games even got a face lift for the occasion, each of the game’s portrait and cutscenes are superbly animated and full of details ! That recreation of Ys II final battle is only a technical flex before the game bombards you with an avalanche of colors which pops out of your screen and invites you to live the adventure of a lifetime !
While the in-game graphics might be less impressive than the anime style portrait, cg’s and animation I just love how colorful the game looks which complimented by the extremely varied environments the game make you go through from lush forest to snowy mountains to a creepy abandoned mansion and even more, the visuals manage sometimes to pull off some really cool things with the environment and it definitely make the journey feel more alive than ever !
One particularly impressive thing about Dawn of Ys is that while text boxes are still the norm for dialogues with regular NPC’s most of the big story scene are entirely dubbed with animated character portraits popping on the screen and sometimes even CG’s much like in visual novel to highlight some of the more important moments, the original Japanese performance is honestly pretty stellar and I’m still shocked at how cleanly the voice acting sound on such an old hardware.
However this raised an issue when it came to the availability of the game for the longest time as much like Mask of the Sun, Dawn of Ys remained a Japanese exclusive and in the case of Dawn while an english fan translation already existed for a while most of the important dialogue remained untranslated simply because they couldn’t display subtitles during the game numerous voiced only segments. Thankfully nowadays this is no longer an issue thanks to a group of talented but amateurish voice actors who banded together with the goal to bring a fandub of the entire game !
While it’s not quite as professionally well made as the official dub of Ys 1&2 with the only professional voice actor here being Alan Oppenheimer, third cousin of THE Oppenheimer and voice of Skeletor in the He-Man series giving his voice to Darm in the intro of the game. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the crew delivered a hack job and I think that on average, they did manage to at least capture the feel of that era of voice-acting. I think it was probably something the dubbing team wanted to transmit with their performance, something that sound like it was recorded by a bunch of voice actors going off way too much in a at times goofy, at times overly serious and badass tone and I just think it works really well and definitely feel like the game actually did came out in the west. The only issue with the English Dub however is that the general audio mixing is rather poor, you can feel each member of the team had different mike quality and the voice acting can sometimes be a bit muffled by the music or sound effect playing in the background and with no option to arrange the audio mixing yourself in the settings you’ll have to sometimes open your ear wide to understand what the hell are they saying. Be sure to check their website at : https://www.ysutopia.net/downloads/ys4/Ys%20IV%20Dub%20Readme/readme.html
But back to the story, as Adol is celebrating with his friends, Sara the local fortune teller tells him about the distant land of Celceta. While she was escaping the forces of Dark Fact she discovered a connection between the black pearl and some ruins recently found on the mainland and she asked Adol to investigate it ! Without losing a single minute, Adol answered the call to adventure and in the dark of night set out to Celceta the mysteries of this ancient land ! But in the shadows, a sinister group of individual are trying to perform a dark ritual shown in a metal as fuck way too fucking gory for this franchise animated cutscenes before the game starts off with this absolute BANGER !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK9JTh0gAXs
GODDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN MY DUDE THESE SAXOPHONES ARE MAKING MY ASS WETTER THAN A FOUNTAIN ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON JESUS CHRIST !
One of the strongest aspect of the Ys series ever since its infancy has always been its amazing soundtrack, baring some exceptions, you know that an Ys game is going to own several asses just going by the soundtrack alone and I must report that the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys is once again completely out of this world ! For the first time in the history of the franchise, it’s the Falcom Sound JDK team handling the soundtrack. The Falcom JDK team is Falcom's very own personal rock-band. Composed of many prominent members joining in and out as the company evolve with time, the JDK team was originally founded to make CD quality audio version of Falcom’s soundtrack to sell them as promotional material but eventually, the JDK team took a more prominent role in development and as the advent of technology and sound quality went on, the JDK team now started actually composing for Ys as well as other Falcom titles.
Ys IV soundtrack was composed before the game ever began development and most of the music were made on CD’s that were later released as the “Ys IV Perfect Collection” but while the original album is freaking phenomenal on its own, that doesn’t take away the excellent instrumentalisation that went into translating the original composition into something that could be played by the PCE absolutely insane sound chip ! It’s simple, the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys might be my favorite soundtrack in the entire series ! While Yuzo Koshiro’s soundtrack for the original 2 Ys games was already an absolute joy for the ear, his departure didn’t mean that the JDK team couldn’t up the ante and provide a soundtrack which tells a million words with only a few notes !
The synths, the guitars, the FREAKING SAXOPHONE in the intro of the game, everything about this OST oozes from pure 90’s funk and pop with a lot variety in the composition, of course you get your adventure tracks that make you pump to rush into battle like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWYZDs0ARqg but you also get more ambient music that makes you feel like you’re adventuring in a scary yet sacred place and you don’t belong there with ominous sound reverberating through the room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QRx_ZBoSrE then you fight a boss and the music goes : https://youtu.be/4HNEPXbNEK4?si=oaBREVaNcJIG7zqj !
There is so much variety and energy to the soundtrack that to me it easily rivals some of the greats like Final Fantasy, Megaman, Castlevania or even Donkey Kong Country with which Dawn of Ys shares its sense of harmony and insane instrumentalisation which seems impossible to do on such ancient hardware but yet it does !
And I even like a lot of the creative choice they make when remaking old tracks, Fountain of Love, Tears of Sylph and the Syonin for example is composed with an instrumentalisation closer to that of the PC-98 instead of how it was in the PCE version of Ys 1 to clearly separate the homely, familiar and old-school feeling of Adol’s quasi home-town which contrasts with the rest of the adventures which uses more elaborate instrumentalisation as Adol dives into the unknown, the same way Adol evolves and his adventure get more grandiose and epic, the soundtrack get crazier and more complex in return !
Heck at some point in the game, you return to Darm Tower which is about to crumble and fall, they could’ve done some weird melancholic version of the tune but nah, your return to Darm Tower is accompanied by some funky, jazzy upbeat version of the original tune, what once used to be the base of operation of a great evil and Adol’s greatest challenge yet is now a freaking dance party !!! You’re dancing to the beat of your old enemies main theme and desecrate their corpses because that’s how strong and confident Adol became through his adventure and to him the Darm Tower isn’t a place of challenge to him but a leisurely walk to the DANCEFLOOR BABY : https://youtu.be/hMnq4RSmZtI?si=mxLh4IP0a_1t2QcR
Theme of Adol 1993, Field, A Great Ordeal, Temple of The Sun, Karna, A Kiss from Eldeel, so many great tracks henched into my brain thanks to Ryo Yonemitsu exquisite arrangements of the JDK’s masterclass of a soundtrack for the PC-Engine ! I’m not a music theorist so I can’t really explain with technical terms how and why these tracks work for me but the vibes are genuinely immaculate !
The Ys franchise is first and foremost about adventure, about this intoxicating feeling of wanting to give everything up, grab our bags and journey to places unknown ! Pushing with relentless motion through the different places Adol visits on his journey and a soundtrack this energetic and varied only emphasize that feeling even more !
But fear not my friend because Dawn of Ys isn’t just a really cool aesthetic served on silver platter of banger tracks, it’s also first and foremost an EXCELLENT videogame ! Once again, we’re back to Bump Combat and I know that after everything I’ve just said that might’ve gotten you a little bit too excited you’ll probably say something of the likes of : “Oh really ? We’re doing this ancient ass, clunky ass, stupid ass bump system again ?” and ladies and gentle straw men who live in my head, I’ve heard your plight !
After all, Bump Combat is such an acquired taste that I had to spend two whole reviews talking about the strengths of a well executed version of such a system as well as its merits when it comes to the flow and the momentum of the game and the cracks that shows when this balance isn’t respected by badly coded hitboxes, stilted movement, terrible boss design and so forth. But Ok I know this can be a turn-off to some people but once again put your bias aside because Dawn of Ys took Bump Combat and made it EXCELLENT ! It’s easily the best game featuring bump combat in the entire series (it’s also the last one if we don’t count all of the countless ports of Ys 1&2 for modern platforms).
Dawn of Ys, much like Mask of The Sun, decides to take the same basic moveset as Ys II, with the same sets of magic to unlock too. One might think of this decision as lazy since the game doesn’t really offer much novelty from a strict gameplay sense but while your toolkit may be the same, the way Hudson uses that toolkit is much more different and the game is full of surprises at every turn. The only real difference now is that you now possess the power of DIAGONAL movement which is an actual god sent for fighting enemies or just traversing the map and offers a greater degree of freedom when it comes to positioning and even puzzles !
Unlike Tonkin House who understood so little of the appeal of the bump combat system they implemented elements of game design which came in contradiction to it, Hudson decided to play with that element of constant motion with sometimes really clever movement based puzzle making almost each dungeon in the game pop with creativity and flair they couldn’t really achieve back then. Like I said in my first review, the secret of the early Ys games was their simplicity and ease of access but also its constant sense of motion which made you rush into battle to the tunes of power metal ! But while simplicity is indeed charming, ambition is definitely more enthralling !
While Ys II chose the route of streamlining the game to be more accessible and focus more greatly on its narration by designing their game in a more linear fashion, Hudson decided to take the freedom of Ys 1 and the varied setpieces of Ys 2 to create the perfect synthesis of the Ys formula imaginable. Dawn of Ys is a game which never stops going and always comes up with new and exciting ideas for your adventure !
When you arrive on the mainland to start your adventure, boom you’re confronted by the Romun Empire and sent to prison where they take your cool ass equipment from your adventures in Ys II and you’re mad as shit about this but you break-out with the help of cool characters such as Durgen and Karna and you realize that sometimes the game will make you fight with ally who also deals with enemies the same as you ! One time you’re on a raft and have to survive an onslaught of enemies, one time you’re in a volcano ! One time you’re turned into a monster and have to find a way to turn back to normal ! One time you’re in Esher Space and the gravity is flipped upside down and so much more !
What about the bosses tho ? Well Hudson also pushed themselves on that front, Dawn of Ys possesses more than 15 bosses compared to Mask of The Sun mere 9 and it’s one more boss than both Ys 1&2 combined (proving once again that Dawn of Ys is the true Ys II if the first two games are combined into one complete experience). With bump combat and magic available much like in Ys II we can imagine that there would be an imbalance between the two mechanics but nope, each boss of Dawn of Ys is extremely well designed and fun to fight !
All of the bosses strike a good balance between having to use bump combat and magic to defeat them and when it comes to pattern and all, I have absolutely nothing to complain about here, some of the later bosses are true marvel of boss design which fully plays into the strength of the somewhat simple yet effective battle system of the series so far ! A friend of mine once told me that the Twin Head boss in Ys 1 was the best they could do with Bump Combat and he was immediately proven wrong upon playing Dawn of Ys for the first time and realizing that even the first boss of that games tops any boss from either Ys 1 or Ys 2. Dawn of Ys is a game of constant wonder that always finds a way to surprise you at every turn with its setpieces, and each one of them go by so fast that you don’t get to see the time pass ! This game's sense of flow and pacing is so immaculate that not a single moment of it is boring and you feel like you’re living a really epic adventure with twists and turns and revelations at every corner ! The game may be short, it can be completed in a little over 10 h but these 10h are so intense and filled with stuff that you feel like the adventure is 10 times more epic and grand than what you can imagine !
And this proves that a game can make us feel and experience many things with more intensity no matter the actual game time, something that Falcom seems to have forgotten with time ! It’s not about how long and how stuffed with content a game is, it’s not about how much you can pad out a game to give the illusion of something richer, deeper and more interesting. It’s about making the most of what the content you have to truly impact the minds of the player who experiences your art ! And if length and only length was a determining factor some medium like films wouldn’t be so successful and Hudson understood it perfectly.
The story of Dawn of Ys is also one that I wanted to give a lot of credit towards. While Mask of The Sun followed the guideline of the design document to a T without attempting anything fancy (and with how awkwardly the story was told here, they didn’t attempt to even follow it right imo), Hudson took the idea of a direct sequel to Ys 1&2 further and did a lot of really cool things with the continuity and the established lore at the time ! The game is called “The Dawn of Ys” because more than just a new adventure in a brand new land, Adol was about to discover the secret of what he went through in the first two games ! It seems that Celceta holds the answers to all the events that lead to the corruption of the Black Pearl and the fall of Ys before Adol’s arrival in the first game and as you explore Celceta, you find yourself uncovering these answers and I absolutely love the connections they made here !
From the relationship the twin goddesses had with the inhabitant of Celceta, to the origins of Darm and the Black Pearl, to how certain things in Esteria and Ys relate to things in Celceta and how everything played into one another. One of my absolute favorite moment of the game is when during one of the game many info-dump flashbacks, you not only learn the real name of Dark Fact but also it’s revealed to you that one of the items you’ve been using in Ys 1 is actually a super important item in the global lore of the series ! Meaning that you now have to depart for Esteria and revisit the map of Ys 1 now free of all the demons ! Can you imagine the absolute flex that it is ? They didn’t have to do this and yet they did ! And it’s so good seeing all the characters from the first two games but also the different places and what they became after Adol’s departure, Ys 1 which used to be so simple, is now relegated to a small chapter inside of a much more ambitious whole ! Sure, it’s not on the level of say, the second half of DQ3 or the Kanto reveal in Pokemon Gold and Silver to name a similar exemple but man I’m a sucker for that type of stuff !
Everything about Dawn of Ys to its presentation, to its music, to its story, to level design, to the way the game builds on the basis of Ys 1&2 and plays with its continuity make the game feel like a non-stop constantly moving grand epic to which we never see the time passes ! They took everything that made Ys 1&2 so iconic and perfected it, Hudson didn’t just want to create yet another title in the prestigious Ys saga, they wanted to create the Ultimate Ys game !
The game is a love letter to the series and what Masaya Hashimoto and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, now too busy to work on their own project accomplished years ago and in many ways they managed to surpass them (well at least as far as making a Ys game goes !) and I believe that no one understood the appeal of Ys more than the team at Hudson Soft.
However, Falcom had other plans for the franchises and didn’t want to let go of Adol and the series and with Hudson hopping a bit too much above the initial guidelines to make a conclusion to the series instead of yet another episode, they decided that the game would now be considered not canon and Mask of The Sun will therefore be the version of reference for every subsequent Ys title. On one hand, I get it, this isn’t Hudson’s series, it was Falcom’s and if they wanted to continue with this series they just couldn’t let something like the ending of Dawn of Ys happen and give the series the proper closure it deserves.
Personally speaking, while what Hudson Soft did can be compared to mere fanfiction, it’s really good fanfiction and aside from coming into conflicts with the modern lore of the series and offering an epilogue that could have easily been acknowledged by Falcom without actually hurting the continuity, I think that what Hudson did here is phenomenal, the ending of Dawn of Ys is perhaps my favorite ending in the series despite and never fail to make me emotional. So many of Hudson’s ideas for the lore and continuity of the series at least in my opinion could’ve been reworked into the main timeline as I do think that some ideas here are actually better than what Falcom will eventually do with them !
Much to my dismay, that means that for how excellent Dawn of Ys is, its legacy is now forgotten, even Falcom seems to be really keen on ignoring the game’s existence or any influence Hudson might’ve had on the franchise (in fact : in the modern port of the older titles, you can play every OST’s of each version of Ys 1,2 and 3 but not the PC-Engine version but I bet it’s due to copyright issues rather than pettiness) and I think this is a great injustice.
I really do implore you, if you enjoy Ys especially Ys 1&2, I urge yourself to try out Dawn of Ys even more so if you were disappointed by Falcom’s own take on the game they did 20 years later with “Memories of Celceta” (but that will be a story for another time !). It’s really a masterpiece and easily amongst the best the series has to offer, a true labor of love and passion made by people who probably loved and understood Ys more than its original creators.
The next game in the series will be handled by Falcom themselves and who knows, maybe they won’t fuck it up… right ?
See you next time, as we take a look at “Ys V” the game, the game which almost killed the Ys franchise !
O melhor dos Ys clássicos, a despedida do bump system!
Tudo isso feito com uma apresentação incrível, lindos gráficos, gameplay bem amarradinho e satisfatório, músicas incríveis e animações de tirar o fôlego!
Tudo isso feito com uma apresentação incrível, lindos gráficos, gameplay bem amarradinho e satisfatório, músicas incríveis e animações de tirar o fôlego!