Ys Strategy is a real-time strategy game developed by Future Creates exclusive to the Nintendo DS. It was published by Marvelous Interactive (now absorbed into its parent company, Marvelous Entertainment) in Japan and Rising Star Games in Europe. Its status in canon is unknown, as Falcom hasn't stated anything about it.
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holy crap this sux
What.....just why was this game made?
What if we made a spinoff game of a franchise that's completely antithetical to its core themes and mechanics in every single way?
Ys is definitely one of my favorite franchises now, with its high intensity and fast paced combat with super responsive controls and crazy boss fights. But what if we were to spice up this franchise in a big way, with something completely different like... resource management! And waiting hours for ships to build and characters to walk across the screen and chop down trees for lumber! Wouldn't that be exciting, action-packed gameplay?
I really can't stress how sluggish this game feels; your heroes feel like they're perpetually mired in a bullet-time void, there's tons of dialogue and it loads ridiculously slow unless you mash the A button, and the entire first chapter is just tedious tutorials and unskippable cutscenes. It also doesn't help that the touch screen controls to even select units and buildings feels super imprecise and finicky. Oh, and the visuals are absolutely horrid; I think I've seen Commodore 64 games with more pixels than this game's overworld. There's a game hidden behind here somewhere, but it's not worth the eternal loading screen that it's shoved behind. Needless to say, Falcom doesn't mention this game anywhere in its Ys canon and I can't say I'm horribly surprised it never got released in the US. Avoid this like the plague, both if you're an RTS fan and a Ys fan.
Ys is definitely one of my favorite franchises now, with its high intensity and fast paced combat with super responsive controls and crazy boss fights. But what if we were to spice up this franchise in a big way, with something completely different like... resource management! And waiting hours for ships to build and characters to walk across the screen and chop down trees for lumber! Wouldn't that be exciting, action-packed gameplay?
I really can't stress how sluggish this game feels; your heroes feel like they're perpetually mired in a bullet-time void, there's tons of dialogue and it loads ridiculously slow unless you mash the A button, and the entire first chapter is just tedious tutorials and unskippable cutscenes. It also doesn't help that the touch screen controls to even select units and buildings feels super imprecise and finicky. Oh, and the visuals are absolutely horrid; I think I've seen Commodore 64 games with more pixels than this game's overworld. There's a game hidden behind here somewhere, but it's not worth the eternal loading screen that it's shoved behind. Needless to say, Falcom doesn't mention this game anywhere in its Ys canon and I can't say I'm horribly surprised it never got released in the US. Avoid this like the plague, both if you're an RTS fan and a Ys fan.