After finishing Ys I & II, I went straight to the sequel. I watched a let’s play of this game well over a decade ago, and that was actually probably my first exposure to Ys as a franchise. It didn’t look super incredible then, so I’ve never given it that much thought in the time since, but I figured since I was already thinking about Ys (and this is also a game my partner quite likes) that I might as well track down a way to play it and finally experience this game myself. It took me around 5 or so hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware.

Ys III takes place two years after the first Ys, with Adol going off with Dogi (a minor character from the first Ys) on more adventures around the world. Eventually, a fortune teller gives Dogi a disastrous fortune about his hometown of Redmont, and the two set off there at once. With such ominous beginnings, Adol quickly finds himself on a quest to save not just Redmont but all of Felghana from the great evil that lies just beneath its surface. Once again, this is a relatively early 90’s action/adventure game, so it’s not the best thing in the world, but we’re already seeing good steps from Ys I & II. The total cast is significantly smaller than that of those games, and those who are here generally have relatively far more active roles in the story instead of just being glorified dialogue flag triggers for Adol. It’s hardly going to give most SquareSoft games a run for their money, of course, but we’re taking firm steps in the right direction, and it’s a story I thought was good fun.

The actual gameplay of Ys III could hardly be more different while still being in the same action/adventure genre. Dead and buried is the old staple of bump combat, as now not only does Adol fight by swinging his sword with the attack button, but we’re not even a top-down game anymore! Ys III is a sidescrolling action/adventure game in the vein of something like Castlevania II or Zelda II, with everything from towns to dungeons navigated like that and having no overworld to speak of. This is sort of a double-edged sword. On the more negative end is that sidescrollers just have a lot less literal space to work with as adventure games. The world feels quite small compared to Ys I & II (even though it’s not terribly bigger or smaller), and the level design ends up feeling quite unimpressive as well.

On the other hand, however, I honestly far prefer the gameplay in this to the gameplay of Ys I & II. While the bosses still aren’t amazing and a lot of enemies are quite simple and similar to one another, needing to jump, duck, and swing your sword to fight stuff means that combat has far more depth, and I found it far more fun as a result. Sure, a lot of bosses are still a matter of mulch or be mulched, that more active element means you actually feel more accomplished for taking a boss down quick compared to the bump combat equivalent of just having vindication that you did enough grinding to see this through. Hit detection (especially on the penultimate and final bosses) is a bit wonky at times, but this game at the very least continues to have the same save anywhere system that the earlier Ys games has, so getting nuked down by a boss is still just a matter of entering the room and trying again until your strategy is more sound.

This game still has levels to grind for, sure, but the relative length of this game being shorter also comes with the levels being far faster to grind for too. I did maybe a combined hour or hour and a half of grinding in this (with the owls in the ruins being a particularly great place to reach max level quickly), and after that it was all smooth sailing. This game even has better signposting than the first two did as well, thankfully, and I didn’t get lost or need to look up where to go a single time~. Ys III is overall still a bit on the easy side (much like Ys I & II were if you kept on top of grinding), but the overall play style of this was something I ended up enjoying much more despite how much smaller an adventure this is.

Though we’re on a SNES and therefore lack the storage capacity for the voice acting or CD-quality sound that a PC Engine can boast, the presentation is still as good as ever. The graphics are a bit simple compared to some other SFC games, but environments are still nice and colorful, and enemies especially are very pretty and well designed. Though I’ve been told that other versions (such as the PCE CD version, naturally) have better music, the SFC is still a very capable machine, and this is still an Ys game, so the music still rocks as much as ever even though the gameplay has changed so much.

Verdict: Recommended. This is a game that I don’t think is honestly that much better than Ys Books I & II on paper, but the execution is done so much better that it ends up being much easier to recommend as a result. If you don’t mind a bit of jank and a bit of grinding at the start, this is a good fun action/adventure 16-bit adventure game. It’s not the best thing on the system, for sure, but it still manages to be good to play with good music, and it’ll make a fun thing to go through in a weekend if this is a retro genre you’re interested in (as I so very much am).

Game Review - originally written by Spinner 8

Yep, the unloved bastard child of the Ys series. It’s really not that bad of a game, but it’s just not an Ys game by any means, aside from the fact that Adol is in it. It’s kind of like Zelda II, except Wanderers from Ys is actuallly good. Anyways, the game takes on a side-scrolling perspective, and you have to swing your sword at stuff (which, if you’re not familiar with the Ys series, is actually a pretty big change), and you get your ass kicked a lot. Maybe you have to go around and waste tons and tons of time leveling up, but Falcom could’ve at least given you an easier way to replenish HP. In order to do so (without using any valuable Herb) you have to go outside the cave, and then your health gradually refills while outside. Then you go back inside. Which is pretty goddamn annoying! Okay, it’s really not that bad, but.. well, you’ll find out in a second.

The MSX version here either has a ton of slowdown, or all my emulators are just whacked. I’ve got to say, though, the tradeoff here is almost worth it, because the graphics are simply marvelous. Lots of colors, parallax scrolling… and a ton of slowdown. Oh well.

Of COURSE my first Ys game is the black sheep of the franchise. You all know the drill.

It's a substandard action game; these hitboxes are sparse and the enemy behavior is rudimentary. It also underdelivers on exploration and social aspects you'd expect from this era's top-down JRPGs, so I get why series fans would feel alienated. It's also-also overly-grindy - but, I actually liked it for that. I'm always a sucker for the drastic take on JRPG leveling, where enemies knock you out in one hit but then you level up and trample them like ants. I was essentially getting my Maten No Soumetsu fix from a 6-hour game instead of an 80-hour game with game over RNG.

It's a very pleasant and comfortable vibe, too - wonderful music, a homely town you revisit between dungeons, nice background art, and characters that were easy to get invested in despite being 16 pixels tall. Even the bordered screen grew on me - it's like peering into the storybook.

I don't know why they felt the need to drop you into The Big Seizure Dimension in the final boss. It wouldn't be that horrible of a fight if not for that (and the shaking ground beneath you that randomizes your jump starting point and makes it really easy to scrape your head against the boss when you try to attack it).

I'm curious to try out the rest of the Ys games now

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…

The two stars come from a playthrough after I put in codes to make it playable (a gold and xp code to get through the levels without spending a half hour grinding on scorpions first, and then just a straight up invincibility code later on). As every angry Amazon customer review says, if I could go any lower than a half star, I would. When it’s playable with codes, it’s really no better or worse than Zelda II, if you’re into that. Otherwise, if you’re into shit from a butt that sucks, go ahead and play this without them

i played a second version of this game because cope, I played the Turbografx CD version first and on Genesis most things are better but some key areas are much worse. Overall the game feels much more polished both in gameplay and graphics, however this is offset by the level/difficulty curve being drastically worse, often requiring multiple levels in between bosses. Additionally, some bosses like the wyvern and final boss have completely broken hitboxes that make them impossible to reliably hit without taking damage, though this can be offset with the Protect Ring or higher levels. Of course, a lot of the TG-CD novelties that made the game memorable to me like the CD-quality soundtrack and glorious dubbed voice acting are absent as well. I'd definitely still rather play that version but overall this is a close second.

Played the NES version.

Honestly better than I thought as a port, didn't think the NES could handle it but it was actually decent.
The problem is that Wanderers from Ys is a VERY flawed game at its core, so a port being decent doesn't mean the game is good. It's too linear, unfair and the grinding is AWFUL.

Played the SNES version after, and it somehow manages to be even worse. That Galbalan fight is one of the worst boss fights of all time imo.

This is apparently the black sheep of the franchise, but I love the fact that they dumped the stupid bump combat from the first two, and the side scrolling works pretty well. What I don't love is the amount of grinding this requires to clear what would otherwise be a relatively short game.

The story is pretty self contained which makes the entire adventure feel very localized and compact. Music as usual is nicely done, and the visuals are also decent minus some annoying parallax in the original PC-88 release. I'd say its my favorite Ys game out of the first three just because of the change in combat, but it was too lacking in other areas to rank among the elites of the genre.

I played the SNES version, I think I made a lapse in my judgment
The bosses were either boring easy or literally hell, and after reaching max level in Illburns Ruins then the bosses just got more and more annoying (except Garland was fine bc Time Ring go behind him for free hits... well until I get hit and get 2HKO yeah)
Valestein Castle just sucked, the nightcore (pitched up) version of the song and the traps that killed you in 2 hits were very fun
Galbalan made me use multiple save states... 21 of them to be precise. Even then, it took 28 minutes. That fight just sucked.

Game Review - originally written by (wraith)

This yet another port of another game in Falcom’s Ys series. Why is this series of games ported to EVERY platform? Because it rules, that’s why. Unfortunately, this particular Ys game is the black sheep. First of all, it’s a side-scroller. Second, it is insanely (infuriatingly, even) difficult. I never beat the SNES version without the invincibility code. It’s that hard. And this one has no such code. Hopefully some of the later stages are easier because the NES can’t handle the amount of sprites the SNES could. Either way, check this game out, or don’t. If you do, I can’t be held responsible if you end up hurling your gamepad at the wall in frustration.

The combat gameplay is horribly executed in hit detection, but I have to say even if it's so clunky I can see something interesting coming out of it. Just like in turn based RPGs you are always going to take damage, it's interesting to see someone make an action sidescroller with the same mentality. Here it's just because it's poorly thought out and programmed at least in the SNES version, but if well pulled off it could be an interesting exercise for the player in resource management strategy knowing when to use your healing items since you know there is going to be mandatory damage

Otherwise it's a very simple sidescroller, probably the simplest RPG I have seen, but it's also quite short (just leave the controller taped so that you grind on enemies respawning for some hours then come back, it's no biggie) and the simple story benefits from that as well, there's nothing more to it than uncovering the past of one of the antagonists and his revenge against the kingdom you are at and I would have liked more things that made you attatched to the town of Redmont so that final goodbye would be more bittersweet. It may not be Link's Awakening in that regard, but again, it goes off without so much filler but the necessary to know the town's backstory so you care about it a little

So I've played a few Ys games now: remakes of I and half of II, and a few Steam releases (Origins and some other...) but I can't understand how this series was popular enough to get to those better titles. Ys I and II are janky short RPGs where you hug enemies to death and Ys III is a bad Zelda II that can be completed in 2 hours if not for all the grind and enemies with wonky hitboxes eating your health immeadiately without any invincibility frames.

I quite like their RPG mechanics, and mysterious atmosphere (although Ys III has no mystery, all items are just given to you), reminds me of La-Mulana, but holy shit those are not good.

Frankly, by the time I fucked up my game once and restarted (it drops you into a cave with no immediate exit and way stronger enemies + a boss and lmao if you save over your file), I just grinded to max level early with enemies that walk straight into you. Still a hell of a game at the end, though.

I don't particularly know anything about Ys, this was just in a set of ROMs I blindly downloaded lately and I thought it might be interesting to go for. Honestly, it's pretty bad. It's another one of those early action RPGs that fails to nicely emulate the feel of Zelda II, though it's still better than contemporaries like Cadash.

The biggest issue is easily the difficulty. It is completely barbaric how hard Ys III is, particularly because of lack of invincibility frames. Pretty much anything can make short work of you at any given time if you're not careful. There's a leveling up system, but it takes sooo long to level up each time. I decided I had to just max my level out about halfway in to avoid further troubles after I reached an earlier boss underleveled and took like 20-30 fucking minutes on it. As a whole, the difficulty is just way too high and the curve is way too steep.

The presentation is alright, I suppose. The characters and enemies are pretty lacking in style, but some of the backgrounds and such are very nice, though it just made me wish the game wasn't confined to a smaller border in the screen. The best aspect of the game is probably the music, it sounds like it was composed specifically for the Genesis rather than being on a port. The item get theme, however, is nearly the same as Metroid's for some reason, which I got quite a kick out of.

I can't really recommend this because playing it is kind of miserable. Honestly a lot of Zelda II-styled games at the time are, and as much as a soft spot I have for Zelda II even it is notorious for being pretty brutishly difficult. I've heard the remake of this game is actually pretty solid, but I haven't really found myself interested. I, for some reason, am more comfortable in my weird little bubble of 4th gen games of wildly varying quality.

Gotta be honest, I got right up to the last boss, gave it a couple tries, then gave up and watched the ending on YouTube so I could hurry up and relinquish control of my sister's TV back to her (as she glared daggers at me). I had some fun with this title, but the sidescroller experience seems to have been a miss.

At the micro level, the game feels like a very solid NES title. So about par the course with Falcom's approach to console technology even into the modern day. Movement acceleration of any kind is practically non-existent, so paired with the low framerate inherit to the system and high movement speed, you end up overshooting or undershooting quite often. It's not bad per say, it's just all problems that were already solved by its peers in the sidescroller space.

And that really, for me, gets to the macro level issue with this game. I can understand if they made a sidescroller because the devs at Falcom really wanted to try, but it ultimately feels like they made a sidescroller because "that's what sells on consoles" and then tried to put a few of the trappings on Ys over that.... Except that this was actually originally a PC88 release and didn't see a port for over a year, so it effectively was an NES game rather than an SNES. Looking at footage of the original version (which is actually rather gorgeous for '89) it seems that the original played at a lower framerate and the combat was tuned for that. So comparing it to SMW or Secret of Mana would be a bit inappropriate, but I still hold that console ports were in the works from early in development, based on the decisions made even in the original release.

Aside from the action, the adventure elements are where I'm a bit more disappointed as they're a big downgrade from what was in Ys I & II. The progression of events is very linear with only a few backtracking curveballs to break things up and a couple of chests in missable nooks and crannies. There's still a little bit of their signature emphasis on the NPC characters, but with the english translation the dialogue is pretty stilted. Can't comment on how that compares to the rest of Falcom's writing at the time, though, since I only played the Complete+ versions of Ys I & II.

Despite all my complaining, it gets a bit of a "whole is better than the sum of its parts" effect where none of the flaws are severe enough that you can't enjoy it if you know what you're signing up for. For prospective players, this is a game for action RPG enthusiasts curious about the history of the genre and Falcom diehards (which I am both). So if you're a modern Ys fan and don't want to dive this deep into retroland, just play the remake "The Oath in Felghana." And if you're just looking for SNES games to play, you can probably do better.

But it has its charm.

Fun little bonus fact: The first time I played this game was actually when I was about 5 or 6 years old because my friend randomly owned it. We all called it "Why-Es" of course and had no idea how to play it, but I always remembered it because I had never seen a SNES game with RPG elements like the ones I liked in Neverwinter Nights.

It's a bit wild to me that 20 years later I'm learning Japanese just to play their games before they're officially localized...

Antes que nada, jugarse la versión de PC-Engine o Sega Genesis que son las mejores en general.

— PCE: La mejor calidad de música, doblaje de voz meme, alta dificultad.
— Genesis: Distintas escenas, no hay voces, alta dificultad

Desde que salió el remake (The Oath in Felghana) no ha parado de estar este juego en las sombras y a veces hasta asociado como la oveja negra junto con Ys V. Pero la realidad es que es un juegazo que no tiene nada que envidiar a su remake, son experiencias completamente diferentes que valen la pena disfrutar.

Puede impactar que la jugabilidad sea diferente a Ys I & II ya que es básicamente el mismo cambio que paso de Zelda a Zelda II, pero cuando le agarras el gustillo dan ganas de volverlo a rejugar. Y por ser una entrega standalone que no agrega mucho a la historia como Origin, IV, VI, etc. Tiene una trama interesante que marco el concepto en la saga de ir a otros sitios aparte de Esteria.

Básicamente, de los mejores Ys junto con su remake.

Ys III has somewhat of an identity crisis; it's following in the footsteps of Zelda by making their second instalment (if we count 1 and 2 as one combined game, as originally intended) a 2D side scroller, and trying to squash the system from 1 and 2 into this new setting. However, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

To the games credit, the presentation is on point. Graphics are pleasant (though suffer from a bit of a lack of vibrancy) with some very nice parallax scrolling, and the music is about the level you'd come to expect from Falcom's sound team: kick-ass. And considering this is a port, it converts to the Mega Drive's sound chip surprisingly well, far better than the SNES ports music did. The translation is a bit spotty, with odd wording and weird typos, but it's still cohesive.

As for the gameplay...it's now a side scrolling hack n' slash dungeon crawler. No overworld, just a friendly town and a map leading to the various dungeons you unlock throughout the story (of which there are only about 5 areas, some containing multiple dungeons). The sword-swishing isn't great early on, as your effective range is so short that enemies can actually reach and hurt you between attacks, even if you hold the button down. This improves as you upgrade gear, but as with 1 and 2, the earlygame is brutal. You can easily die just trying to grind to level 2, and you'll need to.

That's the critical flaw for me, actually: the difficulty spikes. Early on, you'll be mincemeat if you're not at least level 3, which requires a lot of tedious grinding of the same 2 basic enemies. As the game goes on, it becomes a pattern: Enter dungeon, get beaten up immediately, cautiously grind until the next level, get through dungeon ok, reach boss, get destroyed, grind again to next level, try boss again, kick boss' ass. Repeat. The sheer difference in difficulty for most boss fights with just a single level of difference feels poorly balanced.

There's also a ring system thrown in, where you can obtain several rings through your adventure and equip them for certain effects. In the older games these would just be passive bonuses and stayed at that, but now they consume a meter called ring power. Ring power can go up to 255, and goes up by a measly *1 point for each enemy killed. Each ring drains ring power at a rate of at least* 1 per second, so you can only use these sparingly for tough sections or bosses. While interesting in theory, it's just not given enough room to develop beyond just using the power ring for bosses, the healing ring for when you're about to die and already used your herb (Adol can carry 5 entire sets of armor but not more than one damn herb), and the time ring for BS enemy patterns in the endgame.

It's also a short experience, clocking in at just 6 hours - perhaps merciful, as a good portion of that is grinding. The story is nothing to write home about and in my opinion, doesn't come close to the heights of the first two games' stories and lore, which this almost completely ignores in favour of essentially starting anew.

Despite my criticisms, it remains fairly playable, and the excellent music will help alleviate some of the boredom of grinding. It's not the worst action RPG around, but it sure isn't a gem.

Ys III is not quite obscure nowadays, the series has gained some popularity due to its newer release and multiplatform re-release among younger demographics. The original Ys III however has been quite obscure back in the 90s, when RPG was a niché genre and was not that popular among gamers. Nowadays, the game has a renaissance with many remakes, including Ys: The Oath in Felghana, a remake of Ys III initially released on the PSP. Ys III revisits Zelda II in its side-scrolling RPG elements. The game was released on PC88 in 1989, two years following Zelda II's release. Unlike Zelda II or Ys I&II, Wanderers from Ys does not have any overworld map, the game entirely plays like a platformer à la Zelda II - more accurately Sorcerian on the PC88. Most of the challenge is spent grinding, collecting items at the store before taking on the bosses of each stage. The game plays much like its prequel, only with a perspective change, those who like the PC88 charm of Japanese JRPG will certainly enjoy this title. The Genesis port is the one to play, with some of the best music adaptations, closest to the PC88 version, and little of its choppiness.