Cani
Ys V : The Forgettable One
The 90’s was perhaps Falcom’s roughest era. Not necessarily because the company wasn’t releasing good games, in fact they were still productive, but less so than they used to back in the 80’s. But as the years and years went on more and more of Falcom’s old staff started leaving the company to move to greener pastures and eventually Yoshio Kiya, creator of the Dragon Slayer series and last remaining member of Falcom founding staff left the company after releasing his last title : “The Legend of Xanadu'' yet another subseries of his ever expanding Dragon Slayer saga and a spin-off of the Xanadu subseries (yes, I know following the release of this franchise is highly complicated when looking at it retrospectively) over creative differences with Masayuki Kato the then CEO of Falcom.
Falcom wasn’t quite in its flop era yet but they were definitely heading towards it, all the problems the company accumulated both creatively and financially were starting to catch up to them. Falcom decided to focus entirely on working on their existing IP’s instead of creating new ones with the dungeon crawling series Brandish receiving 2 new sequels, Legend of Xanadu receiving one sequel without Masayuki Kato at its head and they even started a brand new arc for the Legend of Heroes franchise with the release of “Legend of Heroes 3 : Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch” the first episode of the Gagharv trilogy which started Falcom’s now titular brand of highly detailed continuous storytelling with games focusing on different parts of a singular world (and if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because that’s eventually what’s going lead up to Trails later down the line).
In the midst of all this chaos, the company shifted between continuing developing games for the PC-98 and the PC-Engine but were also shifting to more popular home console, even getting a partnership with Sega which never quite took off as only the Sega CD version of Popful Mail ever came out of that partnership, heck we were even supposed to get a Sega made version of Ys IV for the same platform but it never happened. After developing yet another port of Popful Mail for the Super Famicom however, Falcom was starting to be a bit more confident with developing games on console and it was then decided that the next, this time Falcom-made, title of the Ys franchise would be launching exclusively for the Super Famicom and thus : Ys V was born and was pretty much the final nail in Falcom’s metaphorical coffin.
Now, remember what I said about Ys III ? The reason for Ys III’s failure as a game was because Falcom was trying to compete with Zelda II and thus released a shallow imitation of the formula built on the corpse of a completely unrelated project turned into an Ys title at the last possible minute. But now we’re in the year 1995, the Playstation just came out in Japan a whole year ago and was heading towards international shores and while the Super Nintendo was still going strong, it wasn’t going as strong as it used to be. Lots of developers were still releasing games for the platforms for the few poor people who couldn’t afford Sony’s new wonder machine (and the PS1 really only took off by 1996 if you ask me) but now if you wanted to find success on the platform you had to stand out from the crowd and even then, you were competing with a fierce competition.
The SNES was the golden land of JRPG’s, a highly competitive market where only the strong could survive and the rest would be buried into the depth of history. How will Falcom fare in this jungle after seeing fluctuating success on the PC-Market ?
Well… not great…
One thing we can observe when looking at the history of Falcom even in the modern age is that it’s a company who pushes all the buttons on high alarm when they’re faced with a shift in the industry or when their own failures comes creeping in on their finances and what better way to secure the bag than to imitate the competition once again ? To abandon all sense of identity to pursue the road of stagnation ? That’s pretty much what Ys V is at its core.
When looking at Ys V, you might get confused at what you’re seeing. None of it feels like an Ys game or heck even a classic Falcom title ! The colors are darker, the tone of the game is edgier and more melodramatic and aside from Adol’s titular red hair who actually has some sort of prevalence within the story of the game this time around, you’d never guess that you were playing a game from the Ys series.
Ys V isn’t a particularly bad game, far from it but quickly you realize how derivative it feels not only from its own franchise (with a setting eerily similar to Ys 1&2 to the point of self plagiarizing) but also from other works of the industry at the time as the game could easily be mistaken for a Squaresoft release with a lot of similar effects, graphical assets, menus and presentation. From the ways the in-game menus looks like those of Final Fantasy, to those pixelated transition effect, to the color palette looking like FFVI or Chrono Trigger (except less vibrant) to even some mechanical similarities like a worse version of Secret of Mana rotating menu system and even a gauge that you need to wait to fill up to launch magic attack.
Heck at times it feels like a Quintet game, the studio which staff created the first 3 Ys games, even the music bares a lot of similarities to Quintet’s output or even Nobuo Uematsu’s and sound nothing like something that would come out of the Falcom Sound JDK team but yet it does !
One could be critical of games like Ys III or Mask of the Sun for being genuinely bad games but one thing but even with Ys III trying to imitate Zelda II, the whole package was unmistakably Falcom if only for their soundtrack alone but also the ways menus were arranged and the way the stories were told. But do all of these similarities make Ys V a bad game ?
Not exactly in my opinion but the answer is more complicated than a simple Yes or No. Ys V starts off with Adol going on yet another adventure this time in the land of Xandria where it’s been told that an ancient city which had disappeared 500 ago has started to reappear in the middle of the Kefin desert, a couple of years before the event of the game a team of researcher were investigating the area and found a little girl who lost her memories. Stein, one of the researchers, decided to adopt the little girl and name her Nienna but as time passed and Nienna grew, Stein became obsessed with the lost city of Kefin and one day disappeared into the night never to be seen again. As Adol arrives in Xandria, he’s contracted by a rich merchant by the name of Dorman to collect crystals for him, these crystals seemingly hold the secrets to unlocking the doors of the ancient city from which it has been told that they discovered alchemy.
The premise is pretty much a retelling of Ys 1 and 2 but with somewhat of a darker tone, the way the story is told is a bit weird however. The game is pretty much split into two parts, the quest for the crystals and everything happening in Kefin and let’s just say that the main quest isn’t really the most thrilling thing in the universe, gathering a bunch of crystals in a JRPG is already such a derivative storytelling device that it’s kind of impressive Falcom was never called out for it back in the day but also because pretty much nothing really happens during that time aside from the Crystal Quest.
The story does sets up some interesting mysteries tho, we learn that Darman’s intention aren’t quite noble, we get to meet Nienna one of the more forgettable heroine of the franchise, we start confronting with a family of bandits and most of all a village fears us as a prophecy foretold than a man with fiery haircut will bring despair upon the land which is then followed by Adol meeting the ghost of some Goth Guy who lost his fiancé years ago and is now accompanying Adol through the adventure in a subplot that seems so disconnected from the rest that it’s a bit awkwardly put together and by the end involves FUCKING TIME TRAVEL.
The story of Ys V, though derivative of what the series already did in the past, isn’t devoid of interesting or intriguing ideas but it’s the way everything is presented and paced together that makes it superbly unimpressive. But honestly, the later half of the story does come up together surprisingly well, with a lot of fascinating lore, lots of neat twists and great plot ideas. I honestly think that last third is amongst the best Falcom as ever put for the series in terms of finale, the atmosphere is really on-point and I kinda dig the darker atmosphere of the game when we reach that point and everything surrounding alchemy and how it works just begs to be expanded upon in future titles or even a remake.
What clearly doesn’t help the pacing of the game however is the new gameplay system which is kind of sluggish. The game retained the top-down perspective of the older titles but finally decided to forego bump combat in favor of a more traditional style of action combat and exploration. However, while I do welcome the change as the series needs to evolve with its time, I do think the execution of it leaves a lot to be desired. Adol sword swings are slow and enemies take a lot of hits before dying no matter the level which isn’t helped by the fact that attacking in this game locks you into place even when attacking and jumping at the same time. Because yes ! You now have a jump button and you know what that means ? Platforming ! And is the platforming good in this game ? Take a wild guess ! Thankfully the platforming heavy moments are few and far between but when they do come up, they’re as awkward to manoeuver as you may think (which isn’t helped by the way the game handles elevation and gravity…).
Eventually though, you do get a feel for how slow and mechanical the combat is so it’s not bad or unplayable, it’s just… terribly boring ? The game isn’t all that challenging either and rarely if ever will you find yourself in front of the game over screen. And I know what you’re going to say : “But Cani isn’t being accessible the whole point of Ys ?”, but you need to understand that there’s a vast difference to what was considered an accessible game back and what an accessible game was in 1995.
Back then being accessible was about cutting down the middle-man of complex mechanics and needless mechanical fluff so that anyone can jump on a game, it didn’t mean that the game needed to be braindead easy, a bit of challenge never really killed anyone after all but in 1995, being easy just resulted in a less interesting title and while you can still understand the appeal of a mechanically simple game like the original two Ys title, you can’t really be all that accepting of such a lack of challenge in a more complex game like Ys V (which is also the first game to allow you to use more than 1 healing items per battle but requires a lot of cumbersome menuing which halts the pacing of the game even more).
Speaking of needlessly complicated and cumbersome game mechanics, I have not talked about one of the game's central mechanics that’s heavily pushed by the game : the magic system ! This time around, Adol can wield the power of the elements to cast a variety of devastating and impressive looking spells ranging from simple projectile to powerful screen nukes. In order to obtain these spells, you must first find elements scattered across the world, sometimes in really well hidden places and fuse them in specific combinations to create flux stones, you can equip up to 3 flux stones giving you access to three spells you can switch back and forth at leisure. There are over 18 possible combinations of elements and thus 18 different spells ! That sounds like an ambitious, interesting and fun mechanic but then you realize that for how complex the system is, it’s completely and utterly pointless to use any of it.
To cast a spell, you need to spend both MP and something call Charge Point, you can only send a spell if you have enough MP but also only when your charge point are at max percentage, to recharge your charge point, you need to wait in place and rapidly tap the R button to fill it up so you can get a go at shooting another spell ! This limitation already slows down the momentum of the game to a crawl but their utility is also limited by how slow the animation for these spells can be, everytime you cast them Adol needs to do some little dance before shooting a projectile or launching a screen nuke which locks him into place and at the mercy of any potential threats ! On top of that, most bosses are unaffected by magic for Story reasons when those big magic attacks were pretty much made to be used on them. The only spell in the game which is of any use is the basic fireball spell you get in the tutorial area which fires quickly, doesn’t require much MP, doesn’t require a long charge period and shoots instantly out of your sword like in the older titles. Now.. after hearing all of this…
WHY WOULD ANYONE ENGAGE WITH THIS MECHANIC OUTSIDE OF THE 2 TIMES THE GAME FORCES YOU TO USE IT ?
The game is already slow as it is while simply swinging your sword at enemies so asking the player to do something that seems so cumbersome and unintuitive is kind of beyond me. It’s probably the reason why regular takes so much time to kill the regular way but killing them the regular way is still more effective and doesn’t kill the flow of combat and exploration. I do commend the team for coming up with the idea and it is rather fun to try and find what types of combination work to get what type of spells, I do get the appeal of experimenting with it but it seems like a lot of effort was put into that singular part of the game that could’ve been put elsewhere like making the adventure more interesting, fleshing out the story, make the main combat better or optimize the game a little bit because it also runs like shit with constant slowdown and slow “loading” time when entering new areas or houses.
A quick word on the dungeon design and bosses while we’re at it because that’s also part of the course for this type of game. I found the dungeon design to be serviceable, not amazing but serviceable, they get the job done and they’re not too annoying or confusing to navigate with a few clever puzzles and some nice atmosphere to boot. Shoutouts especially to the last dungeon of the game which is perhaps the best in the series up to that point and carries the last third of the game while making it slightly more interesting to play through. The bosses however are all rather forgettable, the dominant strategy for most of them is to find a safe spot and continuously swing your sword at them, they take really long to kill and aren’t all that exciting but none of them struck me as particularly bullshit.
One thing that’s also strange is the fact that unlike other titles, you can only save at Inn’s which is such a needlessly punitive system especially if you happen to die in the later half and have to do a lot of that stuff again, again another weird design choice to make the game slower.
Now it’s time to talk about the music and here’s where it gets a bit interesting. When I first played Ys V, I must admit, I found the music to be serviceable at best. Nothing really memorable outside of that one track that was literally an SNES rendition of “A boy who got wings” mixed with “Theme of Adol” from previous titles. But upon re-listening to it in isolation for the sake of this review, I realized that I should be giving more credit to this soundtrack than I initially thought.
First of all, while some sonorities are unmistakably SNES sounding, the general instrumentalisation is really good and at times approaches CD Quality audio. You can feel that this game was released late into the console where composers understood the hardware a little better but it definitely holds its own ground against contemporaries of its era in that aspect. The compositions aren’t bad either and while the general tempo is definitely slower than in other titles in the series, I think it fits the game's general vibe and slower gameplay style.
But I also think that much like the rest of the game, it feels really derivative and nothing like you come to expect from the Ys series let alone a Falcom title which even with their calmer tracks has a style unique to the JDK team and the different composers who work in it. There’s this feeling that the team didn’t really wanted to go too crazy with the soundtrack and went for something that would more easily fit the SNES hardware while taking a lot of inspirations from other places, mainly square titles but some tracks here borderline sounds like some stuff you’d find in Quintet games like Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma (which released a year later).
The music really sounds like every single SNES RPG you’ve likely ever played and lacks a bit of that flair or that punch you’d hear from Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura, Koji Kondo, Yasunori Mitsuda or other prominent game composers of that era and as such can come off as less memorable and catchy as the work of these creators. That’s a shame because Ys V soundtrack will eternally stand out as the odd one, the one that’s too basic for the rest of Falcom’s catalog when it really isn’t a bad soundtrack at all or even a mid one, just kind of unremarkable and lacking of that classic Ys flair that’s so characteristic of the series and a soundtrack which doesn’t really stick into your mind after pushing off the power button. Another problem is how often the music switches meaning you rarely ever hear the full track.
And that pretty much sums up Ys V as a videogame, not a terrible or even bad game by any stretch of the imagination but a terribly middling one which doesn’t leave much of an impact and is over before you know it. I’ve complained about the slower pace of the game but really the game is pretty short by itself, it can be completed in about 5h which is less than all the other titles up to that point but these 5h feels kind of endless, sluggish and pretty unrewarding. It’s not really the change of space that’s an issue, after all why not experiment with a slower more atmospheric take on Adol’s adventure but it’s how it’s executed that bothers me.
The game is also way too easy but in a boring kind of way to the point the team had to release an extended release of the game a year later known as “Ys V Expert” which ups the challenge a little bit, make the enemies more reactive, tweak a few things here and there and add an entire optional dungeon. But by that point, in 1996 no less, no one really gave much of a shit about Ys V and it’s not the rise in difficulty that was gonna turn the public opinion on this game around. You’ve likely played other games like Ys V on the same platform, games which are far more polished, creative and unique than Ys V could ever hope to be.
If you really wanted to experience something closer to an evolution of the Ys formula made by the actual creators of Ys, look no further than Quintet Studio and their titular “Heaven and Earth” trilogy especially Terranigma which came the same year as Ys V and even if it stayed relatively obscure is look fondly upon by many people who tried it for being a genuine masterpiece of the Action-RPG genre on the console. With a fun, fast-paced combat system, a superbly well written and well told story with a lot of twists and turns, full of surprises and clear passion put behind it. To me these were the developers worth looking at when you wanted to experience the future of the Ys series.
It seems that Falcom by themselves never quite understood Ys and its appeal when it first released back in 1987, all of their attempts at coming back to it were misguided attempt to fundamentally change what Ys was without trying to evolve the formula to greater height and always taking the series in the wrong direction to fit with current trend. It’s no wonder then that aside from Hudson Soft's phenomenal attempt at reviving the series, people weren’t really confident in Falcom delivering an Ys title that will make them dream of adventure anymore !
Ys III wasn’t Ys it was Zelda II, Ys V wasn’t Ys it was every Squaresoft game under the sun. And with how short, easy, derivative and disappointing the game ended up being for many people, Ys V became the final nail in the coffin for the series which will lay dormant for the next 8 years skipping a whole generation of consoles with Falcom only releasing new remakes and ports of Ys 1&2 as if the franchise was cursed to only thrive through the legacy of these two titles. Even to this day, Ys V has not received a single modern remake aside from the PS2 version which isn’t even canon and Falcom has yet to integrate Adol’s adventure in Xandria into the modern canon (even if they seem to be more and more interested by the prospect.)
What Falcom needed was a renaissance, a new vision, something that will bring the company back into the game ! And all of this will eventually happen at the turn of the millennium ! Next time, we’ll be talking about Ys VI the game which redefined and saved Ys !
The 90’s was perhaps Falcom’s roughest era. Not necessarily because the company wasn’t releasing good games, in fact they were still productive, but less so than they used to back in the 80’s. But as the years and years went on more and more of Falcom’s old staff started leaving the company to move to greener pastures and eventually Yoshio Kiya, creator of the Dragon Slayer series and last remaining member of Falcom founding staff left the company after releasing his last title : “The Legend of Xanadu'' yet another subseries of his ever expanding Dragon Slayer saga and a spin-off of the Xanadu subseries (yes, I know following the release of this franchise is highly complicated when looking at it retrospectively) over creative differences with Masayuki Kato the then CEO of Falcom.
Falcom wasn’t quite in its flop era yet but they were definitely heading towards it, all the problems the company accumulated both creatively and financially were starting to catch up to them. Falcom decided to focus entirely on working on their existing IP’s instead of creating new ones with the dungeon crawling series Brandish receiving 2 new sequels, Legend of Xanadu receiving one sequel without Masayuki Kato at its head and they even started a brand new arc for the Legend of Heroes franchise with the release of “Legend of Heroes 3 : Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch” the first episode of the Gagharv trilogy which started Falcom’s now titular brand of highly detailed continuous storytelling with games focusing on different parts of a singular world (and if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because that’s eventually what’s going lead up to Trails later down the line).
In the midst of all this chaos, the company shifted between continuing developing games for the PC-98 and the PC-Engine but were also shifting to more popular home console, even getting a partnership with Sega which never quite took off as only the Sega CD version of Popful Mail ever came out of that partnership, heck we were even supposed to get a Sega made version of Ys IV for the same platform but it never happened. After developing yet another port of Popful Mail for the Super Famicom however, Falcom was starting to be a bit more confident with developing games on console and it was then decided that the next, this time Falcom-made, title of the Ys franchise would be launching exclusively for the Super Famicom and thus : Ys V was born and was pretty much the final nail in Falcom’s metaphorical coffin.
Now, remember what I said about Ys III ? The reason for Ys III’s failure as a game was because Falcom was trying to compete with Zelda II and thus released a shallow imitation of the formula built on the corpse of a completely unrelated project turned into an Ys title at the last possible minute. But now we’re in the year 1995, the Playstation just came out in Japan a whole year ago and was heading towards international shores and while the Super Nintendo was still going strong, it wasn’t going as strong as it used to be. Lots of developers were still releasing games for the platforms for the few poor people who couldn’t afford Sony’s new wonder machine (and the PS1 really only took off by 1996 if you ask me) but now if you wanted to find success on the platform you had to stand out from the crowd and even then, you were competing with a fierce competition.
The SNES was the golden land of JRPG’s, a highly competitive market where only the strong could survive and the rest would be buried into the depth of history. How will Falcom fare in this jungle after seeing fluctuating success on the PC-Market ?
Well… not great…
One thing we can observe when looking at the history of Falcom even in the modern age is that it’s a company who pushes all the buttons on high alarm when they’re faced with a shift in the industry or when their own failures comes creeping in on their finances and what better way to secure the bag than to imitate the competition once again ? To abandon all sense of identity to pursue the road of stagnation ? That’s pretty much what Ys V is at its core.
When looking at Ys V, you might get confused at what you’re seeing. None of it feels like an Ys game or heck even a classic Falcom title ! The colors are darker, the tone of the game is edgier and more melodramatic and aside from Adol’s titular red hair who actually has some sort of prevalence within the story of the game this time around, you’d never guess that you were playing a game from the Ys series.
Ys V isn’t a particularly bad game, far from it but quickly you realize how derivative it feels not only from its own franchise (with a setting eerily similar to Ys 1&2 to the point of self plagiarizing) but also from other works of the industry at the time as the game could easily be mistaken for a Squaresoft release with a lot of similar effects, graphical assets, menus and presentation. From the ways the in-game menus looks like those of Final Fantasy, to those pixelated transition effect, to the color palette looking like FFVI or Chrono Trigger (except less vibrant) to even some mechanical similarities like a worse version of Secret of Mana rotating menu system and even a gauge that you need to wait to fill up to launch magic attack.
Heck at times it feels like a Quintet game, the studio which staff created the first 3 Ys games, even the music bares a lot of similarities to Quintet’s output or even Nobuo Uematsu’s and sound nothing like something that would come out of the Falcom Sound JDK team but yet it does !
One could be critical of games like Ys III or Mask of the Sun for being genuinely bad games but one thing but even with Ys III trying to imitate Zelda II, the whole package was unmistakably Falcom if only for their soundtrack alone but also the ways menus were arranged and the way the stories were told. But do all of these similarities make Ys V a bad game ?
Not exactly in my opinion but the answer is more complicated than a simple Yes or No. Ys V starts off with Adol going on yet another adventure this time in the land of Xandria where it’s been told that an ancient city which had disappeared 500 ago has started to reappear in the middle of the Kefin desert, a couple of years before the event of the game a team of researcher were investigating the area and found a little girl who lost her memories. Stein, one of the researchers, decided to adopt the little girl and name her Nienna but as time passed and Nienna grew, Stein became obsessed with the lost city of Kefin and one day disappeared into the night never to be seen again. As Adol arrives in Xandria, he’s contracted by a rich merchant by the name of Dorman to collect crystals for him, these crystals seemingly hold the secrets to unlocking the doors of the ancient city from which it has been told that they discovered alchemy.
The premise is pretty much a retelling of Ys 1 and 2 but with somewhat of a darker tone, the way the story is told is a bit weird however. The game is pretty much split into two parts, the quest for the crystals and everything happening in Kefin and let’s just say that the main quest isn’t really the most thrilling thing in the universe, gathering a bunch of crystals in a JRPG is already such a derivative storytelling device that it’s kind of impressive Falcom was never called out for it back in the day but also because pretty much nothing really happens during that time aside from the Crystal Quest.
The story does sets up some interesting mysteries tho, we learn that Darman’s intention aren’t quite noble, we get to meet Nienna one of the more forgettable heroine of the franchise, we start confronting with a family of bandits and most of all a village fears us as a prophecy foretold than a man with fiery haircut will bring despair upon the land which is then followed by Adol meeting the ghost of some Goth Guy who lost his fiancé years ago and is now accompanying Adol through the adventure in a subplot that seems so disconnected from the rest that it’s a bit awkwardly put together and by the end involves FUCKING TIME TRAVEL.
The story of Ys V, though derivative of what the series already did in the past, isn’t devoid of interesting or intriguing ideas but it’s the way everything is presented and paced together that makes it superbly unimpressive. But honestly, the later half of the story does come up together surprisingly well, with a lot of fascinating lore, lots of neat twists and great plot ideas. I honestly think that last third is amongst the best Falcom as ever put for the series in terms of finale, the atmosphere is really on-point and I kinda dig the darker atmosphere of the game when we reach that point and everything surrounding alchemy and how it works just begs to be expanded upon in future titles or even a remake.
What clearly doesn’t help the pacing of the game however is the new gameplay system which is kind of sluggish. The game retained the top-down perspective of the older titles but finally decided to forego bump combat in favor of a more traditional style of action combat and exploration. However, while I do welcome the change as the series needs to evolve with its time, I do think the execution of it leaves a lot to be desired. Adol sword swings are slow and enemies take a lot of hits before dying no matter the level which isn’t helped by the fact that attacking in this game locks you into place even when attacking and jumping at the same time. Because yes ! You now have a jump button and you know what that means ? Platforming ! And is the platforming good in this game ? Take a wild guess ! Thankfully the platforming heavy moments are few and far between but when they do come up, they’re as awkward to manoeuver as you may think (which isn’t helped by the way the game handles elevation and gravity…).
Eventually though, you do get a feel for how slow and mechanical the combat is so it’s not bad or unplayable, it’s just… terribly boring ? The game isn’t all that challenging either and rarely if ever will you find yourself in front of the game over screen. And I know what you’re going to say : “But Cani isn’t being accessible the whole point of Ys ?”, but you need to understand that there’s a vast difference to what was considered an accessible game back and what an accessible game was in 1995.
Back then being accessible was about cutting down the middle-man of complex mechanics and needless mechanical fluff so that anyone can jump on a game, it didn’t mean that the game needed to be braindead easy, a bit of challenge never really killed anyone after all but in 1995, being easy just resulted in a less interesting title and while you can still understand the appeal of a mechanically simple game like the original two Ys title, you can’t really be all that accepting of such a lack of challenge in a more complex game like Ys V (which is also the first game to allow you to use more than 1 healing items per battle but requires a lot of cumbersome menuing which halts the pacing of the game even more).
Speaking of needlessly complicated and cumbersome game mechanics, I have not talked about one of the game's central mechanics that’s heavily pushed by the game : the magic system ! This time around, Adol can wield the power of the elements to cast a variety of devastating and impressive looking spells ranging from simple projectile to powerful screen nukes. In order to obtain these spells, you must first find elements scattered across the world, sometimes in really well hidden places and fuse them in specific combinations to create flux stones, you can equip up to 3 flux stones giving you access to three spells you can switch back and forth at leisure. There are over 18 possible combinations of elements and thus 18 different spells ! That sounds like an ambitious, interesting and fun mechanic but then you realize that for how complex the system is, it’s completely and utterly pointless to use any of it.
To cast a spell, you need to spend both MP and something call Charge Point, you can only send a spell if you have enough MP but also only when your charge point are at max percentage, to recharge your charge point, you need to wait in place and rapidly tap the R button to fill it up so you can get a go at shooting another spell ! This limitation already slows down the momentum of the game to a crawl but their utility is also limited by how slow the animation for these spells can be, everytime you cast them Adol needs to do some little dance before shooting a projectile or launching a screen nuke which locks him into place and at the mercy of any potential threats ! On top of that, most bosses are unaffected by magic for Story reasons when those big magic attacks were pretty much made to be used on them. The only spell in the game which is of any use is the basic fireball spell you get in the tutorial area which fires quickly, doesn’t require much MP, doesn’t require a long charge period and shoots instantly out of your sword like in the older titles. Now.. after hearing all of this…
WHY WOULD ANYONE ENGAGE WITH THIS MECHANIC OUTSIDE OF THE 2 TIMES THE GAME FORCES YOU TO USE IT ?
The game is already slow as it is while simply swinging your sword at enemies so asking the player to do something that seems so cumbersome and unintuitive is kind of beyond me. It’s probably the reason why regular takes so much time to kill the regular way but killing them the regular way is still more effective and doesn’t kill the flow of combat and exploration. I do commend the team for coming up with the idea and it is rather fun to try and find what types of combination work to get what type of spells, I do get the appeal of experimenting with it but it seems like a lot of effort was put into that singular part of the game that could’ve been put elsewhere like making the adventure more interesting, fleshing out the story, make the main combat better or optimize the game a little bit because it also runs like shit with constant slowdown and slow “loading” time when entering new areas or houses.
A quick word on the dungeon design and bosses while we’re at it because that’s also part of the course for this type of game. I found the dungeon design to be serviceable, not amazing but serviceable, they get the job done and they’re not too annoying or confusing to navigate with a few clever puzzles and some nice atmosphere to boot. Shoutouts especially to the last dungeon of the game which is perhaps the best in the series up to that point and carries the last third of the game while making it slightly more interesting to play through. The bosses however are all rather forgettable, the dominant strategy for most of them is to find a safe spot and continuously swing your sword at them, they take really long to kill and aren’t all that exciting but none of them struck me as particularly bullshit.
One thing that’s also strange is the fact that unlike other titles, you can only save at Inn’s which is such a needlessly punitive system especially if you happen to die in the later half and have to do a lot of that stuff again, again another weird design choice to make the game slower.
Now it’s time to talk about the music and here’s where it gets a bit interesting. When I first played Ys V, I must admit, I found the music to be serviceable at best. Nothing really memorable outside of that one track that was literally an SNES rendition of “A boy who got wings” mixed with “Theme of Adol” from previous titles. But upon re-listening to it in isolation for the sake of this review, I realized that I should be giving more credit to this soundtrack than I initially thought.
First of all, while some sonorities are unmistakably SNES sounding, the general instrumentalisation is really good and at times approaches CD Quality audio. You can feel that this game was released late into the console where composers understood the hardware a little better but it definitely holds its own ground against contemporaries of its era in that aspect. The compositions aren’t bad either and while the general tempo is definitely slower than in other titles in the series, I think it fits the game's general vibe and slower gameplay style.
But I also think that much like the rest of the game, it feels really derivative and nothing like you come to expect from the Ys series let alone a Falcom title which even with their calmer tracks has a style unique to the JDK team and the different composers who work in it. There’s this feeling that the team didn’t really wanted to go too crazy with the soundtrack and went for something that would more easily fit the SNES hardware while taking a lot of inspirations from other places, mainly square titles but some tracks here borderline sounds like some stuff you’d find in Quintet games like Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma (which released a year later).
The music really sounds like every single SNES RPG you’ve likely ever played and lacks a bit of that flair or that punch you’d hear from Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura, Koji Kondo, Yasunori Mitsuda or other prominent game composers of that era and as such can come off as less memorable and catchy as the work of these creators. That’s a shame because Ys V soundtrack will eternally stand out as the odd one, the one that’s too basic for the rest of Falcom’s catalog when it really isn’t a bad soundtrack at all or even a mid one, just kind of unremarkable and lacking of that classic Ys flair that’s so characteristic of the series and a soundtrack which doesn’t really stick into your mind after pushing off the power button. Another problem is how often the music switches meaning you rarely ever hear the full track.
And that pretty much sums up Ys V as a videogame, not a terrible or even bad game by any stretch of the imagination but a terribly middling one which doesn’t leave much of an impact and is over before you know it. I’ve complained about the slower pace of the game but really the game is pretty short by itself, it can be completed in about 5h which is less than all the other titles up to that point but these 5h feels kind of endless, sluggish and pretty unrewarding. It’s not really the change of space that’s an issue, after all why not experiment with a slower more atmospheric take on Adol’s adventure but it’s how it’s executed that bothers me.
The game is also way too easy but in a boring kind of way to the point the team had to release an extended release of the game a year later known as “Ys V Expert” which ups the challenge a little bit, make the enemies more reactive, tweak a few things here and there and add an entire optional dungeon. But by that point, in 1996 no less, no one really gave much of a shit about Ys V and it’s not the rise in difficulty that was gonna turn the public opinion on this game around. You’ve likely played other games like Ys V on the same platform, games which are far more polished, creative and unique than Ys V could ever hope to be.
If you really wanted to experience something closer to an evolution of the Ys formula made by the actual creators of Ys, look no further than Quintet Studio and their titular “Heaven and Earth” trilogy especially Terranigma which came the same year as Ys V and even if it stayed relatively obscure is look fondly upon by many people who tried it for being a genuine masterpiece of the Action-RPG genre on the console. With a fun, fast-paced combat system, a superbly well written and well told story with a lot of twists and turns, full of surprises and clear passion put behind it. To me these were the developers worth looking at when you wanted to experience the future of the Ys series.
It seems that Falcom by themselves never quite understood Ys and its appeal when it first released back in 1987, all of their attempts at coming back to it were misguided attempt to fundamentally change what Ys was without trying to evolve the formula to greater height and always taking the series in the wrong direction to fit with current trend. It’s no wonder then that aside from Hudson Soft's phenomenal attempt at reviving the series, people weren’t really confident in Falcom delivering an Ys title that will make them dream of adventure anymore !
Ys III wasn’t Ys it was Zelda II, Ys V wasn’t Ys it was every Squaresoft game under the sun. And with how short, easy, derivative and disappointing the game ended up being for many people, Ys V became the final nail in the coffin for the series which will lay dormant for the next 8 years skipping a whole generation of consoles with Falcom only releasing new remakes and ports of Ys 1&2 as if the franchise was cursed to only thrive through the legacy of these two titles. Even to this day, Ys V has not received a single modern remake aside from the PS2 version which isn’t even canon and Falcom has yet to integrate Adol’s adventure in Xandria into the modern canon (even if they seem to be more and more interested by the prospect.)
What Falcom needed was a renaissance, a new vision, something that will bring the company back into the game ! And all of this will eventually happen at the turn of the millennium ! Next time, we’ll be talking about Ys VI the game which redefined and saved Ys !
Xenosaga : A Fine Enough Introduction
My history with the Xeno Series is a bit skewed up, during Operation Rainfall, I obviously heard about and played the first Xenoblade game and absolutely loved it like many people at the time but it’s been so long a replay might be needed to refresh my memory of it. I’ve then played Xenoblade X and enjoyed it a lot too and then Xenoblade 2 which is a game I had to learn to love since it was kind of hard game to sit through with all the aesthetic changes that I wasn’t a fan of and the humor and tone which was a bit hit or miss for me (and don’t get me started on the gacha mechanics or just the overall game system taking literal years before becoming interesting or fun). I still think Xenoblade 2 is a bit too long for its own good with a somewhat strong ending that while it may have come out of nowhere with its last minute connection to Xenoblade 1 was nonetheless really good and the cast was solid enough for me to care about it in the end, I realize it’s a much smarter game now than I gave it credit for back in the day.
And while I do enjoy the Xenoblade games and think they are fully deserving of the praises they got over the years (probably one of the rare cases of a modern RPG franchise actually delivering on its promises), they never really stuck to me, only Xenoblade X did funnily enough because of its deeply interesting and detailed sci-fi world that I only wish the story could’ve explored more, it had a lot of interesting stuff to it but I also think it’s the one with the best gameplay in the franchise, exploring around this planet and eventually unlocking the mechs was a freaking magical experience and the few story bits there was really intrigued me and I hope a sequel is on the way.
But none of them stuck to me more than Xenogears when I eventually got around to it in 2020 or something (my memory is really bad I should really journal my games more lmao). I obviously knew about the other Xenogames, I knew about how Xenogears was this highly regarded masterpiece and I knew Xenosaga mainly because of Kos-Mos appearance in the Namco x Capcom (Project x Zone) series where her design immediately caught my attention.
Xenogears to put it lightly is one of my favorite games of all time now and is now actually sitting comfortably in my top 10 best games I’ve ever played (which is constantly shifting anyway depending on my mood and if I happen to find a game excellent enough to deserve such placement), it’s not without its flaws, it’s the product of a botched development cycle which ended up in a somewhat incomplete product with a combat system which is really fun but gets shallow very fast and some of the more questionable dungeon design in the medium to the point that I was actually happy the second half pretty much was a visual novel. But gosh darn it if everything else from the music, the aesthetic, the plot, the characters, the mystery, the lore, this game is a goddamn juggernaut of an art piece like no other which somehow managed to turn its biggest weakness into its biggest strength by tying the plot directly to its own existence as an incomplete part of a never to be completed whole.
There are very few games I can 100% praise for their raw storytelling value alone but Xenogears stands tall amongst the crowd with some of the most beautifully poignant, spectacular and at times cerebral scenarios in the whole medium of video games. It’s constantly bombarding you with stuff to get fascinated about, it’s an endless well of reflexion in which you can find more and more meaning the more you dig it’s simply put a masterpiece
One day I’ll make a proper review about Xenogears. I really want to talk about how special that game is for me and the entire RPG genre as a whole someday, but today isn’t that day. Seeing as awesome as Xenogears was and how happy I still am for how it turned out, I can’t help but still feel frustrated that Takahashi was never able to fulfill his vision and kickstart the Xenogears franchise. There are many reasons why this wasn’t possible, Square didn’t plan to have another juggernaut of highly ambitious mega-series alongside Final Fantasy and Xenogears by itself was already taking a bit too much time.
While 90’s Square was great at giving small directors their time on the spotlight, they were not the best at supporting them financially in the long run because to Square all of these other games were just distractions in-between big releases of Final Fantasy, and the flop caused by the FF movie at the turn of the medium pretty much doomed the Xenogears franchise from ever existing. It is really so sad to read Perfect Works and realize that in another reality Xenogears would be Square’s very own MGS series, a series of highly acclaimed titles made by a visionary author with a strong vision for videogames and sci-fi stories.
But while that day might never come for Xenogears that doesn’t mean Takahashi was about to give up on the idea of his grand sci-fi epic just yet. Shortly after the release of Xenogears and the realization they could never brought forth their visions onto the world, Takahashi and his team quit Squaresoft to form Monolith Software and with the help of Bandai Namco they will try to revive Xenogears into the epic saga it was meant to be and this next entry in the now meta “Xeno” franchise will be appropriately called : Xenosaga.
Xenosaga was released on the PS2 in 2003, now mind you, one thing that’s great about me is that I am an expert at not spoiling myself on stuff so I knew pretty much nothing going into Xenosaga, therefore I was surprised to see Takahashi giving zero fuck when dropping the Zohar right on minute one and continuing on reusing character design from Xenogears into this game to pretty much tilt people with connections that may or may not be there. Very early on, you get to see a character looking awfully similar to Elly and there’s a lot of mystery surrounding that mysterious figure even as the game eventually caps off.
The story takes place in the distant future as you start of on a space-station, you play as Shion Uzuki resident glasses girl and chief of engineering on the Kos-Mos project on behalf of Vector industry, a private weapon manufacturer who manages these artificial super soldiers called “Realians'' which are artificial humans created for the purpose of fighting in wars and serve different position. The Kos-Mos project was meant to see if humanity could build an entirely artificial humanoid weapon (Realians are biologicals, they’re pretty much tube babies with machine stuff into them, I’m honestly not sure).
After a quick training session in VR and Shion getting some sort of hallucination of Elly from Xenogears, she is called on deck to report on the experimentation but suddenly these weird interdimensional aliens called Gnosis starts attacking the ship looking for the Zohar found inside of it and now the game becomes Dead Space for a minute ! After the space station gets blown off, Shion, Kos-Mos and Allen end up on a random merchant ship and are now heading to Second Miltia to find refuge there and report back to Vector after witnessing Kos-Mos starting to disobey her order a little bit.
At the same time, Ziggy, a soldier brought back to life as a cyborg, is tasked by some government people of the galactic federation to retrieve an important realian by the name of Momo from the hands of U-TIC, a shady terrorist organization with plans to do evil terrorist organization stuff yet not developed in this game but seems to be like a cult thing ? Momo is a Series 100 who was created by a certain Joachim Mizrahi, a crazy scientist which caused the disappearance of Old Miltia and the apparition of the Gnosises 14 years ago. During the mission, Ziggy ends up being chased by the terrorist and as they find an escape pod, they’re now heading to Second Miltia too to report on the mission and will soon meet up with our main party.
Meanwhile, Jr, a badass shotacon with guns that is clearly not the secret Yaoi lovechild of Bart and Billy from Xenogears is trying to investigate the sudden disappearance of a planet by the name of Ariadne with the help of his ship called the Durandal and his crew composed of hot babes on behalf of the Kukai Foundation, a private militia turned independent nation trying to stop U-Tic from doing their shady evil terrorist stuff. Jr is probably the coolest character in this game and by the second act pretty much overtakes the plot by himself as he is closely related to Albedo a mysterious freakish guy who’s trying to get his hands on Momo to obtain informations found in her head in order to… spread chaos across the Cosmos on behalf of U-DO which is some higher entity I have still fuck all idea what it even looks like.
Eventually all of these characters' paths will cross and they’ll eventually try to stop Evil Mc Immortal Interdimensional Demi-God from causing too much trouble. This is my personal recollection of the plot and that’s already a lot to summarize and to uncover, Xenosaga is a victim of “batshit insane sci-fi rpg plot syndrome”. It introduces tons of concepts and in-universe terms with some religious symbolism thrown into the mix, a fuck lot of yet to be resolved mysteries and tons of moving parts with factions left and right with their own goal and agenda. It’s probably even more hard sci-fi than even Xenogears was at times and I must admit that it’s at times a bit harder to follow than this game was.
Xenosaga is less of a story with some main drive or even an apparent main theme, with Xenogears you could be confused by some of the deeper plot elements but in the end you could at least parse the intentions of the story but here, not so much and I think it was done on purpose. Xenosaga 1 is only the first episode of a trilogy and it shows, it pretty much feels like how it would be to end Xenogears at the end of Disc 1 and having to wait a solid year or two to get the stuff from Disc 2 which yes would’ve probably made Disc 2 more complete but at the same time would Xenogears be as memorable as it is if it really just cutted off to Disc 1 ? I don’t think so.
As such it’s hard to parse or even criticize the story of the game when it clearly is here to establish everything but you can’t help but feel that at least the first half of the game is kind of a slog. The story just sorts of happen, you go from one set pieces to the next, from one perspective switch to the other and while the end goal of most of the protagonists is the reach Second Miltia, by the time you get there a lot of stuff happens that you clearly have trouble understanding the implications of and then the credits play to a beautiful vocal song as it is tradition in the franchise and you’re left wanting more. While I’m cautious calling the story “good”, I can’t deny that it is interesting and thoroughly engaging past the midway point but you can definitely feel that the plot is begging to unleash its full sauce in the sequels.
What I understood of the story is that 14 years ago, a war was fought on some distant planet called Miltia over an artifact called the Zohar retrieved here by the researchers in the intro (or maybe that part is completely unrelated) and all of the characters are somewhat linked to the events that took place on that fateful day and all of the implications which ensued from this conflict. While the story can be confusing and at times struggle to make its point clear, I can deny that the whole thing is really well presented. Xenogears was mostly a visual novel in disguise, with a lot of reading and dialogue scenes that were superbly directed for what the PS1 could allow at the time combined with the occasional anime FMV cutscene punctuating the bigger moments of the narrative.
Here Xenosaga pushes that envelop even further and what I’ve played of the Xenoblade series showed me that what Monolith really is into is directing awesome story cutscenes that can be a tad bit too long but also quite spectacular and you can sense that this passion for cinematography above all else started all the way back with this game. Of course, it’s easy to dismiss the effort brought here in the cutscene department as it’s a dinky old 2003 PS2 game but for the standard of that era I’d say they did more than a decent enough job with them.
The direction during the dialogues scenes can be a bit awkward and stiff which is definitely not helped by the artstyle having trouble dealing with facial expression (except for Albedo that guy’s fucking great everytime he’s one screen) but the big action set pieces like space battles and others are done surprisingly well. There are tons of really iconic moments of great direction during those and especially some of the more “horror oriented” segments which this game is full of, the scene of Kos-Mos awakening for the first time is one of the most iconic shit I’ve ever seen and gives me chills everytime (and so does the Albedo limb ripping scene like holy shit, they even managed to made it more terrifying in the English version). All the scenes in the encephalon were pretty damn great too and you can definitely feel in those segments the continued influence of Xenogears style of bizarre imagerie and philosophical rambling which is the closest video games has ever been from trying to be Evangelion and succeeding in my opinion.
The Artstyle of the game is a bit hit or miss however, it’s still the character designer from Xenogears but much like Xenoblade X, I thought the style kind of transitioned pretty awkwardly to 3D, all the characters feel like dolls with fish eyes, they have a definitive plastic feel to them but honestly, I think it kinda works in the games favor at times since most of the characters are meant to be artificial humans anyway and this style translate that impression well even if it probably wasn’t the intended result. It’s still charming however in a nostalgic 2000’s era anime way and it gives the game a real sense of identity which kinda gets lost from what I’ve seen of the sequels.
I think the problem with those character design like I said is that combined with the obvious datedness of trying to be a cinematographic game in 2003, they don’t convey emotion all too strongly and it feels awkward, Momo doesn’t look cute or peppy, she looks tired and sleepy all the time when it clearly wasn’t the intention but I’m nitpicking, I’d say the game somewhat holds up graphically nowadays if you’re not particularly allergic to anime artstyle. I mean you better enjoy these cutscenes anyway because pretty much 50% of the whole runtime of the game is spent watching cutscenes, sometimes long uninterrupted stretches of them to the point they have to pause the game to let you save through them much like Disc 2 of XG did.
As for the voice acting, I had to play this game with the original Japanese dub, nothing against the English cast from what I heard the performances are really good especially for that era where English Voice acting for weird esoteric Japanese games weren’t at its best and English Albedo really fucking kills it during one of the big moments. I had to play it in Japanese because of glitch which also exists on real hardware (played on emulator cause I ain’t losing my mortgage over this shit) where the game can just randomly crash while trying to save the game regularly, this is quite the heavy oversight and I’m not sure what the reception of it was when the game came out but this sucks.
Anyway back to voice acting, the Japanese voice acting fairs pretty well, Kos-Mos in particular really nails the robot voice, they really did a solid job making her appearance as iconic as possible from the design, to her scenes to her voice acting. I’d say on average it was a distant voice cast and I’m actually shocked to see a non-ear grating loli character for a change ? Momo actually sounds like a damn child for a change and with her whole schtick being a magical girl (???) For some reasons, I was definitely expecting the voice acting to go in the overly moe territory Jun Maeda seems to be weirdly fond of (I really ain’t a fan of Jun Maeda’s fetish for girl talking like goddamn Pokemon). I think the English Performance from what I heard is a bit better but the Japanese one is no slouch either and in the end I didn’t miss out on much in my opinion.
Since the game is mostly cutscenes one might think that the general pacing of the game gets hurt as a result and you’d be right, it takes a bit of time before the game actually goes anywhere and there are several instances of players getting control for 5 min before being embarked to another slew of cutscenes. I’m an MGS fan so that style of storytelling doesn’t bother me much and the game is 30h long so it’s not that bad in the grand scheme of things.
Speaking of gameplay, while there might not be that many instances of them, it’s still a significant part of the game and we’re gonna talk about it. Xenosaga’s battle system is pretty much an evolution of the one found in Xenogears, while Xenogears gameplay was fun it did start to get a bit dry by the end game to the point that I had to resolve to using game exploit to get through some of the more important fights in the second half of the game, this game mostly solves that issues by expanding greatly on what Gears did. During battle, you can use either Square or Triangle to deal different types of damage with specific combinations leading to other moves.
The main difference here is the way you deal death blows, death blows (called : “techniques”) here must be activated by first using a hit and then canceling the second to charge up your AP meter which then allows you to use one of your death blows, at first I wasn’t a fan of this as I felt it needlessly dragged fights for longer than they should but compared to Xenogears there’s a greater variety of death blows and ways to include them within attack sequences that I didn’t mind it by the end (and later down, you can upgrade certain death blow to remove that limitation on them and use them as regular attack).
On top of that, much like Xenogears, characters can have access to Ether attacks which are magic attacks requiring MP to be used. However? I found most of the offensive ones in this game to be a bit lacking in power to be used effectively in battle (except for a few of them that we’ll talk about a bit later…) as well as costing too much HP but the support spells truly makes up for it in comparison as buffing your party becomes an essential part of battles.
Another cool thing about Xenosaga however is the fact that for any battle scenario, you can just call your mechs. In Xenogears, mech fights were only allowed for certain specific parts of the game but here, some characters can summon their mechs in battle at any time which is freaking awesome and gives you a second health bar to protect you. The upgrade in firepower is pretty significant but the Gears kinda loses their utility near the end where your main on-foot party gets fully decked out with useful spells and deathblows and the cost associated with upgrading your mechs (which are surprisingly customizable) can be a bit much especially with how stingy the game is with giving you money that you’d rather spend on utility items and equipments for your main party but I’m sure the investment is worth it.
That’s all of your battle options but there’s still 2 other subtleties about fighting that I need to mention which are the different bonuses that can happen at every turn and the boost meter. For each successful deathblow, your boost meter fills up, one unit of boost allows you to bypass the turn order and chain attacks with characters, when used properly, this can be a devastating tool to chain enemies and not let them fight. Enemies can also boost too, mostly in retaliation from attacking them but what bothers me a bit more about that is that for some reasons some enemies can boost over your boost which is something you yourself can’t do at any points, I get that it’s to make the game a bit more challenging and battles a bit more spectacular but honestly I just felt that it was cheap and I didn’t like it very much.
Where Xenosaga gets a bit more complicated however is in its progression systems, level ups do happen and upgrade your stats but on top of EXP you also get three different types of additional points which are Ether point, Tech Points and Skill points all of which have different uses that I will be explaining here.
Ether points allows you to learn new Ether abilities through a skill tree of sorts, each character as their own magic skill tree but what I really enjoyed about this system is how versatile it is. On top of learning new magics, you can actually transfer skills from one character to the next. Want all of your characters to learn the powerful spell buffs of Ziggy for exemple ? Just spend a couple of points and you can transfer that skill from one character to the next. Very quickly did I use this feature to let my characters be even stronger, the one caveat of this is that you can’t equip all of your spells at all time, you have to select them on a list and you can only have a certain amount since they all have a different cost).
Tech Points are used primarily for two things : Upgrading your deathblows (and thus removing their limitations) and being spent to upgrade certain specific stats of your characters on top of what levels up already does. Skill Points can allow you to learn the passive abilities of accessories you gather throughout your adventure, up to tree slots. It’s a feature I haven’t used much but could’ve been beneficial but I didn’t understand the whole “skill level” thing associated with assimilating certain accessories so I didn’t bother.
Overall I’d say the system is a good evolution of Xenogears but does the game itself support that system enough to make it fun ? Well, kinda but also not really. By the mid-point of the game I was kinda confused at how tanky the enemies were and how little damage I was actually doing to them, combine that with the general slowness of battle and the fact that enemies respawn with each room transitions (this game doesn’t have random encounters thank god, since Xenogears was bad with this) and you can’t escape fights unless you use a consumable item or use a specific spell, the game unfortunately drags after a while.
There are several informations that are withheld from you, tons of accessories and exploit that are tied to obscure minigames that can only be accessed through specific save points by using a specific item, I didn’t bother much with said mini-games as they were kind of ass but some people might be into them. They could’ve made my life a bit easier but fortunately as soon as I was getting bored of the battle system of the game, the game just said “Hey, have you heard about Megazords ?” and I was like “Ok hit me up”.
The game has only one major sidequest which are tied to red doors and red keys that you can find throughout the game world, while most of them give you random accessories you may or may not use, some give you “robot parts”. These robot parts are tied to a pretty funny side quest where you help this crazy scientist build a giant robot, each part of said robot turns into a summon that Shion can use and these summons while costing a lot in MP are really powerful and can pretty much trivialize most random encounters in the game. The final summon you obtain for completing the sidequest is “Erde Kaiser” , a GaoGaiGar type MegaZord who deals 9999 damage to every enemy in the game including bosses.
You can bet your ass that when I got him around the last dungeon of the game, I’ve abused the fuck out of it because I was more invested in the story than the gameplay aspect of it and look… if you give a monkey a bazooka with a banana shaped button, you won’t be able to convince it not to press it right ? Well I am a sad monkey but replace the banana with cool giant robots, man I just love when serious ass setting just have the most wacky out of place stuff out of nowhere for no reasons other than to be silly and reminding us this is indeed a silly Japanese RPG in the end (shoutouts to the freakin Ace Combat 4 ad you get by mail too btw !)
One thing that made the gameplay drag a bit further to me was the exploration or lack thereof. The game is pretty straightforward and linear in its progression but the areas you explore are pretty big and while they don’t lack in puzzles and neat level design at times, the general slow movement of the game and the constant backtracking the game asks of you at certain points can be a bit annoying. They’re definitely less a chore to go through than some of the dungeons from Xenogears (thank fuck they forgot about platforming) but the overall game suffers from a lack of variety in its environments. I know it’s for story reasons but aside from the Encephalon and the Gnosis Cathedral, most of the environments are dry looking sci-fi space stations, you go from one spaceship to the next and it’s really hard to distinguish them.
The game has this very cold and claustrophobic atmosphere to it, not helped by the lack of soundtrack. Yeah contrary to other games in the franchise, Xenosaga is a very quiet game, most of what you’re going to hear during explorations are the different sound effects and the battle theme which is the only battle theme in the whole game aside from the last fight. I’m still struggling to understand if this was done on purpose to give a more eerie vibe to the already pretty eerie and survival-horror-esque vibe by making you feel the emptiness of space or if it’s due to a lack of planning or budget. You can forget about budget because the game literally has the London Philharmonic Orchestra itself to accompany Yasunori’s Matsuda’s composition during the cutscenes. The Soundtrack is generally pretty good for the most part and accompanies the cutscenes well enough but the contrast between the heavy spectacular like moment of the narrative and the more quiet gameplay section doesn’t help the soundtrack leaving a lasting impression on me aside from a few really solid tracks.
One thing about this game mechanics kinda confused me and it’s the distribution of resources which is a bit weird. Money in this game comes around quite rarely, some enemies drops money but it’s a ridiculously low amount of them for the most part you’re meant to either sell barter items that enemies drop (and I’ll never understand the appeal of adding an additional step to “getting money” but here they couldn’t even make their mind about it) our use the money you find just exploring and exploding stuff with your phone laser. At first I thought “hmmm, that’s interesting” because the game clearly wants to have a sort of survival horror vibe to it and what better ways to do this than limiting the number of resources available and forcing you to rely on the loots you find in chest which are here replaced by destructible parts of the environments you can shoot down with a laser app on your phone which is … a bit weird but ok ?
And I wouldn’t mind that but then, it turns out the game does asks a lot of money to keep your equipment up to speed and especially to upgrade your mechs which because of a lack of funds start becoming useless by the second half in favor of your playable characters (especially with Shion’s Power Rangers summon). There’s a point in the game, where you receive an e-mail telling you about investing in stocks but when this mail arrived I couldn’t invest in them at all as I lacked the basic funds to purchase said stocks and I was like “Well Ok, I’ll just wait” but the thing is that you have to do it at this specific moment or else you can say goodbye to tons of money down on the line which would’ve been helpful in order to purchase new mech shit. There’s also a hidden “hacker side-quest” which gives you 200 000 golds, mind you that the most expensive shit in this game is a mech suit that cost 300 000 golds which is an amount of money I don’t think is even possible to achieve playing this game regularly without grinding.
Speaking of grinding, this game does have residual exp for other party members but not residual everything else, this means that while the characters does level up accordingly with the flow of the story, their stats and capabilities didn’t which isn’t helped by this game giving you a pitifully small amount of each point categories per battle which makes half of your party members fall behind in power and prevent you from actually experimenting more with party composition. I know there are some equipments which mitigates the grind and there’s an hidden point multiplier system that I didn’t know how to take advantage of but why should I care about when by the midway point of the game and especially the last dungeon I could just go “Go Go Power Rangers” and trivialize most combat encounter which seem a bit more fun than dealing with the hassle of the game balance crumbling onto itself midway through the game and making every fight a drag.
While I don’t think the gameplay part of Xenosaga is bad per say, it’s clearly not the most exciting part of the game, much like Xenogears Monolith Software still had a lot to learn before finally arriving at a battle system which is thoroughly engaging on top of Takahashi’s wacky plot ideas. My hypothesis is also that Baiten Kaitos another game by Monolith released the same year and had a much more ambitious and experimental battle system and maybe it’s a case of putting too much fruit in the same basket, not to say Xenosaga wasn’t the most ambitious project of the two but the priorities here where lowkey different. I still did enjoy and had fun with the game in the grand scheme of things and much like Xenogears compensated a lot of its shortcomings by one of the greatest script ever written for a videogame, Xenosaga compensated its weakness with stunning cinematography (at the time), an intriguing sci-fi setting and tons of iconic characters to get invested into.
Where Xenosaga falls short is that Xenogears in how incomplete the game was still ended up being a story that told a satisfying tale, one that leaves a lot to the interpretation of its players but still nonetheless concluded in a somewhat satisfying way while delivering on all the themes it wanted to explore. In comparison it’s hard to not think of Xenosaga as a shallower take on similar ideas since the game doesn’t hold a candle to Xenogears in terms of raw artistry and emotion, most of Xenosaga 1 exists to establish the wider setting that the series will explore in more details in other episode but maybe it’s a bit too cryptic and a bit too complex for its own good at times. I ultimately really enjoyed the story but I still have trouble understanding what Takahashi wanted to tell me with all that techy sci-fi mambo jumbo religious nonsense this time around and I ultimately had trouble parsing what the story was even about.
Yes I admit that the game story kicked my ass a little bit, it’s not easy to 100% pay attention to cutscenes and dialogues especially since the game is just teasing you with so much lore. However I do like the cohesion of the entire vision at play here, at first I thought the main twist of the narrative would be that there is no remaining planet in the galaxy since you spend most of your time on space stations, VR simulations and inside a giant space whale but it was to make the ending of the game feel that much more special when after 30h of cold sci-fi looking environments and horror stuff, you end up on a beautiful sunset on some lively planets while some really good vocal track plays out like at the end of Xenogears or the Xenoblade games which seems to follow in its footsteps. It’s such an iconic yet liberating imagery that I really enjoyed it and of course Shion welcoming back Kos-Mos was really cute (yes I love Shion Uzuki, Yes I’m mad about her design change in the other games).
I’d say the cast heavily carries the story for me, I pretty much loved all of them even though I still have trouble understanding what’s the deal with Chaos (the dude might be an Angel or something since it's heavily teased in his deathblows) but he’s still a chill dude. Kos-Mos in particular surprised me because of how much they play out the whole “robot” thing with her. Most stories will usually go with the “robot learn to be human” thing but Kos-Mos is 100% a machine and the few human traits that she displays are very assholish at times which is freaking fantastic, I love how much of a bad bitch she can be while Shion is trying desperately to tame her, I mean ffs, Kos-Mos kills a dude at the start of the game in cold Blood because it was the most optimal solution and I was always on the edge about her doing things. But my favorite character is definitely Jr. AKA Rubedo who completely steals the show by the second half and has the most personal stake in the conflict by the second half of the game especially with the main antagonist being his… brother ? evil clone ? I’m still not quite sure. He combines the best out of both Bart and Billy from Xenogears and most of his deathblows and spells are the coolest in the game and yes I also need a ship full of cute babes to follow me everywhere and be my yes-woman, Jr. really be on that sigma grindset for real.
In conclusion, I enjoyed my time with Xenosaga, it’s a game I won’t ranking super high for the moment but I can definitely change my mind about it after the other two episodes.If anything the game pretty much suffers from being an obvious intro titles and sadly cannot stand on its own like Xenogears or even the first Xenoblade game can, but as far as intro titles are, I’m glad that this one at least doesn’t ask me to spend 90h of nothing with shallow characters and an hamfisted worldbuilding with no flares put behind it, even if the gameplay aspect leaves a lot to be desired, I’m thoroughly on board for Takahashi’s wild ride !
My history with the Xeno Series is a bit skewed up, during Operation Rainfall, I obviously heard about and played the first Xenoblade game and absolutely loved it like many people at the time but it’s been so long a replay might be needed to refresh my memory of it. I’ve then played Xenoblade X and enjoyed it a lot too and then Xenoblade 2 which is a game I had to learn to love since it was kind of hard game to sit through with all the aesthetic changes that I wasn’t a fan of and the humor and tone which was a bit hit or miss for me (and don’t get me started on the gacha mechanics or just the overall game system taking literal years before becoming interesting or fun). I still think Xenoblade 2 is a bit too long for its own good with a somewhat strong ending that while it may have come out of nowhere with its last minute connection to Xenoblade 1 was nonetheless really good and the cast was solid enough for me to care about it in the end, I realize it’s a much smarter game now than I gave it credit for back in the day.
And while I do enjoy the Xenoblade games and think they are fully deserving of the praises they got over the years (probably one of the rare cases of a modern RPG franchise actually delivering on its promises), they never really stuck to me, only Xenoblade X did funnily enough because of its deeply interesting and detailed sci-fi world that I only wish the story could’ve explored more, it had a lot of interesting stuff to it but I also think it’s the one with the best gameplay in the franchise, exploring around this planet and eventually unlocking the mechs was a freaking magical experience and the few story bits there was really intrigued me and I hope a sequel is on the way.
But none of them stuck to me more than Xenogears when I eventually got around to it in 2020 or something (my memory is really bad I should really journal my games more lmao). I obviously knew about the other Xenogames, I knew about how Xenogears was this highly regarded masterpiece and I knew Xenosaga mainly because of Kos-Mos appearance in the Namco x Capcom (Project x Zone) series where her design immediately caught my attention.
Xenogears to put it lightly is one of my favorite games of all time now and is now actually sitting comfortably in my top 10 best games I’ve ever played (which is constantly shifting anyway depending on my mood and if I happen to find a game excellent enough to deserve such placement), it’s not without its flaws, it’s the product of a botched development cycle which ended up in a somewhat incomplete product with a combat system which is really fun but gets shallow very fast and some of the more questionable dungeon design in the medium to the point that I was actually happy the second half pretty much was a visual novel. But gosh darn it if everything else from the music, the aesthetic, the plot, the characters, the mystery, the lore, this game is a goddamn juggernaut of an art piece like no other which somehow managed to turn its biggest weakness into its biggest strength by tying the plot directly to its own existence as an incomplete part of a never to be completed whole.
There are very few games I can 100% praise for their raw storytelling value alone but Xenogears stands tall amongst the crowd with some of the most beautifully poignant, spectacular and at times cerebral scenarios in the whole medium of video games. It’s constantly bombarding you with stuff to get fascinated about, it’s an endless well of reflexion in which you can find more and more meaning the more you dig it’s simply put a masterpiece
One day I’ll make a proper review about Xenogears. I really want to talk about how special that game is for me and the entire RPG genre as a whole someday, but today isn’t that day. Seeing as awesome as Xenogears was and how happy I still am for how it turned out, I can’t help but still feel frustrated that Takahashi was never able to fulfill his vision and kickstart the Xenogears franchise. There are many reasons why this wasn’t possible, Square didn’t plan to have another juggernaut of highly ambitious mega-series alongside Final Fantasy and Xenogears by itself was already taking a bit too much time.
While 90’s Square was great at giving small directors their time on the spotlight, they were not the best at supporting them financially in the long run because to Square all of these other games were just distractions in-between big releases of Final Fantasy, and the flop caused by the FF movie at the turn of the medium pretty much doomed the Xenogears franchise from ever existing. It is really so sad to read Perfect Works and realize that in another reality Xenogears would be Square’s very own MGS series, a series of highly acclaimed titles made by a visionary author with a strong vision for videogames and sci-fi stories.
But while that day might never come for Xenogears that doesn’t mean Takahashi was about to give up on the idea of his grand sci-fi epic just yet. Shortly after the release of Xenogears and the realization they could never brought forth their visions onto the world, Takahashi and his team quit Squaresoft to form Monolith Software and with the help of Bandai Namco they will try to revive Xenogears into the epic saga it was meant to be and this next entry in the now meta “Xeno” franchise will be appropriately called : Xenosaga.
Xenosaga was released on the PS2 in 2003, now mind you, one thing that’s great about me is that I am an expert at not spoiling myself on stuff so I knew pretty much nothing going into Xenosaga, therefore I was surprised to see Takahashi giving zero fuck when dropping the Zohar right on minute one and continuing on reusing character design from Xenogears into this game to pretty much tilt people with connections that may or may not be there. Very early on, you get to see a character looking awfully similar to Elly and there’s a lot of mystery surrounding that mysterious figure even as the game eventually caps off.
The story takes place in the distant future as you start of on a space-station, you play as Shion Uzuki resident glasses girl and chief of engineering on the Kos-Mos project on behalf of Vector industry, a private weapon manufacturer who manages these artificial super soldiers called “Realians'' which are artificial humans created for the purpose of fighting in wars and serve different position. The Kos-Mos project was meant to see if humanity could build an entirely artificial humanoid weapon (Realians are biologicals, they’re pretty much tube babies with machine stuff into them, I’m honestly not sure).
After a quick training session in VR and Shion getting some sort of hallucination of Elly from Xenogears, she is called on deck to report on the experimentation but suddenly these weird interdimensional aliens called Gnosis starts attacking the ship looking for the Zohar found inside of it and now the game becomes Dead Space for a minute ! After the space station gets blown off, Shion, Kos-Mos and Allen end up on a random merchant ship and are now heading to Second Miltia to find refuge there and report back to Vector after witnessing Kos-Mos starting to disobey her order a little bit.
At the same time, Ziggy, a soldier brought back to life as a cyborg, is tasked by some government people of the galactic federation to retrieve an important realian by the name of Momo from the hands of U-TIC, a shady terrorist organization with plans to do evil terrorist organization stuff yet not developed in this game but seems to be like a cult thing ? Momo is a Series 100 who was created by a certain Joachim Mizrahi, a crazy scientist which caused the disappearance of Old Miltia and the apparition of the Gnosises 14 years ago. During the mission, Ziggy ends up being chased by the terrorist and as they find an escape pod, they’re now heading to Second Miltia too to report on the mission and will soon meet up with our main party.
Meanwhile, Jr, a badass shotacon with guns that is clearly not the secret Yaoi lovechild of Bart and Billy from Xenogears is trying to investigate the sudden disappearance of a planet by the name of Ariadne with the help of his ship called the Durandal and his crew composed of hot babes on behalf of the Kukai Foundation, a private militia turned independent nation trying to stop U-Tic from doing their shady evil terrorist stuff. Jr is probably the coolest character in this game and by the second act pretty much overtakes the plot by himself as he is closely related to Albedo a mysterious freakish guy who’s trying to get his hands on Momo to obtain informations found in her head in order to… spread chaos across the Cosmos on behalf of U-DO which is some higher entity I have still fuck all idea what it even looks like.
Eventually all of these characters' paths will cross and they’ll eventually try to stop Evil Mc Immortal Interdimensional Demi-God from causing too much trouble. This is my personal recollection of the plot and that’s already a lot to summarize and to uncover, Xenosaga is a victim of “batshit insane sci-fi rpg plot syndrome”. It introduces tons of concepts and in-universe terms with some religious symbolism thrown into the mix, a fuck lot of yet to be resolved mysteries and tons of moving parts with factions left and right with their own goal and agenda. It’s probably even more hard sci-fi than even Xenogears was at times and I must admit that it’s at times a bit harder to follow than this game was.
Xenosaga is less of a story with some main drive or even an apparent main theme, with Xenogears you could be confused by some of the deeper plot elements but in the end you could at least parse the intentions of the story but here, not so much and I think it was done on purpose. Xenosaga 1 is only the first episode of a trilogy and it shows, it pretty much feels like how it would be to end Xenogears at the end of Disc 1 and having to wait a solid year or two to get the stuff from Disc 2 which yes would’ve probably made Disc 2 more complete but at the same time would Xenogears be as memorable as it is if it really just cutted off to Disc 1 ? I don’t think so.
As such it’s hard to parse or even criticize the story of the game when it clearly is here to establish everything but you can’t help but feel that at least the first half of the game is kind of a slog. The story just sorts of happen, you go from one set pieces to the next, from one perspective switch to the other and while the end goal of most of the protagonists is the reach Second Miltia, by the time you get there a lot of stuff happens that you clearly have trouble understanding the implications of and then the credits play to a beautiful vocal song as it is tradition in the franchise and you’re left wanting more. While I’m cautious calling the story “good”, I can’t deny that it is interesting and thoroughly engaging past the midway point but you can definitely feel that the plot is begging to unleash its full sauce in the sequels.
What I understood of the story is that 14 years ago, a war was fought on some distant planet called Miltia over an artifact called the Zohar retrieved here by the researchers in the intro (or maybe that part is completely unrelated) and all of the characters are somewhat linked to the events that took place on that fateful day and all of the implications which ensued from this conflict. While the story can be confusing and at times struggle to make its point clear, I can deny that the whole thing is really well presented. Xenogears was mostly a visual novel in disguise, with a lot of reading and dialogue scenes that were superbly directed for what the PS1 could allow at the time combined with the occasional anime FMV cutscene punctuating the bigger moments of the narrative.
Here Xenosaga pushes that envelop even further and what I’ve played of the Xenoblade series showed me that what Monolith really is into is directing awesome story cutscenes that can be a tad bit too long but also quite spectacular and you can sense that this passion for cinematography above all else started all the way back with this game. Of course, it’s easy to dismiss the effort brought here in the cutscene department as it’s a dinky old 2003 PS2 game but for the standard of that era I’d say they did more than a decent enough job with them.
The direction during the dialogues scenes can be a bit awkward and stiff which is definitely not helped by the artstyle having trouble dealing with facial expression (except for Albedo that guy’s fucking great everytime he’s one screen) but the big action set pieces like space battles and others are done surprisingly well. There are tons of really iconic moments of great direction during those and especially some of the more “horror oriented” segments which this game is full of, the scene of Kos-Mos awakening for the first time is one of the most iconic shit I’ve ever seen and gives me chills everytime (and so does the Albedo limb ripping scene like holy shit, they even managed to made it more terrifying in the English version). All the scenes in the encephalon were pretty damn great too and you can definitely feel in those segments the continued influence of Xenogears style of bizarre imagerie and philosophical rambling which is the closest video games has ever been from trying to be Evangelion and succeeding in my opinion.
The Artstyle of the game is a bit hit or miss however, it’s still the character designer from Xenogears but much like Xenoblade X, I thought the style kind of transitioned pretty awkwardly to 3D, all the characters feel like dolls with fish eyes, they have a definitive plastic feel to them but honestly, I think it kinda works in the games favor at times since most of the characters are meant to be artificial humans anyway and this style translate that impression well even if it probably wasn’t the intended result. It’s still charming however in a nostalgic 2000’s era anime way and it gives the game a real sense of identity which kinda gets lost from what I’ve seen of the sequels.
I think the problem with those character design like I said is that combined with the obvious datedness of trying to be a cinematographic game in 2003, they don’t convey emotion all too strongly and it feels awkward, Momo doesn’t look cute or peppy, she looks tired and sleepy all the time when it clearly wasn’t the intention but I’m nitpicking, I’d say the game somewhat holds up graphically nowadays if you’re not particularly allergic to anime artstyle. I mean you better enjoy these cutscenes anyway because pretty much 50% of the whole runtime of the game is spent watching cutscenes, sometimes long uninterrupted stretches of them to the point they have to pause the game to let you save through them much like Disc 2 of XG did.
As for the voice acting, I had to play this game with the original Japanese dub, nothing against the English cast from what I heard the performances are really good especially for that era where English Voice acting for weird esoteric Japanese games weren’t at its best and English Albedo really fucking kills it during one of the big moments. I had to play it in Japanese because of glitch which also exists on real hardware (played on emulator cause I ain’t losing my mortgage over this shit) where the game can just randomly crash while trying to save the game regularly, this is quite the heavy oversight and I’m not sure what the reception of it was when the game came out but this sucks.
Anyway back to voice acting, the Japanese voice acting fairs pretty well, Kos-Mos in particular really nails the robot voice, they really did a solid job making her appearance as iconic as possible from the design, to her scenes to her voice acting. I’d say on average it was a distant voice cast and I’m actually shocked to see a non-ear grating loli character for a change ? Momo actually sounds like a damn child for a change and with her whole schtick being a magical girl (???) For some reasons, I was definitely expecting the voice acting to go in the overly moe territory Jun Maeda seems to be weirdly fond of (I really ain’t a fan of Jun Maeda’s fetish for girl talking like goddamn Pokemon). I think the English Performance from what I heard is a bit better but the Japanese one is no slouch either and in the end I didn’t miss out on much in my opinion.
Since the game is mostly cutscenes one might think that the general pacing of the game gets hurt as a result and you’d be right, it takes a bit of time before the game actually goes anywhere and there are several instances of players getting control for 5 min before being embarked to another slew of cutscenes. I’m an MGS fan so that style of storytelling doesn’t bother me much and the game is 30h long so it’s not that bad in the grand scheme of things.
Speaking of gameplay, while there might not be that many instances of them, it’s still a significant part of the game and we’re gonna talk about it. Xenosaga’s battle system is pretty much an evolution of the one found in Xenogears, while Xenogears gameplay was fun it did start to get a bit dry by the end game to the point that I had to resolve to using game exploit to get through some of the more important fights in the second half of the game, this game mostly solves that issues by expanding greatly on what Gears did. During battle, you can use either Square or Triangle to deal different types of damage with specific combinations leading to other moves.
The main difference here is the way you deal death blows, death blows (called : “techniques”) here must be activated by first using a hit and then canceling the second to charge up your AP meter which then allows you to use one of your death blows, at first I wasn’t a fan of this as I felt it needlessly dragged fights for longer than they should but compared to Xenogears there’s a greater variety of death blows and ways to include them within attack sequences that I didn’t mind it by the end (and later down, you can upgrade certain death blow to remove that limitation on them and use them as regular attack).
On top of that, much like Xenogears, characters can have access to Ether attacks which are magic attacks requiring MP to be used. However? I found most of the offensive ones in this game to be a bit lacking in power to be used effectively in battle (except for a few of them that we’ll talk about a bit later…) as well as costing too much HP but the support spells truly makes up for it in comparison as buffing your party becomes an essential part of battles.
Another cool thing about Xenosaga however is the fact that for any battle scenario, you can just call your mechs. In Xenogears, mech fights were only allowed for certain specific parts of the game but here, some characters can summon their mechs in battle at any time which is freaking awesome and gives you a second health bar to protect you. The upgrade in firepower is pretty significant but the Gears kinda loses their utility near the end where your main on-foot party gets fully decked out with useful spells and deathblows and the cost associated with upgrading your mechs (which are surprisingly customizable) can be a bit much especially with how stingy the game is with giving you money that you’d rather spend on utility items and equipments for your main party but I’m sure the investment is worth it.
That’s all of your battle options but there’s still 2 other subtleties about fighting that I need to mention which are the different bonuses that can happen at every turn and the boost meter. For each successful deathblow, your boost meter fills up, one unit of boost allows you to bypass the turn order and chain attacks with characters, when used properly, this can be a devastating tool to chain enemies and not let them fight. Enemies can also boost too, mostly in retaliation from attacking them but what bothers me a bit more about that is that for some reasons some enemies can boost over your boost which is something you yourself can’t do at any points, I get that it’s to make the game a bit more challenging and battles a bit more spectacular but honestly I just felt that it was cheap and I didn’t like it very much.
Where Xenosaga gets a bit more complicated however is in its progression systems, level ups do happen and upgrade your stats but on top of EXP you also get three different types of additional points which are Ether point, Tech Points and Skill points all of which have different uses that I will be explaining here.
Ether points allows you to learn new Ether abilities through a skill tree of sorts, each character as their own magic skill tree but what I really enjoyed about this system is how versatile it is. On top of learning new magics, you can actually transfer skills from one character to the next. Want all of your characters to learn the powerful spell buffs of Ziggy for exemple ? Just spend a couple of points and you can transfer that skill from one character to the next. Very quickly did I use this feature to let my characters be even stronger, the one caveat of this is that you can’t equip all of your spells at all time, you have to select them on a list and you can only have a certain amount since they all have a different cost).
Tech Points are used primarily for two things : Upgrading your deathblows (and thus removing their limitations) and being spent to upgrade certain specific stats of your characters on top of what levels up already does. Skill Points can allow you to learn the passive abilities of accessories you gather throughout your adventure, up to tree slots. It’s a feature I haven’t used much but could’ve been beneficial but I didn’t understand the whole “skill level” thing associated with assimilating certain accessories so I didn’t bother.
Overall I’d say the system is a good evolution of Xenogears but does the game itself support that system enough to make it fun ? Well, kinda but also not really. By the mid-point of the game I was kinda confused at how tanky the enemies were and how little damage I was actually doing to them, combine that with the general slowness of battle and the fact that enemies respawn with each room transitions (this game doesn’t have random encounters thank god, since Xenogears was bad with this) and you can’t escape fights unless you use a consumable item or use a specific spell, the game unfortunately drags after a while.
There are several informations that are withheld from you, tons of accessories and exploit that are tied to obscure minigames that can only be accessed through specific save points by using a specific item, I didn’t bother much with said mini-games as they were kind of ass but some people might be into them. They could’ve made my life a bit easier but fortunately as soon as I was getting bored of the battle system of the game, the game just said “Hey, have you heard about Megazords ?” and I was like “Ok hit me up”.
The game has only one major sidequest which are tied to red doors and red keys that you can find throughout the game world, while most of them give you random accessories you may or may not use, some give you “robot parts”. These robot parts are tied to a pretty funny side quest where you help this crazy scientist build a giant robot, each part of said robot turns into a summon that Shion can use and these summons while costing a lot in MP are really powerful and can pretty much trivialize most random encounters in the game. The final summon you obtain for completing the sidequest is “Erde Kaiser” , a GaoGaiGar type MegaZord who deals 9999 damage to every enemy in the game including bosses.
You can bet your ass that when I got him around the last dungeon of the game, I’ve abused the fuck out of it because I was more invested in the story than the gameplay aspect of it and look… if you give a monkey a bazooka with a banana shaped button, you won’t be able to convince it not to press it right ? Well I am a sad monkey but replace the banana with cool giant robots, man I just love when serious ass setting just have the most wacky out of place stuff out of nowhere for no reasons other than to be silly and reminding us this is indeed a silly Japanese RPG in the end (shoutouts to the freakin Ace Combat 4 ad you get by mail too btw !)
One thing that made the gameplay drag a bit further to me was the exploration or lack thereof. The game is pretty straightforward and linear in its progression but the areas you explore are pretty big and while they don’t lack in puzzles and neat level design at times, the general slow movement of the game and the constant backtracking the game asks of you at certain points can be a bit annoying. They’re definitely less a chore to go through than some of the dungeons from Xenogears (thank fuck they forgot about platforming) but the overall game suffers from a lack of variety in its environments. I know it’s for story reasons but aside from the Encephalon and the Gnosis Cathedral, most of the environments are dry looking sci-fi space stations, you go from one spaceship to the next and it’s really hard to distinguish them.
The game has this very cold and claustrophobic atmosphere to it, not helped by the lack of soundtrack. Yeah contrary to other games in the franchise, Xenosaga is a very quiet game, most of what you’re going to hear during explorations are the different sound effects and the battle theme which is the only battle theme in the whole game aside from the last fight. I’m still struggling to understand if this was done on purpose to give a more eerie vibe to the already pretty eerie and survival-horror-esque vibe by making you feel the emptiness of space or if it’s due to a lack of planning or budget. You can forget about budget because the game literally has the London Philharmonic Orchestra itself to accompany Yasunori’s Matsuda’s composition during the cutscenes. The Soundtrack is generally pretty good for the most part and accompanies the cutscenes well enough but the contrast between the heavy spectacular like moment of the narrative and the more quiet gameplay section doesn’t help the soundtrack leaving a lasting impression on me aside from a few really solid tracks.
One thing about this game mechanics kinda confused me and it’s the distribution of resources which is a bit weird. Money in this game comes around quite rarely, some enemies drops money but it’s a ridiculously low amount of them for the most part you’re meant to either sell barter items that enemies drop (and I’ll never understand the appeal of adding an additional step to “getting money” but here they couldn’t even make their mind about it) our use the money you find just exploring and exploding stuff with your phone laser. At first I thought “hmmm, that’s interesting” because the game clearly wants to have a sort of survival horror vibe to it and what better ways to do this than limiting the number of resources available and forcing you to rely on the loots you find in chest which are here replaced by destructible parts of the environments you can shoot down with a laser app on your phone which is … a bit weird but ok ?
And I wouldn’t mind that but then, it turns out the game does asks a lot of money to keep your equipment up to speed and especially to upgrade your mechs which because of a lack of funds start becoming useless by the second half in favor of your playable characters (especially with Shion’s Power Rangers summon). There’s a point in the game, where you receive an e-mail telling you about investing in stocks but when this mail arrived I couldn’t invest in them at all as I lacked the basic funds to purchase said stocks and I was like “Well Ok, I’ll just wait” but the thing is that you have to do it at this specific moment or else you can say goodbye to tons of money down on the line which would’ve been helpful in order to purchase new mech shit. There’s also a hidden “hacker side-quest” which gives you 200 000 golds, mind you that the most expensive shit in this game is a mech suit that cost 300 000 golds which is an amount of money I don’t think is even possible to achieve playing this game regularly without grinding.
Speaking of grinding, this game does have residual exp for other party members but not residual everything else, this means that while the characters does level up accordingly with the flow of the story, their stats and capabilities didn’t which isn’t helped by this game giving you a pitifully small amount of each point categories per battle which makes half of your party members fall behind in power and prevent you from actually experimenting more with party composition. I know there are some equipments which mitigates the grind and there’s an hidden point multiplier system that I didn’t know how to take advantage of but why should I care about when by the midway point of the game and especially the last dungeon I could just go “Go Go Power Rangers” and trivialize most combat encounter which seem a bit more fun than dealing with the hassle of the game balance crumbling onto itself midway through the game and making every fight a drag.
While I don’t think the gameplay part of Xenosaga is bad per say, it’s clearly not the most exciting part of the game, much like Xenogears Monolith Software still had a lot to learn before finally arriving at a battle system which is thoroughly engaging on top of Takahashi’s wacky plot ideas. My hypothesis is also that Baiten Kaitos another game by Monolith released the same year and had a much more ambitious and experimental battle system and maybe it’s a case of putting too much fruit in the same basket, not to say Xenosaga wasn’t the most ambitious project of the two but the priorities here where lowkey different. I still did enjoy and had fun with the game in the grand scheme of things and much like Xenogears compensated a lot of its shortcomings by one of the greatest script ever written for a videogame, Xenosaga compensated its weakness with stunning cinematography (at the time), an intriguing sci-fi setting and tons of iconic characters to get invested into.
Where Xenosaga falls short is that Xenogears in how incomplete the game was still ended up being a story that told a satisfying tale, one that leaves a lot to the interpretation of its players but still nonetheless concluded in a somewhat satisfying way while delivering on all the themes it wanted to explore. In comparison it’s hard to not think of Xenosaga as a shallower take on similar ideas since the game doesn’t hold a candle to Xenogears in terms of raw artistry and emotion, most of Xenosaga 1 exists to establish the wider setting that the series will explore in more details in other episode but maybe it’s a bit too cryptic and a bit too complex for its own good at times. I ultimately really enjoyed the story but I still have trouble understanding what Takahashi wanted to tell me with all that techy sci-fi mambo jumbo religious nonsense this time around and I ultimately had trouble parsing what the story was even about.
Yes I admit that the game story kicked my ass a little bit, it’s not easy to 100% pay attention to cutscenes and dialogues especially since the game is just teasing you with so much lore. However I do like the cohesion of the entire vision at play here, at first I thought the main twist of the narrative would be that there is no remaining planet in the galaxy since you spend most of your time on space stations, VR simulations and inside a giant space whale but it was to make the ending of the game feel that much more special when after 30h of cold sci-fi looking environments and horror stuff, you end up on a beautiful sunset on some lively planets while some really good vocal track plays out like at the end of Xenogears or the Xenoblade games which seems to follow in its footsteps. It’s such an iconic yet liberating imagery that I really enjoyed it and of course Shion welcoming back Kos-Mos was really cute (yes I love Shion Uzuki, Yes I’m mad about her design change in the other games).
I’d say the cast heavily carries the story for me, I pretty much loved all of them even though I still have trouble understanding what’s the deal with Chaos (the dude might be an Angel or something since it's heavily teased in his deathblows) but he’s still a chill dude. Kos-Mos in particular surprised me because of how much they play out the whole “robot” thing with her. Most stories will usually go with the “robot learn to be human” thing but Kos-Mos is 100% a machine and the few human traits that she displays are very assholish at times which is freaking fantastic, I love how much of a bad bitch she can be while Shion is trying desperately to tame her, I mean ffs, Kos-Mos kills a dude at the start of the game in cold Blood because it was the most optimal solution and I was always on the edge about her doing things. But my favorite character is definitely Jr. AKA Rubedo who completely steals the show by the second half and has the most personal stake in the conflict by the second half of the game especially with the main antagonist being his… brother ? evil clone ? I’m still not quite sure. He combines the best out of both Bart and Billy from Xenogears and most of his deathblows and spells are the coolest in the game and yes I also need a ship full of cute babes to follow me everywhere and be my yes-woman, Jr. really be on that sigma grindset for real.
In conclusion, I enjoyed my time with Xenosaga, it’s a game I won’t ranking super high for the moment but I can definitely change my mind about it after the other two episodes.If anything the game pretty much suffers from being an obvious intro titles and sadly cannot stand on its own like Xenogears or even the first Xenoblade game can, but as far as intro titles are, I’m glad that this one at least doesn’t ask me to spend 90h of nothing with shallow characters and an hamfisted worldbuilding with no flares put behind it, even if the gameplay aspect leaves a lot to be desired, I’m thoroughly on board for Takahashi’s wild ride !
2023
I fixed her
2009
Ys Seven : The Odd Duck
During the late 2000’s and early 2010’s Falcom pretty much found a new home with the PSP, it was the perfect niche to set in and be the small but surprising developer people were following out of cult following rather than because they broke new ground. And while we’ll be getting that era of Falcom a bit later over here in the west (mostly through word of mouth and the success of the Cold Steel titles) in Japan, Falcom was still going strong releasing new games and experimenting a lot with them.
Ys will be taking a bit of a backseat in the two years following Ys Origins release, most likely to try and come up with a way to bring Ys to new heights and shake the formula of the franchise so as to not make it redundant. With Felghana and Origins, it was clear to many that Ys had found what is essentially its best formula yet but after Origins already tried to spice things up with additional character to play and a bigger emphasis on lore, worldbuilding and narration, the Ark System was pretty much perfected and Falcom was ready to move on from it as to not make the series redundant.
Ys Seven released in 2009 was in fact the first game since Ys VI in 2006 to actually propel the story of Adol forward in time instead of going back in time and explore other unexplored parts of Adol’s life and in fact it would be the last until Ys IX in 2019 ! But Ys Seven was a big step for Ys for two other reasons, first of all it’s the first fully 3D Ys games ! While the series has dabbled in 3D in the past with the Ark Engine, here the entire game is in 3D, 3D Towns, 3D characters, 3D enemies, 3D environments !
This does give the game a significant boost when it comes to its presentation in my opinion, of course it’s still a dinky ass looking PSP game made on a sandwich budget but for once I can commend the general artstyle of the game hard-carrying the entire package. The game is colorful and full of life and the region of Altago is surprisingly pretty to look at and really varied in its environments taking place in this world equivalent to North Africa, there’s a lot of different locales and inspirations from the fauna and floras of the African continent as a whole from rocky mountainous mountains to huge plains and savannah and I personally just enjoy how much everything pops ! The game has some pretty stunning looking environments at times (but I mean, I like low poly games and old games in general so it doesn’t bother me, just throw pretty colors at me and I’m game !) and even the character models are pretty cool looking, I especially like Adol’s design in Ys Seven, it’s easily my favorite Adol design in the series and I think the scarf really does add a lot to his character.
But the other big change about Ys Seven is the gameplay system which is just so much more than a simple gameplay change but also a change in game design philosophy and narrative interpretation of Adol’s character because for the first time Adol wasn’t going to explore the land of Altago alone but alongside a couple of other characters tagging along the line. As expected it’s a change that was received quite coldly at first and in fact still divides the fandom to this very day much like how some people think that bump combat was the core identity of the series and they should’ve kept it and experimented on it.
See, the entire meta-narrative of the franchise is that we follow Adol on his journey through an interpretation of him rather than an actual person and every game design decision made for the series up to that point actually matched that philosophy.
Personally and even if I got used to it after 4 games, I still feel iffy about the party system not just mechanically speaking but also in terms of consistency and just overall “vibe” so to speak. Adol in the previous game was a mute protagonist and he still is to some degree in the modern titles which gives him dialogue option even if giving dialogue option to a mute character has never been a substitute for proper characterization in my opinion. In fact most of his characterization (outside of the two oddball titles that were Mask and III) was done mostly through the prism of the gameplay and overall presentation of the game !
As early as Ys 1, Adol is presented as a brave adventurer thirsty for freedom and curious about all things. The manual tells you how you’re looking at him through the different travel diaries he left throughout his lifetime until he died at the age of 63 while trying to reach the North Pole which at least set like a “plan” for Adol’s adventure. As such Ys 1 was all about imitating that flow and over the years, the series has had the reputation of just being a faster take on Zelda. Adol in all the previous games is represented as this absolute unstoppable unit of man ready to storm a castle and rush through its corridors, jumping and slashing his way to the tune of death metal ! Adol was a one-man-unit, he was the man of the situation and even if he met a lot of people along the way like his trusted companion Dogi most of his most notable feats were done through his hand alone.
There’s no reason to imagine that Adol would travel the world with a party of people, it’ll just slow him down and really if Adol isn’t capable of doing all the cool shit he can usually pull off on his own, is he still as awesome of a character as he used to be ? Of course, Adol isn’t a loner but he’s first and foremost a machine built for exploring ancient ruins and uncovering secrets, it’s hard to imagine him being the main character of a party where he’ll just be the main swordsman dealing most of the DPS and doing most of the leg work. Also due to his nature as a mute protagonist which was only previously characterized by his action, he is the perfect narrative vessel for projecting your own fantasy of being a cool adventurer !
And that’s to me the core of the issue, because by being part of a party of characters that means that Adol need to transform and become more of an actual character, he needs not to be an avatar, nor an idealized representation of his adventure where he may or may not over-exaggerate certain points, he needs to be a proper human being. And that’s where the party system game to me falls a bit flat when it comes to Adol because he now falls in all the trappings of the “mute protagonist” people like to complain about.
Because he is a mute protagonist with only a couple of dialogue choices that means that his arc is going to be by default very flat and his interactions with the rest of his crewmates are going to be flatter too with no meaningful character conflicts between him and the rest of his crewmate who are going to either worship him like a god or just have a slight aversion to him that’s gonna be solved in no time by Adol doing something cool. The reason mute protagonists are often frowned upon outside of the lack of direct characterization through text is also because they don’t really add much to the overall dynamic of the cast and mostly serve to gas up the players. When it comes to video games, I don’t think you want to be told to be awesome, you want to feel awesome ! You can tell a lot about a mute character through the things unique to the medium of video games and that’s what a lot of older Ys titles did but the modern discourse surrounding mute protagonists changed because the purpose and how they are integrated changed and not always for the best in my opinion.
However, I’m also not entirely against the party system or the idea of Ys games being about a party of characters rather than a single man unit and I think I understand why this change was made in the end. Adol is a guy with a sword and he’ll always be a guy with a sword so to spice things up, adding new characters with different playstyle isn’t really a bad idea and Origins already experimented with the idea of alternate characters so it’s just in the natural continuity of what that game did. On the other hand, JRPG and Action-RPG as a genre has evolved and even the Ys franchise has evolved since the 80’s and that means that now the franchise is on hardware powerful enough to display more text and create deeper more fully structured stories instead of just telling a story through the prism of gameplay alone.
So now, the Ys franchise is trying to appeal more to the wider JRPG crowds which are all used to big adventures where your main characters are joined by a variety of party members each with their own desire, dreams and goals which oftentimes guides the story of the game more than said main protagonist. Heck the Ys franchise was already starting to get deeper more involved story with Ys Origins where the story was more than just a pretext to climb a big tower and was a big part of my and many people appreciation of that game. With this decision, Falcom tried to tie the Ys franchise deeper to the JRPG genre as a whole, not trying to live in the shadow of Zelda or other big franchises for too long and thus these changes while controversial I felt were necessary to make Ys standout a bit more in an highly competitive market. Some people will say that the series has lost its identity since that change but so did many people who thought the same when bump combat wasn’t a thing anymore.
With that bit of ranting out of the way, how does Ys Seven fair up with these changes in mind, well for that we’ll first have to talk about how the Party System even works mechanically speaking. On a surface level, Ys Seven is still your classic Ys game, the combat is fast and frantic with an exciting sense of flow to it. Each blow and attack comes out quick with very little lag and I feel that at least for this game, it’s one of the “faster” feeling games in the franchise. Unfortunately despite the game being fully 3D this time around, the game has removed the option to jump, likely a response to many people complaining about platforming in the Ark Engine titles (skill issues imo). Therefore the game definitely has more of an hack’n’slash Diablo like feel to it which is completed by the combat now adding skills on top of your regular combos.
Instead of switching to different types of magic adding to your base moveset, here Adol and his teammates can learn a variety of skills they can attribute to 4 skill slots, each of these skills cost SP which can be regained by attacking or blocking enemies. You can also charge your regular attacks to deal a more powerful strike which does more damage but also gives you more SP. On top of all of this there’s also another meter on the right which fills up with attack and guarding, once full you can unleash an EX-Skill which is essentially a big super attack which deals tons of damage at the cost of your entire EX-Bar. It’s a system which on surface isn’t too dissimilar to other action RPG’s you might’ve played such as the Tales Of Series with the only difference here compared to that franchise is that everything happens in real time on the field rather than taking you to a separate battle arena each time you encounter a monster. Enemies now also have a stunt meter on top of their health, most regular enemies will die shortly before reaching that point but bosses won’t and once that meter is full they’ll be vulnerable to attack for a short time while being completely stunt, another system we’ve seen far too often in post 2010’s JRPG if I’m being honest.
And this is where the different party members come into play, during regular gameplay, 3 party members can be active on the field, and different party members deal different types of damage : Slash, Strikes and Pierce. Slashers are fast attackers which deals moderate damage and mostly use swords as their main means of attacking (it’s the main damage type of Adol), Strikers are heavy hitters which does a lot of damage but are very slow, Piercers are mostly ranged attackers which attacks from a distance by shooting projectiles (in later games, some non-projectile based characters are added and they’re just super-fast fencers which deals low damage). The main reason why you’d want to switch between party members however is because certain enemies are weak to certain types of attack and thus switching between them becomes essential to claiming victory over some of the tougher enemies.
Overall, Ys Seven version of this system is actually quite decent but a lot of balancing and gameplay issues kinda sours the fun of the system and definitely shows a severe case of “first game syndrome”. For starters, while Adol is still pretty fun to use, I found a lot of the additional characters to be a bit lacking in the fun department. Heavy characters are too slow for me to consider using them for too long and ranged attackers don’t actually have combo and unleash projectile not unlike Hugo from Origins and thus I didn’t find them that exciting to use in the long run. Also the way the game makes characters available is a bit weird, during the first half only Adol, Dogi and Aisha are available with some guest characters joining for the duration of their attributed dungeon before leaving your party. Some of these playable characters join your party permanently in the second half, but by that point your main party is so stacked that there’s no real incentive to use the other characters (keep that in mind, I’m gonna quizz you later) especially when some of them serve similar roles as your main three. I’ve mainly stick to an Adol only playthrough with the only other character other I found fun to use being Geis (a character from Ys VI making its grand return here as a playable character) so let’s just say that the rest of my party was lacking behind in stats and skills since updating them cost a lot of resources (again, keep that in mind).
The characters in question also aren’t the most interesting ones from a storytelling perspective. I found the team of characters in Ys Seven to be thoroughly unmemorable outside of Dogi, Aisha and Geis (two of which are returning characters with long-established roles in the series). Most of them are just random tribesmen associated with the different temples you visit throughout the game and they don’t really stand out more than that storywise except for maybe Cruxie who replaces her brother Mustafa after some story event happened to her. I like Aisha as a character too but she fits into the typical tomboyish princess role you’ve likely seen in many other JRPG’s over the years and thus your appreciation of her will really depend on your fondness for such tropes.
Other gameplay issues come from guarding, guarding in Ys Seven is a bit wack and unreliable mostly because of how loose the game is compared to other titles, dodge rolling makes you travel half the goddamn screen each time you use it and thus placement can be a bit wanky. While you’re not playing as them, the other party members are controlled via AI and let’s say the AI in this game gets pretty wack. From the auto-harvest not activating on ressources points, to them falling off of platforms and cliffs (which wouldn’t be an issue if switching to them didn’t also mean switching places with them !) or ruining your combos with bad attack choices and targeting the wrong enemies. The AI in this game is up to a lot of shenanigans and aside from being spare HP bags and being good at dodging its not great.
Last but not least, the way you learn abilities in this game is quite wack, each equipment you buy has a skill attached to them and to permanently keep those skills you have to farm AP on the enemies, a system not too dissimilar to how FFIX does it. I didn’t mind it in that game since most of the skills were passive abilities but here not sticking to outdated weapon and armor for longer than necessary locks you from having a complete moveset for each your characters and since AP can only be earned by active party members, they will inevitably lack behind for the late game (again more on that later).
But alright that’s the gameplay change but how’s the game itself ? This time around, Adol gets to explore the Kingdom of Altago on the Afrocan continent, a vast place with many different types of biomes and a bunch of tribes trying to survive out there in the wild to take care of each of their Dragon temples. A long-time ago, the 5 Dragons of Altago breathed new life onto the land, their goal being to keep the balance of their elements in check and if that balance had to be broken, the Wind of Destruction might destroy the land to reset the flow of Energy. To stop this, the prophecy talks about a legendary Dragon Hero who will one day make a pilgrimage to the 5 dragon shrines and receive a blessing from each of its dragons in order to stop the upcoming calamity. As Adol and Dogi land in the capital city, they come into contact with two herb sellers by the name of Tia and Maya getting harassed by the Dragon Knights, the elite soldiers of Altago. After a brief altercation, Adol gets thrown in jail, however having heard of his many adventures, the King of Altago tasks him with investigating the local shrines after a couple of earthquakes has been happening throughout the land. Upon visiting the first shine, Adol learns that he is in fact the chosen Dragon Hero who needs to seek the blessing of each of the dragons to stop the upcoming calamity.
As you can see the story of Ys Seven is overall a pretty basic “save the world by gathering 5 McGuffin” plot line seen in a lot of JRPG. Adol and his friends will go to different regions to explore each of the shrines, encounter the tribe's people, team-up with their local hero and defeat a boss at the end. If anything, the story of Ys Seven isn’t that amazing, it’s cliché, quite predictable and at point even boring and with the party members not having much depth it's really hard to think of this story as anything but serviceable (even if the series rarely shined in that department past Ys 1, 2 and Dawn). You can see the twists coming from a mile away and to top it all of the game is divided into two parts which doesn’t help the game’s pacing.
Because yes, after visiting the 5 shrines, some plot shenanigans happens and Adol gets thrown into jail again, gets to revisit all of the shrines to get blessings from the dragons again and… Yeah I don’t think I need to draw a picture here, this game is a bit too long (20h which is twice as long as your average Ys Game) and stretched out for how basic of a storyline it is. It’s also not helped that all of the quick travel points in the second half get deactivated forcing you to re-explore the entire map once again on foot. Sure the game does open some new areas to make the journey back less tedious but it’s such obvious padding that I’m shocked it got past the development phase. Despite my complaints about the story however, I do enjoy the Kingdom of Altago and its lore and some of the ecological and even political elements weave together to spice this pretty basic plot line into something far more enjoyable than expected. Tia for exemple without spoiling too much on what her deal is turns out to be one of my favorite heroines of the franchise and the end of her storyline did manage to make me emotional. What little actual story there is is good but it’s a shame that the whole Dragon Quest™ takes up 80% of the actual runtime of the game to be appreciated.
Since you’re mostly going to spend the grand majority of the game exploring the overworld as well as the different shrines (twice with other dungeons past the actual dungeons in the second half) how do they fare up ? Well this is where the game kinda suffers from its shift in gameplay and the lack of platforming elements, since the game removed the ability to jump a lot of the dungeons are pretty straightforward in design with one path leading to an item which unlocks the path to the boss. That’s not to say they’re not fun to explore or have fun gimmicks and obstacles, but they’re a far-cry from how the Ark Engine games were designed and I even must admit that they have a hard time even comparing to some of the best areas from Dawn of Ys.
The actual overworld connecting each of the towns and shrine fairs a bit better in the level design department with lots of interesting ways all the areas connect to one another and the monsters you fight there being pretty fun to fight with even some world bosses to take on if you feel especially spicy today. I’d say that in general the level design of each area and dungeons while not being able to compete on the same level as the ones from the Ys Engine era definitely compensate with some ideas and they’re overall pretty fun to go through nonetheless. I think the music alone carries the level design here, Ys Seven music is especially good even amongst the high standard of the series and if I’m being frank it’s at least in my Top 5 in terms of Soundtrack for the series.
So everything about this game is stuff that I just enjoy in an OK way but now I want to talk about the bosses…
They kinda… exist… or flat-out sucks…
With the party system, you now pretty much have 3 Health Bar instead of one and much like Ys VI we’re back to consumables items you can use mid-battle, I’m going to be honest, the party-system game kinda drop the balls hard on the bosses just for that reason alone since the challenge becomes quite nonexistent (which is why I advised playing these games on higher difficulties to have some semblance of a challenge). Because you have so much health and resources to manage that health the developers thought it was a good idea to turn every bosses into big fucking HP sponges which take fucking forever to die, I swear some of these bosses probably last up to 25 or even 30 minutes just to deplete their health bar. This isn’t really hard, it’s just incredibly long, boring and tedious for nothing and only a rare few of them have patterns worth giving a shit about. The only boss that I somehow remember is the first one you fight, which actually had some patterns to work with and some fun counters you can pull but other than that and in spite of the designs being pretty clean it’s not glorious.
Which now leads me to talk about the absolute fucking cancer cell that is the final boss of this game.
I failed to mention it until now but this game introduces a crafting system, with resources to gather in order to make better equipment. Some ressources fall naturally from enemies and some are harvested in certain spots in the game forcing you to stop your forward momentum to pick up some flowers and you better gather these resources because you sure as hell gonna need them. Why do I only mention this now ? Well remember when I said that the game had multiple party members but the game rarely if ever encourages you to use them ? Well, I hope you’ve actually been using them and keeping their equipment in check because they’re all going to participate in the fight ! All of them ! So if some of them are behind the curve, you can bet your ass the final boss is gonna whoop the floor with your ass. This is where the game which so far has avoided the sin of being too grindy becomes an infernal fucking grind fest.
To defeat the final boss, you need to have perfect equipment and everyone’s ultimate weapons, otherwise you simply won’t defeat him. To get those, you will have to grind ressources a lot ! And the worst part is that the game actually doesn’t tell you where to find specific resources, there’s not a compendium where that info can be found so if you’re somehow missing an ingredient for a recipe you’re shit out of luck except if you have a guide. I swear on top of having to farm levels and skills and resources for equipment you actually have to fight the damn boss. If you’re underprepared the boss is straight impossible but even with all the appropriate preparation he’s still a pain in the goddamn ass.
He has 3 phases, the first one being the longest since he’s only vulnerable for a set period of time and you have to dodge the rest of his attacks and attack his head before doing proper damage. The second will test your ability to guard and counter something that is almost never needed in the rest of the game and the third phase is a solo fight where Adol finishes the boss. Each phase has an ungodly amount of HP much like every boss in the game and if you fail at any of them, it’s back to the first phase (there’s also an easy humanoid boss fight before fighting him just adding to the frustration.
I guess I could give props to this boss actually having patterns and stuff to care about but god it’s such a pain in the ass. It’s easily the worst final boss in the entire series and perhaps one of the worst bosses in the entire franchise (yes even worse than Dark Fact in Chronicles and worse than any bosses in Mask of The Sun). This single element kinda sours a lot of the impact during the ending which without really spoiling all that much actually managed to get me a bit emotional despite the game’s many flaws.
After everything I’ve just said, you may think that my opinion on Ys Seven is less than favorable but on the contrary, I do actually enjoy the game maybe a tad bit more than most people. I like the setting, the lore, the music, the dungeons while more straightforward are still lots of fun to explore and the story although kind of non-existent for most of it manages to hit with some truly memorable moments which stuck in my mind whenever I think about this game (SHIRTLESS ADOL DAMN SON).
But it’s also fair to admit that Ys Seven isn’t all that remarkable of an entry especially after the home-run the previous two entries in the series were, much like Ys VI it’s a rough transitional period with some well executed ideas mixed with a lot of less than optimal ones. Ys Seven is a game I like a lot, maybe a tad bit more than Ys VI if only for the fact Ys Seven is just simply a lot more fast-paced and fun than that game and also doesn’t have any sort of weird esoteric mechanic such as dash jumping. Ys Seven sadly is just kinda there and just kind of exists and while I may enjoy it more than most, thinking back on it while writing this review almost made me draw a blank on what I can even say about this one.
Ys Seven is a game I don’t have any strong opinion about, either positive or negative, it’s the most quintessential 7/10 ARPG possible with mechanics you’ve likely seen executed better somewhere else, a story which is cliché, basic and quite predictable especially for Ys standard. The game also has sidequests and the fact I’m only mentioning them now during the conclusion shows you how much care was put into them. Overall, Ys Seven is solid, I’m in conflict with some of its ideas, starting with the party system I have some level of apprehension for and it’s not helped that it’s not executed at its best here.
Next time however, I’ll promise you some salt, we’re going to talk about a game I enjoy much less than Ys Seven, the actual version of Ys IV delivered by Falcom… and… thing’s aren’t pretty.
During the late 2000’s and early 2010’s Falcom pretty much found a new home with the PSP, it was the perfect niche to set in and be the small but surprising developer people were following out of cult following rather than because they broke new ground. And while we’ll be getting that era of Falcom a bit later over here in the west (mostly through word of mouth and the success of the Cold Steel titles) in Japan, Falcom was still going strong releasing new games and experimenting a lot with them.
Ys will be taking a bit of a backseat in the two years following Ys Origins release, most likely to try and come up with a way to bring Ys to new heights and shake the formula of the franchise so as to not make it redundant. With Felghana and Origins, it was clear to many that Ys had found what is essentially its best formula yet but after Origins already tried to spice things up with additional character to play and a bigger emphasis on lore, worldbuilding and narration, the Ark System was pretty much perfected and Falcom was ready to move on from it as to not make the series redundant.
Ys Seven released in 2009 was in fact the first game since Ys VI in 2006 to actually propel the story of Adol forward in time instead of going back in time and explore other unexplored parts of Adol’s life and in fact it would be the last until Ys IX in 2019 ! But Ys Seven was a big step for Ys for two other reasons, first of all it’s the first fully 3D Ys games ! While the series has dabbled in 3D in the past with the Ark Engine, here the entire game is in 3D, 3D Towns, 3D characters, 3D enemies, 3D environments !
This does give the game a significant boost when it comes to its presentation in my opinion, of course it’s still a dinky ass looking PSP game made on a sandwich budget but for once I can commend the general artstyle of the game hard-carrying the entire package. The game is colorful and full of life and the region of Altago is surprisingly pretty to look at and really varied in its environments taking place in this world equivalent to North Africa, there’s a lot of different locales and inspirations from the fauna and floras of the African continent as a whole from rocky mountainous mountains to huge plains and savannah and I personally just enjoy how much everything pops ! The game has some pretty stunning looking environments at times (but I mean, I like low poly games and old games in general so it doesn’t bother me, just throw pretty colors at me and I’m game !) and even the character models are pretty cool looking, I especially like Adol’s design in Ys Seven, it’s easily my favorite Adol design in the series and I think the scarf really does add a lot to his character.
But the other big change about Ys Seven is the gameplay system which is just so much more than a simple gameplay change but also a change in game design philosophy and narrative interpretation of Adol’s character because for the first time Adol wasn’t going to explore the land of Altago alone but alongside a couple of other characters tagging along the line. As expected it’s a change that was received quite coldly at first and in fact still divides the fandom to this very day much like how some people think that bump combat was the core identity of the series and they should’ve kept it and experimented on it.
See, the entire meta-narrative of the franchise is that we follow Adol on his journey through an interpretation of him rather than an actual person and every game design decision made for the series up to that point actually matched that philosophy.
Personally and even if I got used to it after 4 games, I still feel iffy about the party system not just mechanically speaking but also in terms of consistency and just overall “vibe” so to speak. Adol in the previous game was a mute protagonist and he still is to some degree in the modern titles which gives him dialogue option even if giving dialogue option to a mute character has never been a substitute for proper characterization in my opinion. In fact most of his characterization (outside of the two oddball titles that were Mask and III) was done mostly through the prism of the gameplay and overall presentation of the game !
As early as Ys 1, Adol is presented as a brave adventurer thirsty for freedom and curious about all things. The manual tells you how you’re looking at him through the different travel diaries he left throughout his lifetime until he died at the age of 63 while trying to reach the North Pole which at least set like a “plan” for Adol’s adventure. As such Ys 1 was all about imitating that flow and over the years, the series has had the reputation of just being a faster take on Zelda. Adol in all the previous games is represented as this absolute unstoppable unit of man ready to storm a castle and rush through its corridors, jumping and slashing his way to the tune of death metal ! Adol was a one-man-unit, he was the man of the situation and even if he met a lot of people along the way like his trusted companion Dogi most of his most notable feats were done through his hand alone.
There’s no reason to imagine that Adol would travel the world with a party of people, it’ll just slow him down and really if Adol isn’t capable of doing all the cool shit he can usually pull off on his own, is he still as awesome of a character as he used to be ? Of course, Adol isn’t a loner but he’s first and foremost a machine built for exploring ancient ruins and uncovering secrets, it’s hard to imagine him being the main character of a party where he’ll just be the main swordsman dealing most of the DPS and doing most of the leg work. Also due to his nature as a mute protagonist which was only previously characterized by his action, he is the perfect narrative vessel for projecting your own fantasy of being a cool adventurer !
And that’s to me the core of the issue, because by being part of a party of characters that means that Adol need to transform and become more of an actual character, he needs not to be an avatar, nor an idealized representation of his adventure where he may or may not over-exaggerate certain points, he needs to be a proper human being. And that’s where the party system game to me falls a bit flat when it comes to Adol because he now falls in all the trappings of the “mute protagonist” people like to complain about.
Because he is a mute protagonist with only a couple of dialogue choices that means that his arc is going to be by default very flat and his interactions with the rest of his crewmates are going to be flatter too with no meaningful character conflicts between him and the rest of his crewmate who are going to either worship him like a god or just have a slight aversion to him that’s gonna be solved in no time by Adol doing something cool. The reason mute protagonists are often frowned upon outside of the lack of direct characterization through text is also because they don’t really add much to the overall dynamic of the cast and mostly serve to gas up the players. When it comes to video games, I don’t think you want to be told to be awesome, you want to feel awesome ! You can tell a lot about a mute character through the things unique to the medium of video games and that’s what a lot of older Ys titles did but the modern discourse surrounding mute protagonists changed because the purpose and how they are integrated changed and not always for the best in my opinion.
However, I’m also not entirely against the party system or the idea of Ys games being about a party of characters rather than a single man unit and I think I understand why this change was made in the end. Adol is a guy with a sword and he’ll always be a guy with a sword so to spice things up, adding new characters with different playstyle isn’t really a bad idea and Origins already experimented with the idea of alternate characters so it’s just in the natural continuity of what that game did. On the other hand, JRPG and Action-RPG as a genre has evolved and even the Ys franchise has evolved since the 80’s and that means that now the franchise is on hardware powerful enough to display more text and create deeper more fully structured stories instead of just telling a story through the prism of gameplay alone.
So now, the Ys franchise is trying to appeal more to the wider JRPG crowds which are all used to big adventures where your main characters are joined by a variety of party members each with their own desire, dreams and goals which oftentimes guides the story of the game more than said main protagonist. Heck the Ys franchise was already starting to get deeper more involved story with Ys Origins where the story was more than just a pretext to climb a big tower and was a big part of my and many people appreciation of that game. With this decision, Falcom tried to tie the Ys franchise deeper to the JRPG genre as a whole, not trying to live in the shadow of Zelda or other big franchises for too long and thus these changes while controversial I felt were necessary to make Ys standout a bit more in an highly competitive market. Some people will say that the series has lost its identity since that change but so did many people who thought the same when bump combat wasn’t a thing anymore.
With that bit of ranting out of the way, how does Ys Seven fair up with these changes in mind, well for that we’ll first have to talk about how the Party System even works mechanically speaking. On a surface level, Ys Seven is still your classic Ys game, the combat is fast and frantic with an exciting sense of flow to it. Each blow and attack comes out quick with very little lag and I feel that at least for this game, it’s one of the “faster” feeling games in the franchise. Unfortunately despite the game being fully 3D this time around, the game has removed the option to jump, likely a response to many people complaining about platforming in the Ark Engine titles (skill issues imo). Therefore the game definitely has more of an hack’n’slash Diablo like feel to it which is completed by the combat now adding skills on top of your regular combos.
Instead of switching to different types of magic adding to your base moveset, here Adol and his teammates can learn a variety of skills they can attribute to 4 skill slots, each of these skills cost SP which can be regained by attacking or blocking enemies. You can also charge your regular attacks to deal a more powerful strike which does more damage but also gives you more SP. On top of all of this there’s also another meter on the right which fills up with attack and guarding, once full you can unleash an EX-Skill which is essentially a big super attack which deals tons of damage at the cost of your entire EX-Bar. It’s a system which on surface isn’t too dissimilar to other action RPG’s you might’ve played such as the Tales Of Series with the only difference here compared to that franchise is that everything happens in real time on the field rather than taking you to a separate battle arena each time you encounter a monster. Enemies now also have a stunt meter on top of their health, most regular enemies will die shortly before reaching that point but bosses won’t and once that meter is full they’ll be vulnerable to attack for a short time while being completely stunt, another system we’ve seen far too often in post 2010’s JRPG if I’m being honest.
And this is where the different party members come into play, during regular gameplay, 3 party members can be active on the field, and different party members deal different types of damage : Slash, Strikes and Pierce. Slashers are fast attackers which deals moderate damage and mostly use swords as their main means of attacking (it’s the main damage type of Adol), Strikers are heavy hitters which does a lot of damage but are very slow, Piercers are mostly ranged attackers which attacks from a distance by shooting projectiles (in later games, some non-projectile based characters are added and they’re just super-fast fencers which deals low damage). The main reason why you’d want to switch between party members however is because certain enemies are weak to certain types of attack and thus switching between them becomes essential to claiming victory over some of the tougher enemies.
Overall, Ys Seven version of this system is actually quite decent but a lot of balancing and gameplay issues kinda sours the fun of the system and definitely shows a severe case of “first game syndrome”. For starters, while Adol is still pretty fun to use, I found a lot of the additional characters to be a bit lacking in the fun department. Heavy characters are too slow for me to consider using them for too long and ranged attackers don’t actually have combo and unleash projectile not unlike Hugo from Origins and thus I didn’t find them that exciting to use in the long run. Also the way the game makes characters available is a bit weird, during the first half only Adol, Dogi and Aisha are available with some guest characters joining for the duration of their attributed dungeon before leaving your party. Some of these playable characters join your party permanently in the second half, but by that point your main party is so stacked that there’s no real incentive to use the other characters (keep that in mind, I’m gonna quizz you later) especially when some of them serve similar roles as your main three. I’ve mainly stick to an Adol only playthrough with the only other character other I found fun to use being Geis (a character from Ys VI making its grand return here as a playable character) so let’s just say that the rest of my party was lacking behind in stats and skills since updating them cost a lot of resources (again, keep that in mind).
The characters in question also aren’t the most interesting ones from a storytelling perspective. I found the team of characters in Ys Seven to be thoroughly unmemorable outside of Dogi, Aisha and Geis (two of which are returning characters with long-established roles in the series). Most of them are just random tribesmen associated with the different temples you visit throughout the game and they don’t really stand out more than that storywise except for maybe Cruxie who replaces her brother Mustafa after some story event happened to her. I like Aisha as a character too but she fits into the typical tomboyish princess role you’ve likely seen in many other JRPG’s over the years and thus your appreciation of her will really depend on your fondness for such tropes.
Other gameplay issues come from guarding, guarding in Ys Seven is a bit wack and unreliable mostly because of how loose the game is compared to other titles, dodge rolling makes you travel half the goddamn screen each time you use it and thus placement can be a bit wanky. While you’re not playing as them, the other party members are controlled via AI and let’s say the AI in this game gets pretty wack. From the auto-harvest not activating on ressources points, to them falling off of platforms and cliffs (which wouldn’t be an issue if switching to them didn’t also mean switching places with them !) or ruining your combos with bad attack choices and targeting the wrong enemies. The AI in this game is up to a lot of shenanigans and aside from being spare HP bags and being good at dodging its not great.
Last but not least, the way you learn abilities in this game is quite wack, each equipment you buy has a skill attached to them and to permanently keep those skills you have to farm AP on the enemies, a system not too dissimilar to how FFIX does it. I didn’t mind it in that game since most of the skills were passive abilities but here not sticking to outdated weapon and armor for longer than necessary locks you from having a complete moveset for each your characters and since AP can only be earned by active party members, they will inevitably lack behind for the late game (again more on that later).
But alright that’s the gameplay change but how’s the game itself ? This time around, Adol gets to explore the Kingdom of Altago on the Afrocan continent, a vast place with many different types of biomes and a bunch of tribes trying to survive out there in the wild to take care of each of their Dragon temples. A long-time ago, the 5 Dragons of Altago breathed new life onto the land, their goal being to keep the balance of their elements in check and if that balance had to be broken, the Wind of Destruction might destroy the land to reset the flow of Energy. To stop this, the prophecy talks about a legendary Dragon Hero who will one day make a pilgrimage to the 5 dragon shrines and receive a blessing from each of its dragons in order to stop the upcoming calamity. As Adol and Dogi land in the capital city, they come into contact with two herb sellers by the name of Tia and Maya getting harassed by the Dragon Knights, the elite soldiers of Altago. After a brief altercation, Adol gets thrown in jail, however having heard of his many adventures, the King of Altago tasks him with investigating the local shrines after a couple of earthquakes has been happening throughout the land. Upon visiting the first shine, Adol learns that he is in fact the chosen Dragon Hero who needs to seek the blessing of each of the dragons to stop the upcoming calamity.
As you can see the story of Ys Seven is overall a pretty basic “save the world by gathering 5 McGuffin” plot line seen in a lot of JRPG. Adol and his friends will go to different regions to explore each of the shrines, encounter the tribe's people, team-up with their local hero and defeat a boss at the end. If anything, the story of Ys Seven isn’t that amazing, it’s cliché, quite predictable and at point even boring and with the party members not having much depth it's really hard to think of this story as anything but serviceable (even if the series rarely shined in that department past Ys 1, 2 and Dawn). You can see the twists coming from a mile away and to top it all of the game is divided into two parts which doesn’t help the game’s pacing.
Because yes, after visiting the 5 shrines, some plot shenanigans happens and Adol gets thrown into jail again, gets to revisit all of the shrines to get blessings from the dragons again and… Yeah I don’t think I need to draw a picture here, this game is a bit too long (20h which is twice as long as your average Ys Game) and stretched out for how basic of a storyline it is. It’s also not helped that all of the quick travel points in the second half get deactivated forcing you to re-explore the entire map once again on foot. Sure the game does open some new areas to make the journey back less tedious but it’s such obvious padding that I’m shocked it got past the development phase. Despite my complaints about the story however, I do enjoy the Kingdom of Altago and its lore and some of the ecological and even political elements weave together to spice this pretty basic plot line into something far more enjoyable than expected. Tia for exemple without spoiling too much on what her deal is turns out to be one of my favorite heroines of the franchise and the end of her storyline did manage to make me emotional. What little actual story there is is good but it’s a shame that the whole Dragon Quest™ takes up 80% of the actual runtime of the game to be appreciated.
Since you’re mostly going to spend the grand majority of the game exploring the overworld as well as the different shrines (twice with other dungeons past the actual dungeons in the second half) how do they fare up ? Well this is where the game kinda suffers from its shift in gameplay and the lack of platforming elements, since the game removed the ability to jump a lot of the dungeons are pretty straightforward in design with one path leading to an item which unlocks the path to the boss. That’s not to say they’re not fun to explore or have fun gimmicks and obstacles, but they’re a far-cry from how the Ark Engine games were designed and I even must admit that they have a hard time even comparing to some of the best areas from Dawn of Ys.
The actual overworld connecting each of the towns and shrine fairs a bit better in the level design department with lots of interesting ways all the areas connect to one another and the monsters you fight there being pretty fun to fight with even some world bosses to take on if you feel especially spicy today. I’d say that in general the level design of each area and dungeons while not being able to compete on the same level as the ones from the Ys Engine era definitely compensate with some ideas and they’re overall pretty fun to go through nonetheless. I think the music alone carries the level design here, Ys Seven music is especially good even amongst the high standard of the series and if I’m being frank it’s at least in my Top 5 in terms of Soundtrack for the series.
So everything about this game is stuff that I just enjoy in an OK way but now I want to talk about the bosses…
They kinda… exist… or flat-out sucks…
With the party system, you now pretty much have 3 Health Bar instead of one and much like Ys VI we’re back to consumables items you can use mid-battle, I’m going to be honest, the party-system game kinda drop the balls hard on the bosses just for that reason alone since the challenge becomes quite nonexistent (which is why I advised playing these games on higher difficulties to have some semblance of a challenge). Because you have so much health and resources to manage that health the developers thought it was a good idea to turn every bosses into big fucking HP sponges which take fucking forever to die, I swear some of these bosses probably last up to 25 or even 30 minutes just to deplete their health bar. This isn’t really hard, it’s just incredibly long, boring and tedious for nothing and only a rare few of them have patterns worth giving a shit about. The only boss that I somehow remember is the first one you fight, which actually had some patterns to work with and some fun counters you can pull but other than that and in spite of the designs being pretty clean it’s not glorious.
Which now leads me to talk about the absolute fucking cancer cell that is the final boss of this game.
I failed to mention it until now but this game introduces a crafting system, with resources to gather in order to make better equipment. Some ressources fall naturally from enemies and some are harvested in certain spots in the game forcing you to stop your forward momentum to pick up some flowers and you better gather these resources because you sure as hell gonna need them. Why do I only mention this now ? Well remember when I said that the game had multiple party members but the game rarely if ever encourages you to use them ? Well, I hope you’ve actually been using them and keeping their equipment in check because they’re all going to participate in the fight ! All of them ! So if some of them are behind the curve, you can bet your ass the final boss is gonna whoop the floor with your ass. This is where the game which so far has avoided the sin of being too grindy becomes an infernal fucking grind fest.
To defeat the final boss, you need to have perfect equipment and everyone’s ultimate weapons, otherwise you simply won’t defeat him. To get those, you will have to grind ressources a lot ! And the worst part is that the game actually doesn’t tell you where to find specific resources, there’s not a compendium where that info can be found so if you’re somehow missing an ingredient for a recipe you’re shit out of luck except if you have a guide. I swear on top of having to farm levels and skills and resources for equipment you actually have to fight the damn boss. If you’re underprepared the boss is straight impossible but even with all the appropriate preparation he’s still a pain in the goddamn ass.
He has 3 phases, the first one being the longest since he’s only vulnerable for a set period of time and you have to dodge the rest of his attacks and attack his head before doing proper damage. The second will test your ability to guard and counter something that is almost never needed in the rest of the game and the third phase is a solo fight where Adol finishes the boss. Each phase has an ungodly amount of HP much like every boss in the game and if you fail at any of them, it’s back to the first phase (there’s also an easy humanoid boss fight before fighting him just adding to the frustration.
I guess I could give props to this boss actually having patterns and stuff to care about but god it’s such a pain in the ass. It’s easily the worst final boss in the entire series and perhaps one of the worst bosses in the entire franchise (yes even worse than Dark Fact in Chronicles and worse than any bosses in Mask of The Sun). This single element kinda sours a lot of the impact during the ending which without really spoiling all that much actually managed to get me a bit emotional despite the game’s many flaws.
After everything I’ve just said, you may think that my opinion on Ys Seven is less than favorable but on the contrary, I do actually enjoy the game maybe a tad bit more than most people. I like the setting, the lore, the music, the dungeons while more straightforward are still lots of fun to explore and the story although kind of non-existent for most of it manages to hit with some truly memorable moments which stuck in my mind whenever I think about this game (SHIRTLESS ADOL DAMN SON).
But it’s also fair to admit that Ys Seven isn’t all that remarkable of an entry especially after the home-run the previous two entries in the series were, much like Ys VI it’s a rough transitional period with some well executed ideas mixed with a lot of less than optimal ones. Ys Seven is a game I like a lot, maybe a tad bit more than Ys VI if only for the fact Ys Seven is just simply a lot more fast-paced and fun than that game and also doesn’t have any sort of weird esoteric mechanic such as dash jumping. Ys Seven sadly is just kinda there and just kind of exists and while I may enjoy it more than most, thinking back on it while writing this review almost made me draw a blank on what I can even say about this one.
Ys Seven is a game I don’t have any strong opinion about, either positive or negative, it’s the most quintessential 7/10 ARPG possible with mechanics you’ve likely seen executed better somewhere else, a story which is cliché, basic and quite predictable especially for Ys standard. The game also has sidequests and the fact I’m only mentioning them now during the conclusion shows you how much care was put into them. Overall, Ys Seven is solid, I’m in conflict with some of its ideas, starting with the party system I have some level of apprehension for and it’s not helped that it’s not executed at its best here.
Next time however, I’ll promise you some salt, we’re going to talk about a game I enjoy much less than Ys Seven, the actual version of Ys IV delivered by Falcom… and… thing’s aren’t pretty.
The fight in this are pretty much Epic Rap Battles for Intellectuals
2019
This review contains spoilers
Ok so I'm gonna be honest here, the game comes with the best of intentions
Trying to have this darker and ambitious story and some fun addition to the movement options to make the game flow better as well as taking ideas from Ys VIII and expanding on them
But good intentions is the only thing this game can offer because everything else feels like an insult to my intelligence
First of all, the story might actually be the worst in any Ys game and not only Kondo doesn't know how to write the guy's fucking PROUD of that fact since it's easily the game with the longest script as you spend more time pressing the A button to advance the dialogues in very poorly directed "cutscenes" than anything else
The Structure and Rhythm of the game is absolutely glacial taking cues from the Trails series by having a story where jack shit happens from hour 1 to 30 aside from way too long character introductions that goes nowhere except if you go out of your way to do the side content later on because these characters suck dick and poop, they're incredibly one-note walking anime cliché with a few personality quirk and absolutely zero depth or development (and the few they have get retcon by some of the ending reveal)
Only Anemone and Renegade were somewhat likeable and interesting and for Renegade I'm stretching hard because Kondo just can't write disabled people for the life of him (yeup, sure the curse that traps you inside Paris and forces you to fight monsters every 5h is a good trade-off for getting your legs back)
The game takes also a lot of cues from Ys VIII with the tavern which is a budget castaway village with some of the most forgettable faces in the franchise and the few that aren't forgettable ... should've been part of the main story ???? Like the literal queen of Gllia is here and the conclusion of her revenge plot against the empire to take back her thrones is to become a maid for some cunny fanservice ? And what about Maxim what was the deal with this dude
[15:44]
In fact a lot of the things it takes from Ys VIII don't work nearly as much here and aren't justified as much, like why do I need to complete the map ? This isn't some random land , it's a big city with a long recorded history, you could probably buy a map at the local book store, even the hotspot you find , they justify this with a tourist agency but goddamn, imagine a tourist agency sending people down dungeons full of ferocious beast to do some sightseeing, wonderful vacations
But the worst thing it took from Ys VIII which was already bad in that games are the raids, which in this game not only are mandatory to progress through the story and explore more of the map , but are also piss fucking easy and a visual clusterfuck that just feels like a pace breaker just to make the game seem longer than it would otherwise be
Don't get me started how you have to grind side-quest and random monsters in the city just to get access to a 50m² area of the map , good job
I'll talk about the gameplay later now back to story
Because this game seems very keen on wanting to have a political conflict being the center of its narrative and this political conflict is handled in the most spineless and stinky way possible, the first chapter is already fucking terrible, just absolutely terrible
Yeah sure we shouldn't give money and redistribute wealth to poor people because all they do is waste it on alcohol and games anyway unlike the elite merchants running the city by exploiting the mines and getting everyone sick in the process but stealing from them is bad and the daughter comes to the conclusion she should start her own start-up to make people smile with flowers
The game is full of liberal centrist bullshit like this, it's so disinterested in actually addressing the problems it puts into light and instead try to fake some anti-manichean narrative where the rebels are "as bad the oppressive regime", the game has some weird accidental or not pro-imperialism agenda where it seems like it wants to point out how bad stuff got since the Romun empire got into place but also don't want to bring solutions to this and outright think colonization is ok sometimes
I'm actually baffled that Adol kind of supports such ideas himself, he who is an adventurer a free spirit as free as the the wind and actively researched and monitored by the empire trying to steal his wing away
The game seem so disinterested in actually addressing the issues that eventually it invents a new menace altogether to shy away from that piss poor attempt at political commentary because Kondo's probably some Japanese pro-imperialistic cucklord who loves the status quo
Because nothing changes at the end of the game, nothing is addressed since Balduq is still a stinking hell hole
But I guess it got slightly better now that a bunch of goths don't have to punch bad thoughts away
[15:55]
Which btw does nothing since the population is still miserable regardless
The Grimwald Nox is a fake problem and destroying it was a fake solution
[15:56]
it's hollow
But man the ending stretch of this game is so fucking bad I was fucking shocked Like how was any of this acceptable by any good writing conventions ?
The entire alchemy plots serves only to detract from the main issue of the narrative, the main villain plan is complete nonsense but then turns out he's not even the main villain, the main villain is a random ass guy with barely any teasing at all in the narrative whatsoever that makes the old villain feel like a tragic heroe
Like Châtelard has the technology to spawn infinite demons and dinosaurs
but his plan is to clone the old heroes of the legend to help him fight the empire, sending them into an orphanage, waiting for them to grow up and then tell them to join them and it backfired hard because the game is written by an imperialist hack
All the characters are clones which adds more complications than it solves anything regarding their established character arcs
Cred goes into a random frenzy for no reasons
And his arc is concluded in the blandest way possible
The guy legit had no redeeming quality as a human being but guess he has a heart now or some shit and repressed feeling
And this is the most any of these characters gets in terms of good interesting developments (modifié)
But then there's the case of Adol
So I heard that the foundation for this game story was to make "adol talk" and sure they did that and they even referenced some stuff from his previous adventures but how does any of this have to do with anything ?
The game isn't making some grand intelligent statement or character analysis of Adol and his journey so most of the weird off-shoot fanservice aspect that happens near the end is completely pointless, serves no purpose in the main story either the alchemy shit or the political shit and it's just tacked on there to tuckle on your heart strings and emotionally manipulate you into thinking this is more than it actually is
Like it's so tacked on, one of the spirits is DARK FACT
Like Dark Fact going "Alright adol break the evil monster spawning eggs" is just funny cuz the entire character is just being evil for the sake of it unless they think the anime is more canon than the game remake
And how is Dark Fact a divinity now ? Even less a person Adol as a strong attachment to ?
All the others make sense
(I give Eldeel a pass even thought I hate how they rewrote his character in Celceta)
But Dark Fact ?
Why not Ernst ?????
NOBODY THOUGHT THIS THROUGH
THIS IS GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARBAGE
I'M NOT BUYING THIS NONSENSE
I'm not even gonna elaborate on Zora's plan cuz ... god he's the absolute worst antagonist in the series
Also man Jules in a wheelchair , was that part of the cloning process, how did he didn't got his legs back when they fuse the clone with their original self , the original Jules isn't disabled like what ?!
And even at the end Aprilis goes like "Man I hope destroying Grimwald was the right decision"
BITCH
THERE WAS LITERALLY NO POSITIVES
TO KEEPING GRIMWALD
WHETHER IT EXIST OR NOT ISN'T CHANGING ANYTHING
Because this game love the status quo since it's written by the Japanese JK Rowling
Now you know I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that Ys is a series know for its writing. Even in the best ones like VIII and Origins they have some issues. But when it's such a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge part of the game , it's hard to ignore
o ok the story is bad and invasive, what else ? The Gameplay ?
I'll admit at first the new movement options are pretty neat and running around the city is nice ... in theory
Because it's so Jank most of the times getting around anything feels like a freaking endurance test on top of the game being limited as shit in terms of scope, the city is already small when completed but then there's the whole NOX stuff
That drags the entire thing down with barriers, invisible walls, visible walls, bumpy corners you bump into everywhere
And the worst part is the city is where most of that is put into good use because anywhere else in the game it's an entirely different story, it's like the game designer forgot you had these abilities
You have 3 big empty open areas with random monsters placed half-hazardly and whenever you try to climb a wall, you know, like you've been conditioned to do for almost 30h, it ain't fucking working so you have to go around the small hill until you find a convenient rock platform to ascend
The dungeons are bad, they're all aesthetically bland, it's a 2019 games that's designed like an NES RPG in terms of dungeons
What was you favorite ?
The cramped corridors with brown bricks or the cramped corridors with blue bricks ?
That's literally all these dungeons have to offer and it's freaking boring, the most fun dungeons are the one where you play as Prison Adol who is way more limited , there's like one dungeon in the entire game that feels like I'm playing a modern Ys title
But the game is also EASSSSSYYYYYYYYYY in the most boring way possible, I even tried to up the difficulty up to Nightmare and I was still rolling through the game with no problems, you get amazing stat bonuses items and equipments very early on and with little to no interval or grind necessary, money and ressources become worthless because there's a random chance you get the best items in the game and become the Hulk by mid-game just by opening chests
The bosses are big moving target with little to no interesting patterns and zero reactivity also most of the attacks have this weird delay on them it's... HUUUUUH
You can crimson line to get closer to enemies but other than that the powers have no combat use other than the one where you charge your attack to get SP's which wasn't something you had to unlock in previous games
So the story is bad and the gameplay quickly becomes boring so what gives ?
I don't get it
How do you make an Ys game known for its quick moment to moment action boring and philosophically insulting ?
And people gobbed that shit up
Falcom fans don't know what a good game is or what ?
They're so conditioned to a set standard with this company that they're satisfied with the bare minimum
Oh and the game's ugly as shit
It doesn't even have a good artistic direction like Ys VIII to compensate the PS2 limitations
So it makes the exploration part of that game even duller
Man I kinda wish my last adventure with Adol wasn't that cause I didn't want to leave on a bad impression
Trying to have this darker and ambitious story and some fun addition to the movement options to make the game flow better as well as taking ideas from Ys VIII and expanding on them
But good intentions is the only thing this game can offer because everything else feels like an insult to my intelligence
First of all, the story might actually be the worst in any Ys game and not only Kondo doesn't know how to write the guy's fucking PROUD of that fact since it's easily the game with the longest script as you spend more time pressing the A button to advance the dialogues in very poorly directed "cutscenes" than anything else
The Structure and Rhythm of the game is absolutely glacial taking cues from the Trails series by having a story where jack shit happens from hour 1 to 30 aside from way too long character introductions that goes nowhere except if you go out of your way to do the side content later on because these characters suck dick and poop, they're incredibly one-note walking anime cliché with a few personality quirk and absolutely zero depth or development (and the few they have get retcon by some of the ending reveal)
Only Anemone and Renegade were somewhat likeable and interesting and for Renegade I'm stretching hard because Kondo just can't write disabled people for the life of him (yeup, sure the curse that traps you inside Paris and forces you to fight monsters every 5h is a good trade-off for getting your legs back)
The game takes also a lot of cues from Ys VIII with the tavern which is a budget castaway village with some of the most forgettable faces in the franchise and the few that aren't forgettable ... should've been part of the main story ???? Like the literal queen of Gllia is here and the conclusion of her revenge plot against the empire to take back her thrones is to become a maid for some cunny fanservice ? And what about Maxim what was the deal with this dude
[15:44]
In fact a lot of the things it takes from Ys VIII don't work nearly as much here and aren't justified as much, like why do I need to complete the map ? This isn't some random land , it's a big city with a long recorded history, you could probably buy a map at the local book store, even the hotspot you find , they justify this with a tourist agency but goddamn, imagine a tourist agency sending people down dungeons full of ferocious beast to do some sightseeing, wonderful vacations
But the worst thing it took from Ys VIII which was already bad in that games are the raids, which in this game not only are mandatory to progress through the story and explore more of the map , but are also piss fucking easy and a visual clusterfuck that just feels like a pace breaker just to make the game seem longer than it would otherwise be
Don't get me started how you have to grind side-quest and random monsters in the city just to get access to a 50m² area of the map , good job
I'll talk about the gameplay later now back to story
Because this game seems very keen on wanting to have a political conflict being the center of its narrative and this political conflict is handled in the most spineless and stinky way possible, the first chapter is already fucking terrible, just absolutely terrible
Yeah sure we shouldn't give money and redistribute wealth to poor people because all they do is waste it on alcohol and games anyway unlike the elite merchants running the city by exploiting the mines and getting everyone sick in the process but stealing from them is bad and the daughter comes to the conclusion she should start her own start-up to make people smile with flowers
The game is full of liberal centrist bullshit like this, it's so disinterested in actually addressing the problems it puts into light and instead try to fake some anti-manichean narrative where the rebels are "as bad the oppressive regime", the game has some weird accidental or not pro-imperialism agenda where it seems like it wants to point out how bad stuff got since the Romun empire got into place but also don't want to bring solutions to this and outright think colonization is ok sometimes
I'm actually baffled that Adol kind of supports such ideas himself, he who is an adventurer a free spirit as free as the the wind and actively researched and monitored by the empire trying to steal his wing away
The game seem so disinterested in actually addressing the issues that eventually it invents a new menace altogether to shy away from that piss poor attempt at political commentary because Kondo's probably some Japanese pro-imperialistic cucklord who loves the status quo
Because nothing changes at the end of the game, nothing is addressed since Balduq is still a stinking hell hole
But I guess it got slightly better now that a bunch of goths don't have to punch bad thoughts away
[15:55]
Which btw does nothing since the population is still miserable regardless
The Grimwald Nox is a fake problem and destroying it was a fake solution
[15:56]
it's hollow
But man the ending stretch of this game is so fucking bad I was fucking shocked Like how was any of this acceptable by any good writing conventions ?
The entire alchemy plots serves only to detract from the main issue of the narrative, the main villain plan is complete nonsense but then turns out he's not even the main villain, the main villain is a random ass guy with barely any teasing at all in the narrative whatsoever that makes the old villain feel like a tragic heroe
Like Châtelard has the technology to spawn infinite demons and dinosaurs
but his plan is to clone the old heroes of the legend to help him fight the empire, sending them into an orphanage, waiting for them to grow up and then tell them to join them and it backfired hard because the game is written by an imperialist hack
All the characters are clones which adds more complications than it solves anything regarding their established character arcs
Cred goes into a random frenzy for no reasons
And his arc is concluded in the blandest way possible
The guy legit had no redeeming quality as a human being but guess he has a heart now or some shit and repressed feeling
And this is the most any of these characters gets in terms of good interesting developments (modifié)
But then there's the case of Adol
So I heard that the foundation for this game story was to make "adol talk" and sure they did that and they even referenced some stuff from his previous adventures but how does any of this have to do with anything ?
The game isn't making some grand intelligent statement or character analysis of Adol and his journey so most of the weird off-shoot fanservice aspect that happens near the end is completely pointless, serves no purpose in the main story either the alchemy shit or the political shit and it's just tacked on there to tuckle on your heart strings and emotionally manipulate you into thinking this is more than it actually is
Like it's so tacked on, one of the spirits is DARK FACT
Like Dark Fact going "Alright adol break the evil monster spawning eggs" is just funny cuz the entire character is just being evil for the sake of it unless they think the anime is more canon than the game remake
And how is Dark Fact a divinity now ? Even less a person Adol as a strong attachment to ?
All the others make sense
(I give Eldeel a pass even thought I hate how they rewrote his character in Celceta)
But Dark Fact ?
Why not Ernst ?????
NOBODY THOUGHT THIS THROUGH
THIS IS GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARBAGE
I'M NOT BUYING THIS NONSENSE
I'm not even gonna elaborate on Zora's plan cuz ... god he's the absolute worst antagonist in the series
Also man Jules in a wheelchair , was that part of the cloning process, how did he didn't got his legs back when they fuse the clone with their original self , the original Jules isn't disabled like what ?!
And even at the end Aprilis goes like "Man I hope destroying Grimwald was the right decision"
BITCH
THERE WAS LITERALLY NO POSITIVES
TO KEEPING GRIMWALD
WHETHER IT EXIST OR NOT ISN'T CHANGING ANYTHING
Because this game love the status quo since it's written by the Japanese JK Rowling
Now you know I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that Ys is a series know for its writing. Even in the best ones like VIII and Origins they have some issues. But when it's such a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge part of the game , it's hard to ignore
o ok the story is bad and invasive, what else ? The Gameplay ?
I'll admit at first the new movement options are pretty neat and running around the city is nice ... in theory
Because it's so Jank most of the times getting around anything feels like a freaking endurance test on top of the game being limited as shit in terms of scope, the city is already small when completed but then there's the whole NOX stuff
That drags the entire thing down with barriers, invisible walls, visible walls, bumpy corners you bump into everywhere
And the worst part is the city is where most of that is put into good use because anywhere else in the game it's an entirely different story, it's like the game designer forgot you had these abilities
You have 3 big empty open areas with random monsters placed half-hazardly and whenever you try to climb a wall, you know, like you've been conditioned to do for almost 30h, it ain't fucking working so you have to go around the small hill until you find a convenient rock platform to ascend
The dungeons are bad, they're all aesthetically bland, it's a 2019 games that's designed like an NES RPG in terms of dungeons
What was you favorite ?
The cramped corridors with brown bricks or the cramped corridors with blue bricks ?
That's literally all these dungeons have to offer and it's freaking boring, the most fun dungeons are the one where you play as Prison Adol who is way more limited , there's like one dungeon in the entire game that feels like I'm playing a modern Ys title
But the game is also EASSSSSYYYYYYYYYY in the most boring way possible, I even tried to up the difficulty up to Nightmare and I was still rolling through the game with no problems, you get amazing stat bonuses items and equipments very early on and with little to no interval or grind necessary, money and ressources become worthless because there's a random chance you get the best items in the game and become the Hulk by mid-game just by opening chests
The bosses are big moving target with little to no interesting patterns and zero reactivity also most of the attacks have this weird delay on them it's... HUUUUUH
You can crimson line to get closer to enemies but other than that the powers have no combat use other than the one where you charge your attack to get SP's which wasn't something you had to unlock in previous games
So the story is bad and the gameplay quickly becomes boring so what gives ?
I don't get it
How do you make an Ys game known for its quick moment to moment action boring and philosophically insulting ?
And people gobbed that shit up
Falcom fans don't know what a good game is or what ?
They're so conditioned to a set standard with this company that they're satisfied with the bare minimum
Oh and the game's ugly as shit
It doesn't even have a good artistic direction like Ys VIII to compensate the PS2 limitations
So it makes the exploration part of that game even duller
Man I kinda wish my last adventure with Adol wasn't that cause I didn't want to leave on a bad impression
Nintendo has remembered about Mario
I always love me some good old Mario games from time to time, I think 2D Mario is a tradition we need to keep alive because of how foundational the series is for gaming as a whole and I think every generation of children deserves a good 2D Mario game to call their own.
But for me, I feel the overall 2D Mario series kinda started to fall off around the mid-2000's when New Super Mario bros was released on the Nintendo DS. Now don't get me wrong, NSMB DS is a fantastic fucking game and I feel like it's the only New Soup game people should absolutely play, at the time NSMB was a return to form for Mario who hadn't had a 2D entry since the SNES days with Super Mario World (arguably one of the best Mario game and one of the best game ever made) but it started quite an unfortunate trend for the plumber.
The Gamecube Era was perhaps Nintendo's most experimental period, they were willing to do anything and everything with their franchises and this led to some wild ass take on their IP's. Luigi's Mansion was a survival horror game, Mario Sunshine was set entirely in a tropical resort setting and let you have fun with a water gun, Paper Mario TTYD and Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga were RPG's set in a vastly different setting and with a much more tongue-in-cheek tone closer to that of SMRPG (and succeeding even more than that game).
Heck even the sports title were wild, remember Waluigi humping the air in Mario Strikers ? That sure was a thing that happened...
NSMB DS in the midst of all of this was going back to basic and for many people that had left the series, it was nice and reached much more people than your typical Nintendo Nerds and thus we can think of NSMB DS as a necessary step to go back to basic and maintain the traditional 2D formula...
And then they did it again...
And again...
And again....
Until the basic aesthetic of NSMB kinda overtook the entire Mario franchise and for a while it seemed that the developers were not allowed to have fun with Mario outside of his 3D venture (and even then we got 3D Land and 3D World which was a way to follow-up Galaxy by asking "what if 3D Mario was more like 2D Mario). It's kind a sad sight to see for me who grew up more on Mario in his wacky days and has grown an appreciation for the classics of old.
Back then each 2D Mario offered a new aesthetic, new ideas, new game mechanic but for 4 games in a row Nintendo was serving us the same new soup that we tasted in 2006 and as more time pass and the "New" part of the name didn't hold as much weight anymore as it was more of a sign of stagnation than anything else.
While I'm not saying that the NSMB line-up was especially bad, the 2D platforming scene has had time to evolve after NSMB brought back the genre back in the spotlight, everyone and their mother started making 2D platformers. Modernizing classic game design tropes and making bangers after banger, heck even Donkey Kong, Mario's core nemesis got 2 new games that were vastly superior than that of the plumber with Tropical Freeze still being a shiny exemple of creativity and excellent level design even to this day.
So eventually Nintendo said : "Fuck it let's let other people make Mario if they're not happy" and this led to the Mario Maker series where in fact many people did create their own Mario stages and even Mario games that were most of the time better than NSMB games.
So yeah, I think at some point Nintendo has realized that uniformizing Mario like that has led to more discontent within their core fanbase than anything else and while Nintendo certainly care much about the global market than its herd ofcultists hardcore fans, it was still time to bring back wonder into the Mario Series.
Did they succeed ?
Holy shit are you kidding me, of course they succeeded !
Super Mario Wonder is much like Sonic Mania and Megaman 9, an actual proper return to form for the series. Mario is finally taking a page from the indie 2D platforming scene and looked pretty much everywhere to see how much of it they can blend together and Mario-fy and they succeeded with flying colors.
First off, the game is freaking gorgeous, the animations are full of life and energy the likes we haven't seen before in this series and it's genuinely super fun to see but the general aesthetic of the game is clean as fuck. Since the game takes place in a separate Kingdom we get to see new spins on old ideas and while I personally wish they went harder with the theming of each world the likes we can see in Mario Odyssey for exemple, I can't lie that they make up for it with excellent level design and most importantly one of this game greatest gameplay idea : The Wonder Flower which makes you embrace an LSD induced hallucination that makes the entire stage play differently or turn you into a new form.
And each level has a different Wonder Effect making for some great level variety.
The new power-up are I'd say Ok, not the best we've seen in the series but shoutout to the Bubble Flower which has several layer of depth to how it can be used to cheese the game in different way. I'm not particularly a fan of Elephant Mario tho... it's just... weird...
This game is so chuck full of cool ideas that the second level is about Piranha Plant singing, in any game this would be the peak of the game but here it's only the start. The only issue I have with the game is that it's a tad bit on the easy side but that's just modern Mario for you, a stupidly easy main game only for all the difficulty to ramp up in the ultra duper secret 100% completion level.
Badges are a neat addition but outside of two badges, I found most of them to be too situational to be used consistently outside of the stages they were designed for but hey, I guess some of them are just cool accessibility feature to help kids (which already have like 5 characters for that).
Anyway, Mario is so back and it's nice to see
I always love me some good old Mario games from time to time, I think 2D Mario is a tradition we need to keep alive because of how foundational the series is for gaming as a whole and I think every generation of children deserves a good 2D Mario game to call their own.
But for me, I feel the overall 2D Mario series kinda started to fall off around the mid-2000's when New Super Mario bros was released on the Nintendo DS. Now don't get me wrong, NSMB DS is a fantastic fucking game and I feel like it's the only New Soup game people should absolutely play, at the time NSMB was a return to form for Mario who hadn't had a 2D entry since the SNES days with Super Mario World (arguably one of the best Mario game and one of the best game ever made) but it started quite an unfortunate trend for the plumber.
The Gamecube Era was perhaps Nintendo's most experimental period, they were willing to do anything and everything with their franchises and this led to some wild ass take on their IP's. Luigi's Mansion was a survival horror game, Mario Sunshine was set entirely in a tropical resort setting and let you have fun with a water gun, Paper Mario TTYD and Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga were RPG's set in a vastly different setting and with a much more tongue-in-cheek tone closer to that of SMRPG (and succeeding even more than that game).
Heck even the sports title were wild, remember Waluigi humping the air in Mario Strikers ? That sure was a thing that happened...
NSMB DS in the midst of all of this was going back to basic and for many people that had left the series, it was nice and reached much more people than your typical Nintendo Nerds and thus we can think of NSMB DS as a necessary step to go back to basic and maintain the traditional 2D formula...
And then they did it again...
And again...
And again....
Until the basic aesthetic of NSMB kinda overtook the entire Mario franchise and for a while it seemed that the developers were not allowed to have fun with Mario outside of his 3D venture (and even then we got 3D Land and 3D World which was a way to follow-up Galaxy by asking "what if 3D Mario was more like 2D Mario). It's kind a sad sight to see for me who grew up more on Mario in his wacky days and has grown an appreciation for the classics of old.
Back then each 2D Mario offered a new aesthetic, new ideas, new game mechanic but for 4 games in a row Nintendo was serving us the same new soup that we tasted in 2006 and as more time pass and the "New" part of the name didn't hold as much weight anymore as it was more of a sign of stagnation than anything else.
While I'm not saying that the NSMB line-up was especially bad, the 2D platforming scene has had time to evolve after NSMB brought back the genre back in the spotlight, everyone and their mother started making 2D platformers. Modernizing classic game design tropes and making bangers after banger, heck even Donkey Kong, Mario's core nemesis got 2 new games that were vastly superior than that of the plumber with Tropical Freeze still being a shiny exemple of creativity and excellent level design even to this day.
So eventually Nintendo said : "Fuck it let's let other people make Mario if they're not happy" and this led to the Mario Maker series where in fact many people did create their own Mario stages and even Mario games that were most of the time better than NSMB games.
So yeah, I think at some point Nintendo has realized that uniformizing Mario like that has led to more discontent within their core fanbase than anything else and while Nintendo certainly care much about the global market than its herd of
Did they succeed ?
Holy shit are you kidding me, of course they succeeded !
Super Mario Wonder is much like Sonic Mania and Megaman 9, an actual proper return to form for the series. Mario is finally taking a page from the indie 2D platforming scene and looked pretty much everywhere to see how much of it they can blend together and Mario-fy and they succeeded with flying colors.
First off, the game is freaking gorgeous, the animations are full of life and energy the likes we haven't seen before in this series and it's genuinely super fun to see but the general aesthetic of the game is clean as fuck. Since the game takes place in a separate Kingdom we get to see new spins on old ideas and while I personally wish they went harder with the theming of each world the likes we can see in Mario Odyssey for exemple, I can't lie that they make up for it with excellent level design and most importantly one of this game greatest gameplay idea : The Wonder Flower which makes you embrace an LSD induced hallucination that makes the entire stage play differently or turn you into a new form.
And each level has a different Wonder Effect making for some great level variety.
The new power-up are I'd say Ok, not the best we've seen in the series but shoutout to the Bubble Flower which has several layer of depth to how it can be used to cheese the game in different way. I'm not particularly a fan of Elephant Mario tho... it's just... weird...
This game is so chuck full of cool ideas that the second level is about Piranha Plant singing, in any game this would be the peak of the game but here it's only the start. The only issue I have with the game is that it's a tad bit on the easy side but that's just modern Mario for you, a stupidly easy main game only for all the difficulty to ramp up in the ultra duper secret 100% completion level.
Badges are a neat addition but outside of two badges, I found most of them to be too situational to be used consistently outside of the stages they were designed for but hey, I guess some of them are just cool accessibility feature to help kids (which already have like 5 characters for that).
Anyway, Mario is so back and it's nice to see
2006
Ys Origins : A Blast from the Past
2006 marked the 20th anniversary of the Ys franchise, since then the series has gone through a lot, sometimes succeeding in living up to the legacy left by the first game and sometimes failing miserably at doing so. Nonetheless, in the minds of many Ys only really exist through the prism of its first 2 original entries, in fact, you could easily say that the only two games in the franchise worthy of the title of “Ys” were the first two games. Not only were these the only games actually set in the land of Ys and its surrounding area of Esteria but Ys II also happened to be “the final chapter” as if out of all of Adol’s Adventure and in spite this one being the first, it was the single most important adventure, the one which defined Ys as a franchise and the one where all things return to in the end.
In the Falcom community there seem to be this common consensus that Trails is the “story and lore” focused franchise while Ys is the “gameplay and action” franchise boiling down Ys as nothing more than just a simple past-time between two big episodes of the Trails series which have more meat to their bones while Ys has this much “rawer” approach to storytelling which doesn’t speak to the common youth of today. Ys stories aren’t worth analyzing because they’re not wordy enough, they’re not deep enough and they’re quite derivative of each other. In fact, the main storyline set by Ys 1 and 2 has been reused countless times throughout the series. Adol crashes on some island, has some adventure involving one or two girls with blue hair and it always ends up with him uncovering the mystery of an ancient civilization which fell to ruin because of the folly of man.
But why ? Why has Falcom tried to recapture the magic of Ys 1 and 2’s story either through re-releases or new games with similar premises if the story in those games were only meant to be a “motivator” for your quest and nothing more ? Well maybe it’s because Ys 1 and 2 in all of their 80’s sensibilities had something to stand out from the crowd and that something was its rich and interesting story as well as its lore ! Back in the first review, I said that Ys 1’s main objective was to make an accessible RPG for newcomers and while it was successfully done through its game mechanics, I also want to believe this was achieved through its storytelling even in the older version which had less memory for text and all that jazz.
In the 80’s most RPG’s would only have maybe like a text scroll to establish the setting and maybe some NPC trying to talk about some prophecies or wtv, Final Fantasy I will try to have more ambitious storytelling with the whole time-traveling which as iconic of a twist this was, it was a rather messy attempt even for the standard of the era. Falcom were different however, as far as Dragon Slayer and Xanadu they wanted to tell stories through the complex medium of video games and integrate that story inside of the game design loop. That’s how you end up with Ys which became the culmination of that philosophy, where by exploring the world, talking to NPC’s, reading the manual and watching the various attempts at cutscenes even in the older versions you would be experiencing a story and a world worth giving a shit about.
In the original Zelda for exemple, everything was very mechanical, there were no towns, only caves full of old men giving cryptic hint and monsters offering you rubies, the wonder of Zelda came mostly from its freeform explorative approach to game design while in comparison Ys was much more restrictive in the areas you explored and in which order you were supposed to explore them.
Ys 1 and 2 told a story, much more developed than those of the era, it had books that you can read and learn about the lore of this world, it had an on-going storyline about some guy stealing silver which culminated in a puzzle to the scale of the entire game and was the key to defeat the final boss, it had iconic characters with arcs some of which returned in the other titles.
Feena and Rheah from their design to the way you speak and interact with them have this aura of mystery surrounding them that makes you want to learn more about their circumstances and how tragic their fate ends up being in the end. It also had cutscenes to introduce the plot of the two half and Lillia fucking tilt her head in glorious 80’s animation and made every 10 year old boy wet their pants at how fucking impressive that was at the time that Lillia became the icon of the series all throughout the 80’s (she even had her own freaking song !!!!).
Everything about the original Ys 1 and 2 were iconic, for today’s standard it might be hard to understand the appeal or the magic of these few elements but combined together and you have a game with some of the most effective storytelling in the medium. It’s so iconic that Ys 1&2 iconography and characters are pretty much the one thing Falcom keeps reusing in all of the series promotional material. It even had an anime, a manga adaptation, an extended Korean remake of the 2nd game (that I wish I could play because it makes me very curious but alas I don’t speak Korean) and even to this very day when you look up at Ys tags on various websites, Feena is the one character to pop up the most in fanarts while you’d think more recent heroines from games which sold much better like Dana would dominate the leaderboard on the waifu wars.
With such cult classic status, it’s only natural that the new team at Falcom wanted to take their piece of the Ys pies by adding their own flavor and their own interpretation of it much like Hudson did in the 90’s when they got the opportunity to work on an original entry for the franchise. This started with “Ys 1&2 Eternal”, the latest version of the game at the time which set out to completely overhaul the script to fit Falcom’s modern standard of storytelling set by the Gagharv trilogy. A bigger emphasis was put on fleshing out the characters and especially fleshing out Adol and Feena relationship (Lillia was always kinda mid and Kondo basically erasing her relevance in the modern canon was the right decision imo) but also make the towns more alive and the world bigger much like they did with Oath in Felghana later down the line.
This was a first step towards (war) the modernization of the classic Ys tale with the new team releasing Ys VI two years later in 2003 which set out to do what Dawn did 10 years ago by creating a new yet familiar story set in a distant land which holds the answer to many of the unanswered mysteries of Ys 1&2 and whether or not you might prefer Hudson’s take or this one, today Ys VI and its story of ancient technologically advanced civilization and magic reality warping metal is now the current canon of the franchise even if we could be regretting that it kind of takes away a lot of the “mystic” of Feena’s and Rheah’s origins. Oath tied Ys III to the wider lore of the franchise and now to solidify the new lore once and for all, Falcom was going to go back to the origins of the franchise, for the first time in over 20 years, Ys was going back to Ys to explore the origins of this legendary tale in a game set 700 years before the event of the first game and that game which will end up as one of the most popular entry in the franchise for a while will be simply known as Ys Origins !
Ys Origins released in 2006 set to re-explore the mythical Origins of Ys, the game takes place roughly after the ancient city of Ys took off into the sky and the demons born from the Black Pearl built a Tower in order to try and reach it. The two Goddesses worried about what might be happening on the surface one day disappeared and thus an investigation team was set on the surface to retrieve them and explore the Demon Tower. Since the game takes place roughly 700 years before Adol’s birth you obviously won’t be playing as him for this adventure (though two different version of him is playable in the game boss rush mode) but rather as 3 different protagonists each taking turns in climbing the wretched tower each with their own gameplay style and differing storylines.
This is the main difference between this game and Oath when it comes to mechanics, since Oath pretty much perfected the Ark style of gameplay this one simply just builds on top of it by proposing different playable characters as its central main gimmick. The only real change from Oath to Origins is the addition of a shop in which you can spend points in order to buy upgrades for your equipment or helpful permanent perks for your character. So let’s go around and take a look at each of these characters, see how they play and analyze their storyline because for once, Origins script actually has a lot more meat to it than previous entries thanks in no small part to not having a mute protagonist as the main lead this time around.
Yunica Tovah is the daughter of Sage Tovah, every citizen of Ys have some affinity for magic but Yunica was born without any magical power which ostracized her from the rest of society and gave her severe anxiety over not being able to live up to her prestigious lineage. However she shared a deep friendship with the Twin Goddesses who pretty much served as close friend and surrogate mother to them and in spite of her inaptitude in wielding magic she still took the pledge to protect the two goddess by becoming a knight and likely lifting up massive amount of weight because this tiny woman sure can wield a big ass ax as her main weapon. When she heard that the goddesses left for the surface, she immediately joined the investigation team to find them and bring them back on the floating island to fulfill her promise to the two of them.
Yunica is the closest this game gets from classic Adol gameplay, she pretty much has almost all of the same moveset as Adol and her wielding an ax doesn’t seem to affect her swinging speed whatsoever, Yunica doesn’t have many options to deal with enemies at a distance and only gets a projectile near the end of the game with the trade-off being that she has to switch from using her ax to using a flaming greatsword making her damage output bigger but slowing down her movement significantly, this stance only slightly being compensated by being able to finally shoot projectiles.
Yunica is a character which doesn’t really stray away too far from classic Ys gameplay, even her two additional elemental magic power are a circular wind attack vaguely similar to the ones found in Oath, the fire spell we mentioned works like the fire sword in Napishtim and only her thunder spell is slightly different being a slam on the ground which create a vertical shockwave in front of her. However I still had fun playing as her because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and that’s how Yunica feels like as far as gameplay goes but what about her storyline ?
As you climb Darm’s Tower, Yunica comes to question her own abilities and even her reasons for going into the tower in the first place. She experiences self doubt and there’s some really touching moment where she wonders if she’s even fit to be a knight or be the goddesses protector when everyone around her is seemingly more capable than her at dealing with this situation. You can feel that Yunica’s reason for getting up the tower is mostly a personal one, it’s a reason for her to confront her fear and insecurities as well as reinforce her devotion to her cause ! I personally really love Yunica, I feel she’s pretty underrated as far as Ys heroine goes and it’s a shame she’s not talked about that much in the wider Falcom community as the only character equal to her in my mind is Estelle from Trails in the Sky and that’s high praise coming from me.
However, I do understand why most people don’t really feel for Yunica that much, it’s a classic journey of self discovery with the tower being a metaphor for overcoming a big obstacle in her life, it’s the classic shonen anime story of a character starting weak and full of insecurities but through trials and tribulation rise up from her condition to become a badass. It’s the type of story that works well in the context of an RPG or even a videogame because as much as you the player get stronger and become better at the game so does Yunica in her story, it’s a very easy way to have a bit of ludo-narrative in the game without thinking too much. But it’s also a story you’ve likely seen somewhere else, it’s still effective, it’s still well executed but it isn’t exactly novel either and whether you’ll find yourself inspired by Yunica or just think of it as just another story in the pile is really up to you.
The bigger issue with Yunica’s story other than its lack of originality is just that it’s super disconnected from the rest of the game for reasons we’ll get into when discussing the other two characters which happen to have a deeper relationship and to one another as far as the wider story goes. Yunica’s story just kinda feel isolated and probably the least canon or least worth experiencing if you’re here to mainly experience the story of the game (even if it’s not likely the reason why you’re playing an Ys game in the first place, but this one is kind of an exception to the rule and also deeply tied to the lore of the franchise). Combine that with her play style being really similar to Adol and the redundancy and irrelevance of the character becomes quite hard to ignore as much as it pains me to say this because Yunica is a pretty cool gal all things considered and my second favorite character to play as in the game.
But enough about women wielding axes, it’s time to talk about the man, the myth, the legend, mister Sigma Male incarnate himself Hugo Fact. Hugo is a descendent of the house of Fact, a prestigious family of mages which excels in all things magical and accept nothing less than perfection when it comes to their teaching. Each member of the Fact family is molded from birth to always strive to be better than everyone else even sacrificing your humanity if it means achieving greater power. As such Hugo is the polar opposite of Yunica, he’s confident to a fault, cocky, ambitious, abrasive, egotistical, he thinks of himself as better, smarter, stronger and superior to everyone else and he’s also the CEO of misogyny (seriously this guy level of women disrespect is OFF THE CHART). Heck, the guy really hasn’t any personal reason to join the investigation, he doesn’t do it out of moral obligation and he couldn’t care less about the well-being of the two goddesses which he has some r/atheism opinion about (despite them literally existing within the canon). The reason he decided to climb the tower was because he was given a mission to find and kill a man who happens to be on the surface on behalf of his father and he just sees this mission as just another fun way to pass the time and flex his skills.
And you will be flexing a lot because Hugo Fact is fucking BROKEN AS SHIT. Unlike Yunica, Hugo plays very differently from your typical Ys game. His gameplay mostly focus on shooting projectiles than dealing with enemies with close combat, it makes the gameplay of the game feel closer to that of a shmup than that of a typical action RPG, and by the end of his run you start to feel like someone who just got an absurdly good pool of power ups with the most perfect synergies in the Binding of Isaac.Instead of attacking with a regular weapon, Hugo has two orbiting artifacts known as the Eyes of Fact which constantly shoot little pellets as long as you keep mashing that attack button. To compensate with the absurd advantages of shooting a shit load of projectile at an incredibly fast rate, Hugo has to stop in his tracks whenever he’s shooting which makes it harder to dodge upcoming attacks, assuming the enemies would even get the luxury of counter attacking you (and even then, his lunge attack is a big fuck you thunder with a wider range and which even debuffs any enemies it touches like wow !).
And his three spells you obtain throughout the course of the game are nothing to shy on about either : His wind spell produce a shield around him which slows down his descend to clear huge gaps but most importantly can tank one or multiple hits before breaking depending on whether you charged it or not and even grants you the power of bump combat in case you missed that shit since 1993 ! His thunder spell are remote bombs which when fully charged deal so much fucking damage it kills pretty much any ennemies in one hit even when you’re underleveled, the charge time isn’t even that long actually so you can pretty melt freaking bosses faster than climate change melts the artics. And lastly his fire spell produce two orbiting fire orbs dealing damage around hugo at a really hit rate and when charged can even launch two big fuck you lasers. Add to this the fact that his boost mode doubles his fire rate by adding a second pair of Eyes and you have a recipe for disaster.
Look as much as I can see the fun in going “random bullshit go” and “Press X to win” type of gameplay, I feel Hugo is a bit fucking overkill in that department, you’re literally a freaking unstoppable god, even on higher difficulties Hugo’s run is a freaking walk in the park to the point that I found his gameplay to be mostly boring rather than fun. When the game presents to you any form of challenge it kinda goes against the purposes of an action rpg where you have to properly use your toolset to handle different situation and maxing your combat efficiency, here everything usually die so fast and your bonus gauge make you so strong and tanky that the gameplay becomes a formality and you really shouldn’t be feeling that when playing an Ys game. It’s one thing to make you feel powerful through the gameplay, but simply making you broken beyond belief isn’t really gonna cut it buster.
To compensate for his relatively lackluster gameplay, Hugo’s story is actually pretty damn good, I think I started to got a knack for absolutely chaotic protagonist which are the embodiment of problematic, an entire life-time of being raised on anime and manga where protagonist archetypes aren’t the most varied will do that to you but Hugo’s story feel like you’re playing as that rival character who succumbs to darkness before eventually getting his shit together and help the heroes. Hugo’s interaction with the rest of the cast whether they’re allies or foes are so thoroughly entertaining thanks to his snarky ass behavior and some well delivered punchline which will either make you scream “yoooo” or will make you punch his fucking face and I think it makes for some really interesting dynamics. He even has some sort of a will-they won’t-they romance with one of the antagonists and it’s pretty fun and strangely wholesome to see that relationship evolve and sadly end in tragedy…
Because the path to power comes with many sacrifices mostly of your own humanity, whereas Yunica’s quest is all about overcoming her shortcomings, Hugo’s quest is to learn how to empathize with other people again and breaking from the conditioning left by his father and become his own man free from the ambitions of the house of Fact. As you progress through the game Hugo loses himself more and more getting drunk on all the power he’s been accumulating until he realizes that he’s turning into more of a demon than the demons he’s fighting. Hugo’s story is really damn cool, if only to see a second more unique perspective on the different story segment covered in Yunica’s route but I have two issues with it imo.
One and this is linked to Yunica, I do think that both characters should’ve had more of a confrontation which is the entire purpose of a dual narrative like this. But sadly, it’s never the case, when you’re playing as Hugo, Yunica is a tertiary character at best and vice-versa and instead of their arc paralleling each other, they’re treated as just separate interpretations of the same events. And while I guess that works for the main series where the story is based on Adol’s diaries, here the story is just “how they remember it” and none of the two tales are even that canon.
My other problem with Hugo’s campaign is how it ends. I don’t think giving a last minute redemption arc to the guy was the best course of action. Everything in Hugo’s route leads me to believe the initial plan for his character was to completely lose himself to the power of his demon essence and become Dark Fact, the antagonist of the first game and with this game being a prequel it only makes sense that this was a possibility. Heck even one of his leitmotiv shares some similarities to Dark Fact’s theme so what was all that bait and switch all about. I would’ve absolutely pog out of my damn mind if they turned Hugo into Dark Fact and make him some sort of tragic victim of his own hubris as he was close to regaining his humanity and break from his father’s will, it would’ve make for quite the amazing tie to the first game in my opinion.
If you consider the wider story however it’s even messier. Because as cool and kino Hugo’s entire arc in this game is and it’s still a relatively ok conclusion in the end, making the entire point of Hugo’s story about breaking the traditional thirst for power of the house of Fact only for his direct descendent 700 years down the line to just undo all of his ancestor’s effort and just be a generic Dark Lord McDoucheBag is pretty freaking lame. Especially since now it leaves Dark Fact as this iconic villain but one which has no real layers to him, I mean his name is literally Dark Fact (not Sieg like in Dawn) probably because his parents fucking hated him or something and since the OVA’s aren’t canon, he doesn’t have the tragic villain schtick of that version of his story either. Dark Fact will forever remain dark and I do think it’s a fact that this entire thing is just a huge missed opportunity that could’ve given both Hugo and the main antagonist of Ys 1 a lot more layers even if retrospectively (à la Jack Garland from FF Strangers of Paradise).
But while Hugo doesn’t have much parallel to Yunica within the story, he has with the man he came to kill in the first place : Claw which will reveal to Hugo that the House of Fact definitely needs counseling more than any sage family on this goddamn island. Once you finish the story of both Yunica and Hugo, the surprise plot twist of the game is that a third playable character unlocks and this time it’s the actual main canon storyline of the game which ties deeper into the worldbuilding, lore and continuity with Ys 1&2.
The mysterious Claw is a recurring antagonist you fight throughout the course of Yunica and Hugo’s campaign but definitely has more ties to Hugo than he does Yunica (who sure as hell is starting to feel like a filler character the more lines I type). He used to be a man but chose the path of becoming a demon joining the Darklings a mysterious organization that you may or may have not heard of from a little game known as Ys VI but are also for the most part the generals of Darm from Ys II which is pretty neat. Now Claw’s story is perhaps the best part of this entire anthology story and there’s so many cool things they do with him and his connections to the goddess, specifically Rheah, who gets much more development in this game than she ever did originally. It’s also the only story chapter with a unique intro featuring our two favorite goddesses explaining why they’ve descended upon the surface in the first place.
Gameplay wise, Claw is pretty much a glass cannon, he hits hard but also takes a lot more of a beating. To compensate for his demonic power somehow giving him glass bones syndrome, he’s probably the most fast and agile character of the three in fact very early on his first spell is literally a dash that gives him a bit of invincibility and allows you to quickly get out of tough situations. In fact because he is the third playable character you’re probably familiar with the overall structure and level design of the game by now and the dash makes clearing areas much faster so Claws campaign is about half as short as the other two. But outside of his dash spell, the other two leaves kind of a lot to be desired : The Thunder spell is a powerful thunder punch which locks you into place and has a miserably small hitbox and the fire spell is just a tornado jump and let’s just that in a game where it’s impossible to juggle enemies into the air, it’s only situationally useful in terms of combat.
Claw is probably the character I like to play as the most out of all 3 characters mostly because dashing through the corridors of the Darm tower at Super speed dealing with enemies along the way brings that constant exhilarating sense of motion which has become titular of the Ys series core identity. And even tho the rest of his toolkit leaves a lot to be desired, I was more than satisfied with his base moveset as well as his boost mode which fully turns him into a demon dealing a truck load of damage but making you even more prone to ass-beating, an interesting risk vs reward mechanic in my opinion.
But the icing on the cake for me is definitely the story of Claw, if you played Hugo’s campaign there isn’t any mystery towards his identity as it is revealed right from the onset that he is Hugo’s brother who mysteriously disappeared after the demon invasion on Ys a couple of years before the events of the game. What led this man to shun his previous identity, his weapon and the pledge he gave to the goddess to join the demons in their relentless assault against the city of Ys ? And how does his story tie to the wider lore of the franchise up to that point ?
Well that’s for you to discover, I think Toal is perhaps one of the only story worth experiencing blind in this game especially if you’re familiar with the original two titles as its doing some pretty interesting thing with the continuity and tying up what you’re doing to stuff Adol will eventually interact with in the future game. The ending of that route is the type of ending to give a complete boomer who got hooked on playing Ys as a kid a complete full hard-on at how everything comes back together in the end and even though I’m not a boomer who played these games as a kid (I only discovered them in 2022), the ending of that route and the game as a whole gave so many fucking chills god I love Ys OG setting.
As you can probably guess by now, I think Ys Origins is one of the few Ys games with a remarkably well told and interesting story thanks in no small part to its tie to the original two games to which I have a lot of appreciation for especially its lore. The game often throws retro-active reference to the first two games either through its story moments, puzzles or even the items you come across which are artifacts Adol eventually uses himself in Ys 1&2 which just has a nice bit of continuity which reminded me a lot of what Dawn of Ys did. But whereas Dawn, as awesome as it was, could seem like fanfiction in the way it retcons a lot of stuff into its own plot, here the team at Falcom did a valiant effort to respect the sanctity and the mystic of the original game essence.
So many times prequel mostly exist to ruin the magic of the original title of which they’re supposed to pay homage to but not Ys Origins, Ys Origins is a fantastic companion piece to Ys 1&2, you could imagine they would’ve shoved more of the modern canon stuff into the main storyline but I’m glad they didn’t push it too hard especially if some people are just interested in these games. While the side-cast is kinda there for the ride with not many of them standing out, Feena and Rheah got some much needed amount of extra characterization and background added to them and It’s done in a way which only reinforced my love for these iconic characters rather than ruining them with pointless details or some stupidly subversive plot twist like it’s often the case in way too many productions. I should give a special shoutout to Rheah in particular who didn’t really have much as far as character goes in the original 2 games but here got a lot more presence in the narrative and even a pretty cute romance story with Claw which was surprising to see.
Setting the entire story inside of Darm’s Tower might probably sound like a bad idea as far as visual variety goes especially in a series which thrived on exploring varied and mysterious environments but I found that they did a really solid job reimagining one of the most iconic location in the series for the modern age. Which makes me realize that in all of my fanboyism, I forgot to talk about the overall level design of the game as well as the different bosses you confront throughout your ascension of the Darm Tower.
In my Oath in Felghana review, I’ve mentioned that one of the unfortunate side-effects of basing the game on a game which had a more rigid level-based structure kinda took away from the feeling of adventure and freedom that the previous game offered ! However, I’ve also said that such a level design had its place in the Ark Engine system which had more of an arcade vibe with the combo meters and the general faster flow of the game and that it wasn’t bad as much as it was restrictive. Well Ys Origins kinda falls right into those same trappings, diving head straight into them like an olympic swimmer. The game does have an upgrade system giving you new abilities and tool for your move set but unlike Oath in which it gave the world a sort of Metroidvania feel to it as it was often advised to go back to old areas to get items and complete side quest here in Ys Origins, these new abilities only serves as keys to open locks in the areas you got them with very little incentive to actually go back to previous areas.
Some people might think that it’s a good thing actually as it doesn’t needlessly waste your time with pointless detour but some people might also miss the pleasure of exploration the franchise is known for and thus while I don’t think it’s a flaw of the game, I could potentially understand how divisive this could be. But, on the other hand, Ys Origins was the most popular title series for a reason and its level design is perhaps the best in the entire series.
You may think that an entire game set in one place will eventually become boring but thankfully, this is a vastly overhauled version of the Tower from Ys 1&2 with each floor serving as its own dungeon so to speak complete with unique combat encounters, puzzles, platforming challenges, level design gimmick and themes to each of the 7 floors which compose your ascension of the wretched tower ! And I think they did a more than fantastic job with each of them in my opinion. Unlike Oath which felt the need to incorporate a lot of frankly questionable 2.5D sections to parallel the original Ys III, here the level designers took their stick out of their asses and made the most of the game 3D nature and the verticality that comes with setting your game inside a goddamn tower.
While none of the areas in the game reaches the same heights as Valestein Castle from Oath in my opinion, I think the level design here is a lot more consistent and a lot more creative with even some neat reinterpretation of Ys 1 plot beat like the demon corridor or the hall of mirror the later of which definitely is one of the highlights of the game in terms of set pieces. There’s a deeper sense of cinematography and flow to each dungeon and even if they all share some similar assets to keep the visuals consistent, the game always keep surprising us with some neat obstacles, also falling in this game rarely end up in you having to reclimb an entire area like in Ys VI or Oath to a lesser extend, making platformer that much more smoother in my opinion.
The only area I’m not too big on is the big desert area in the middle because while “Silent Sands” is a banger track I do think that the area by itself far overstays its welcome which isn’t helped by this being the area with most plot shit and backtracking happening slowing the game pace to a crawl for the duration of the floor especially in between two relatively good areas (one of which is an actual fun water level, I know crazy). Another issue that came to my attention while I was playing the game is that in the Swamp floor, the game stop having a natural level curve, the game isn’t super reliant on grinding as long as you don’t avoid enemies but once you reach the Mantis I always happened to be underleveled and doing piss damage to it and had to two a second run of the area to grind a bit, an unfortunate oversight which doesn’t ruin the game for me but is worth noting.
So the general level design is excellent and perhaps some of the best Falcom has ever put out but how about the bosses, well…
THEY’RE FREAKING AWESOME
Ys Origins easily has the best selection of bosses in the entire series only rivaled by Dawn of Ys in my opinion. They really nailed the balance this time between not having too long or annoying patterns while still giving the player the freedom to fight them on equal footing. The only “bad” boss is the plant in the desert area (yeah this area again… told you it was the black spot of the game) and maybe the final boss of Hugo and Yunica’s route for being way too damn easy but even then, they far outclass the selection of bosses seen in previous titles.
And I also think that’s quite amazing that each bosses you fight in this are for the most part reimagining of the ones from Ys 1&2 with even some continuity between how they look there and how they’ll eventually look in those games (like the big zombie head from II but this time it’s a big fire giant that’s not a putrefied corpse at all until you fuck his shit up).
On top of being really mechanically solid, the bosses this time around are also quite spectacular, much more than what Falcom is usually willing to do on their limited budget. The Centipede fight (perhaps THE most iconic boss of the game) is a great example of this, you might even confuse it for an Ys Origins original because of how lame its original incarnation was but here it’s such a freaking amazing set piece.
Your character enters the room and the Centipede is hiding in the wall then fucking boom it comes out and the arena is this Crash Bandicoot style circular arena and you have on top of the Centipede to break all of its individual parts or trying to get him from the ground with your thunder attack while dodging a million projectile which gets increasingly more and more overwhelming as the fight progresses. It’s so fucking kino and most of the big bosses in this game operates on the same logic like the Mantis which is this really cool boss which changes the game camera angle as he jumps and fucks around summoning a thousand minions. Suffice to say that the bosses in this game are not only super cool to figure out as boss fights but also freaking cool as just spectacle bosses in general. Like I said, while there’s one or two bosses that are weaker than others, most of them are actually quite excellent and superbly reimagine mechanics of the first game in the Ark Engine.
But the game doesn’t just have big bosses, it also has a lot of smaller bosses mostly against human opponents. I feel like Falcom saw the generally positive reception people had on the 2 Chester Fights in Oath in Felghana and wanted to capitalize on the hype it created. Mechanically speaking, I’d say that these are some of the most interesting bosses, mostly because you’re pretty much on equal footing with them and they feel less “Mario Bossy” if that makes sense ? Much like you they don’t have invincibility frames and can be hurt at any time, they have a burst mode and spells of their own, some of them are actually pretty damn challenging.
However, while I commend the effort, none of them reaches the climatic epicness of Chester 2 in terms of complexity or just raw hype because a lot of those boss fights are against pretty random and forgettable side-characters, I wish they kept the human bosses solely for rival fights between the three characters only, there’s a huge missed opportunity there for some pretty cool stuff but it’s not the main bulk of these human fights (you don’t get a single fight against Yunica like wow she’s so left out that’s crazy…).
So that’s it right ? We pretty much found the perfect Ys game? Excellent level design, excellent bosses, excellent variety in gameplay thanks to different playable characters and a deep respect for the series legacy that can be felt all throughout the work (did I also mention the game has great music too ?? I mean at this point it’s kinda redundant since they’ve been chaining home runs on that front for quite some time and I’m not really good at explaining why music is good, call my man MB for that, I’m sure he can cook up a better video essay on the subject than me !). So what’s the catch ?
Well, I think it’s time to address the big elephant in the room, which is this game's strange structure and how it affects its pacing. Because for how much good content there is there and even with the different characters switching up the gameplay…
You still have to play the game 3 separate times in order to get a full grasp on the story, and witnessing its true ending and to me that’s a big fucking issue !
See you don’t actually switch up characters, those are essentially 3 different routes much like Resident Evil with its Leon A, Clair B, Tofu Guy bullshit. And look, on one hand, can I really complain about the repeated playthroughs ? One of my favorite games of all time is Mega Man X4 which is the first time in the series that you can either play as X or Zero and in order to experience the full game, you essentially have to play it two times. It’s the same stages, mostly the same bosses but instead of playing as a guy who shoots lemons, you play as the hottest laser sword wielding robot the world has ever seen and he plays like a charm.
So technically speaking, I don’t fundamentally have an issue with but many people within the community do, if there’s one thing that Origins is unanimously criticized for is the 3 required playthroughs to reach the true ending, it was such a massive complain that on PC and on PC only, you only have to do 2 of the 3 routes and I mean by that point, you might as well do the third one amirite ?
But see, the main difference between MMX4, Resident Evil 2 and this game is the time commitment. Oath in Felghana and pretty much any Ys game up to that point except III an V last for about 10 to 12h and even if Falcom and their fans might disagree, this is the ideal length for an Ys game. Just a short, intense 10h adventure to occupy an afternoon and that’s what makes them so compelling and replayable because you can put it down and come back to it later on higher difficulty if you feel like killing some times. They might have a decent enough story to get interested in or at least an interesting narration to motivate yourself to keep going but once you experienced everything the game has to offer once, it’s not gonna change the second time through for your pretty eyes ! And it’s not a “change in perspective” or a slightly different gameplay that’s gonna change your mind about it.
And that 10 to 12h time commitment is alright for a single game… but what if I told you that it was also the average length of one route of this game ! And that’s when you slowly start to realize… oh shit really ? Look, I’m definitely making a mountain out of a molehill, but the reason why I love Oath so much is that it’s a one and done deal, all banger no filler game, but here it’s a bit more difficult to defend that position. A single run of RE2 will last you maybe 6 to 7h, a single run of MMX4 will last you like 4 to 5h and that game also doesn’t have like a huge amount of dialogues you have to sit through which interrupts the flow of the game.
And look as much as I’ve praised the story so far and it’s cool to see different perspectives, the main structure of it all stays the same ! You go through the same obstacles, the desert area is a slog for all characters with a shit load of cutscenes and dialogue slowing it down to a crawl, the same 2nd run of the swamp to get properly leveled for the mantis boss. All of them have to have a talk with Yunica’s ghost dad for some goddamn reasons when the dude only has any sort of relevance in her route. You may say that you could just play one of the routes and leave the rest for later but then you won’t be experiencing the full story which I believe is worth a damn this time around even though one is essentially filler (sorry Yunica…). I still think the actual content is good mind you, but it’s an odd-case of having so little of it that they have to spread it thin to make the most of it, I would’ve liked just a tad bit more variety in the level design and structure to accommodate to each character skills and arc to not make the entire process as redundant but hey, game is still fun in the end but I can definitely see how playing the same game 3 times would be a deal breaker to some people.
Asides from that and a couple of smaller complaint, I do think that Ys Origins deserves the cult status that it has today, it’s a fantastic companion piece to the original game that will greatly please fans of the original game without losing the initial magic of the duology and it’s also a fantastic entry point for anyone wanting to get into the series and who knows maybe the ending will make some who were more reluctant to try out the original two games as well as the rest of the franchise.
The New Team at Falcom has succeeded in creating a modern cult classic which many people remember as fondly as the original two games, adding to its legacy and ending the Ark Engine trilogy on a bang. The entire project just oozes from the passion of its developers composed mostly of older fans of Falcom finally getting the chance to finally have their piece of the puzzle and I think that Ys couldn’t dream of a better game to pay homage to its 20 years of legacy.
But all good things must come to an end and the developers weren’t going to keep improving on the formula, after all they already perfected it and as much as I enjoy the Ark Engine games, the series needs to move forward and diversify itself. Even if it was a pretty short lived but intense era, next time, we’re properly continuing Adol’s adventure and this adventure is about to be a party (system !) !
2006 marked the 20th anniversary of the Ys franchise, since then the series has gone through a lot, sometimes succeeding in living up to the legacy left by the first game and sometimes failing miserably at doing so. Nonetheless, in the minds of many Ys only really exist through the prism of its first 2 original entries, in fact, you could easily say that the only two games in the franchise worthy of the title of “Ys” were the first two games. Not only were these the only games actually set in the land of Ys and its surrounding area of Esteria but Ys II also happened to be “the final chapter” as if out of all of Adol’s Adventure and in spite this one being the first, it was the single most important adventure, the one which defined Ys as a franchise and the one where all things return to in the end.
In the Falcom community there seem to be this common consensus that Trails is the “story and lore” focused franchise while Ys is the “gameplay and action” franchise boiling down Ys as nothing more than just a simple past-time between two big episodes of the Trails series which have more meat to their bones while Ys has this much “rawer” approach to storytelling which doesn’t speak to the common youth of today. Ys stories aren’t worth analyzing because they’re not wordy enough, they’re not deep enough and they’re quite derivative of each other. In fact, the main storyline set by Ys 1 and 2 has been reused countless times throughout the series. Adol crashes on some island, has some adventure involving one or two girls with blue hair and it always ends up with him uncovering the mystery of an ancient civilization which fell to ruin because of the folly of man.
But why ? Why has Falcom tried to recapture the magic of Ys 1 and 2’s story either through re-releases or new games with similar premises if the story in those games were only meant to be a “motivator” for your quest and nothing more ? Well maybe it’s because Ys 1 and 2 in all of their 80’s sensibilities had something to stand out from the crowd and that something was its rich and interesting story as well as its lore ! Back in the first review, I said that Ys 1’s main objective was to make an accessible RPG for newcomers and while it was successfully done through its game mechanics, I also want to believe this was achieved through its storytelling even in the older version which had less memory for text and all that jazz.
In the 80’s most RPG’s would only have maybe like a text scroll to establish the setting and maybe some NPC trying to talk about some prophecies or wtv, Final Fantasy I will try to have more ambitious storytelling with the whole time-traveling which as iconic of a twist this was, it was a rather messy attempt even for the standard of the era. Falcom were different however, as far as Dragon Slayer and Xanadu they wanted to tell stories through the complex medium of video games and integrate that story inside of the game design loop. That’s how you end up with Ys which became the culmination of that philosophy, where by exploring the world, talking to NPC’s, reading the manual and watching the various attempts at cutscenes even in the older versions you would be experiencing a story and a world worth giving a shit about.
In the original Zelda for exemple, everything was very mechanical, there were no towns, only caves full of old men giving cryptic hint and monsters offering you rubies, the wonder of Zelda came mostly from its freeform explorative approach to game design while in comparison Ys was much more restrictive in the areas you explored and in which order you were supposed to explore them.
Ys 1 and 2 told a story, much more developed than those of the era, it had books that you can read and learn about the lore of this world, it had an on-going storyline about some guy stealing silver which culminated in a puzzle to the scale of the entire game and was the key to defeat the final boss, it had iconic characters with arcs some of which returned in the other titles.
Feena and Rheah from their design to the way you speak and interact with them have this aura of mystery surrounding them that makes you want to learn more about their circumstances and how tragic their fate ends up being in the end. It also had cutscenes to introduce the plot of the two half and Lillia fucking tilt her head in glorious 80’s animation and made every 10 year old boy wet their pants at how fucking impressive that was at the time that Lillia became the icon of the series all throughout the 80’s (she even had her own freaking song !!!!).
Everything about the original Ys 1 and 2 were iconic, for today’s standard it might be hard to understand the appeal or the magic of these few elements but combined together and you have a game with some of the most effective storytelling in the medium. It’s so iconic that Ys 1&2 iconography and characters are pretty much the one thing Falcom keeps reusing in all of the series promotional material. It even had an anime, a manga adaptation, an extended Korean remake of the 2nd game (that I wish I could play because it makes me very curious but alas I don’t speak Korean) and even to this very day when you look up at Ys tags on various websites, Feena is the one character to pop up the most in fanarts while you’d think more recent heroines from games which sold much better like Dana would dominate the leaderboard on the waifu wars.
With such cult classic status, it’s only natural that the new team at Falcom wanted to take their piece of the Ys pies by adding their own flavor and their own interpretation of it much like Hudson did in the 90’s when they got the opportunity to work on an original entry for the franchise. This started with “Ys 1&2 Eternal”, the latest version of the game at the time which set out to completely overhaul the script to fit Falcom’s modern standard of storytelling set by the Gagharv trilogy. A bigger emphasis was put on fleshing out the characters and especially fleshing out Adol and Feena relationship (Lillia was always kinda mid and Kondo basically erasing her relevance in the modern canon was the right decision imo) but also make the towns more alive and the world bigger much like they did with Oath in Felghana later down the line.
This was a first step towards (
Ys Origins released in 2006 set to re-explore the mythical Origins of Ys, the game takes place roughly after the ancient city of Ys took off into the sky and the demons born from the Black Pearl built a Tower in order to try and reach it. The two Goddesses worried about what might be happening on the surface one day disappeared and thus an investigation team was set on the surface to retrieve them and explore the Demon Tower. Since the game takes place roughly 700 years before Adol’s birth you obviously won’t be playing as him for this adventure (though two different version of him is playable in the game boss rush mode) but rather as 3 different protagonists each taking turns in climbing the wretched tower each with their own gameplay style and differing storylines.
This is the main difference between this game and Oath when it comes to mechanics, since Oath pretty much perfected the Ark style of gameplay this one simply just builds on top of it by proposing different playable characters as its central main gimmick. The only real change from Oath to Origins is the addition of a shop in which you can spend points in order to buy upgrades for your equipment or helpful permanent perks for your character. So let’s go around and take a look at each of these characters, see how they play and analyze their storyline because for once, Origins script actually has a lot more meat to it than previous entries thanks in no small part to not having a mute protagonist as the main lead this time around.
Yunica Tovah is the daughter of Sage Tovah, every citizen of Ys have some affinity for magic but Yunica was born without any magical power which ostracized her from the rest of society and gave her severe anxiety over not being able to live up to her prestigious lineage. However she shared a deep friendship with the Twin Goddesses who pretty much served as close friend and surrogate mother to them and in spite of her inaptitude in wielding magic she still took the pledge to protect the two goddess by becoming a knight and likely lifting up massive amount of weight because this tiny woman sure can wield a big ass ax as her main weapon. When she heard that the goddesses left for the surface, she immediately joined the investigation team to find them and bring them back on the floating island to fulfill her promise to the two of them.
Yunica is the closest this game gets from classic Adol gameplay, she pretty much has almost all of the same moveset as Adol and her wielding an ax doesn’t seem to affect her swinging speed whatsoever, Yunica doesn’t have many options to deal with enemies at a distance and only gets a projectile near the end of the game with the trade-off being that she has to switch from using her ax to using a flaming greatsword making her damage output bigger but slowing down her movement significantly, this stance only slightly being compensated by being able to finally shoot projectiles.
Yunica is a character which doesn’t really stray away too far from classic Ys gameplay, even her two additional elemental magic power are a circular wind attack vaguely similar to the ones found in Oath, the fire spell we mentioned works like the fire sword in Napishtim and only her thunder spell is slightly different being a slam on the ground which create a vertical shockwave in front of her. However I still had fun playing as her because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and that’s how Yunica feels like as far as gameplay goes but what about her storyline ?
As you climb Darm’s Tower, Yunica comes to question her own abilities and even her reasons for going into the tower in the first place. She experiences self doubt and there’s some really touching moment where she wonders if she’s even fit to be a knight or be the goddesses protector when everyone around her is seemingly more capable than her at dealing with this situation. You can feel that Yunica’s reason for getting up the tower is mostly a personal one, it’s a reason for her to confront her fear and insecurities as well as reinforce her devotion to her cause ! I personally really love Yunica, I feel she’s pretty underrated as far as Ys heroine goes and it’s a shame she’s not talked about that much in the wider Falcom community as the only character equal to her in my mind is Estelle from Trails in the Sky and that’s high praise coming from me.
However, I do understand why most people don’t really feel for Yunica that much, it’s a classic journey of self discovery with the tower being a metaphor for overcoming a big obstacle in her life, it’s the classic shonen anime story of a character starting weak and full of insecurities but through trials and tribulation rise up from her condition to become a badass. It’s the type of story that works well in the context of an RPG or even a videogame because as much as you the player get stronger and become better at the game so does Yunica in her story, it’s a very easy way to have a bit of ludo-narrative in the game without thinking too much. But it’s also a story you’ve likely seen somewhere else, it’s still effective, it’s still well executed but it isn’t exactly novel either and whether you’ll find yourself inspired by Yunica or just think of it as just another story in the pile is really up to you.
The bigger issue with Yunica’s story other than its lack of originality is just that it’s super disconnected from the rest of the game for reasons we’ll get into when discussing the other two characters which happen to have a deeper relationship and to one another as far as the wider story goes. Yunica’s story just kinda feel isolated and probably the least canon or least worth experiencing if you’re here to mainly experience the story of the game (even if it’s not likely the reason why you’re playing an Ys game in the first place, but this one is kind of an exception to the rule and also deeply tied to the lore of the franchise). Combine that with her play style being really similar to Adol and the redundancy and irrelevance of the character becomes quite hard to ignore as much as it pains me to say this because Yunica is a pretty cool gal all things considered and my second favorite character to play as in the game.
But enough about women wielding axes, it’s time to talk about the man, the myth, the legend, mister Sigma Male incarnate himself Hugo Fact. Hugo is a descendent of the house of Fact, a prestigious family of mages which excels in all things magical and accept nothing less than perfection when it comes to their teaching. Each member of the Fact family is molded from birth to always strive to be better than everyone else even sacrificing your humanity if it means achieving greater power. As such Hugo is the polar opposite of Yunica, he’s confident to a fault, cocky, ambitious, abrasive, egotistical, he thinks of himself as better, smarter, stronger and superior to everyone else and he’s also the CEO of misogyny (seriously this guy level of women disrespect is OFF THE CHART). Heck, the guy really hasn’t any personal reason to join the investigation, he doesn’t do it out of moral obligation and he couldn’t care less about the well-being of the two goddesses which he has some r/atheism opinion about (despite them literally existing within the canon). The reason he decided to climb the tower was because he was given a mission to find and kill a man who happens to be on the surface on behalf of his father and he just sees this mission as just another fun way to pass the time and flex his skills.
And you will be flexing a lot because Hugo Fact is fucking BROKEN AS SHIT. Unlike Yunica, Hugo plays very differently from your typical Ys game. His gameplay mostly focus on shooting projectiles than dealing with enemies with close combat, it makes the gameplay of the game feel closer to that of a shmup than that of a typical action RPG, and by the end of his run you start to feel like someone who just got an absurdly good pool of power ups with the most perfect synergies in the Binding of Isaac.Instead of attacking with a regular weapon, Hugo has two orbiting artifacts known as the Eyes of Fact which constantly shoot little pellets as long as you keep mashing that attack button. To compensate with the absurd advantages of shooting a shit load of projectile at an incredibly fast rate, Hugo has to stop in his tracks whenever he’s shooting which makes it harder to dodge upcoming attacks, assuming the enemies would even get the luxury of counter attacking you (and even then, his lunge attack is a big fuck you thunder with a wider range and which even debuffs any enemies it touches like wow !).
And his three spells you obtain throughout the course of the game are nothing to shy on about either : His wind spell produce a shield around him which slows down his descend to clear huge gaps but most importantly can tank one or multiple hits before breaking depending on whether you charged it or not and even grants you the power of bump combat in case you missed that shit since 1993 ! His thunder spell are remote bombs which when fully charged deal so much fucking damage it kills pretty much any ennemies in one hit even when you’re underleveled, the charge time isn’t even that long actually so you can pretty melt freaking bosses faster than climate change melts the artics. And lastly his fire spell produce two orbiting fire orbs dealing damage around hugo at a really hit rate and when charged can even launch two big fuck you lasers. Add to this the fact that his boost mode doubles his fire rate by adding a second pair of Eyes and you have a recipe for disaster.
Look as much as I can see the fun in going “random bullshit go” and “Press X to win” type of gameplay, I feel Hugo is a bit fucking overkill in that department, you’re literally a freaking unstoppable god, even on higher difficulties Hugo’s run is a freaking walk in the park to the point that I found his gameplay to be mostly boring rather than fun. When the game presents to you any form of challenge it kinda goes against the purposes of an action rpg where you have to properly use your toolset to handle different situation and maxing your combat efficiency, here everything usually die so fast and your bonus gauge make you so strong and tanky that the gameplay becomes a formality and you really shouldn’t be feeling that when playing an Ys game. It’s one thing to make you feel powerful through the gameplay, but simply making you broken beyond belief isn’t really gonna cut it buster.
To compensate for his relatively lackluster gameplay, Hugo’s story is actually pretty damn good, I think I started to got a knack for absolutely chaotic protagonist which are the embodiment of problematic, an entire life-time of being raised on anime and manga where protagonist archetypes aren’t the most varied will do that to you but Hugo’s story feel like you’re playing as that rival character who succumbs to darkness before eventually getting his shit together and help the heroes. Hugo’s interaction with the rest of the cast whether they’re allies or foes are so thoroughly entertaining thanks to his snarky ass behavior and some well delivered punchline which will either make you scream “yoooo” or will make you punch his fucking face and I think it makes for some really interesting dynamics. He even has some sort of a will-they won’t-they romance with one of the antagonists and it’s pretty fun and strangely wholesome to see that relationship evolve and sadly end in tragedy…
Because the path to power comes with many sacrifices mostly of your own humanity, whereas Yunica’s quest is all about overcoming her shortcomings, Hugo’s quest is to learn how to empathize with other people again and breaking from the conditioning left by his father and become his own man free from the ambitions of the house of Fact. As you progress through the game Hugo loses himself more and more getting drunk on all the power he’s been accumulating until he realizes that he’s turning into more of a demon than the demons he’s fighting. Hugo’s story is really damn cool, if only to see a second more unique perspective on the different story segment covered in Yunica’s route but I have two issues with it imo.
One and this is linked to Yunica, I do think that both characters should’ve had more of a confrontation which is the entire purpose of a dual narrative like this. But sadly, it’s never the case, when you’re playing as Hugo, Yunica is a tertiary character at best and vice-versa and instead of their arc paralleling each other, they’re treated as just separate interpretations of the same events. And while I guess that works for the main series where the story is based on Adol’s diaries, here the story is just “how they remember it” and none of the two tales are even that canon.
My other problem with Hugo’s campaign is how it ends. I don’t think giving a last minute redemption arc to the guy was the best course of action. Everything in Hugo’s route leads me to believe the initial plan for his character was to completely lose himself to the power of his demon essence and become Dark Fact, the antagonist of the first game and with this game being a prequel it only makes sense that this was a possibility. Heck even one of his leitmotiv shares some similarities to Dark Fact’s theme so what was all that bait and switch all about. I would’ve absolutely pog out of my damn mind if they turned Hugo into Dark Fact and make him some sort of tragic victim of his own hubris as he was close to regaining his humanity and break from his father’s will, it would’ve make for quite the amazing tie to the first game in my opinion.
If you consider the wider story however it’s even messier. Because as cool and kino Hugo’s entire arc in this game is and it’s still a relatively ok conclusion in the end, making the entire point of Hugo’s story about breaking the traditional thirst for power of the house of Fact only for his direct descendent 700 years down the line to just undo all of his ancestor’s effort and just be a generic Dark Lord McDoucheBag is pretty freaking lame. Especially since now it leaves Dark Fact as this iconic villain but one which has no real layers to him, I mean his name is literally Dark Fact (not Sieg like in Dawn) probably because his parents fucking hated him or something and since the OVA’s aren’t canon, he doesn’t have the tragic villain schtick of that version of his story either. Dark Fact will forever remain dark and I do think it’s a fact that this entire thing is just a huge missed opportunity that could’ve given both Hugo and the main antagonist of Ys 1 a lot more layers even if retrospectively (à la Jack Garland from FF Strangers of Paradise).
But while Hugo doesn’t have much parallel to Yunica within the story, he has with the man he came to kill in the first place : Claw which will reveal to Hugo that the House of Fact definitely needs counseling more than any sage family on this goddamn island. Once you finish the story of both Yunica and Hugo, the surprise plot twist of the game is that a third playable character unlocks and this time it’s the actual main canon storyline of the game which ties deeper into the worldbuilding, lore and continuity with Ys 1&2.
The mysterious Claw is a recurring antagonist you fight throughout the course of Yunica and Hugo’s campaign but definitely has more ties to Hugo than he does Yunica (who sure as hell is starting to feel like a filler character the more lines I type). He used to be a man but chose the path of becoming a demon joining the Darklings a mysterious organization that you may or may have not heard of from a little game known as Ys VI but are also for the most part the generals of Darm from Ys II which is pretty neat. Now Claw’s story is perhaps the best part of this entire anthology story and there’s so many cool things they do with him and his connections to the goddess, specifically Rheah, who gets much more development in this game than she ever did originally. It’s also the only story chapter with a unique intro featuring our two favorite goddesses explaining why they’ve descended upon the surface in the first place.
Gameplay wise, Claw is pretty much a glass cannon, he hits hard but also takes a lot more of a beating. To compensate for his demonic power somehow giving him glass bones syndrome, he’s probably the most fast and agile character of the three in fact very early on his first spell is literally a dash that gives him a bit of invincibility and allows you to quickly get out of tough situations. In fact because he is the third playable character you’re probably familiar with the overall structure and level design of the game by now and the dash makes clearing areas much faster so Claws campaign is about half as short as the other two. But outside of his dash spell, the other two leaves kind of a lot to be desired : The Thunder spell is a powerful thunder punch which locks you into place and has a miserably small hitbox and the fire spell is just a tornado jump and let’s just that in a game where it’s impossible to juggle enemies into the air, it’s only situationally useful in terms of combat.
Claw is probably the character I like to play as the most out of all 3 characters mostly because dashing through the corridors of the Darm tower at Super speed dealing with enemies along the way brings that constant exhilarating sense of motion which has become titular of the Ys series core identity. And even tho the rest of his toolkit leaves a lot to be desired, I was more than satisfied with his base moveset as well as his boost mode which fully turns him into a demon dealing a truck load of damage but making you even more prone to ass-beating, an interesting risk vs reward mechanic in my opinion.
But the icing on the cake for me is definitely the story of Claw, if you played Hugo’s campaign there isn’t any mystery towards his identity as it is revealed right from the onset that he is Hugo’s brother who mysteriously disappeared after the demon invasion on Ys a couple of years before the events of the game. What led this man to shun his previous identity, his weapon and the pledge he gave to the goddess to join the demons in their relentless assault against the city of Ys ? And how does his story tie to the wider lore of the franchise up to that point ?
Well that’s for you to discover, I think Toal is perhaps one of the only story worth experiencing blind in this game especially if you’re familiar with the original two titles as its doing some pretty interesting thing with the continuity and tying up what you’re doing to stuff Adol will eventually interact with in the future game. The ending of that route is the type of ending to give a complete boomer who got hooked on playing Ys as a kid a complete full hard-on at how everything comes back together in the end and even though I’m not a boomer who played these games as a kid (I only discovered them in 2022), the ending of that route and the game as a whole gave so many fucking chills god I love Ys OG setting.
As you can probably guess by now, I think Ys Origins is one of the few Ys games with a remarkably well told and interesting story thanks in no small part to its tie to the original two games to which I have a lot of appreciation for especially its lore. The game often throws retro-active reference to the first two games either through its story moments, puzzles or even the items you come across which are artifacts Adol eventually uses himself in Ys 1&2 which just has a nice bit of continuity which reminded me a lot of what Dawn of Ys did. But whereas Dawn, as awesome as it was, could seem like fanfiction in the way it retcons a lot of stuff into its own plot, here the team at Falcom did a valiant effort to respect the sanctity and the mystic of the original game essence.
So many times prequel mostly exist to ruin the magic of the original title of which they’re supposed to pay homage to but not Ys Origins, Ys Origins is a fantastic companion piece to Ys 1&2, you could imagine they would’ve shoved more of the modern canon stuff into the main storyline but I’m glad they didn’t push it too hard especially if some people are just interested in these games. While the side-cast is kinda there for the ride with not many of them standing out, Feena and Rheah got some much needed amount of extra characterization and background added to them and It’s done in a way which only reinforced my love for these iconic characters rather than ruining them with pointless details or some stupidly subversive plot twist like it’s often the case in way too many productions. I should give a special shoutout to Rheah in particular who didn’t really have much as far as character goes in the original 2 games but here got a lot more presence in the narrative and even a pretty cute romance story with Claw which was surprising to see.
Setting the entire story inside of Darm’s Tower might probably sound like a bad idea as far as visual variety goes especially in a series which thrived on exploring varied and mysterious environments but I found that they did a really solid job reimagining one of the most iconic location in the series for the modern age. Which makes me realize that in all of my fanboyism, I forgot to talk about the overall level design of the game as well as the different bosses you confront throughout your ascension of the Darm Tower.
In my Oath in Felghana review, I’ve mentioned that one of the unfortunate side-effects of basing the game on a game which had a more rigid level-based structure kinda took away from the feeling of adventure and freedom that the previous game offered ! However, I’ve also said that such a level design had its place in the Ark Engine system which had more of an arcade vibe with the combo meters and the general faster flow of the game and that it wasn’t bad as much as it was restrictive. Well Ys Origins kinda falls right into those same trappings, diving head straight into them like an olympic swimmer. The game does have an upgrade system giving you new abilities and tool for your move set but unlike Oath in which it gave the world a sort of Metroidvania feel to it as it was often advised to go back to old areas to get items and complete side quest here in Ys Origins, these new abilities only serves as keys to open locks in the areas you got them with very little incentive to actually go back to previous areas.
Some people might think that it’s a good thing actually as it doesn’t needlessly waste your time with pointless detour but some people might also miss the pleasure of exploration the franchise is known for and thus while I don’t think it’s a flaw of the game, I could potentially understand how divisive this could be. But, on the other hand, Ys Origins was the most popular title series for a reason and its level design is perhaps the best in the entire series.
You may think that an entire game set in one place will eventually become boring but thankfully, this is a vastly overhauled version of the Tower from Ys 1&2 with each floor serving as its own dungeon so to speak complete with unique combat encounters, puzzles, platforming challenges, level design gimmick and themes to each of the 7 floors which compose your ascension of the wretched tower ! And I think they did a more than fantastic job with each of them in my opinion. Unlike Oath which felt the need to incorporate a lot of frankly questionable 2.5D sections to parallel the original Ys III, here the level designers took their stick out of their asses and made the most of the game 3D nature and the verticality that comes with setting your game inside a goddamn tower.
While none of the areas in the game reaches the same heights as Valestein Castle from Oath in my opinion, I think the level design here is a lot more consistent and a lot more creative with even some neat reinterpretation of Ys 1 plot beat like the demon corridor or the hall of mirror the later of which definitely is one of the highlights of the game in terms of set pieces. There’s a deeper sense of cinematography and flow to each dungeon and even if they all share some similar assets to keep the visuals consistent, the game always keep surprising us with some neat obstacles, also falling in this game rarely end up in you having to reclimb an entire area like in Ys VI or Oath to a lesser extend, making platformer that much more smoother in my opinion.
The only area I’m not too big on is the big desert area in the middle because while “Silent Sands” is a banger track I do think that the area by itself far overstays its welcome which isn’t helped by this being the area with most plot shit and backtracking happening slowing the game pace to a crawl for the duration of the floor especially in between two relatively good areas (one of which is an actual fun water level, I know crazy). Another issue that came to my attention while I was playing the game is that in the Swamp floor, the game stop having a natural level curve, the game isn’t super reliant on grinding as long as you don’t avoid enemies but once you reach the Mantis I always happened to be underleveled and doing piss damage to it and had to two a second run of the area to grind a bit, an unfortunate oversight which doesn’t ruin the game for me but is worth noting.
So the general level design is excellent and perhaps some of the best Falcom has ever put out but how about the bosses, well…
THEY’RE FREAKING AWESOME
Ys Origins easily has the best selection of bosses in the entire series only rivaled by Dawn of Ys in my opinion. They really nailed the balance this time between not having too long or annoying patterns while still giving the player the freedom to fight them on equal footing. The only “bad” boss is the plant in the desert area (yeah this area again… told you it was the black spot of the game) and maybe the final boss of Hugo and Yunica’s route for being way too damn easy but even then, they far outclass the selection of bosses seen in previous titles.
And I also think that’s quite amazing that each bosses you fight in this are for the most part reimagining of the ones from Ys 1&2 with even some continuity between how they look there and how they’ll eventually look in those games (like the big zombie head from II but this time it’s a big fire giant that’s not a putrefied corpse at all until you fuck his shit up).
On top of being really mechanically solid, the bosses this time around are also quite spectacular, much more than what Falcom is usually willing to do on their limited budget. The Centipede fight (perhaps THE most iconic boss of the game) is a great example of this, you might even confuse it for an Ys Origins original because of how lame its original incarnation was but here it’s such a freaking amazing set piece.
Your character enters the room and the Centipede is hiding in the wall then fucking boom it comes out and the arena is this Crash Bandicoot style circular arena and you have on top of the Centipede to break all of its individual parts or trying to get him from the ground with your thunder attack while dodging a million projectile which gets increasingly more and more overwhelming as the fight progresses. It’s so fucking kino and most of the big bosses in this game operates on the same logic like the Mantis which is this really cool boss which changes the game camera angle as he jumps and fucks around summoning a thousand minions. Suffice to say that the bosses in this game are not only super cool to figure out as boss fights but also freaking cool as just spectacle bosses in general. Like I said, while there’s one or two bosses that are weaker than others, most of them are actually quite excellent and superbly reimagine mechanics of the first game in the Ark Engine.
But the game doesn’t just have big bosses, it also has a lot of smaller bosses mostly against human opponents. I feel like Falcom saw the generally positive reception people had on the 2 Chester Fights in Oath in Felghana and wanted to capitalize on the hype it created. Mechanically speaking, I’d say that these are some of the most interesting bosses, mostly because you’re pretty much on equal footing with them and they feel less “Mario Bossy” if that makes sense ? Much like you they don’t have invincibility frames and can be hurt at any time, they have a burst mode and spells of their own, some of them are actually pretty damn challenging.
However, while I commend the effort, none of them reaches the climatic epicness of Chester 2 in terms of complexity or just raw hype because a lot of those boss fights are against pretty random and forgettable side-characters, I wish they kept the human bosses solely for rival fights between the three characters only, there’s a huge missed opportunity there for some pretty cool stuff but it’s not the main bulk of these human fights (you don’t get a single fight against Yunica like wow she’s so left out that’s crazy…).
So that’s it right ? We pretty much found the perfect Ys game? Excellent level design, excellent bosses, excellent variety in gameplay thanks to different playable characters and a deep respect for the series legacy that can be felt all throughout the work (did I also mention the game has great music too ?? I mean at this point it’s kinda redundant since they’ve been chaining home runs on that front for quite some time and I’m not really good at explaining why music is good, call my man MB for that, I’m sure he can cook up a better video essay on the subject than me !). So what’s the catch ?
Well, I think it’s time to address the big elephant in the room, which is this game's strange structure and how it affects its pacing. Because for how much good content there is there and even with the different characters switching up the gameplay…
You still have to play the game 3 separate times in order to get a full grasp on the story, and witnessing its true ending and to me that’s a big fucking issue !
See you don’t actually switch up characters, those are essentially 3 different routes much like Resident Evil with its Leon A, Clair B, Tofu Guy bullshit. And look, on one hand, can I really complain about the repeated playthroughs ? One of my favorite games of all time is Mega Man X4 which is the first time in the series that you can either play as X or Zero and in order to experience the full game, you essentially have to play it two times. It’s the same stages, mostly the same bosses but instead of playing as a guy who shoots lemons, you play as the hottest laser sword wielding robot the world has ever seen and he plays like a charm.
So technically speaking, I don’t fundamentally have an issue with but many people within the community do, if there’s one thing that Origins is unanimously criticized for is the 3 required playthroughs to reach the true ending, it was such a massive complain that on PC and on PC only, you only have to do 2 of the 3 routes and I mean by that point, you might as well do the third one amirite ?
But see, the main difference between MMX4, Resident Evil 2 and this game is the time commitment. Oath in Felghana and pretty much any Ys game up to that point except III an V last for about 10 to 12h and even if Falcom and their fans might disagree, this is the ideal length for an Ys game. Just a short, intense 10h adventure to occupy an afternoon and that’s what makes them so compelling and replayable because you can put it down and come back to it later on higher difficulty if you feel like killing some times. They might have a decent enough story to get interested in or at least an interesting narration to motivate yourself to keep going but once you experienced everything the game has to offer once, it’s not gonna change the second time through for your pretty eyes ! And it’s not a “change in perspective” or a slightly different gameplay that’s gonna change your mind about it.
And that 10 to 12h time commitment is alright for a single game… but what if I told you that it was also the average length of one route of this game ! And that’s when you slowly start to realize… oh shit really ? Look, I’m definitely making a mountain out of a molehill, but the reason why I love Oath so much is that it’s a one and done deal, all banger no filler game, but here it’s a bit more difficult to defend that position. A single run of RE2 will last you maybe 6 to 7h, a single run of MMX4 will last you like 4 to 5h and that game also doesn’t have like a huge amount of dialogues you have to sit through which interrupts the flow of the game.
And look as much as I’ve praised the story so far and it’s cool to see different perspectives, the main structure of it all stays the same ! You go through the same obstacles, the desert area is a slog for all characters with a shit load of cutscenes and dialogue slowing it down to a crawl, the same 2nd run of the swamp to get properly leveled for the mantis boss. All of them have to have a talk with Yunica’s ghost dad for some goddamn reasons when the dude only has any sort of relevance in her route. You may say that you could just play one of the routes and leave the rest for later but then you won’t be experiencing the full story which I believe is worth a damn this time around even though one is essentially filler (sorry Yunica…). I still think the actual content is good mind you, but it’s an odd-case of having so little of it that they have to spread it thin to make the most of it, I would’ve liked just a tad bit more variety in the level design and structure to accommodate to each character skills and arc to not make the entire process as redundant but hey, game is still fun in the end but I can definitely see how playing the same game 3 times would be a deal breaker to some people.
Asides from that and a couple of smaller complaint, I do think that Ys Origins deserves the cult status that it has today, it’s a fantastic companion piece to the original game that will greatly please fans of the original game without losing the initial magic of the duology and it’s also a fantastic entry point for anyone wanting to get into the series and who knows maybe the ending will make some who were more reluctant to try out the original two games as well as the rest of the franchise.
The New Team at Falcom has succeeded in creating a modern cult classic which many people remember as fondly as the original two games, adding to its legacy and ending the Ark Engine trilogy on a bang. The entire project just oozes from the passion of its developers composed mostly of older fans of Falcom finally getting the chance to finally have their piece of the puzzle and I think that Ys couldn’t dream of a better game to pay homage to its 20 years of legacy.
But all good things must come to an end and the developers weren’t going to keep improving on the formula, after all they already perfected it and as much as I enjoy the Ark Engine games, the series needs to move forward and diversify itself. Even if it was a pretty short lived but intense era, next time, we’re properly continuing Adol’s adventure and this adventure is about to be a party (system !) !
2024
I think that we, as a society
Should make more games about tiny girls using a drill to do platforming and stuff
But alas, we only got Drill Dozer, Gurumin and this
We're a couple of steps away from the perfect TTGL videogame
Should make more games about tiny girls using a drill to do platforming and stuff
But alas, we only got Drill Dozer, Gurumin and this
We're a couple of steps away from the perfect TTGL videogame
Oath In Felghana : Ys perfected ?
If there’s one game so far that we constantly bashed over perhaps unfairly it’s Ys III : Wanderers from Ys ! And look, I’m sorry to all the people who enjoy the original iteration of Adol’s third adventure, after all why would they keep re-releasing the game later down the line if it was that much of a failure ? Well suffice to say that Ys III marked the end of Ys presence in the west for a long while, only returning to western shores with Ys VI in the 2000’s thanks to the help of Konami porting the game on consoles which was only a brief return but something was about to change within Falcom after the release of this game.
See, initially after releasing Ys 1&2 Eternal (the semi-complete remake of Ys 1&2 on which the Chronicles version available on steam is based on) the natural next course of action for the company was to do something similar with Ys III, pretty much taking the base game of Ys III and give it a graphical overhaul as well as some slight gameplay and progression adjustment. But the younger staff at Falcom were tired of releasing ports and remakes and decided to take things into their own hand, this led of course to the creation of 2 new franchises (Zwei and Gurumin), a new episode of the Ys franchise as well as the start of a new legend of Heroes subseries : Trails in the Sky.
All these projects will see moderate but significant enough success in Japan where the PC market wasn’t quite dead yet at the turn of the millennium and later down the line a small console was about to push Falcom even deeply into the top of its niche : The Playstation Portable. It’s simple every early 2000’s releases of Falcom will see ports and re-release on the PSP and thanks to many western publishers being interested in Falcom’s output and some good old word of mouth, Falcom went from a company struggling to revive from its ashes to a company somewhat recognized for their low budget but full of heart title.
But the idea of remaking Ys III was still in the mind of Falcom and thus, they decided that instead of making yet another overhauled port of Ys III since it was kind of the series blacksheep, they decided instead on completely remaking Ys III from the ground up. And thus, Ys : The Oath in Felghana was born !
There’s a belief I have when it comes to game remakes that I think should be widely more considered in this industry. Our society has commonly accepted videogames to be an art form as valid as cinema or literature and yet the consumerist nature of gaming and its tie to the evolution of technology forces us to always seek to upgrade our games to current standard. This leads to either a completely original product based on the original and only borrowing its rough plot outline and iconography, an enhanced version of the same game with different graphics and slight gameplay rebalancing (which would be closer to a remaster than a so called remake) or the more rare occurrence like FF VII Remake to be some sort of a meta-sequel and an extension to the original made first and foremost for people already familiar with the original (but still sell itself as something a newcomer can jump into no problem which is schizophrenia as fuck).
However, my issue with this lies in the fact that we mostly do that to good games, games that are considered classics of the medium and that’s where I’m really confused because if those games are classics ? Why do we feel like replacing them in the modern discourse with a new shinier version stripped of its context and mechanics ? Is there a point really ?
And this led me to another reflection. If the core idea of remaking something is to upgrade a videogame to be more palatable to modern audiences, why do that with good games ? Of course, the reason is oftentime “Money” but there’s also this deeper sense of hypocrisy in the gaming community that we wish the games we used to love could be as good as we remember them being ? If they made us feel something back then, they could make us feel something now but also we don’t want to be reminded of the rougher reality that games technically and mechanically ages. But if games can be good enough to become classics, why remake them in the first place ? That means they’re technically timeless, technically they’re a piece of history worth going back to and maybe modernizing it will make it lose its meaning rather than add to it ?
As you can probably tell, I’m not a big fan of remakes, but there’s one thing that I’m open to, remakes of games that never got that chance to shine under the spotlight. In our childhood we all had these games which we enjoyed but can’t really be called “all-time classics” and personally I think it’s much more interesting to see a game which had the potential to be great actually being given the chance to prove itself with a second take on the same ideas. I believe Ys III despite my virulent review of it was that kind of game for many people. In an era where the selection of games were pretty limited and accessibility was even worse than it is now, people just used to cherish what little games they could actually get their hands on and if that game happened to be Ys III well… You could be playing better but you could be playing worse really.
But Ys Oath in Felghana doesn’t just remake one of the series most infamous titles, it takes that blight upon the series legacy and literally turns a pile of shit into diamond because Oath in Felghana might be the best Ys game we’ve covered so far and I mean it !
Oath in Felghana is a remake of Ys III but first and foremost it’s the second game in the Ark Engine trilogy. Following the advance and game design prowess of its predecessors, Oath in Felghana sets out to literally perfect the formula left by its forefather. As such the gameplay segment of this review will be shorter than usual because most of what Adol can do in Ys VI, he can do here and yes even the Dash Jump which is still possible to do but not required anymore to clear certain gap or explore, it’s now just a speedrun tech like god intended.
However that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t change anything because on top of Ys VI’s mechanics a couple of new things have been added which greatly enhances the flow and overall dynamism of the game. Now the game has a sort of combo meter which doubles as an EXP multiplier, the more combo you make and the higher the multiplier is which can raise the EXP gain up to 2x the normal amount as long as you keep the combo going but that’s not all.
As you mash through enemies some of them will drop stat enhancing bonuses which works similarly to the combo meter whereas if you keep collecting said bonus the multiplier gets bigger and bigger as long as you don’t break out the chain. These bonuses can range from strength, defense and MP regeneration speed and once all of them are maxed out, you truly feel like an unstoppable god tearing and shredding through monsters which all comes back to that old comment I made about the Ys series pretty much being “Zelda for Doom-brained people”. This single addition to the gameplay really changes everything, whereas Ys VI was a slower more methodical game, this game wastes no time and the game feel is immaculate.
Another thing which pushes the players to do well is the boost meter, once full Adol can rush towards his enemies with doubled strength and speed which is very satisfying to activate.
Magic also makes a return, no more sword style changes this time around unfortunately but a selection of magic rings adding new moves to Adol arsenal which replaces the terrible magic ring system of the original game while making shoutouts to them. A grand total of 3 Magic Rings can be found throughout the game, one is a fire ring which allows you to throw fireballs in rapid succession or charge it for a bigger blast, the other is a wind ring giving Adol a circular attack which can be used both on the ground and in the air to cover long distances and last longer and is wider as you charge it (easily one of the best addition to Adol’s toolkit) and last but not least a thunder ring which allows you to punch through wall with a big fist which gives you a couple seconds of invincibility frames while doing so.
And those invincibility frames are gonna come useful because the game seriously doesn’t fuck around, this might actually be one of the more challenging Ys games in terms of difficulty even on Normal Mode, one of the reasons to this difficulty switch is the fact that you can’t stack up on healing items anymore, in fact you can’t use healing items period. The only way to heal is to get healing herbs dropping from enemies which automatically heals a set amount or rest at one of the game's various save points. On top of that most of the enemies especially in the later stage of the games are much more aggressive and can easily overwhelm you if you’re not careful combine that with the level design having a bit more hazard than Ys VI did and you get a game which doesn’t fuck around.
Of course this means that this time around you actually have to master bosses pattern and defeat them without a get out of jail free card that can heal you mid-battles and when it comes to bosses I will say that Oath in Felghana has quite a lot of hit and miss in that department. Of course, all of them are better than their original counterparts and I will even say that most of them are actually better than the ones in Ys VI but one thing that kinda bothers me about some of them is just the sheer length of their pattern. Most bosses in Oath have a very small window in which you can actually attack them, the first boss in the game in fact is a prime example of this and is a bit too steep of a difficulty curve if you ask me for being so soon in the game. Some bosses like the Bird, the Fire Dragon and the Ice Dragon just plain don’t fucking work with how the colisions are handled in that game.
The bird and his goddamn flipping panel still gives me nightmare to this day because of how annoying it is to fight, the Fire Dragon just happens to be really tanky for no discernable reasons which makes the fight drag for longer than it should be and the Ice Dragon isn’t difficult per say but you can feel that this boss was designed so you can make heavy use of the thunder ring invincibility frames which isn’t all that natural of a solution and his patters are kind of all over the damn place.
But other than these few bad apples, I found the good boss to be especially good, shoutouts to your second encounter with Chester which might actually be my favorite boss fight in the entire series. Ys isn’t really known for having boss fights against human opponents but the Ark Engine had more of them and Chester II is an excellent example of an epic showdown between two swordsmen, his patterns are fast but fair and overpowering him is very satisfying. I wish more bosses in the series were designed like the Chester fight cause it’s pretty damn good in my opinion.
I also really liked the other non-human bosses aside from the ones I’ve mentioned, on average I’d say the boss design can range from either annoying or really good but all of them are especially challenging for the reasons I’ve mentioned earlier.
As far as the gameplay goes, Oath in Felghana managed to fully understand what it means to be an Ys title in the modern age, the gameplay is a constantly flowing, never-stopping pumping action game which feels fresh, modern and exciting to play the whole way through. Every element of the gameplay just works and even if some people might still complain about minor things such as platforming not being that great once again, I can’t deny that the gameplay here is simply superb and easily the best the series has to offer.
But it wouldn’t be that amazing of a title if it didn’t also have something Ys has been known for since its first entry aka a solid story to motivate the player to uncover the mysteries of the lands. Much like the original game, the story here is rather straightforward and at first not really that interesting. The game follows the rough outline set by the original to a T, Dogi and Adol arrives in Felghana and meets up with Elena the local Adol James Bond Girl of the week, some tyrannical king is messing around trying to claim a bunch of artifact which could potentially awaken an ancient demon and Adol is on a wild goose chase to stop them while encountering his right-hand man Chester along the way.
It was a simple and basic story in 1989 and it’s still relatively as basic and simple in 2005 when the game came out, however I will say that the actual script of the game this time around isn’t nearly as hilariously bad as it was in the original. This is due in part to a much better localization work (courtesy of XSeed) but also a significantly enhanced and upgraded script to give the entire story a bit more flavor. One area in which we can see this improvement is with the main hub town of the game Redmont. Redmont in the original was a place you had to go back to from time to time to progress the story but as a place it wasn’t particularly interesting, NPC’s were forgettable and most of its iconic nature was due to its rather catchy music but here, the town got expanded significantly and is much more alive than in the original.
The game was released a solid year after the release of Trails in the Sky, the first game in the Trails series and it shows ! It’s in this game that the two series started to mutually influence each other and I will say that in the case of Oath in Felghana it’s definitely for the better here. What Felghana took from the Trails franchise is its intricate sense of detail within its script, each NPCs have their own name, their own life, their own routine and their dialogue changes for every advancement in the plot encouraging the player to check-in on them from time to time to experience micro-level story arcs or participate in side-quest.
However because the setting of the game is much smaller in scale, I think it works especially better here than in the Trails franchise, sure Trails has a more ambitious setting but if there’s one thing that I learned from playing those game is that the “Falcom Formula” tends to work better in the context of a small hub you come back to rather than an entire country which inhabitants kinda come and go and most thing they say enters one ear and come out the other. Another thing which reinforces this sentiment is the fact that each character has their own character portraits and even their own bit of voice acting which definitely helps imprinting Redmont as one of the more memorable Falcom towns in their catalog.
One thing I’m happy the game hasn’t taken from Trails (yet) is the way it handled side-quest, I haven’t really gone too deeply about side-content in this review but Ys Oath in Felghana kinda retains a very 90’s approach to going about side-content. From time to time as you check out on NPC or find new trinkets in dungeon, you can find side-quest none of which are particularly memorable (aside from one about an old lady losing her son and which was already a quest in the original game but much more developed here) but they add some cool content and some nice incentive to go explore and interact with the world as much as possible. While it’s true that it results it some content being missable, I never really truly mind that as it just feels more natural than putting those on a quest board which make side-content feels like chores instead of something you want to properly engage with and feel like a nice surprise when you find out about them.
I did mention that the game has voice acting which I will comment on, the game has both Japanese and English dubs, I went with both and I must admit that as much as the Japanese dub is excellent, I do like the somewhat goofier tone of the English voice acting which reminds me of how even goofier the original script was but one thing I think definitely sells it for me is the British Narrator !
See since Adol doesn’t talk, all of his interactions are written in green-text describing what he’s doing or saying but some genius at Xseed thought that it was worth adding voice acting over and it’s done through some Stanley Parable-esque narrator sarcastically reading the lines and I just find that fucking hilarious. The idea that everywhere Adol goes there’s an out-of-bound British dude hiding in the bushes narrating his entire life is just so perfect and so in-line with the idea we’re experiencing Adol story through his travel diaries that I wonder why it didn’t immediately became a mainstay of the franchise after this point.
As for the actual story however, I think it’s just simply told better, with more characters and more details to flesh out the setting and several other subtle things to tie it better to the rest of the franchise which started with Ys VI but continues here. Ys III was never meant to be an Ys game originally and so its story couldn’t really connect to the wider lore of the franchise and for the longest time it remained pretty separated from the rest as a standalone product. Here the game puts much more of an emphasis on its central prophecy and lore while putting Adol and Chester in the forefront of the story which is handled way better this time around. Even Dogi’s relationship with Elena and Chester is fleshed out more and it definitely feels like there’s an actual level of care and importance here.
Chester isn’t as goofy or as one note of an antagonist as he was in the original, he’s a goal oriented, cold as fuck motherfucker who’s ready to do anything to fulfill the prophecy in order to avenge his sister and his village. And it’s done with much more subtlety and finesse this time around, with climactic confrontation in the form of 2 boss fights which weren’t present in the original but also a lot of subtle foreshadowing about his true intentions as well as his doubts in carrying said plan. Even Elena is much better written this time around, she’s a sassy tomboy who cares deeply about her brother and Dogi’s well-being and is ready to pack a punch when deemed necessary.
Elena from Oath is one of the most underrated heroine in the franchise in my opinion and my only real regret is that all of these cool fanarts of her carrying Chester’s sword and armor isn’t an actual thing in the plot but some weird inside joke of the developers who likes to dress her up in many different outfits from across the series as a reward for completing boss rush mode in set difficulties (canonical cosplayer girl yippee !).
Even the progression of the story is slightly touched upon with some things arriving out of order from the original which lead me to talk about the overall structure and level design of the game which I think is one of the game's biggest strengths as well as its weakness. While the game is completely remade in 3D with that classic isometric view it is nonetheless mostly based on a 2D Action game which were separated in levels rather than a big world to explore. And even thought the game does a lot of effort to make the world feels less segmented (with the addition of a central overworld allowing you to listen to : “The Boys who had Wings” for more than 10 seconds), it nonetheless feels like a succession of random set pieces than a natural world which you can explore freely with tons of secrets to find.
Unlike Ys VI which took place on an Island and therefore could allow itself to be a bit more exploratory, here the exploration is kept to a minimum in favor of focusing on environments which feels more like levels than proper dungeon. This isn’t to say that it’s bad though, the game has definitely more of an arcadey feel than its predecessors already with the additions of all these combo meters to fill up and this structure definitely doesn’t feel at odds with the rest of the game. What does bother just a tad bit with the level design is that sometimes the game has troubles between being a 3D action game and wanting to pay homage to the original level design. While some areas take full advantage of the game being 3D, some areas definitely don’t have as much depth and are closer to 2.5 D than fully 3D environment, I like the attention to detail and you can point out some areas to how they were made in the original but it does create a bit of issues when it comes to the freedom of player movement.
The Ice Cave in particular is probably the worst area of the game, with lots of slipping surfaces, enemies that take way too much space and are way too aggressive which doesn’t mesh well with the 2.5d environments and a lot of pits you can fall into which brings you to a lower level and reminding you of the worse of Ys VI level design. But when the game hits, oh boy it does hit because now I need to talk about Valestein Castle !!!!
Valestein Castle was already the most iconic location of the original, featuring multiple paths, a spike in difficulty, multiple traps and hazards and literally the best fucking music in the entire goddamn franchise. But here everything about it screams pure fucking ludokino ! It’s easily to this day the best dungeon ever created by Falcom. When people tell me that Falcom can’t do good level design or even good dungeon design after witnessing their more modern output, I always point at this fucking dungeon in particular because it shows that back in the day Falcom was actually stacked with semi-competent level design which were able to put their whole pussy into making great and amazing dungeons to explore.
Valestein Castle has everything you could ask for, challenging combat encounters, a vast and open-ended structure, multiple subsections within it, a somewhat metroidvania style structure, memorable locales and set pieces with various traps, platforming challenges and lots of story events to keep you on your toe and of course that banging fucking soundtrack.
The Sight of Adol, this badass adventurer rushing to assault the castle of the local tyrannical king, jumping and slashing his way through countless corridors filled with traps and deadly enemies while rescuing the villagers you came to know and grew an attachment to and stopping Chester’s revenge plot from claiming more lives than necessary ending with a climatic climb on top of a clocktower, multiple boss encounters one of the best fight in the game with Chester and even the rare good instances of a good twist villain in Falcom’s history is truly awe inspiring and truly hype.
Valestein Castle is so massive and iconic that it feels like it could’ve easily been the climax of the game if it wasn’t for the aforementioned last minute twist which exist to tie the remake to the plotline of the original in some pretty clever way in my opinion at least, and while the final dungeon isn’t bad per say, it definitely pales in comparison to Valestein Castle in terms of how iconic the entire thing is and much like the original, the game ends on a somewhat less bombastic note but the final boss is actually pretty fun if I’m being honest so It’s aight.
I’ve praised the music of Valestein Castle, but the rest of the OST is also rather fantastic, one of the rare saving grace of the original was its soundtrack (to which you can listen to multiple version of it by switching it out in the pause menu) and here it’s still one of the best Falcom OST. Originally composed by Mieko Ishikawa which succeeded Yuzo Koshiro after its departure, the new arrangement were handled by Yukihiro Jindo and his team which did a fantastic job breeding new life into these tracks, in fact I’d say this is some of Falcom’s best arrangement work they’ve ever done when it comes to remaking a game. I also like the fact they didn’t play it safe and weren’t afraid to deviate from the original composition, Redmont theme is calmer and more whimsical, Boys had wings now has violins and Valestein Castle feels like the same track was put on steroid but even some of the less notable tracks were given a lot of care and if anything I just like the sheer variety of the composition here.
Oath in Felghana is what I personally consider to be the platonic ideal of the perfect Ys title, it’s a game which is short and to the point while remaining intense through on through. It’s a game which breathes with an air of adventure and freedom, it’s a game of constant motion rarely stopping to smell the roses, an all banger no filler affair which is fun, exciting, and amazing to play or even replay. Oath in Felghana is a game I often replay for fun because it’s simply just too damn fun and not wasting your time in doing so ! It has great level designs, amazing music and the most fun gameplay in the series yet !
The only real thing that stops Oath in Felghana from being a true JRPG classic much like its forefather is the things it unfortunately had to carry out of the original like a pretty barebone and unoriginal story which was modified to be better but only ends up as being serviceable. The setting of Felghana isn’t the most interesting one in the franchise either and I would even dare to say it’s a bit too vanilla for my taste despite the many improvements that were made to the script and overall direction to make it feel more lived in. It’s not a bad story but it’s clear that the gameplay, the level design, the music and just the general experience of playing the game does a lot of the heavy lifting to make it work.
But as it stands, it’s one of my favorite titles in the franchise and I even consider it to be one of its peak. But this isn’t the end of our journey with the Ark Engine as we still have one more game to cover, the 10th anniversary of the Ys franchise was arriving soon and as such it was time to go back in time ! Back to Ys’s Origins !! See you next time for another Falcom banger
If there’s one game so far that we constantly bashed over perhaps unfairly it’s Ys III : Wanderers from Ys ! And look, I’m sorry to all the people who enjoy the original iteration of Adol’s third adventure, after all why would they keep re-releasing the game later down the line if it was that much of a failure ? Well suffice to say that Ys III marked the end of Ys presence in the west for a long while, only returning to western shores with Ys VI in the 2000’s thanks to the help of Konami porting the game on consoles which was only a brief return but something was about to change within Falcom after the release of this game.
See, initially after releasing Ys 1&2 Eternal (the semi-complete remake of Ys 1&2 on which the Chronicles version available on steam is based on) the natural next course of action for the company was to do something similar with Ys III, pretty much taking the base game of Ys III and give it a graphical overhaul as well as some slight gameplay and progression adjustment. But the younger staff at Falcom were tired of releasing ports and remakes and decided to take things into their own hand, this led of course to the creation of 2 new franchises (Zwei and Gurumin), a new episode of the Ys franchise as well as the start of a new legend of Heroes subseries : Trails in the Sky.
All these projects will see moderate but significant enough success in Japan where the PC market wasn’t quite dead yet at the turn of the millennium and later down the line a small console was about to push Falcom even deeply into the top of its niche : The Playstation Portable. It’s simple every early 2000’s releases of Falcom will see ports and re-release on the PSP and thanks to many western publishers being interested in Falcom’s output and some good old word of mouth, Falcom went from a company struggling to revive from its ashes to a company somewhat recognized for their low budget but full of heart title.
But the idea of remaking Ys III was still in the mind of Falcom and thus, they decided that instead of making yet another overhauled port of Ys III since it was kind of the series blacksheep, they decided instead on completely remaking Ys III from the ground up. And thus, Ys : The Oath in Felghana was born !
There’s a belief I have when it comes to game remakes that I think should be widely more considered in this industry. Our society has commonly accepted videogames to be an art form as valid as cinema or literature and yet the consumerist nature of gaming and its tie to the evolution of technology forces us to always seek to upgrade our games to current standard. This leads to either a completely original product based on the original and only borrowing its rough plot outline and iconography, an enhanced version of the same game with different graphics and slight gameplay rebalancing (which would be closer to a remaster than a so called remake) or the more rare occurrence like FF VII Remake to be some sort of a meta-sequel and an extension to the original made first and foremost for people already familiar with the original (but still sell itself as something a newcomer can jump into no problem which is schizophrenia as fuck).
However, my issue with this lies in the fact that we mostly do that to good games, games that are considered classics of the medium and that’s where I’m really confused because if those games are classics ? Why do we feel like replacing them in the modern discourse with a new shinier version stripped of its context and mechanics ? Is there a point really ?
And this led me to another reflection. If the core idea of remaking something is to upgrade a videogame to be more palatable to modern audiences, why do that with good games ? Of course, the reason is oftentime “Money” but there’s also this deeper sense of hypocrisy in the gaming community that we wish the games we used to love could be as good as we remember them being ? If they made us feel something back then, they could make us feel something now but also we don’t want to be reminded of the rougher reality that games technically and mechanically ages. But if games can be good enough to become classics, why remake them in the first place ? That means they’re technically timeless, technically they’re a piece of history worth going back to and maybe modernizing it will make it lose its meaning rather than add to it ?
As you can probably tell, I’m not a big fan of remakes, but there’s one thing that I’m open to, remakes of games that never got that chance to shine under the spotlight. In our childhood we all had these games which we enjoyed but can’t really be called “all-time classics” and personally I think it’s much more interesting to see a game which had the potential to be great actually being given the chance to prove itself with a second take on the same ideas. I believe Ys III despite my virulent review of it was that kind of game for many people. In an era where the selection of games were pretty limited and accessibility was even worse than it is now, people just used to cherish what little games they could actually get their hands on and if that game happened to be Ys III well… You could be playing better but you could be playing worse really.
But Ys Oath in Felghana doesn’t just remake one of the series most infamous titles, it takes that blight upon the series legacy and literally turns a pile of shit into diamond because Oath in Felghana might be the best Ys game we’ve covered so far and I mean it !
Oath in Felghana is a remake of Ys III but first and foremost it’s the second game in the Ark Engine trilogy. Following the advance and game design prowess of its predecessors, Oath in Felghana sets out to literally perfect the formula left by its forefather. As such the gameplay segment of this review will be shorter than usual because most of what Adol can do in Ys VI, he can do here and yes even the Dash Jump which is still possible to do but not required anymore to clear certain gap or explore, it’s now just a speedrun tech like god intended.
However that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t change anything because on top of Ys VI’s mechanics a couple of new things have been added which greatly enhances the flow and overall dynamism of the game. Now the game has a sort of combo meter which doubles as an EXP multiplier, the more combo you make and the higher the multiplier is which can raise the EXP gain up to 2x the normal amount as long as you keep the combo going but that’s not all.
As you mash through enemies some of them will drop stat enhancing bonuses which works similarly to the combo meter whereas if you keep collecting said bonus the multiplier gets bigger and bigger as long as you don’t break out the chain. These bonuses can range from strength, defense and MP regeneration speed and once all of them are maxed out, you truly feel like an unstoppable god tearing and shredding through monsters which all comes back to that old comment I made about the Ys series pretty much being “Zelda for Doom-brained people”. This single addition to the gameplay really changes everything, whereas Ys VI was a slower more methodical game, this game wastes no time and the game feel is immaculate.
Another thing which pushes the players to do well is the boost meter, once full Adol can rush towards his enemies with doubled strength and speed which is very satisfying to activate.
Magic also makes a return, no more sword style changes this time around unfortunately but a selection of magic rings adding new moves to Adol arsenal which replaces the terrible magic ring system of the original game while making shoutouts to them. A grand total of 3 Magic Rings can be found throughout the game, one is a fire ring which allows you to throw fireballs in rapid succession or charge it for a bigger blast, the other is a wind ring giving Adol a circular attack which can be used both on the ground and in the air to cover long distances and last longer and is wider as you charge it (easily one of the best addition to Adol’s toolkit) and last but not least a thunder ring which allows you to punch through wall with a big fist which gives you a couple seconds of invincibility frames while doing so.
And those invincibility frames are gonna come useful because the game seriously doesn’t fuck around, this might actually be one of the more challenging Ys games in terms of difficulty even on Normal Mode, one of the reasons to this difficulty switch is the fact that you can’t stack up on healing items anymore, in fact you can’t use healing items period. The only way to heal is to get healing herbs dropping from enemies which automatically heals a set amount or rest at one of the game's various save points. On top of that most of the enemies especially in the later stage of the games are much more aggressive and can easily overwhelm you if you’re not careful combine that with the level design having a bit more hazard than Ys VI did and you get a game which doesn’t fuck around.
Of course this means that this time around you actually have to master bosses pattern and defeat them without a get out of jail free card that can heal you mid-battles and when it comes to bosses I will say that Oath in Felghana has quite a lot of hit and miss in that department. Of course, all of them are better than their original counterparts and I will even say that most of them are actually better than the ones in Ys VI but one thing that kinda bothers me about some of them is just the sheer length of their pattern. Most bosses in Oath have a very small window in which you can actually attack them, the first boss in the game in fact is a prime example of this and is a bit too steep of a difficulty curve if you ask me for being so soon in the game. Some bosses like the Bird, the Fire Dragon and the Ice Dragon just plain don’t fucking work with how the colisions are handled in that game.
The bird and his goddamn flipping panel still gives me nightmare to this day because of how annoying it is to fight, the Fire Dragon just happens to be really tanky for no discernable reasons which makes the fight drag for longer than it should be and the Ice Dragon isn’t difficult per say but you can feel that this boss was designed so you can make heavy use of the thunder ring invincibility frames which isn’t all that natural of a solution and his patters are kind of all over the damn place.
But other than these few bad apples, I found the good boss to be especially good, shoutouts to your second encounter with Chester which might actually be my favorite boss fight in the entire series. Ys isn’t really known for having boss fights against human opponents but the Ark Engine had more of them and Chester II is an excellent example of an epic showdown between two swordsmen, his patterns are fast but fair and overpowering him is very satisfying. I wish more bosses in the series were designed like the Chester fight cause it’s pretty damn good in my opinion.
I also really liked the other non-human bosses aside from the ones I’ve mentioned, on average I’d say the boss design can range from either annoying or really good but all of them are especially challenging for the reasons I’ve mentioned earlier.
As far as the gameplay goes, Oath in Felghana managed to fully understand what it means to be an Ys title in the modern age, the gameplay is a constantly flowing, never-stopping pumping action game which feels fresh, modern and exciting to play the whole way through. Every element of the gameplay just works and even if some people might still complain about minor things such as platforming not being that great once again, I can’t deny that the gameplay here is simply superb and easily the best the series has to offer.
But it wouldn’t be that amazing of a title if it didn’t also have something Ys has been known for since its first entry aka a solid story to motivate the player to uncover the mysteries of the lands. Much like the original game, the story here is rather straightforward and at first not really that interesting. The game follows the rough outline set by the original to a T, Dogi and Adol arrives in Felghana and meets up with Elena the local Adol James Bond Girl of the week, some tyrannical king is messing around trying to claim a bunch of artifact which could potentially awaken an ancient demon and Adol is on a wild goose chase to stop them while encountering his right-hand man Chester along the way.
It was a simple and basic story in 1989 and it’s still relatively as basic and simple in 2005 when the game came out, however I will say that the actual script of the game this time around isn’t nearly as hilariously bad as it was in the original. This is due in part to a much better localization work (courtesy of XSeed) but also a significantly enhanced and upgraded script to give the entire story a bit more flavor. One area in which we can see this improvement is with the main hub town of the game Redmont. Redmont in the original was a place you had to go back to from time to time to progress the story but as a place it wasn’t particularly interesting, NPC’s were forgettable and most of its iconic nature was due to its rather catchy music but here, the town got expanded significantly and is much more alive than in the original.
The game was released a solid year after the release of Trails in the Sky, the first game in the Trails series and it shows ! It’s in this game that the two series started to mutually influence each other and I will say that in the case of Oath in Felghana it’s definitely for the better here. What Felghana took from the Trails franchise is its intricate sense of detail within its script, each NPCs have their own name, their own life, their own routine and their dialogue changes for every advancement in the plot encouraging the player to check-in on them from time to time to experience micro-level story arcs or participate in side-quest.
However because the setting of the game is much smaller in scale, I think it works especially better here than in the Trails franchise, sure Trails has a more ambitious setting but if there’s one thing that I learned from playing those game is that the “Falcom Formula” tends to work better in the context of a small hub you come back to rather than an entire country which inhabitants kinda come and go and most thing they say enters one ear and come out the other. Another thing which reinforces this sentiment is the fact that each character has their own character portraits and even their own bit of voice acting which definitely helps imprinting Redmont as one of the more memorable Falcom towns in their catalog.
One thing I’m happy the game hasn’t taken from Trails (yet) is the way it handled side-quest, I haven’t really gone too deeply about side-content in this review but Ys Oath in Felghana kinda retains a very 90’s approach to going about side-content. From time to time as you check out on NPC or find new trinkets in dungeon, you can find side-quest none of which are particularly memorable (aside from one about an old lady losing her son and which was already a quest in the original game but much more developed here) but they add some cool content and some nice incentive to go explore and interact with the world as much as possible. While it’s true that it results it some content being missable, I never really truly mind that as it just feels more natural than putting those on a quest board which make side-content feels like chores instead of something you want to properly engage with and feel like a nice surprise when you find out about them.
I did mention that the game has voice acting which I will comment on, the game has both Japanese and English dubs, I went with both and I must admit that as much as the Japanese dub is excellent, I do like the somewhat goofier tone of the English voice acting which reminds me of how even goofier the original script was but one thing I think definitely sells it for me is the British Narrator !
See since Adol doesn’t talk, all of his interactions are written in green-text describing what he’s doing or saying but some genius at Xseed thought that it was worth adding voice acting over and it’s done through some Stanley Parable-esque narrator sarcastically reading the lines and I just find that fucking hilarious. The idea that everywhere Adol goes there’s an out-of-bound British dude hiding in the bushes narrating his entire life is just so perfect and so in-line with the idea we’re experiencing Adol story through his travel diaries that I wonder why it didn’t immediately became a mainstay of the franchise after this point.
As for the actual story however, I think it’s just simply told better, with more characters and more details to flesh out the setting and several other subtle things to tie it better to the rest of the franchise which started with Ys VI but continues here. Ys III was never meant to be an Ys game originally and so its story couldn’t really connect to the wider lore of the franchise and for the longest time it remained pretty separated from the rest as a standalone product. Here the game puts much more of an emphasis on its central prophecy and lore while putting Adol and Chester in the forefront of the story which is handled way better this time around. Even Dogi’s relationship with Elena and Chester is fleshed out more and it definitely feels like there’s an actual level of care and importance here.
Chester isn’t as goofy or as one note of an antagonist as he was in the original, he’s a goal oriented, cold as fuck motherfucker who’s ready to do anything to fulfill the prophecy in order to avenge his sister and his village. And it’s done with much more subtlety and finesse this time around, with climactic confrontation in the form of 2 boss fights which weren’t present in the original but also a lot of subtle foreshadowing about his true intentions as well as his doubts in carrying said plan. Even Elena is much better written this time around, she’s a sassy tomboy who cares deeply about her brother and Dogi’s well-being and is ready to pack a punch when deemed necessary.
Elena from Oath is one of the most underrated heroine in the franchise in my opinion and my only real regret is that all of these cool fanarts of her carrying Chester’s sword and armor isn’t an actual thing in the plot but some weird inside joke of the developers who likes to dress her up in many different outfits from across the series as a reward for completing boss rush mode in set difficulties (canonical cosplayer girl yippee !).
Even the progression of the story is slightly touched upon with some things arriving out of order from the original which lead me to talk about the overall structure and level design of the game which I think is one of the game's biggest strengths as well as its weakness. While the game is completely remade in 3D with that classic isometric view it is nonetheless mostly based on a 2D Action game which were separated in levels rather than a big world to explore. And even thought the game does a lot of effort to make the world feels less segmented (with the addition of a central overworld allowing you to listen to : “The Boys who had Wings” for more than 10 seconds), it nonetheless feels like a succession of random set pieces than a natural world which you can explore freely with tons of secrets to find.
Unlike Ys VI which took place on an Island and therefore could allow itself to be a bit more exploratory, here the exploration is kept to a minimum in favor of focusing on environments which feels more like levels than proper dungeon. This isn’t to say that it’s bad though, the game has definitely more of an arcadey feel than its predecessors already with the additions of all these combo meters to fill up and this structure definitely doesn’t feel at odds with the rest of the game. What does bother just a tad bit with the level design is that sometimes the game has troubles between being a 3D action game and wanting to pay homage to the original level design. While some areas take full advantage of the game being 3D, some areas definitely don’t have as much depth and are closer to 2.5 D than fully 3D environment, I like the attention to detail and you can point out some areas to how they were made in the original but it does create a bit of issues when it comes to the freedom of player movement.
The Ice Cave in particular is probably the worst area of the game, with lots of slipping surfaces, enemies that take way too much space and are way too aggressive which doesn’t mesh well with the 2.5d environments and a lot of pits you can fall into which brings you to a lower level and reminding you of the worse of Ys VI level design. But when the game hits, oh boy it does hit because now I need to talk about Valestein Castle !!!!
Valestein Castle was already the most iconic location of the original, featuring multiple paths, a spike in difficulty, multiple traps and hazards and literally the best fucking music in the entire goddamn franchise. But here everything about it screams pure fucking ludokino ! It’s easily to this day the best dungeon ever created by Falcom. When people tell me that Falcom can’t do good level design or even good dungeon design after witnessing their more modern output, I always point at this fucking dungeon in particular because it shows that back in the day Falcom was actually stacked with semi-competent level design which were able to put their whole pussy into making great and amazing dungeons to explore.
Valestein Castle has everything you could ask for, challenging combat encounters, a vast and open-ended structure, multiple subsections within it, a somewhat metroidvania style structure, memorable locales and set pieces with various traps, platforming challenges and lots of story events to keep you on your toe and of course that banging fucking soundtrack.
The Sight of Adol, this badass adventurer rushing to assault the castle of the local tyrannical king, jumping and slashing his way through countless corridors filled with traps and deadly enemies while rescuing the villagers you came to know and grew an attachment to and stopping Chester’s revenge plot from claiming more lives than necessary ending with a climatic climb on top of a clocktower, multiple boss encounters one of the best fight in the game with Chester and even the rare good instances of a good twist villain in Falcom’s history is truly awe inspiring and truly hype.
Valestein Castle is so massive and iconic that it feels like it could’ve easily been the climax of the game if it wasn’t for the aforementioned last minute twist which exist to tie the remake to the plotline of the original in some pretty clever way in my opinion at least, and while the final dungeon isn’t bad per say, it definitely pales in comparison to Valestein Castle in terms of how iconic the entire thing is and much like the original, the game ends on a somewhat less bombastic note but the final boss is actually pretty fun if I’m being honest so It’s aight.
I’ve praised the music of Valestein Castle, but the rest of the OST is also rather fantastic, one of the rare saving grace of the original was its soundtrack (to which you can listen to multiple version of it by switching it out in the pause menu) and here it’s still one of the best Falcom OST. Originally composed by Mieko Ishikawa which succeeded Yuzo Koshiro after its departure, the new arrangement were handled by Yukihiro Jindo and his team which did a fantastic job breeding new life into these tracks, in fact I’d say this is some of Falcom’s best arrangement work they’ve ever done when it comes to remaking a game. I also like the fact they didn’t play it safe and weren’t afraid to deviate from the original composition, Redmont theme is calmer and more whimsical, Boys had wings now has violins and Valestein Castle feels like the same track was put on steroid but even some of the less notable tracks were given a lot of care and if anything I just like the sheer variety of the composition here.
Oath in Felghana is what I personally consider to be the platonic ideal of the perfect Ys title, it’s a game which is short and to the point while remaining intense through on through. It’s a game which breathes with an air of adventure and freedom, it’s a game of constant motion rarely stopping to smell the roses, an all banger no filler affair which is fun, exciting, and amazing to play or even replay. Oath in Felghana is a game I often replay for fun because it’s simply just too damn fun and not wasting your time in doing so ! It has great level designs, amazing music and the most fun gameplay in the series yet !
The only real thing that stops Oath in Felghana from being a true JRPG classic much like its forefather is the things it unfortunately had to carry out of the original like a pretty barebone and unoriginal story which was modified to be better but only ends up as being serviceable. The setting of Felghana isn’t the most interesting one in the franchise either and I would even dare to say it’s a bit too vanilla for my taste despite the many improvements that were made to the script and overall direction to make it feel more lived in. It’s not a bad story but it’s clear that the gameplay, the level design, the music and just the general experience of playing the game does a lot of the heavy lifting to make it work.
But as it stands, it’s one of my favorite titles in the franchise and I even consider it to be one of its peak. But this isn’t the end of our journey with the Ark Engine as we still have one more game to cover, the 10th anniversary of the Ys franchise was arriving soon and as such it was time to go back in time ! Back to Ys’s Origins !! See you next time for another Falcom banger
1989
Ys : A forgotten Revolution
The 80's were such a pivotal time for the history of video games. If you think making games is hard now, imagine what it must've been like in an era where pretty much everything had to be invented, you didn't have bricks as much as you had clay to build those bricks before you could even build the house itself. To most people, 80’s gaming is now a distant relics of a long forgotten past, something not worth going back to if only for curiosity sake, it seems impossible to imagine than a game this ancient can even impress anyone nowadays and yet to me, Ys 1&2 did and they did it spectacularly well.
The Action-RPG genre was barely a thought in the minds of many people but a small studio by the name of Falcom was going to launch a revolution within the genre, a revolution that will put them on the map not as icons but as pioneers of a new age of virtual entertainment. Falcom pretty much invented the Action-RPG genre with their old classic such as Dragon Slayer and its sequel Dragon Slayer II : Xanadu (the Dragon Slayer series by itself being the converging point of about 3/4th of Falcom’s entire catalog of franchise) but as much as these games were small revolutions in the mind of many, they were not the cult classic hit and aside from a few turbo-boomer, you hear very little people going back to the original Xanadu in spite of its reputation ! But in 1987, Falcom released what will be known as their core-franchise for a long while (until it was later replaced to my regret by a much more ambitious but ever so frustratingly disappointing series that I’ve already covered in details on this account) and this franchise was Ys ! Originally thought of as one big game, the final draft of the project will end up becoming a two-parters with Ys II releasing a year later in 1988, suffice to say that every port of both titles past 1988 bundled them together into one singular entry which to my surprise flows surprisingly well into one another despite an hard reset at the start of Part II.
One of those legendary ports is of course the version of the game I’m reviewing today, the 1989 PC-Engine edition of Ys 1&2 developed by Hudson Soft, to many it is considered the definitive version of Ys 1&2 even with the existence of Chronicles + which is the more widely available version of this game in the year of our lord 2023 but the reason why I decided to review the PC-Engine version instead is because while Chronicles + is a really competent remake worth experiencing and perhaps more palatable to a newer audience, it also operated a bunch of changes (mostly to Ys 1, Ys 2 is rather faithful to the original game) some goods of course and some that comes in complete contradiction with the spirit of the original game and the main idea behind its game design philosophy which I will develop further down the line.
See the entire idea behind Ys started pretty much on the same basis as those of the original Dragon Quest which was released a year earlier and which is to make a genre as complex and complicated to navigate through as accessible and easy to understand for console and their limited resources to handle complex systems that were seen on computer as well and pen and paper RPG at the time by translating and digesting those systems for newcomers to the genre. And even with the original Dragon Quest succeeding to such an absurd degree that it pretty much invented an entire subgenre of Japanese Role-Playing Game onto itself, some developers namely Masaya Hashimoto (main programmer and director of the original Ys) thought that they could do even better to fulfill that idea of making the RPG genre more welcoming and thus different systems were put into place to elaborate on that philosophy.
One of the main things that will strike most modern player as odd with Ys is its peculiar battle system, it’s true that nowadays pushing a button to attack sounds like a evidence but back in the day it wasn’t really the case and in fact for many years, the action-rpg genre used this so called “bump system” from Tower of Druaga to the original Hydlide, it was just the norm at the time and Ys just elaborated a bit further on this idea. To hurt enemies in Ys you simply have to bump into them until they die, simple, yet effective but Ys added another layer that didn’t exist in previous iterations of this system which is that it’s encouraged to bump into enemies from their sides rather than from the front, in one part to deal more damage to them and in another to avoid getting damages yourself ! The system, though simple, has a rather steep learning curve that might throw people off at the start of the game and in fact, the game pretty much forces you to interact with it head on in order to immediately buy the necessary equipment to advance throughout the story. It doesn’t make the best first impression but once you get a hold of it, you will realize that as archaic as the bump system can seem at first, it’s actually quite a brilliantly elegant system even compared to its contemporaries at the time which used action buttons !
Its elegance is due to one core factor that makes Ys such a satisfying game to play in it that every interaction with the world (aside from occasionally navigating menus to equip items which is also vastly simplified compared to most RPGs) is done through movement ! Combat is based on movement and positioning, interacting with NPC is done by simply bumping into them which triggers their dialogue boxes, what few puzzles the game has are also based on movement and of course all these elements converge together into the fact that all of this contributes to the main gameplay loop of the game which is exploration ! Ys is a game of constant motion, never stopping, always rushing from moment to moment gameplay, it’s a game which demands its player never stop in the pursuit of adventure and this feeling of constant motion is amplified by the absolutely kick-ass soundtrack playing in the back.
The main composer of the game is Yuzo Koshiro, a guy that will later down the line become infamous for his work at Sega and even though he didn’t himself rearrange the tracks for the PC-Engine version, he still did more than an excellent job with establishing Falcom’s future legacy of their games being carried by impressively excellent soundtrack. Ys is the series for which the JDK team was formed after Yuzo Koshiro left and it definitely works with Ys fast-paced constantly moving action that make the series seem like it was Zelda for people who like to rush through corridors to the sound of death metal like a Doom Player !
But the Bump System and movement alone couldn’t fulfill the fantasy of an easily accessible yet fun video game for newcomers of the genre. It’s also how straightforward yet not streamlined the progression of the game is. Ys 1 is composed of 2 very small overworld areas, 2 villages, 2 dungeons and of course the final stretch of the game being the Darm Tower, a final dungeon so ambitious in its scope and scale it represents the second half of the game by itself ! There is no need to go heal at an Inn and there’s very few shops in the game ! In fact if you want to heal while on the overworld, you can just stop and wait for your health bar to fill up, in dungeons however you will either need a special ring or use an item to fill your HP bar to emphasize how dangerous adventuring into dungeons feel compared to the overworld.
This simple yet elegant design in both form and execution is ultimately what made Ys 1 a classic which stood the test of time even more than a lot of its successors !
No line of dialogues is wasted, no step towards completing the quest is too bullshit or cryptic and you can finish the game simply by paying attention to the in-game dialogues and putting one and two together. Of course there’s some side-objectives that could trouble your progression but they’re generally well integrated within the main game. In (dark) fact the final boss of the game has a weakness which is a puzzle to the scale of the entire game with the game even tricking you with an higher tier of equipment that will do fuck all to him !
And even the grinding process is thought in a way to always make the player see the horizon of his progress, at the bottom of the screen, you can see all the information you need which includes how much EXP you need to level up and see in real time how much EXP enemies gives you, which hints towards how much work you have to put into leveling up and also the EXP rate is degressive meaning that eventually power-grinding in an area is rarely worth it past the soft-level cap imposed by the game at certain points (you also gain an automatic level up upon completing certain task which is neat) and even if you do struggle with the game, you can pretty much save whenever and wherever you want which is an impressive technical feat for the time as well as great for accessibility.
And here’s where my issue lies with the Chronicles version of Ys 1 specifically, the shinier graphics, the full-analog movement and remixed soundtrack are all welcome additions but Ys 1 as a remake want to both be faithful to the original but also add a bit too much fluff which somehow make the game more archaic in its progression than the original game, the overworld is now big and full of empty spaces that weren’t present in the original game, the PNJ now update their dialogues for every story moment (an heritage from Falcom’s Legend of Heroes series) which is great for worldbuilding and such but also muddles the actually helpful information for game progression under a ton of fluff that’s not necessary to the game’s progression but I think what kills this remake a bit is how they’ve handled the level progression and the bosses !
The thing with Ys 1&2 on the PC-Engine however is that since it was pretty much two games fused together back to back, the leveling curve was a bit smoother and spread out for the entire duration of the two games which is great ! But the chronicles version of Ys 1 and 2 separates them into different executables which means that Ys 1 had to change up its leveling system to accommodate. Now you’re only capped at Level 10 and each level up is a significant boost to your stats meaning that the difference between owning a boss’s ass or the boss owning yours is arbitrarily be about at which level you enter the boss arena and the entire second half of the game is going to be reliant solely on your own skills in navigating the bump combat system which somehow despite the introduction of diagonal movement is somehow stricter than in the PC-Engine version but also the bosses are also badly coded !
Their patterns, behaviors and sometimes collisions are heavily fucked over for some reasons and don’t get me started on the final boss which is meme’d across the entire community for being a complete RNG fest of projectiles and framerate turboboosting, it’s an hilariously bad boss but one that makes it probably more memorable than its more manageable original counterpart, to give you an idea, it took me 1 try to defeat Dark Fact in the original and probably 12 for the Chronicles version, it’s actually ridiculous. Since Chronicles is the more widely available version, most people will probably get out of Ys 1 thinking it’s actually more outdated and janky than it actually was which definitely isn’t supposed to be the goal of a remake, it’s not game ruining or anything but I do think that it needed to be discussed.
I spent most of the review talking about my love of Ys 1 and I somehow still haven’t talked about Ys II, well it’s because to me Ys 1&2 are part of the same whole and most of the qualities of Ys 1 follows through on Ys 2 but even then I do think that Ys 2 is the lesser of the two halves mostly because of a few unfortunate decisions, it’s still a good game but the way it handles certain parts that Ys 1 nailed so much kinda frustrates me. The game is definitely more streamlined than its predecessor, in Ys 1 if you wanted to do certain things out of order to get some of the best equipments right from the start well nothing was stopping you aside from the enemies which you can easily ignore but in Ys 2 the progression is a bit more linear, instead of exploring a world, it feels like you’re exploring a set of levels which themselves are dungeons with their own navigation puzzle and NPC quest to wrap your head around !
Again this doesn’t constitute a flaw but I think that they could’ve expanded on the non-linearity and exploration aspect of Ys 1 even further, as for the combat while the bump system is still into place, this time the game introduces magic such as fireballs and a spells that lets you turn into a monster to discuss with the local fauna, that second spells is especially fun to use to get some fun tidbit and dialogues with the different monsters you’ve been slaying mindlessly so it’s a neat addition even if a bit gimmicky but the fireballs kinda break the flow of combat since they’re pretty much the safer options all the time and all the bosses asides from the last 2 are immune to bump combat and weak to fireballs turning these confrontations into bullet hell segment and even more so when contrary to the Chronicles version of Ys 2 one shot you if they hit you forcing a perfect run.
The overall navigation can also be a bit more confusing at times even with how segmented the game feels, the final dungeon of the game aka “The Solomon Shrine” is especially known for being a bit of a head scratcher the first way though with all of its floors and layers and weird conditions to progress into it and the story and this is something even the remake couldn’t make smoother.
Again, nothing that makes Ys 2 an unworthy successor to the first game let alone a bad game or a bad sequel, in fact Ys 2 focuses a bit more on its narration contrary to Ys 1 since it’s supposed to be the “answer arc” of the duology and in that way, it’s an amazing send-off to the duology and the series as a whole (well until they decided to make Ys III making the subtitle of Ys II “The Final Chapter” a bit of an oxymoron but oh well).
In fact this is also something that surprised me compared to a lot of RPG’s of its era and its how subtly well told the story of the game is which is definitely helped by the game’s presentation on the PC-Engine adding animated cutscenes and dubbed dialogue which is missing from other versions of the game including you guessed it, the Chronicles Version. I think that despite its age and the relative straightforwardness of its premise (Random adventurer investigate a demon invasion and uncover the truth about an ancient civilization), the way it’s told as well as incorporated inside of the gameplay loop really make the story of the game stand out from the crowd compared to a lot of its contemporaries, it’s definitely helped in part by the excellent character design, I mean Feena and Reah alone are mostly carried by how they than by their dialogues but also by the myriads of little details in dialogue and ofc the different book of Ys you uncover, some characters even manage to pop-off like Dogi who becomes a mainstay of the series as Adol’s life-long partner or even Lilia, the happy go lucky village girl who helps you on your quest throughout all of Ys II.
This is also something for which I’m going to give an edge to the chronicles version, if both versions follow the same throughline, Chronicles adds a lot of additional fluff to the dialogues which makes the setting of the game more alive than ever and even some addition that ties the game to the lore of the rest of the series, the ending was also changed to be more focused and conclusive towards Adol and Feena relationship which is all fine by me because I enjoy this couple far more than the Adol and Lilia pairing that seem to be a more natural and less tragic path for Adol to choose from but is also tremendously boring as a result (even if they do some cool things with it in the two different version of Ys IV which we may or may not talk about in a future review). In fact I did get a bit emotional during the ending of Chronicles especially with its new beautiful rendition of Feena’s theme but if I’m being honest I do miss this game having more animated cutscenes and voiced dialog. To me both versions of the story are complementary to one another and in the end, it’s worth experiencing both versions to see which part of which did you like best and to form your own opinion on the matter.
I also mentioned that the game includes its narration quite well within its gameplay loop which makes me think about Adol and how I think Adol is one of the rare valid mute protagonists. It’s been established later down in the franchise that the meta-narrative surrounding the Ys series is that we don’t actually play as Adol but rather one interpretation of Adol based on what he chronicled in his book, not only does this tie well with all the older titles getting remakes and as such have slight discrepancies between the different version but also because that means we don’t need Adol to talk, there has been a few games that made Adol talk and the more recent entry definitely push towards a more talkative Adol but I also don’t think it’s necessary, Adol is a badass adventure who rushes to the occasion and acts like a hero, he’s brave, fearless, strong and part of about 20 different prophecies ! His date of birth is the “Year 0” of Ys universes calendar and it’s all up to the game to make you feel like you’re playing as an absolute unstoppable unit which as I mentioned earlier, the game succeeds thanks to this constant sense of motion, an excellent sense of pacing (a word modern Falcom seems to have completely forgotten about) and a kick-ass soundtrack which as much the soundtrack of Adol’s life than it is the soundtrack of the environment he visits.
I also mentioned earlier how the game hides a puzzle to the scale of the whole game and that’s because the villain goes around stealing Silver tools from everyone, the more you progress through the game and the more you sense that it’s kinda weird for someone to be stealing such a specific item and it turns out that not only is it because it’s his weakness but also because Silver is another name for Cleria a much more legendary metal which was the cause of Ys’s downfall and the invasion of Darm’s demon army ! In (dark) fact, I actually recommend to watch the two ova adaptations which adds a lot of layer to the villain of Ys 1 and his plan on top of having a kick-ass and metal as fuck interpretation of the some of the games more iconic locale but also for all the cute moments between Adol and Feena.
The game is an epic journey and I did feel a great sense of fulfillment when finishing it, both games are also extremely short (about 10h each) which makes for a big satisfying 20h game experience which to my opinion stood the test of time much more than people gave it credit for.
And that’s pretty much the sad conclusion of Ys, while it is a cult classic, it’s hard to expect a younger audience to be enraptured by its proposition. Ys is a game which sadly got eclipsed by a much more clever and ambitious title at the time : the original Legend of Zelda which single handedly defined how 2D Action RPG should be made for the following decade (and will do so again with OOT for 3D action rpg games).
But I like to believe in the real strength of Ys as a game, I think both games are much better than the original Zelda or even Zelda 2 for that matter as well as better than a lot of contemporaries and imitators and in a world where Zelda didn’t exist, we could’ve probably expected Ys to be the cornerstone of an entire genre, but also this wasn’t the case but that’s ok because now Ys has known a new life and has continued for years to come, always in the shadows of giants but with a boundless sense of wonder which captured the imagination of many children and young adults over the years !
And for that, and that alone, I urge you to experience Ys 1&2 and discover how shockingly competent those games were if you’re willing to accept a few of its rougher edges and how different of a take on an action-rpg it is even by today standard in which it feels more of a curious novelty than the proper evolution of the medium it was meant to be, it’s still excellent and I love these games deeply !
Maybe I’ll make reviews for the other titles cause I feel like being a bit more positive on this account with a franchise I actually like !
The 80's were such a pivotal time for the history of video games. If you think making games is hard now, imagine what it must've been like in an era where pretty much everything had to be invented, you didn't have bricks as much as you had clay to build those bricks before you could even build the house itself. To most people, 80’s gaming is now a distant relics of a long forgotten past, something not worth going back to if only for curiosity sake, it seems impossible to imagine than a game this ancient can even impress anyone nowadays and yet to me, Ys 1&2 did and they did it spectacularly well.
The Action-RPG genre was barely a thought in the minds of many people but a small studio by the name of Falcom was going to launch a revolution within the genre, a revolution that will put them on the map not as icons but as pioneers of a new age of virtual entertainment. Falcom pretty much invented the Action-RPG genre with their old classic such as Dragon Slayer and its sequel Dragon Slayer II : Xanadu (the Dragon Slayer series by itself being the converging point of about 3/4th of Falcom’s entire catalog of franchise) but as much as these games were small revolutions in the mind of many, they were not the cult classic hit and aside from a few turbo-boomer, you hear very little people going back to the original Xanadu in spite of its reputation ! But in 1987, Falcom released what will be known as their core-franchise for a long while (until it was later replaced to my regret by a much more ambitious but ever so frustratingly disappointing series that I’ve already covered in details on this account) and this franchise was Ys ! Originally thought of as one big game, the final draft of the project will end up becoming a two-parters with Ys II releasing a year later in 1988, suffice to say that every port of both titles past 1988 bundled them together into one singular entry which to my surprise flows surprisingly well into one another despite an hard reset at the start of Part II.
One of those legendary ports is of course the version of the game I’m reviewing today, the 1989 PC-Engine edition of Ys 1&2 developed by Hudson Soft, to many it is considered the definitive version of Ys 1&2 even with the existence of Chronicles + which is the more widely available version of this game in the year of our lord 2023 but the reason why I decided to review the PC-Engine version instead is because while Chronicles + is a really competent remake worth experiencing and perhaps more palatable to a newer audience, it also operated a bunch of changes (mostly to Ys 1, Ys 2 is rather faithful to the original game) some goods of course and some that comes in complete contradiction with the spirit of the original game and the main idea behind its game design philosophy which I will develop further down the line.
See the entire idea behind Ys started pretty much on the same basis as those of the original Dragon Quest which was released a year earlier and which is to make a genre as complex and complicated to navigate through as accessible and easy to understand for console and their limited resources to handle complex systems that were seen on computer as well and pen and paper RPG at the time by translating and digesting those systems for newcomers to the genre. And even with the original Dragon Quest succeeding to such an absurd degree that it pretty much invented an entire subgenre of Japanese Role-Playing Game onto itself, some developers namely Masaya Hashimoto (main programmer and director of the original Ys) thought that they could do even better to fulfill that idea of making the RPG genre more welcoming and thus different systems were put into place to elaborate on that philosophy.
One of the main things that will strike most modern player as odd with Ys is its peculiar battle system, it’s true that nowadays pushing a button to attack sounds like a evidence but back in the day it wasn’t really the case and in fact for many years, the action-rpg genre used this so called “bump system” from Tower of Druaga to the original Hydlide, it was just the norm at the time and Ys just elaborated a bit further on this idea. To hurt enemies in Ys you simply have to bump into them until they die, simple, yet effective but Ys added another layer that didn’t exist in previous iterations of this system which is that it’s encouraged to bump into enemies from their sides rather than from the front, in one part to deal more damage to them and in another to avoid getting damages yourself ! The system, though simple, has a rather steep learning curve that might throw people off at the start of the game and in fact, the game pretty much forces you to interact with it head on in order to immediately buy the necessary equipment to advance throughout the story. It doesn’t make the best first impression but once you get a hold of it, you will realize that as archaic as the bump system can seem at first, it’s actually quite a brilliantly elegant system even compared to its contemporaries at the time which used action buttons !
Its elegance is due to one core factor that makes Ys such a satisfying game to play in it that every interaction with the world (aside from occasionally navigating menus to equip items which is also vastly simplified compared to most RPGs) is done through movement ! Combat is based on movement and positioning, interacting with NPC is done by simply bumping into them which triggers their dialogue boxes, what few puzzles the game has are also based on movement and of course all these elements converge together into the fact that all of this contributes to the main gameplay loop of the game which is exploration ! Ys is a game of constant motion, never stopping, always rushing from moment to moment gameplay, it’s a game which demands its player never stop in the pursuit of adventure and this feeling of constant motion is amplified by the absolutely kick-ass soundtrack playing in the back.
The main composer of the game is Yuzo Koshiro, a guy that will later down the line become infamous for his work at Sega and even though he didn’t himself rearrange the tracks for the PC-Engine version, he still did more than an excellent job with establishing Falcom’s future legacy of their games being carried by impressively excellent soundtrack. Ys is the series for which the JDK team was formed after Yuzo Koshiro left and it definitely works with Ys fast-paced constantly moving action that make the series seem like it was Zelda for people who like to rush through corridors to the sound of death metal like a Doom Player !
But the Bump System and movement alone couldn’t fulfill the fantasy of an easily accessible yet fun video game for newcomers of the genre. It’s also how straightforward yet not streamlined the progression of the game is. Ys 1 is composed of 2 very small overworld areas, 2 villages, 2 dungeons and of course the final stretch of the game being the Darm Tower, a final dungeon so ambitious in its scope and scale it represents the second half of the game by itself ! There is no need to go heal at an Inn and there’s very few shops in the game ! In fact if you want to heal while on the overworld, you can just stop and wait for your health bar to fill up, in dungeons however you will either need a special ring or use an item to fill your HP bar to emphasize how dangerous adventuring into dungeons feel compared to the overworld.
This simple yet elegant design in both form and execution is ultimately what made Ys 1 a classic which stood the test of time even more than a lot of its successors !
No line of dialogues is wasted, no step towards completing the quest is too bullshit or cryptic and you can finish the game simply by paying attention to the in-game dialogues and putting one and two together. Of course there’s some side-objectives that could trouble your progression but they’re generally well integrated within the main game. In (dark) fact the final boss of the game has a weakness which is a puzzle to the scale of the entire game with the game even tricking you with an higher tier of equipment that will do fuck all to him !
And even the grinding process is thought in a way to always make the player see the horizon of his progress, at the bottom of the screen, you can see all the information you need which includes how much EXP you need to level up and see in real time how much EXP enemies gives you, which hints towards how much work you have to put into leveling up and also the EXP rate is degressive meaning that eventually power-grinding in an area is rarely worth it past the soft-level cap imposed by the game at certain points (you also gain an automatic level up upon completing certain task which is neat) and even if you do struggle with the game, you can pretty much save whenever and wherever you want which is an impressive technical feat for the time as well as great for accessibility.
And here’s where my issue lies with the Chronicles version of Ys 1 specifically, the shinier graphics, the full-analog movement and remixed soundtrack are all welcome additions but Ys 1 as a remake want to both be faithful to the original but also add a bit too much fluff which somehow make the game more archaic in its progression than the original game, the overworld is now big and full of empty spaces that weren’t present in the original game, the PNJ now update their dialogues for every story moment (an heritage from Falcom’s Legend of Heroes series) which is great for worldbuilding and such but also muddles the actually helpful information for game progression under a ton of fluff that’s not necessary to the game’s progression but I think what kills this remake a bit is how they’ve handled the level progression and the bosses !
The thing with Ys 1&2 on the PC-Engine however is that since it was pretty much two games fused together back to back, the leveling curve was a bit smoother and spread out for the entire duration of the two games which is great ! But the chronicles version of Ys 1 and 2 separates them into different executables which means that Ys 1 had to change up its leveling system to accommodate. Now you’re only capped at Level 10 and each level up is a significant boost to your stats meaning that the difference between owning a boss’s ass or the boss owning yours is arbitrarily be about at which level you enter the boss arena and the entire second half of the game is going to be reliant solely on your own skills in navigating the bump combat system which somehow despite the introduction of diagonal movement is somehow stricter than in the PC-Engine version but also the bosses are also badly coded !
Their patterns, behaviors and sometimes collisions are heavily fucked over for some reasons and don’t get me started on the final boss which is meme’d across the entire community for being a complete RNG fest of projectiles and framerate turboboosting, it’s an hilariously bad boss but one that makes it probably more memorable than its more manageable original counterpart, to give you an idea, it took me 1 try to defeat Dark Fact in the original and probably 12 for the Chronicles version, it’s actually ridiculous. Since Chronicles is the more widely available version, most people will probably get out of Ys 1 thinking it’s actually more outdated and janky than it actually was which definitely isn’t supposed to be the goal of a remake, it’s not game ruining or anything but I do think that it needed to be discussed.
I spent most of the review talking about my love of Ys 1 and I somehow still haven’t talked about Ys II, well it’s because to me Ys 1&2 are part of the same whole and most of the qualities of Ys 1 follows through on Ys 2 but even then I do think that Ys 2 is the lesser of the two halves mostly because of a few unfortunate decisions, it’s still a good game but the way it handles certain parts that Ys 1 nailed so much kinda frustrates me. The game is definitely more streamlined than its predecessor, in Ys 1 if you wanted to do certain things out of order to get some of the best equipments right from the start well nothing was stopping you aside from the enemies which you can easily ignore but in Ys 2 the progression is a bit more linear, instead of exploring a world, it feels like you’re exploring a set of levels which themselves are dungeons with their own navigation puzzle and NPC quest to wrap your head around !
Again this doesn’t constitute a flaw but I think that they could’ve expanded on the non-linearity and exploration aspect of Ys 1 even further, as for the combat while the bump system is still into place, this time the game introduces magic such as fireballs and a spells that lets you turn into a monster to discuss with the local fauna, that second spells is especially fun to use to get some fun tidbit and dialogues with the different monsters you’ve been slaying mindlessly so it’s a neat addition even if a bit gimmicky but the fireballs kinda break the flow of combat since they’re pretty much the safer options all the time and all the bosses asides from the last 2 are immune to bump combat and weak to fireballs turning these confrontations into bullet hell segment and even more so when contrary to the Chronicles version of Ys 2 one shot you if they hit you forcing a perfect run.
The overall navigation can also be a bit more confusing at times even with how segmented the game feels, the final dungeon of the game aka “The Solomon Shrine” is especially known for being a bit of a head scratcher the first way though with all of its floors and layers and weird conditions to progress into it and the story and this is something even the remake couldn’t make smoother.
Again, nothing that makes Ys 2 an unworthy successor to the first game let alone a bad game or a bad sequel, in fact Ys 2 focuses a bit more on its narration contrary to Ys 1 since it’s supposed to be the “answer arc” of the duology and in that way, it’s an amazing send-off to the duology and the series as a whole (well until they decided to make Ys III making the subtitle of Ys II “The Final Chapter” a bit of an oxymoron but oh well).
In fact this is also something that surprised me compared to a lot of RPG’s of its era and its how subtly well told the story of the game is which is definitely helped by the game’s presentation on the PC-Engine adding animated cutscenes and dubbed dialogue which is missing from other versions of the game including you guessed it, the Chronicles Version. I think that despite its age and the relative straightforwardness of its premise (Random adventurer investigate a demon invasion and uncover the truth about an ancient civilization), the way it’s told as well as incorporated inside of the gameplay loop really make the story of the game stand out from the crowd compared to a lot of its contemporaries, it’s definitely helped in part by the excellent character design, I mean Feena and Reah alone are mostly carried by how they than by their dialogues but also by the myriads of little details in dialogue and ofc the different book of Ys you uncover, some characters even manage to pop-off like Dogi who becomes a mainstay of the series as Adol’s life-long partner or even Lilia, the happy go lucky village girl who helps you on your quest throughout all of Ys II.
This is also something for which I’m going to give an edge to the chronicles version, if both versions follow the same throughline, Chronicles adds a lot of additional fluff to the dialogues which makes the setting of the game more alive than ever and even some addition that ties the game to the lore of the rest of the series, the ending was also changed to be more focused and conclusive towards Adol and Feena relationship which is all fine by me because I enjoy this couple far more than the Adol and Lilia pairing that seem to be a more natural and less tragic path for Adol to choose from but is also tremendously boring as a result (even if they do some cool things with it in the two different version of Ys IV which we may or may not talk about in a future review). In fact I did get a bit emotional during the ending of Chronicles especially with its new beautiful rendition of Feena’s theme but if I’m being honest I do miss this game having more animated cutscenes and voiced dialog. To me both versions of the story are complementary to one another and in the end, it’s worth experiencing both versions to see which part of which did you like best and to form your own opinion on the matter.
I also mentioned that the game includes its narration quite well within its gameplay loop which makes me think about Adol and how I think Adol is one of the rare valid mute protagonists. It’s been established later down in the franchise that the meta-narrative surrounding the Ys series is that we don’t actually play as Adol but rather one interpretation of Adol based on what he chronicled in his book, not only does this tie well with all the older titles getting remakes and as such have slight discrepancies between the different version but also because that means we don’t need Adol to talk, there has been a few games that made Adol talk and the more recent entry definitely push towards a more talkative Adol but I also don’t think it’s necessary, Adol is a badass adventure who rushes to the occasion and acts like a hero, he’s brave, fearless, strong and part of about 20 different prophecies ! His date of birth is the “Year 0” of Ys universes calendar and it’s all up to the game to make you feel like you’re playing as an absolute unstoppable unit which as I mentioned earlier, the game succeeds thanks to this constant sense of motion, an excellent sense of pacing (a word modern Falcom seems to have completely forgotten about) and a kick-ass soundtrack which as much the soundtrack of Adol’s life than it is the soundtrack of the environment he visits.
I also mentioned earlier how the game hides a puzzle to the scale of the whole game and that’s because the villain goes around stealing Silver tools from everyone, the more you progress through the game and the more you sense that it’s kinda weird for someone to be stealing such a specific item and it turns out that not only is it because it’s his weakness but also because Silver is another name for Cleria a much more legendary metal which was the cause of Ys’s downfall and the invasion of Darm’s demon army ! In (dark) fact, I actually recommend to watch the two ova adaptations which adds a lot of layer to the villain of Ys 1 and his plan on top of having a kick-ass and metal as fuck interpretation of the some of the games more iconic locale but also for all the cute moments between Adol and Feena.
The game is an epic journey and I did feel a great sense of fulfillment when finishing it, both games are also extremely short (about 10h each) which makes for a big satisfying 20h game experience which to my opinion stood the test of time much more than people gave it credit for.
And that’s pretty much the sad conclusion of Ys, while it is a cult classic, it’s hard to expect a younger audience to be enraptured by its proposition. Ys is a game which sadly got eclipsed by a much more clever and ambitious title at the time : the original Legend of Zelda which single handedly defined how 2D Action RPG should be made for the following decade (and will do so again with OOT for 3D action rpg games).
But I like to believe in the real strength of Ys as a game, I think both games are much better than the original Zelda or even Zelda 2 for that matter as well as better than a lot of contemporaries and imitators and in a world where Zelda didn’t exist, we could’ve probably expected Ys to be the cornerstone of an entire genre, but also this wasn’t the case but that’s ok because now Ys has known a new life and has continued for years to come, always in the shadows of giants but with a boundless sense of wonder which captured the imagination of many children and young adults over the years !
And for that, and that alone, I urge you to experience Ys 1&2 and discover how shockingly competent those games were if you’re willing to accept a few of its rougher edges and how different of a take on an action-rpg it is even by today standard in which it feels more of a curious novelty than the proper evolution of the medium it was meant to be, it’s still excellent and I love these games deeply !
Maybe I’ll make reviews for the other titles cause I feel like being a bit more positive on this account with a franchise I actually like !
Trails from Zero : A Successful Return to Form
If you've seen my review of the previous 3 entry in the series
My journey with the infamous Trails franchise has been kind of a rocky one, on one hand I absolutely adore what the Trails series does when it comes to presenting its setting world and character but I also have some mixed feeling regarding not only the actual game-part of this game or the structure of it all (especially SC where it pretty much ruined what would otherwise be a pretty satisfying conclusion to the first 2 games which thankfully 3rd was there to cover back and make me actually care about the series)
My favorite (and spoiler alert : Still my n°1 game in the series so far) improved on a lot of things while sacrificing on some of the core aspect of the franchise to be the odd one out and do it's own thing and succeeding so well that I honestly didn't know if I was even going to enjoy the rest of the games since it was gonna return to the old try and true "Trails Pacing"
And at first while playing this new arc, I was suddenly feeling this sensation creeping in on me during the first few hours of the game and I was ready to file many complaint about how boring and uneventful the first 15 to 20h of the game is (which no matter what you think about my patience running low, is still a long ass time for an RPG to kick in).
The game was worse on that front because for that small period of time, there is no hook, you just join the Crossbell Police Department and you're just doing random stuff.
At least in Sky FC, the motivation for going on your journey and accomplishing your bracer task was to graduate from Junior Bracers to Professional one and the game was structured and punctuated in a way that new things are thrown at you every time either be new characters or events but for Zero, there is no underlying plot for a grand majority of the game, stuff just kinda happens
You solve some wolf problem there, you solve an assassination case there, you track down a hacker, you solve gang wars and mafia shit and while you eventually get into the flow of it rather quickly, the plot much like FC really starts to truly kick-off during the mid-section of the game with the Introduction of KeA (who's a pure ball of unsaturated sugar who's too good for this world).
But I will say that despite this, I did get into the flow of it much earlier than even FC because the scrimblo chapters all had bigger stakes and machination behind everything, now that's not to say that the Mafia shit is the most fascinating thing in the world (and trust me they're not that threatening, not much than Team Rocket in the early days of Pokemon) but it does its job well at hooking the player.
It also help how compact the region of Crossbell is, it's a small country much smaller than the likes of Liberl which divided its different chapters by territories
The main city is ofc the main attraction here, it's bustling with life and memorable locations and aesthetically speaking is better than any city from Liberl, the outskirts of the city in comparison are a bit weak, there's 2 villages that are of relatively low importance plot wise and a bunch of side-areas, you go through all of it in a matter of 2 chapters out of 5 which means that the game locks off a bunch of the late game areas to keep at least some new areas by the second half of the game.
There's also fast travel although only inside the city which definitely does help when doing side-quest, I Wish there was a fast travel option for the entire country but it's only available for 1 (one) chapter, otherwise you have to travel in the city then take the bus and while it's definitely less egregious on making you go back and forth in places, the game still does that a lot albeit to a lower amount than the game.
In fact aesthetically speaking, the game ditches free camera control in favor of fixed camera angle that changes perspective from time to time like the 5TH Generation Pokemon games and there's a lot of areas when it does that to great effect.
Gameplay wise, it's pretty much the same as Sky, the 4 main characters are pretty well rounded and balanced for one another (even though I did replace Ellie whenever I had the occasion cause she's kinda ass for a long period of time) and it's relatively easy to make them stupidly broken by the mid-game trivializing most fights, it's probably the only real complaint compared to Trails the 3rd which seemed to have an higher focus on making the game way more challenging so that even normal mode doesn't feel like a walk in the park.
In comparison, this game is more on the easy side of things outside of the final boss or some random surprise bullshit encounters, but the game in general is pretty braindead and most of the "difficulty" comes from how tanky the bosses are and most of them are kinda forgettable and straightforward compared to the head-scratchers of the 3rd bosses, also somehow the game has less spell than 3rd too, in general I do miss the crazy team building and progressive dive into bullshit territory that 3rd had with its bigger gameplay focus.
There's also tons of QoL stuff such as stunning the ennemies to finish them faster with a team rush or a bunch of crits, proper Dual Arts that are visually really cool and unique compared to how SC and 3rd did them, stackable
A big improvement are definitely the different dungeons you visits, taking cues from 3rd dungeon design and the few good new areas of SC, the dungeons are long, sprawling, have some killer atmosphere to them (shoutout to the Star Gazer tower and the Haunted Ruins), a bunch of diverging path an even some light puzzle solving which is definitely more than I was expecting from this franchise and it was a pleasure to go through all of those.
Because that pleasure is a bit short-lived, you do very little rpg-ing in this RPG, in fact the joke about Crossbell somewhat being a VN is true because there is a lot more talking even by Trails standard up to that point, there's a lot of long stretch of moments when all you're going to do is walk and talk to people with nothing else.
It does lead into some pretty annoying moment where you're in an area and you have to check and talk to everything to progress, the mission to stop the assassination of the mayor in the 2nd chapter was pretty eggregious on that part because the triggers to progress are not clear so you're just kinda stuck there going back and forth in the same tiny area, definitely the low points of the game killing any momentum great scenes could have.
Zero does the classic Trails formula the best, and I'm still impressed by the sheer amount of work that was done in order to make this world feel alive and lived in with NPC dialogues changing at every story moment but it's crazy how the game expects you to really go check-in on everyone but this game updates the dialogue for all people in the whole region an like... Ain't nobody got time for that lol ? I did talk and re-talk to NPC whenever I was passing by them but at some points and espcially with how slow the pacing of these games can be, you just kinda wanna move on to the next story bit and finish the game. But I still commend the effort for having such an high amount of text most people will likely completely ignore on their first playthrough and tons of things you have to reach for.
Storywise, I mean it sure is an intro chapter but they made it so it can definitely stand on its own, the game is a good mix between tying some loose plot thread of the previous trilogy and be a solid new entry in the Trails mega-series with a new cast of characters and new conflicts to be interested about.
The main cast of the SSS are... Ok, they definitely don't reach the same level of endearing and lovable as the cast from the previous arc (yet) but they do work and I ended them liking them a lot by the end especially Tio who's probably my favorite out of the main 4 with Randy as a close second.
I can't say much on Lloyd and Ellie tho, as the game stand-in for Estelle and Joshua, I feel like they're both relatively flat characters that don't break any grounds, Lloyd is an optimistic and dense shonen MC like you've seen a lot in those type of story, most of my likeness for him coming from his voice actor (who did Simon in TTGL and the fact they gave his brother Kamina's seiyuu was just here to bait me and it even managed to make me tear up a little albeit for a reason that are not related to this game proper) and Ellie has an inner conflict about getting to the nitty gritty of it while being a member of the nobility but it's not really that well explored.
In fact, only Tio has a lot of development around her which is normal considering that she's linked to the main antagonist goal much like Renne.
Speaking of Renne, it's really funny how the best part of this game story-wise was things that bounced out of the previous arc, in that sense Zero feels like a very nice epilogue to her story-arc and those of Estelle and Joshua and if it wasn't for them stealing the show during the final act, I would've written off the ending of this game has the weakest in the series.
Cause yeah...
I'm gonna be honest, the antagonist this time manages to be even worse than Ouroboros somehow, like I can't believe they did the whole "aloof scientist who's secretly the leader of an evil cult" thing a second time and got away with it scott-free while winking at the audience at how similar this is to Weissman, the guy is quite literally a dollar store Weissman and half of the reasons you wanna see his downfall are linked to the stuff that happened to Renne back in Star Door 15, but he even fails at being genuinely threatening or entertaining unlike Weissman and I can't believe they made a dollar store Weissman all so I can praise Weissman who is an antagonist I also didn't think too much about lmaoooo
It's kind of a shame too because his goofy ass kinda desamorced all the fucked up shit that he caused indirectly, because my dude is just a random fanatic, he really has no motivation beyond his religious fanatism and gives a vibe of "I did it for the lolz" which definitely is hard to stomach since that shit involve fucking Child Abuse (in all sense of the word) and human sacrifices, the cult is bad that's a fact, but their leader is just lame, yes Joachim is a lame vilain and I wish that Falcom tried to be a bit more original there instead of trying to be "in on the joke" and I hope that the pool of good antagonist expand because outside of Richard and Loewe, shit aren't looking great.
Zero is solid, a lot of it is way more entertaining than even FC
If you have to ask me which one I prefer between this and FC, I'd say Zero is the strongest game of the two but the vibe of FC's are immaculate and I can't detach my feelings from it enough, they're about equal and they both shine differently in different places
Now I hope Azure can live up to the hype much more than SC did for FC, I'm already scared of the amount of re-used content or the structure of the game, because while Crossbell is solid for one game, I don't know if they can throw more meaningful gameplay or story content past this
But oh well I can be wrong on that front, we'll see o/
If you've seen my review of the previous 3 entry in the series
My journey with the infamous Trails franchise has been kind of a rocky one, on one hand I absolutely adore what the Trails series does when it comes to presenting its setting world and character but I also have some mixed feeling regarding not only the actual game-part of this game or the structure of it all (especially SC where it pretty much ruined what would otherwise be a pretty satisfying conclusion to the first 2 games which thankfully 3rd was there to cover back and make me actually care about the series)
My favorite (and spoiler alert : Still my n°1 game in the series so far) improved on a lot of things while sacrificing on some of the core aspect of the franchise to be the odd one out and do it's own thing and succeeding so well that I honestly didn't know if I was even going to enjoy the rest of the games since it was gonna return to the old try and true "Trails Pacing"
And at first while playing this new arc, I was suddenly feeling this sensation creeping in on me during the first few hours of the game and I was ready to file many complaint about how boring and uneventful the first 15 to 20h of the game is (which no matter what you think about my patience running low, is still a long ass time for an RPG to kick in).
The game was worse on that front because for that small period of time, there is no hook, you just join the Crossbell Police Department and you're just doing random stuff.
At least in Sky FC, the motivation for going on your journey and accomplishing your bracer task was to graduate from Junior Bracers to Professional one and the game was structured and punctuated in a way that new things are thrown at you every time either be new characters or events but for Zero, there is no underlying plot for a grand majority of the game, stuff just kinda happens
You solve some wolf problem there, you solve an assassination case there, you track down a hacker, you solve gang wars and mafia shit and while you eventually get into the flow of it rather quickly, the plot much like FC really starts to truly kick-off during the mid-section of the game with the Introduction of KeA (who's a pure ball of unsaturated sugar who's too good for this world).
But I will say that despite this, I did get into the flow of it much earlier than even FC because the scrimblo chapters all had bigger stakes and machination behind everything, now that's not to say that the Mafia shit is the most fascinating thing in the world (and trust me they're not that threatening, not much than Team Rocket in the early days of Pokemon) but it does its job well at hooking the player.
It also help how compact the region of Crossbell is, it's a small country much smaller than the likes of Liberl which divided its different chapters by territories
The main city is ofc the main attraction here, it's bustling with life and memorable locations and aesthetically speaking is better than any city from Liberl, the outskirts of the city in comparison are a bit weak, there's 2 villages that are of relatively low importance plot wise and a bunch of side-areas, you go through all of it in a matter of 2 chapters out of 5 which means that the game locks off a bunch of the late game areas to keep at least some new areas by the second half of the game.
There's also fast travel although only inside the city which definitely does help when doing side-quest, I Wish there was a fast travel option for the entire country but it's only available for 1 (one) chapter, otherwise you have to travel in the city then take the bus and while it's definitely less egregious on making you go back and forth in places, the game still does that a lot albeit to a lower amount than the game.
In fact aesthetically speaking, the game ditches free camera control in favor of fixed camera angle that changes perspective from time to time like the 5TH Generation Pokemon games and there's a lot of areas when it does that to great effect.
Gameplay wise, it's pretty much the same as Sky, the 4 main characters are pretty well rounded and balanced for one another (even though I did replace Ellie whenever I had the occasion cause she's kinda ass for a long period of time) and it's relatively easy to make them stupidly broken by the mid-game trivializing most fights, it's probably the only real complaint compared to Trails the 3rd which seemed to have an higher focus on making the game way more challenging so that even normal mode doesn't feel like a walk in the park.
In comparison, this game is more on the easy side of things outside of the final boss or some random surprise bullshit encounters, but the game in general is pretty braindead and most of the "difficulty" comes from how tanky the bosses are and most of them are kinda forgettable and straightforward compared to the head-scratchers of the 3rd bosses, also somehow the game has less spell than 3rd too, in general I do miss the crazy team building and progressive dive into bullshit territory that 3rd had with its bigger gameplay focus.
There's also tons of QoL stuff such as stunning the ennemies to finish them faster with a team rush or a bunch of crits, proper Dual Arts that are visually really cool and unique compared to how SC and 3rd did them, stackable
A big improvement are definitely the different dungeons you visits, taking cues from 3rd dungeon design and the few good new areas of SC, the dungeons are long, sprawling, have some killer atmosphere to them (shoutout to the Star Gazer tower and the Haunted Ruins), a bunch of diverging path an even some light puzzle solving which is definitely more than I was expecting from this franchise and it was a pleasure to go through all of those.
Because that pleasure is a bit short-lived, you do very little rpg-ing in this RPG, in fact the joke about Crossbell somewhat being a VN is true because there is a lot more talking even by Trails standard up to that point, there's a lot of long stretch of moments when all you're going to do is walk and talk to people with nothing else.
It does lead into some pretty annoying moment where you're in an area and you have to check and talk to everything to progress, the mission to stop the assassination of the mayor in the 2nd chapter was pretty eggregious on that part because the triggers to progress are not clear so you're just kinda stuck there going back and forth in the same tiny area, definitely the low points of the game killing any momentum great scenes could have.
Zero does the classic Trails formula the best, and I'm still impressed by the sheer amount of work that was done in order to make this world feel alive and lived in with NPC dialogues changing at every story moment but it's crazy how the game expects you to really go check-in on everyone but this game updates the dialogue for all people in the whole region an like... Ain't nobody got time for that lol ? I did talk and re-talk to NPC whenever I was passing by them but at some points and espcially with how slow the pacing of these games can be, you just kinda wanna move on to the next story bit and finish the game. But I still commend the effort for having such an high amount of text most people will likely completely ignore on their first playthrough and tons of things you have to reach for.
Storywise, I mean it sure is an intro chapter but they made it so it can definitely stand on its own, the game is a good mix between tying some loose plot thread of the previous trilogy and be a solid new entry in the Trails mega-series with a new cast of characters and new conflicts to be interested about.
The main cast of the SSS are... Ok, they definitely don't reach the same level of endearing and lovable as the cast from the previous arc (yet) but they do work and I ended them liking them a lot by the end especially Tio who's probably my favorite out of the main 4 with Randy as a close second.
I can't say much on Lloyd and Ellie tho, as the game stand-in for Estelle and Joshua, I feel like they're both relatively flat characters that don't break any grounds, Lloyd is an optimistic and dense shonen MC like you've seen a lot in those type of story, most of my likeness for him coming from his voice actor (who did Simon in TTGL and the fact they gave his brother Kamina's seiyuu was just here to bait me and it even managed to make me tear up a little albeit for a reason that are not related to this game proper) and Ellie has an inner conflict about getting to the nitty gritty of it while being a member of the nobility but it's not really that well explored.
In fact, only Tio has a lot of development around her which is normal considering that she's linked to the main antagonist goal much like Renne.
Speaking of Renne, it's really funny how the best part of this game story-wise was things that bounced out of the previous arc, in that sense Zero feels like a very nice epilogue to her story-arc and those of Estelle and Joshua and if it wasn't for them stealing the show during the final act, I would've written off the ending of this game has the weakest in the series.
Cause yeah...
I'm gonna be honest, the antagonist this time manages to be even worse than Ouroboros somehow, like I can't believe they did the whole "aloof scientist who's secretly the leader of an evil cult" thing a second time and got away with it scott-free while winking at the audience at how similar this is to Weissman, the guy is quite literally a dollar store Weissman and half of the reasons you wanna see his downfall are linked to the stuff that happened to Renne back in Star Door 15, but he even fails at being genuinely threatening or entertaining unlike Weissman and I can't believe they made a dollar store Weissman all so I can praise Weissman who is an antagonist I also didn't think too much about lmaoooo
It's kind of a shame too because his goofy ass kinda desamorced all the fucked up shit that he caused indirectly, because my dude is just a random fanatic, he really has no motivation beyond his religious fanatism and gives a vibe of "I did it for the lolz" which definitely is hard to stomach since that shit involve fucking Child Abuse (in all sense of the word) and human sacrifices, the cult is bad that's a fact, but their leader is just lame, yes Joachim is a lame vilain and I wish that Falcom tried to be a bit more original there instead of trying to be "in on the joke" and I hope that the pool of good antagonist expand because outside of Richard and Loewe, shit aren't looking great.
Zero is solid, a lot of it is way more entertaining than even FC
If you have to ask me which one I prefer between this and FC, I'd say Zero is the strongest game of the two but the vibe of FC's are immaculate and I can't detach my feelings from it enough, they're about equal and they both shine differently in different places
Now I hope Azure can live up to the hype much more than SC did for FC, I'm already scared of the amount of re-used content or the structure of the game, because while Crossbell is solid for one game, I don't know if they can throw more meaningful gameplay or story content past this
But oh well I can be wrong on that front, we'll see o/
2017
Why did no one told me that they made Mighty N°9 but good ?
Like this random ass crossover spin-off game is pretty much a remake of MN9 if it was actually made with care and effort behind it, the concept of customizing your own bullet while perfectible and easily breakable offers a lot of fun possibilities and the difficulty and level design is just right !
It's not the best designed 2D Classic Megaman by Inti Creates (that would be MM9 imo) but it's probably the second best
If you happen to be a part of the wall of shame that were the Mighty Number 9 credits, give this one a shot, you deserve it
Like this random ass crossover spin-off game is pretty much a remake of MN9 if it was actually made with care and effort behind it, the concept of customizing your own bullet while perfectible and easily breakable offers a lot of fun possibilities and the difficulty and level design is just right !
It's not the best designed 2D Classic Megaman by Inti Creates (that would be MM9 imo) but it's probably the second best
If you happen to be a part of the wall of shame that were the Mighty Number 9 credits, give this one a shot, you deserve it
Trails in the Sky The 3rd : Diamond in the rough, don't skip
Previously on "Cani plays the Kiseki series", Cani was struck with how lukewarm he ended up being towards Trails SC the most hype entry in the sky trilogy, if you want some recontextualization refer to my Sky SC (and a bit of FC review)
With that said, let's talk about the 3rd and final entry in the Sky saga, Trails in the Sky the 3rd !
This one is kind of an oddball within the series, remember how I said that despite its flaws Trails SC still retained the same quality as FC in terms of writing and coherence ? Well this time it's a bit more complicated, Trails the 3rd doesn't really possess any of these qualities because it goes for a completely different thing, while the first 2 games were classic JRPG titles were you go around the world, talk to people and explore dungeons from time to time , Trails the 3rd is mostly a dungeon crawler where you go through different dungeons , beat up ennemies and get some random story content from time to time.
In a lot of ways, Trails the 3rd feels a lot less ambitious than its predecessor, the game is kind of a budget title and it's something that you can feel quite a bit. From all the reused assets, to the weird plot structure and doors, Trails the 3rd is a chimera Frankenstein monster of an entry that is so drastically different from the first two that one might not vibe with it if they liked the first two games much more than me.
Even the title kinda put a big emphasis on that, it's Sky "the 3rd" instead of sky "3rd chapter" that's because the game is the third title of the Sky series but not really a sequel to the Sky main storyline which is well over by now.
I honestly even doubt the game was even planned by any stretch of the imagination, it's like "Ok we have enough unresolved plot points and under developed side-characters to fill an entire game with it but the story is over ? What do we do ?"
"I dunno do you know about Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories ?"
Trails the 3rd has to bear on its shoulders three completely disjointed promises :
-Expanding on the already well developed cast and storyline of the first 2 games
-Setting the stage for future entries
-And telling a self-contained story of its own that's worth going through to not feel to justify this game being more than an anthology
So did it manages to do all of that ?
OH MY GOD THEY DID AND EVEN MORE, TRAILS THE 3rd IS ACTUALLY THE BEST ENTRY IN THE SERIES BY FAR
But how ? How does a game so drastically different ? So drastically cheaper on such a drastically smaller conflict can even achieve the status of being quite literally a masterpiece were the first two entries were alright but not above average ?
I'd say that the first aspect that Sky 3rd excels at is structure and general pacing, the game is much shorter than the first two entries but much more is going on in the story at literally any point, there's not a single dull or repetitive moment nor are their needlessly stretched out chunk of gameplay (except maybe chapter 6 but chapter 6 also possess some of the rawest boss fight in the trilogy) and despite setting its story in a world vastly different than the first two entry, it manages to have a superb vibe and atmosphere enhanced by what is easily the best soundtrack in the entire trilogy.
This is also served by probably the best gameplay the series has seen so far, while like the first two entries I still played on normal difficulty, Trails 3rd really does use the serviceable but still fun battle system of the original to its full potential here. This is due to how the game handles its difficulty and the different ressources you get throughout the game, unlike Sky FC and SC, getting access to Mira and new quartz is harder so the game pretty much forces to play smarter with the limited toolset given to you , that toolset grows exponentially larger as time goes on and the more party members you acquire and the more quartz you can get access to grows and the more insane the builds can be.
I actually enjoy the fact the game prioritize giving you characters you might've not used in the original titles meaning that you have a bigger time to experience with new and unique party combination , eventually you do get all the party members available in the previous games (which have also seen some changes in their gameplay with new or upgraded crafts) as well as two surprise party members which just happens to also be 2 of my favorite antagonist from the previous entries (and both are allegedly SUPER BROKEN) but that doesn't really change the fact that for most of the game you have to adapt yourself to what you have, and thank god investing on some of these characters is so worth it (Tita becomes a fucking MONSTER by the end of the game let me tell you)
Everything is served by the game having quite an upscale in difficulty, because of plot related reasons the monsters have new elemental weaknesses and resistance, so now you can't just spam time magic anymore and be gone with it, elemental weaknesses are even more important in this game than in the previous titles and boss battles aren't just about brute forcing your way through them trying to out-dps them, you need to manage buffs and debuffs accordingly, being cautious of your placement and general movement as well as managing your status resistance because this game will not forgive even random encounters can kick your ass without you noticing if you're not careful about that shit and if it's already this much fun on normal mode, I can't even imagine how amazing it would be on the other game difficulties, 3rd is the only game I'm looking forward to replay just for the gameplay , it's really that good.
The exploration is also vastly improved from SC, SC had the problem of having too much less new content, recycled areas with little to no changes and a fuck lot of backtracking
3rd changes that by doing three things :
-Having way more new environment and dungeons to explore
-Recycling areas but putting a twist on them to make them feel fresh and new to go through
-And little to no backtracking with the game having actual fast travel with a LOT of areas you can teleport to
Meaning that yes, Sky 3rd was clearly less of a pain in the ass than SC in that regard and all that I've mentioned above does make the game pacing quite buttery smooth for the majority of it.
But what's good gameplay and exploration in a JRPG if not tied to a good story ?
Well turns out despite its weird disjointed plot structure, Trails the 3rd is the perfect cap off to the franchise one could ever hoped for.
The main content of the game itself is quite straightforward and short, but the side-content is truly where the game truly shines and what make this the penultimate kiseki experience for any fan of the franchise.
Like I said the game has an anthology approach to its story, along your exploration of Phantasma, you'll get across different kinds of doors which ranges from short stories about random characters to longer more developed stories to minigames. Some doors even have the luxury to tease you on the rest of the franchise especially star door 8 and 14 which sets the stage for what I believe would be stuff happening later in Crossbell and Cold Steel.
These doors really adds a lot to the cast that was already pretty meaty in the original and helped me get an even better appreciation for them even the super minor ones, some of these are actually so good you actually wonder why these subplot weren't in SC to begin with (especially the Estelle and Joshua ones which would've hit even harder in the context of that game rather than a random substory in 3rd).
Of course the clear outliers of all these doors is clearly Star Door 15 which is to put it lightly the "PTSD arc" of the Trails series due to how brutal of a tone and atmosphere change it is from the rest of the game (note : therapy not included) and have put me in quite a bad mood after finishing it. It's so viscerally brutal and told so crudely while keeping the doubt throughout the entire thing where you're in a constant state of "No fucking way..." until it is "yes fucking way" and your heart is broken to pieces.
But what about the main story ? Well this time instead of Estelle and Joshua serving more of a support role this time, the story focus on a character from SC named Kevin, Kevin was already a pretty damn fun character in SC but more in a comedic side-kick kind of way well at least until the ending of the game when a new side of his character is revealed to us.
Trails the 3rd builds on that ending to develop Kevin from a funny sidekick to quite possibly one of my favorite protagonist in media, even surpassing Estelle in her own series despite having two games worth of character development herself.
The story of Kevin about dealing with his past traumas and trying to bear the pain on his shoulder to atone for his sins and how his destructive coping mechanism manages to hurt the people around him (metaphorically and literally through the existence of Phantasma) is one that deeply touched me and was so effective and told with such brillance, nuance and subtlety that it managed to even get little old me emotional.
Suffice to say that the final third of the game is truly where the game reaches its most climatic point yet, seriously this ending feels even more cathartic than the one from SC in many ways and yes it did made me cry like a little baby because despite all of the bumps in the road, I did got attached to these characters and that particular smaller story really emphasized how much seeing them grow over the course of three games truly was something few JRPG can manage to pull off.
The final farewell to the cast was probably the best way to cap off this series.
Trails the 3rd is quite honestly a masterpiece but one that truly holds meaning within the context of its own series and to think some people would skip it is absolutely unreasonable.
You got me Falcom hive, you got me DAMN well
TL;DR : SC is trash , 3RD GANG RISE UP !
Previously on "Cani plays the Kiseki series", Cani was struck with how lukewarm he ended up being towards Trails SC the most hype entry in the sky trilogy, if you want some recontextualization refer to my Sky SC (and a bit of FC review)
With that said, let's talk about the 3rd and final entry in the Sky saga, Trails in the Sky the 3rd !
This one is kind of an oddball within the series, remember how I said that despite its flaws Trails SC still retained the same quality as FC in terms of writing and coherence ? Well this time it's a bit more complicated, Trails the 3rd doesn't really possess any of these qualities because it goes for a completely different thing, while the first 2 games were classic JRPG titles were you go around the world, talk to people and explore dungeons from time to time , Trails the 3rd is mostly a dungeon crawler where you go through different dungeons , beat up ennemies and get some random story content from time to time.
In a lot of ways, Trails the 3rd feels a lot less ambitious than its predecessor, the game is kind of a budget title and it's something that you can feel quite a bit. From all the reused assets, to the weird plot structure and doors, Trails the 3rd is a chimera Frankenstein monster of an entry that is so drastically different from the first two that one might not vibe with it if they liked the first two games much more than me.
Even the title kinda put a big emphasis on that, it's Sky "the 3rd" instead of sky "3rd chapter" that's because the game is the third title of the Sky series but not really a sequel to the Sky main storyline which is well over by now.
I honestly even doubt the game was even planned by any stretch of the imagination, it's like "Ok we have enough unresolved plot points and under developed side-characters to fill an entire game with it but the story is over ? What do we do ?"
"I dunno do you know about Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories ?"
Trails the 3rd has to bear on its shoulders three completely disjointed promises :
-Expanding on the already well developed cast and storyline of the first 2 games
-Setting the stage for future entries
-And telling a self-contained story of its own that's worth going through to not feel to justify this game being more than an anthology
So did it manages to do all of that ?
OH MY GOD THEY DID AND EVEN MORE, TRAILS THE 3rd IS ACTUALLY THE BEST ENTRY IN THE SERIES BY FAR
But how ? How does a game so drastically different ? So drastically cheaper on such a drastically smaller conflict can even achieve the status of being quite literally a masterpiece were the first two entries were alright but not above average ?
I'd say that the first aspect that Sky 3rd excels at is structure and general pacing, the game is much shorter than the first two entries but much more is going on in the story at literally any point, there's not a single dull or repetitive moment nor are their needlessly stretched out chunk of gameplay (except maybe chapter 6 but chapter 6 also possess some of the rawest boss fight in the trilogy) and despite setting its story in a world vastly different than the first two entry, it manages to have a superb vibe and atmosphere enhanced by what is easily the best soundtrack in the entire trilogy.
This is also served by probably the best gameplay the series has seen so far, while like the first two entries I still played on normal difficulty, Trails 3rd really does use the serviceable but still fun battle system of the original to its full potential here. This is due to how the game handles its difficulty and the different ressources you get throughout the game, unlike Sky FC and SC, getting access to Mira and new quartz is harder so the game pretty much forces to play smarter with the limited toolset given to you , that toolset grows exponentially larger as time goes on and the more party members you acquire and the more quartz you can get access to grows and the more insane the builds can be.
I actually enjoy the fact the game prioritize giving you characters you might've not used in the original titles meaning that you have a bigger time to experience with new and unique party combination , eventually you do get all the party members available in the previous games (which have also seen some changes in their gameplay with new or upgraded crafts) as well as two surprise party members which just happens to also be 2 of my favorite antagonist from the previous entries (and both are allegedly SUPER BROKEN) but that doesn't really change the fact that for most of the game you have to adapt yourself to what you have, and thank god investing on some of these characters is so worth it (Tita becomes a fucking MONSTER by the end of the game let me tell you)
Everything is served by the game having quite an upscale in difficulty, because of plot related reasons the monsters have new elemental weaknesses and resistance, so now you can't just spam time magic anymore and be gone with it, elemental weaknesses are even more important in this game than in the previous titles and boss battles aren't just about brute forcing your way through them trying to out-dps them, you need to manage buffs and debuffs accordingly, being cautious of your placement and general movement as well as managing your status resistance because this game will not forgive even random encounters can kick your ass without you noticing if you're not careful about that shit and if it's already this much fun on normal mode, I can't even imagine how amazing it would be on the other game difficulties, 3rd is the only game I'm looking forward to replay just for the gameplay , it's really that good.
The exploration is also vastly improved from SC, SC had the problem of having too much less new content, recycled areas with little to no changes and a fuck lot of backtracking
3rd changes that by doing three things :
-Having way more new environment and dungeons to explore
-Recycling areas but putting a twist on them to make them feel fresh and new to go through
-And little to no backtracking with the game having actual fast travel with a LOT of areas you can teleport to
Meaning that yes, Sky 3rd was clearly less of a pain in the ass than SC in that regard and all that I've mentioned above does make the game pacing quite buttery smooth for the majority of it.
But what's good gameplay and exploration in a JRPG if not tied to a good story ?
Well turns out despite its weird disjointed plot structure, Trails the 3rd is the perfect cap off to the franchise one could ever hoped for.
The main content of the game itself is quite straightforward and short, but the side-content is truly where the game truly shines and what make this the penultimate kiseki experience for any fan of the franchise.
Like I said the game has an anthology approach to its story, along your exploration of Phantasma, you'll get across different kinds of doors which ranges from short stories about random characters to longer more developed stories to minigames. Some doors even have the luxury to tease you on the rest of the franchise especially star door 8 and 14 which sets the stage for what I believe would be stuff happening later in Crossbell and Cold Steel.
These doors really adds a lot to the cast that was already pretty meaty in the original and helped me get an even better appreciation for them even the super minor ones, some of these are actually so good you actually wonder why these subplot weren't in SC to begin with (especially the Estelle and Joshua ones which would've hit even harder in the context of that game rather than a random substory in 3rd).
Of course the clear outliers of all these doors is clearly Star Door 15 which is to put it lightly the "PTSD arc" of the Trails series due to how brutal of a tone and atmosphere change it is from the rest of the game (note : therapy not included) and have put me in quite a bad mood after finishing it. It's so viscerally brutal and told so crudely while keeping the doubt throughout the entire thing where you're in a constant state of "No fucking way..." until it is "yes fucking way" and your heart is broken to pieces.
But what about the main story ? Well this time instead of Estelle and Joshua serving more of a support role this time, the story focus on a character from SC named Kevin, Kevin was already a pretty damn fun character in SC but more in a comedic side-kick kind of way well at least until the ending of the game when a new side of his character is revealed to us.
Trails the 3rd builds on that ending to develop Kevin from a funny sidekick to quite possibly one of my favorite protagonist in media, even surpassing Estelle in her own series despite having two games worth of character development herself.
The story of Kevin about dealing with his past traumas and trying to bear the pain on his shoulder to atone for his sins and how his destructive coping mechanism manages to hurt the people around him (metaphorically and literally through the existence of Phantasma) is one that deeply touched me and was so effective and told with such brillance, nuance and subtlety that it managed to even get little old me emotional.
Suffice to say that the final third of the game is truly where the game reaches its most climatic point yet, seriously this ending feels even more cathartic than the one from SC in many ways and yes it did made me cry like a little baby because despite all of the bumps in the road, I did got attached to these characters and that particular smaller story really emphasized how much seeing them grow over the course of three games truly was something few JRPG can manage to pull off.
The final farewell to the cast was probably the best way to cap off this series.
Trails the 3rd is quite honestly a masterpiece but one that truly holds meaning within the context of its own series and to think some people would skip it is absolutely unreasonable.
You got me Falcom hive, you got me DAMN well
TL;DR : SC is trash , 3RD GANG RISE UP !
Trails of Cold Steel : “It’s a game about nothing”
Been a while since my gigantic review of Azure right ?
I think taking a break between the arcs or heck even between these games is important if you don’t want to end up burning on them. You know, give it a fresh start, give it a fresh new look, give yourself the time to forget about the bad things and enjoy the serie's strengths in retrospect.
Well good for me because the Kiseki grind is not over and there’s a whole new arc to explore this time around with the Cold Steel series. Now to be frank, I was wary about this one, I got a lot of mixed signals from my friends about this, some people loves Cold Steel like it’s the second coming of Jesus Christ but then you have others more reasonable people who have a lot of criticism of the game and let’s be frank neither of those people managed to sold me on Cold Steel.
And looking at it from a distance, this didn’t seem like a good start, a high-school setting, a main character that look just like every Kirito wannabe on the face of the earth even more blatant coomer bait otaku pandering than usual and some stuff I heard from my friends did not bode well for the future of my mental health getting into this game. I knew what I was getting into, it’s trashy JRPG stuff for teenagers to get crazy about on Twitter dot com and kneeling at Rean for being an extreme giga chad of normalcy.
So I went in, tampering my expectations below the ocean floor for this one, thinking that, the series already proved itself enough already and maybe there was a way that my prior investment into the series and the few qualities all the games share with each others in terms of worldbuilding might keep me invested and interested in this right ?
Like this series has set a standard of quality, I’m not a fan of Trails but I can’t deny that in all the issues I had with the series (namely what frustrates me about it that I mentioned in my other reviews), it’s still an ambitious, sincere piece of work with a lot of charm to carry you out for hours even when nothing is happening.
So here I was, bored out of my ass once again in one of my afternoons, and I felt ready, I needed to know what Cold Steel was all about, I needed to form my opinion on it, heck with my expectations being so low it can only positively surprise me right…?
Let’s not play around any longer.
The Legend of Heroes : Trails of Cold Steel is one of the single worst JRPG I had the displeasure of playing and every minute of it felt like actual mind numbing mental torture.
Now claiming such a bold statement for a piece of work with a decent following of people who loves it to death might as well be a death sentence and please, do re-direct all of your future death treats to my dm’s or in the comment so that I can completely ignore them and pretend I’m morally superior to you for not partaking in such trivial display of self-defense and bad intentions.
But I need to get this out of my chest anyway, not only because I have nothing better to do, giving my unneeded opinion on everything is pretty much the solid foundation of my career and because this looks like a job for me, so everybody just follow me cause we need a little controversy cause it’d be so empty without me.
I’m not going to do the old song and dance in this review by re-explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the Trails formula because at this point very little has changed (or at least they took a worse direction overall in terms of execution, more on that later) so let’s just talk about the game itself.
The game is set in the Empire of Erebonia, a vastly overhyped land that was constantly mentioned in the earlier entries in the series most of the time as an antagonistic force so let’s at least address the one positive of such as a setting.
You’re witnessing the event leading up to a full-scale war launched by an expansionist faction who just love to colonize and annex stuff from inside the invader country, it’s a really interesting setup as we rarely get games taking place inside of the “evil empire of doom” most RPG’s tend to have and Erebonia’s situation is a bit more complex than it may seem at first since the Empire itself has its own sets of issues mainly a social caste one. With the nobility still being a thing so we have dukes and lords and barons and the plebs, the commoners but with the advance of technology and change in social habits and custom some commoners have gained prominence in the higher state of society and are now politicians, CEO’s, Generals and some of them have formed the “reformist” faction who are opposed to the “noble faction” which have two lines of thinking “Nobles are cringe and commoners rules but expansionism is based and we should conquer more land to get the point across'' think of it as Stalinism interpreted by a Japanese author who is not super well read on those ideologies.
That is arguably, a fascinating setting for a JRPG and one that could if done correctly rival with the setting of Crossbell which was a whole can of worms onto itself and this is in those instances that even thought the entire rest of the game will absolutely fail at doing anything remotely interesting with that setting that if anything Trails is good a framing the action of their stories in interesting coat of paint.
But then you scratch the paint and you realize that the game is very, very, very rusty and full of cavities and holes and its inner machination is faulty and at times completely out of touch with any form of tangible reality or common sense.
So what POV does the game choose to tell this story, in the Sky Series we played as bracers a private militia with the goal to help the common people without involving themselves in politics, in Crossbell we played as the SSS a special brigade of the police who does the job of bracers but unlike them can actually run investigations and involve themselves with political affairs.
In this game, you play as Rean Schwarzer (a piece of white bread that the game will pretend to be a good protagonist) , a fresh new student going to Thors Military academy. So yes, the framing for this story is that you’re playing as… high-school students… and yes… it’s as thrilling as it sounds…
Look, I don’t mind school setting, I really don’t and in fact some of my favorite pieces of media have a school setting or heavily feature teenagers but as I grow older and bitter and more cynical, my tolerance and patience towards those elements decreases with time. I guess this is my L for playing a video game aimed at a certain demographic of people and complaining about not being catered to but let’s see how the game execute that concept, afterall, I’m all for a good, funny, wholesome high-school slice of life from time to time and it seems like the main bulk of the game anyway.
Now ok, what is the single-most important aspect of any story ? Regardless of genre, regardless of conventions, regardless of scale or ambitions.
That’s right, it’s the characters, my rule of thumb is that you can make even the most basic mind-numbingly cliché story amazing if the characters are awesome (cf. Most of the “Tales of “ series) and boy we sure have characters this time around because guess what, you don’t just have 1, not 2 not 3, not 4 but 9 !
9 fucking playable characters in this game which compose your main party, as you can see this is a large cast of characters which I mean, fine, I don’t mind it but that’s a bit overkill this early into a story as you can’t possibly hope to make all of them standout by the end and you will run into the issues of having a few weak link amongst the party.
Heck even my favorite RPG, FFIX with its cast of 8 playable characters by the end of the game, ends up having 2 characters pretty much being slot fillers that don’t contribute much to the story as a whole and are just here to break the game in half with their abilities but at least you meet them progressively and not all of them dropped on you from the start so they can get a bit of breathing room for them to get introduced before they can wipe the floor with Death Blue Magic.
And you know at least, these characters have personalities, interesting dynamics, layers to them and their arc and even though not all the characters are special, at least the ones who stand out are some of the most compelling characters I’ve had the pleasure to accompany in an RPG.
This is something JRPG understood fairly early on when they started giving a shit about pushing deeper more ambitious narrative into the forefront of the experience, if you want people to spend hours in a game and getting invested into its world, lore and themes, you need good characters to channel those elements and make them shine more brightly.
Well let me tell you that Cold Steel spectacularly fails in epic proportion at making its cast of characters likable or at least interesting, they are the equivalent of paper cutouts with a ChatGPT prompt attached to their mouth and the depth of a glass of water that’s been half-emptied and then left unattended for 9 days straight.
While it is usually a pretty low criticism to say, here it is legit the truth, most of the characters in this game are just a collection of one note anime cliché with almost nothing more going for them beyond that initial first impression. And maybe you’d be like : “But Cani, maybe they start as clichés but then evolve into fully fledged characters through trials and tribulation”, they don’t and I wish I was kidding.
“But do they have like… conflicts with the world or between themselves to make them grow as characters ? Motives that drive them to do the things they do ?” At this point, you might just be grasping at straws trying to find gold. Falcom decided to do the novel idea of making you use your imagination to imagine what these characters could’ve been had they been handled by competent writers who actually cared about the topics they were trying to talk about.
So the context behind how our ragtag team of wet towels got together to become friends and maybe saving the world or some shit is fairly straightforward. At Thors Military academy, classes are usually separated between nobles and commoners with nobles getting extra privileges like exclusive rooms for them and an actual extended vacation period whereas the commoners have a whopping 5 days of break in the whole school year (terrible news, I know right ?) but this time, things are getting a bit wacky and experimental.
Usually the academy has 5 class but this year there’s a 6th one cleverly name “Class VII” (they make a joke about it but don’t expect it to make sense at least in this entry), in class VII members of the nobility and commoners are mixed together into one group to see if they can get along and be friends with each others, they also have a special curriculum which mostly consist of going on on field trips where they’ll fulfill request for the citizen of Erebonia (which is the convenient excuse this game found to justify its terrible structure and quest system more on that later).
This opposition between commoners and nobles is the main conflict of the narrative but it’s only crystalized by two of the most annoying characters I’ve seen in an RPG yet, Machias and Jusis. Machias HATES the nobility because of some old trauma about her sister being bullied into suicide or at least that’s what you learn about after 40h of the game in perhaps the game worst chapter and the dude just can’t stand having to team-up with nobles (rightfully so) so you’d think he’d have a problem with all the nobles but he only has issues with Jusis, a snarky, indifferent asshole, who’s a noble but doesn’t care about all the etiquette coming up with it.
These two character dynamics is the most annoying and cliché thing shit ever, it goes nowhere, they grew to tolerate each other in the span of one chapter but that’s about it and their dialogues might as well be sandpaper for my eyes, they literally have the dynamic of the “enjoyer vs fans” meme, if you liked poor people before, get ready to fucking hate them with Machias… or will you ?
See, you quickly realize that even in its own setup, the game cannot handle that conflict for shit, in Class VII there are only 9 members, 3 of which are nobles and the rest are all commoners, the ratio is a bit unbalanced but alas it gets worse. See because this is a JRPG, every character needs to be a super special character, so all the commoners in class VII do not actually fit the definition of commoners, if anything they’re a product of bourgeoisie.
The commoner characters are either the sons of important political figures, generals or CEO of a multinational company or in the case of Emma while the game doesn’t say it outright yet, she’s a member of a long lineage of secret guardians of the world which is meant to guide Rean (the chosen one of some prophecy we haven’t been briefed about yet but it might happen in the sequel). The only character in the party that can fit the definition is Gaius but that’s because he’s an immigrant from a society where social caste don’t even exist at all so the man is completely outside of that conflict except to show us a different point of view (and pointing out how dated Erebonia’s society is).
This of course gets even worse when around the 70h mark, you get 2 other party members who are also commoners and also have a deep secret past that make them super special (except one will turn out to be the main antagonist of the game real identity, woops, spoiler I guess), now mind you this is actually very thoughtful of the game to finally give us characters that are actually likable and endearing in our main party so late into the game, I’m fine with that but still it’s a bit too late on the uptake.
So you have nobles (who are for the most part not representative of the noble faction at all, nor nobles in general since they need to be “one of the good ones” to be in a JRPG party) and commoners who aren’t really commoners at all and never once represent the real struggle of the common everyday man, a great way to introduce this arc central conflict I guess but somehow it gets worse.
With this setup alone, you realize that what little conflict and themes the game had behind it is completely muddled by a confused writer who has no idea how class warfare even works, this is something I already noticed back when I reviewed yet another game by Kondo “Ys IX Monstrum Nox” which was also another boring slog of a game that shat on Ys’s entire legacy with empty fanservice and terribly bare bone gameplay and level design while trying to make a somewhat confused weirdly political point that just amounted to “Centrism the videogame”.
Chapter 4 of Cold Steel was perhaps one of the rare occasions while playing an RPG that I felt like somebody was ripping my brain apart. A whole lot of things happen in this chapter and a whole lot of nothing too, the gang goes to the capital for some annual festival. Two characters didn’t have an established character arc or any conflict yet so let’s just spawn one out of the blue despite these two characters barely interacting with each others for the past 40h so they have a bit of beef with one another which is this bizarre “I hate you because I love you, stop hiding shit from me” deal and like… what the fuck is this bizarre excuse to lead up to a character dumping their entire life story on you. I get that these are teenagers and teenagers tend to act irrationally at times but this felt very tacked on and was also presented in the lamest way possible (in the lamest in-engine combat cutscene I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing).
But on top of this, you also have more “Machias” moment who at this point of the story stopped being a shitty nerd with prejudice against the nobles and became an advocate for the #NotAllNoble movement, this scene where Machias explain his backstory and then proceed to explain how he changed his opinion made me cringe so hard that I let the game ran in the background for a solid hour and decided to take a shower and grab a beer at how asinine this take is.
Cold Steel, but I’d say Kondo is the kind of person that just runs on sophistry alone, Kondo is the type of person who is wholly uninterested in answering the political conflicts of his story that he will just either not address them or address them in the most out of touch way possible. See, the idea that a society is divided in two camps, one with privilege and the other without any is enough to set the stage for a revolution plotline but not in Kondo’s stories, Revolution is a brutal, outdated way of leading up to a deep change in power dynamics. Kondo prefers to stay in his position because there are good people in the dominant class, therefore, the system is fine and just needs some tweaking to flow better.
That is complete horseshit and sophistry of the highest level, we live a world right now where social divide is as steep as ever, people at the top are indifferent pedantic asshole with the power to get anything they want at the flick of a hand and can exploit millions of people just for being born under the right circumstances or because they stole assets and profited out of them. For as much as I’ve criticized Falcom’s villain for being corny Saturday Morning Cartoon characters, we now live in a world where these characters can be seen as almost realistic depictions of real life individuals.
Let me indulge in being a massive commie here, when people point out systemic issue in a general sense by saying X privileged group of people are responsible for the suffering of less fortunate people, if you answer is : “But not all of them are bad tho”, get ready to have my foot up in your ass because we simply do not care. What we care about is changing the system for the better or at best get rid of it entirely if its based on no solid foundation and the fact that noble exist in Erebonia don’t have solid foundation and that’s even something that the characters point out in the chapter right before it during one of the game many side-quest so why trying to push a narrative of common ground and acceptance, a so called “third” way that takes the best of both world when one side clearly is answering for the plies of the majority of the country’s population.
Mind you, this is just what I got from what little time the game actually brought up these topics up because and that’s the worst part about this game, Cold Steel seems to be wholly uninterested in its own setting and also in addressing the questions and themes they brought along with them, because this doesn’t constitute the bulk of the game and also because in order to make me even care about these topics, it would’ve been a good start to make us follow characters that are well written and likable and entertaining.
Because of the game's shitty structure, whenever tension arises in the story, the game just looks the other way and wants you to grind for more conclusions making it a game about nothing. Most of this game is just empty and void of any potential interest and is only interested in wasting the players time in pointless trivial matters like preparing for a school festival or retrieving someone’s hat (and I swear this is a mandatory quest, you need to do to progress through the game).
In great part due to the game’s structure and pacing.
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I’ve mentioned my game time at several point in my review, to contextualize when the stuff with the game I had problem with arose and that’s because I just wanted to point out that Trails of Cold Steel is a game that took me 100h to complete but since the in-game time is affected by turbo-mode, I will probably say it was closer to roughly 75-80h, nonetheless without turbo mode almost constantly on, this would’ve been the tangible reality of my game time with this game.
Trails games and this isn’t something that started with Cold Steel are long but they often struggle to justify their own length in a meaningful way. There is this common misconception in media analysis that the more time is spent on a piece of media is representative of its level of complexity and interest, that if a game takes its time to tell the things they have to tell then it must mean that it has a lot of things and a lot of interesting to either tell or to make us experience from a gameplay perspective.
Now it is no surprise that Trails game are very wordy, it’s a fact I already pointed out in the Crossbell arc which was a duology of game I’ve jokingly called “more of a visual novel than an RPG” especially for how long the cutscenes and dialogues were in comparison to the time you spend playing the game. Nonetheless, you do play the game, and the game lets you explore its gameworld to participate in classic JRPG affairs like combat, dungeons and of course side-quest that has always been the main point of contention of the game.
Now Trails of Cold Steel is the 6th entry in the Kiseki series, less than 10 years separate the first Trails in the Sky to Trails of Cold Steel so you’d naturally think that the formula has add a positive evolution from the rigid constant use of back and forth between segmented area of the first game, heck even Crossbell proposed an interesting change of pace by having an hub town attached to a bunch of adjacent routes you explore almost in its entirety in the first 15 to 20h of the game but that’s because Crossbell was a small country, here in Erebonia, to give you the sense that the country is large, you traverse the country by train. Meaning the game forces you to go where it wants you to go, but given that those games are linear by nature, it’s not all that terrible.
The problem is that the series already rigid structure has been more rigidified by some choice, each chapters and I mean each chapters plays exactly the same :
-A first day of going around talking to NPC
-A Free Day of going around doing quest and talking to NPC ending on the exploration of a new floor old school house (which is very mysterious place you visit multiple time which is just a reason to get one similarly boring se and repetitive sewer
dungeon to go through at the start of each chapters)
-Followed by a practical exam day which are literally small tutorial fights (and yes you get tutorial fight even in the final chapter 90h into the game)
-Followed by an exposition train trip where you play card games for extra bonding point (more on that later)
-2 (sometimes 3 when the game feel very spicy about it) days worth of pointless fetch quest inside one of the games many town and surrounding areas
-Concluded by (but only starting with Chapter 3) a terrorist attack where you beat the bad guy but they get away and then the news says “Damn, lots of shit happened heh?”
-Then it’s back to the start of the cycle repeat for 6 10 to 15 hours painfully long chapters
Rarely does the game ever deviate from that structure which makes every individual chapter more predictable than the last but also makes each instance of the game padding itself out even more obvious and increasingly annoying as time goes on.
In my previous review of Trails to Azure, I said that the game pacing was excellent but bogged down by the game constant need to pause its action to make us partake in pointless errant of various quality and for the first time ever some of these errant were mandatory to progress into the game with the game sometimes having a weird sense of priorities as what was considered important quest (and as such mandatory) and the ones that could be skipped (which sometimes were actually more story relevant).
And I suggested naively that if they wanted to go moving forward in that direction, they should make things more explicit as to avoid people missing out on important context and lore like that was the case with Azure and so they did the most logical move, make 90% of the side-quest in the game mandatory.
You’ve heard me right, long are the days of getting the luxury to skip on mediocre monster hunt side quests if you didn’t like going through them since this time around you WILL hunt these monsters inside sewers and you WILL enjoy it whether you like it or not. Oh sure the game still has a few game objectives that are completely optional (and even dares to still have secret side quests seriously how is it still a thing). And the worst thing is that they didn’t stop and thought for one second to change the way these games plays out, I hope you like having to arbitrarily do a random monster hunt to progress through the game because this is what most of the climatic big quest of this game consist of and it’s fucking terrible.
Let’s indulge in a bit of game design analysis and try to comprehend this sudden rise in rigidity in a series which already had an issue liberating itself from the shackles of its own faulty foundation.
See, with Trails Falcom has created a really cool world that they’re really proud of and one of the things they are probably even more proud of more than anything else is their NPC’s who constantly update their dialogues for every minor advancement in the story and help the world feel more lived in as you experience micro-level arc and the life of these random people alongside your own journey.
It is one of the core aspect of the series and one of its best idea ever since the original game but in order for this aspect to work on people, you need to condition people to participate in it and while some people are easier to convince than others when it comes to asking them to always recheck all the NPC’s every time you advance the story even in a minor way, others may not.
See most JRPG only ask you the bare minimum when exploring a JRPG town, usually you’re going to enter a town, talk to all the NPC’s to gather clues, learn more about the world or more broadly to advance the plot and maybe check the shops and explore the area to see what other thing might hide in between the streets of these bustling cities but in general this is a one and done thing and unless we’re talking about a semi or full hub town that you come back to constantly and change with time, most of the time it’s a one and done kinda deal, rarely do talking to NPC multiple time at different point worth the hassle.
But in Kiseki it is such a core aspect of the experience, so how do you unconsciously manipulate your player into partaking in such an activity ?
Well by designing the game in a way that will push the people toward that experience and it’s with this game that I finally understood the secret sauce behind what makes Trails side-quest so terrible, these fetch quest and not meant to be interesting, they aren’t meant to be fun, heck they aren’t even meant to fill out the game with content like you’d see in a lot of modern RPG’s.
They are meant to put you on a tour, each quest consist of you going back and forth around the areas the chapter take places in so that you will probably think unconsciously to re-check on all the NPC’s, it’s not about how good the side-quest are, it’s about how these side-quest will force you to a second, third, fourth or even fifth lap of the single area the chapter takes place in and as such, you will have the reflex (or not) to re-talk to the NPC who are on your path to complete these various objectives.
But then how do you encourage the people to even do the side-quest if they’re so boring ? Well before Cold Steel the main incentive behind them was to gather money, you see in Trails you can trade elemental crystal called “sepith” for money but Sepith are also used to create quartz and unlock orbment slot to make your character stronger so using too much Sepith for money means missing out on making your characters better in battle and they might be drag behind the game (very generous) difficulty curve, monsters do not drop money in this game so the only method to get money without trading Sepith were, you guessed it, the side-quest which always gave just the right amount of money to upgrade all of your characters gears as you proceed to the next chapter.
But the Sky games were smart about this by giving its players choice, you can choose to do the side-quest or not, so imagine if there’s a couple of quests that you didn’t want to do like let’s say the monster hunts which were always the most fillerish type of quest in any JRPG, well you can simply skip them, you might not obtain the money, or bracer point for 100% completion or the extra goodies that come along with them but you will spend less time doing unfun shit and you can always use some spare Sepith to fill the gap in your wallet.
But in Cold Steel a new type of Sepith was invented, Sepith Mass, the only purpose of Sepith Mass is to be sold for money, you can’t use them in any other ways (and at this point, why don’t the game simply give you money I hate that gameplay quirk) meaning that the game brought back regular money grinding into a series that has always structured its difficulty and gameplay loop around limiting the player sources of income to force them into doing things they might not have been willing to do in the first place.
Mind you, you can still use regular Sepith for money and by the midway point of the game where all your character are fully upgraded they make it so you never run out of money ever, but that risk vs reward between selling sepith over doing side-quest is completely gone and so with the main purpose of those side-quest being removed, people will be more inclined to skip them and we’ve already mentioned how Falcom doesn’t want to do that for the sake of not making the time spent on making all the NPC’s and their updated dialogues wasted because of the regular player unwillingness to be curious and it’s especially bad to lose your player, especially in a game that was meant to attract a new audience.
So what is the obvious solution ? Well if players won’t go to the side-quest, we’ll make the side-quest go to them and that’s how you end up with a game that has to pad out and fill the gap between important event with pointless errants that the players now MUST WITHOUT ANY QUESTIONS DO !
Oh sure they are still “optional quest” but they represent 10% of the quest this time around and also yes, you’re not rewarded with money for them so feel free to skip them, I did all the side-quest in this game and most of the optional quest reward was not worth the hassle of doing them, I did them just out of completionist sake and to get those sweet sweet AP bonus which are this time around the only thing pushing you towards those optional thing.
And so you’d think, maybe they would make those errant more entertaining, fun or enticing in any way, well no and most of the time the game will make you understand the definition of insanity when most of the quest in the game are regular monster hunt quest and this is how you end up with a game where you’re still rendered at killing monsters in sewers at the 40h mark of the game while the story has still gone nowhere interesting or is spectacularly avoiding to get you in on the good shit.
And this time around, this particular Trails cannot compensate for its shitty structure with good, entertaining or even charming writing for the life of it and can’t even do it through its gameplay either.
Oh yeah because it’s not enough that the game is a boring slog with almost nothing engaging or even charming going on for it, it’s also a boring slog that made the gameplay of the series worse somehow. Trails gameplay was always kinda fun, it was not the revolution of the century but you could see that the more the series progressed and they more they tweaked some of its elements to make more varied boss and monster encounter and make use of its excellent arts and craft system at the center of it all and one thing that lays the foundation of such a solid system were the Quartz system.
Well fuck me because they decided to make orbment and Quartz way worse in this game, see in the previous games in the series, you had to arrange quartz in certain way to gain access to new and more powerful spell, the players needed to struck a good balance to get access to the most move possible while still profiting of the advantages given by each individual quartz like stat increases or additional effect, the system allowed for a lot of customization and a bit of experimentation, often times limiting the player with the characters different align to push them into playing them a certain way or to try and overcome these limitations.
Not this time tho, now you have quartz that give you stat boost and additional effecst and now you have quartz who are specifically designed to give you one spell, no more messing around with crystal combination and doing math, our players don’t care about an actually good progression system or having fun with an RPG, they want to get through the shitty slog part of the game faster so they can get to the twisty twist turn shit faster. This change severely reduces the utility of Arts which used to be main meta of Trails especially on higher difficulty and as such render characters who are either full-caster or mixed-attacker in the game completely and utterly useless outside of spamming their support crafts which are for the most part absurdly good.
Now be ready to just jack your physical attackers with as much strength boosting accessories and quartz as well as passive status effect and spam the ever living shit out of AoE attack like it’s FC’s endgame on steroid, past the midway point of the game most fight can be trivialized by out-dps’ing or simply not let monsters and bosses take turn.
Because all of your characters have insanely broken crafts, the crafts are so broken in this game whether they’re offensive or support type that they render the use of certain arts completely useless, in fact most arts are useless after a while despite the game tutorial making you think that it wouldn’t be the case and that you’d still need to cast a spell and heck now with the Zero-Arts bonus in combat that can pop-up, you can still use them without any cost.
More than never, the determining factor towards victory now are the master quartz an element introduced in Azure that didn’t have much influence on combat and was this game attempt at a job system but now in a setting where Quartz have been jumbled up to favor just powermaxxing everything, Master Quartz are now going to be essential to mix up your gameplay… or not…
The one that are installed by default on your characters are for the most part the best quartz adapted to them and even if you can get new master quartz throughout your adventure, by the time you get them, you MQ would’ve already evolved past a point where it would be worth changing them (Rean and Laura Master Quartz makes them absolutely stupid from the early game all the way to the final boss)
Wow amazing how the game has 11 party members by the end but half of them are rendered almost useless by this change, what else do we have to do to save this mess of a change ?
Well the main new feature that Cold Steel adds to the gameplay of Trails is the addition of links, you can link your character between them for additional advantages in battle and by using certain type of weapons on enemies (with the damage type borrowed from at the time Ys Seven and Celceta), you can initiate a break and chained them with an additional attack.
As you progress through the game, chaining link attack become a good way to inflict serious amount of damages and after a certain point in the game, you can do the rush attack from the Crossbell titles after chaining 5 link attack (which I think is a good limitation over how Crossbell games handled that feature). The more characters are linked together and the more they gain link points and when their link levels up, they can do even more additional action like counter-attacking or protecting their allies or auto-healing.
This is a pretty neat system sadly not exploited to its full potential here in this title because outside of 2 notable exception, this game is painfully easy, ofc part of the blame is on me for playing on normal like always but no thoughts was put into most of the aside bare the 2nd fight against C which was a welcome raise in difficulty.
Sadly 2 things bog down the fun factor of the system for me, the first one is having to resettle the links everytime someone dies, resettling the link doesn’t sacrifice a turn but it’s something you can easily forgot to do until you’re 5 turns in wondering why you can’t break enemies and then realizing that you just forgot to re-link, I think link should be regenerated if one of the pair gets revived without having linked to another character in the meantime, it’d be a great way to do this, also regenerate the link after battles, it’s just kind of stupid but heh, a bit of QoL wouldn’t have hurt and the other thing is the fact than in order to make full use of this system well… you have to actually give enough of a shit about the character to bond with them and level them up faster.
Because yes, back to writing (and also gameplay).
CS1 seems to take a lot (perhaps a bit too much) inspiration from other popular RPGs at the times, the setting is like Final Fantasy Type-0 (to the point of plagiarism) and the way the game tells its story borrows a lot from the Persona series. I could make a commentary on why I don’t think NU-Persona (heck Rean strikes the same pose as Yu Narukami in battle if that isn’t enough proof) should be this influential on this market but that’s not the subject what I mean by this is that the already rigid structure of the game is completed by a bunch of mechanics and narrative trick ripped straight out of Persona without really understanding the point of them.
The game has a calendar system and even multiple time slot often mention each day but that’s about it, it only serves to place the events of the game on a timeline something that the other titles didn’t need to do in the first place so I don’t know why it’s here, there’s no time management, there’s no prioritizing activities or social link over the other, there’s no meta to that system. However what the game has is something similar to the Social Link from Persona called “Bonding events”.
Now Bonding Point and Bonding events was already an element I complained about in Azure but in that game it was sort of an hidden but hinted at feature that was sadly ruined by bad programming and also by Azure oftentimes bad sense of narrative priorities (hiding who character backstory behind the final bonding events for exemple).
I also said that while I don’t mind a bit of player agency and choice for a personalized experience in my JRPG, I also felt like this feature was a bit pointless in a game that is supposed to have one true canon and that there is no way any subsequent game especially from different arcs could follow through on the individual romantic (or not) choice of the players.
But in Azure, it was discreet, badly programmed and not implemented super thoughtfully but at least it was a subtle way to make the player experience with the game more unique depending on how he acted during the game. CS1 decides to fully embrace that aspect of the game and making it more explicit and I do not feel like it pulled that off successfully either and in fact because the characters in this game are rather dry and bland, I had a lot of trouble actually giving a shit about any of them during regular gameplay and I guess they expected me to like them more through their bonding event and fellas, let me tell that if this was the plan then I’m sorry to say that I see the vision but I feel like the vision is shit.
Persona at least try to make the characters and their dynamic compelling outside of their social link and even though the divide between Social Link and main story creates inconsistencies, at least you were probably more willing to learn more about these characters because they have fun interactions with one another that cement them as real people with personalities, doubts, feeling and not just a succession of one-dimensional anime trope with a character design.
I think a lot of CS problem also comes from the presentation of its story, being the first game of the series for the PS Vita and the first game in Full 3D, I can’t say that the change in arstyle brought with it a net positive, sure environments are in 3D but from the dungeons to the different towns and cities that doesn’t really make a difference since they seem structured in a similar fashion than in Azure except now the game presentation needs to rely on cinematography and I think that Falcom didn’t really nail that aspect at all, the scene composition and direction of the scenes and dialogues are so bad, because the party is so large a lot of cutscene just involve all of them sitting around and blocking each other from the view and it makes for very cluttered scene where not much emotions or anything could be displayed to full intensity.
While I was writing this review, I got curious and watched the CS1 musical adaptation and while it couldn’t fix the gaping ideological and thematic holes in the story it definitely did a better job in selling me on these characters in 2h than this game failed at doing in 80 and that’s saying something about how just a little change like characters being more expressive and proper stage direction can do wonder to an average/mediocre story (in fact RIP character portrait it legitimately hurt the game even more visually). I’m not criticizing the graphics here since Falcom probably wanted this game to sell to a wider audience and most of them can’t handle anything else in terms of artstyle but I will say that the transition to 3D wasn’t an improvement but could’ve been had Falcom would have cared more about directing than just dumping a bunch of text to fill textboxes and embrace other type of narration something they’ve always struggled to do even in the earlier titles.
In fact even the writing this time around I felt to be a bit stiff and lifeless which definitely didn’t help me care about what the game was trying to say, I think this is more of a prose issue this time around, I’m missing the charm and quirkiness of the writing in games like Sky (especially sky) and the Crossbell game. CS1 relies a bit too heavily on unfunny forced sex jokes because “anime” or make their character just have the most annoying dialogue ever like Machias, it’s like CS1 is Trails skinwalker because it’s trying to be like those legacy titles but can’t do it even in the NPC dialogues.
The game just doesn’t let the character group dynamic shine because it also feels the need for gameplay reason to separate the group in 2 in all field studies which makes you feel like you never get time to know these characters as people despite the game spending a considerable amount of time trying to make you care about their school activities.
Some people might say that finding CS1 boring but FC charming is gonna be up to my taste and while it is true, FC only got better with time and while FC has less things going on than CS1, at least it wasn’t trying to blueball you with a real story until the final moment which was genuinely hype as fuck, it was a game carried entirely by the relationship and complicity of its two main lead and the guest characters coming along the way.
CS1 has too many characters and doesn’t have time to spend for a lot of them, Trails work best with a smaller cast that grow larger as the game goes on but CS1 build such weak foundation that you’d rather do anything but waste your time desperately grasping at straws to find an ounce of quality to the game’s writing, atmosphere or structure which all works against him.
Even Rean, the main character of this game couldn’t be more barebone for the life of me, he’s a random LN default looking guy with a sword with the personality of a brick and the social awareness of a cloister and the narrative always try to propel him to be this incredible badass while also pushing a Shirou FSN narrative of him being reckless because he hates himself or has trauma or ofc has some sort of curse in his vein that turn him super saiyan from time to time because anime… he has almost no chemistry with any of the female characters even Alisa which is a character many people like but that I just found annoying the whole way through (definitely has at least character motives which is more than nothing I guess),
I just couldn’t bare to care about these characters or even the few good things borrowed from the series legacy had to offer, I think that after 6 games, effort should be made to improve a game formula and not making it worse in every conceivable way and a lot of the tool the game uses to keep you going and invested are really cheap including the ending.
Crow standout as a really cool character but the way the game foreshadow his twist couldn’t be more obvious and in general you feel like this game just care as much about me about all of the stuff it’s presenting to you, it’s infodumping you on stuff in the most bland way possible like in bar or classroom, it’s reflecting on subject matter it barely has any knowledge or deeper understanding of, it nullify all sense of urgency by showing and telling you that shit are happening but you’re doing things that has nothing to do with the shit happening despite having chapter names that make those story beat more badass than they actually are.
They give so little shit, that the final chapter of the game, I kid you not is the worst lead-up to a final dungeon and final boss I’ve ever seen, first of all the final chapter is about a school festival and preparing for a concert like it’s some bad Naruto level filler, you play freaking mini-games, you go on date, suddenly the old schoolhouse lights up and the characters take the whole situation super seriously, you got the epic music, you got the chuuni quotes, you got the weird surreal environment, yeup doesn’t feel like the climax of the game but it’s the final dungeon anyway and you’re going to fight the final bos which is just a really lame fight coming off of the last boss you fought which was the only genuine challenge of the game.
Then it’s followed by several hours of cutscenes to complete the school festival arc with the final concert which… I understand it was meant to be this emotional peak and a huge accomplishment for the characters solidifying their bonds but because of how badly the game managed to develop or make me care about them, this doesn’t feel earned at all and then…
Well
The only really well done part of the game happens in the last few hours, a roller coaster of twist and turn and melancholic vibe featuring child soldiers being scared of being deported and giant robots punching each other in … huh… let’s say … functioning gameplay ?
But even these last moments feel like a cheap way to make you stay and check out the sequel rather than something truly impactful and earned, like yeah sure if this was let’s say FC, I would be like “oh shit” but here, not really and it’s sad really.
Because that ending really slaps dick, it’s really cool, I just don’t feel like the game earn such a finale after failing at building all the foundations necessary to make this ending worth it, the game feel like a waste of my time, a waste of my energy, a waste of my mental health.
And then it just decides to blueball you like that, I just don’t really have much respect for this, even earlier it was doing it with the intro of the game being a flashforward to an event which was a red herring and nothing really major or important and it even dares make you replay through the intro again when you reach that part, gotta love reused content and padding, well played guys.
Mind you, I do plan on still checking the sequel one of these days, not out of excitement to know what will happen next but because I’m too deep into this to stop now and I’m also morbidly curious to see how low that ship could sink.
So…
Huh…
I forgot to mention the actual one positive of the game
IT’S TOWA HERSCHEL OMG, GUYS, GUYS, GUYS, I LOVE HER, SHE SAVED ME GUYS, ALL THE MOMENT WHERE SHE WAS ON THE SCREEN IS THE BEST MOMENT! SHE’S SO SMOL AND CUTE AND HARDWORKING AND I WANT TO GET HER OUT OF THIS GAME AND SHE’S THE ONLY REASON WHY THIS GAME IS A 2/10 INSTEAD OF A BIG FAT 1
FUCK AM I GETTING PSY-OPPED INTO PLAYING MORE OF THESE BECAUSE OF CUTE GIRLS ?
FUCK YOU KONDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Been a while since my gigantic review of Azure right ?
I think taking a break between the arcs or heck even between these games is important if you don’t want to end up burning on them. You know, give it a fresh start, give it a fresh new look, give yourself the time to forget about the bad things and enjoy the serie's strengths in retrospect.
Well good for me because the Kiseki grind is not over and there’s a whole new arc to explore this time around with the Cold Steel series. Now to be frank, I was wary about this one, I got a lot of mixed signals from my friends about this, some people loves Cold Steel like it’s the second coming of Jesus Christ but then you have others more reasonable people who have a lot of criticism of the game and let’s be frank neither of those people managed to sold me on Cold Steel.
And looking at it from a distance, this didn’t seem like a good start, a high-school setting, a main character that look just like every Kirito wannabe on the face of the earth even more blatant coomer bait otaku pandering than usual and some stuff I heard from my friends did not bode well for the future of my mental health getting into this game. I knew what I was getting into, it’s trashy JRPG stuff for teenagers to get crazy about on Twitter dot com and kneeling at Rean for being an extreme giga chad of normalcy.
So I went in, tampering my expectations below the ocean floor for this one, thinking that, the series already proved itself enough already and maybe there was a way that my prior investment into the series and the few qualities all the games share with each others in terms of worldbuilding might keep me invested and interested in this right ?
Like this series has set a standard of quality, I’m not a fan of Trails but I can’t deny that in all the issues I had with the series (namely what frustrates me about it that I mentioned in my other reviews), it’s still an ambitious, sincere piece of work with a lot of charm to carry you out for hours even when nothing is happening.
So here I was, bored out of my ass once again in one of my afternoons, and I felt ready, I needed to know what Cold Steel was all about, I needed to form my opinion on it, heck with my expectations being so low it can only positively surprise me right…?
Let’s not play around any longer.
The Legend of Heroes : Trails of Cold Steel is one of the single worst JRPG I had the displeasure of playing and every minute of it felt like actual mind numbing mental torture.
Now claiming such a bold statement for a piece of work with a decent following of people who loves it to death might as well be a death sentence and please, do re-direct all of your future death treats to my dm’s or in the comment so that I can completely ignore them and pretend I’m morally superior to you for not partaking in such trivial display of self-defense and bad intentions.
But I need to get this out of my chest anyway, not only because I have nothing better to do, giving my unneeded opinion on everything is pretty much the solid foundation of my career and because this looks like a job for me, so everybody just follow me cause we need a little controversy cause it’d be so empty without me.
I’m not going to do the old song and dance in this review by re-explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the Trails formula because at this point very little has changed (or at least they took a worse direction overall in terms of execution, more on that later) so let’s just talk about the game itself.
The game is set in the Empire of Erebonia, a vastly overhyped land that was constantly mentioned in the earlier entries in the series most of the time as an antagonistic force so let’s at least address the one positive of such as a setting.
You’re witnessing the event leading up to a full-scale war launched by an expansionist faction who just love to colonize and annex stuff from inside the invader country, it’s a really interesting setup as we rarely get games taking place inside of the “evil empire of doom” most RPG’s tend to have and Erebonia’s situation is a bit more complex than it may seem at first since the Empire itself has its own sets of issues mainly a social caste one. With the nobility still being a thing so we have dukes and lords and barons and the plebs, the commoners but with the advance of technology and change in social habits and custom some commoners have gained prominence in the higher state of society and are now politicians, CEO’s, Generals and some of them have formed the “reformist” faction who are opposed to the “noble faction” which have two lines of thinking “Nobles are cringe and commoners rules but expansionism is based and we should conquer more land to get the point across'' think of it as Stalinism interpreted by a Japanese author who is not super well read on those ideologies.
That is arguably, a fascinating setting for a JRPG and one that could if done correctly rival with the setting of Crossbell which was a whole can of worms onto itself and this is in those instances that even thought the entire rest of the game will absolutely fail at doing anything remotely interesting with that setting that if anything Trails is good a framing the action of their stories in interesting coat of paint.
But then you scratch the paint and you realize that the game is very, very, very rusty and full of cavities and holes and its inner machination is faulty and at times completely out of touch with any form of tangible reality or common sense.
So what POV does the game choose to tell this story, in the Sky Series we played as bracers a private militia with the goal to help the common people without involving themselves in politics, in Crossbell we played as the SSS a special brigade of the police who does the job of bracers but unlike them can actually run investigations and involve themselves with political affairs.
In this game, you play as Rean Schwarzer (a piece of white bread that the game will pretend to be a good protagonist) , a fresh new student going to Thors Military academy. So yes, the framing for this story is that you’re playing as… high-school students… and yes… it’s as thrilling as it sounds…
Look, I don’t mind school setting, I really don’t and in fact some of my favorite pieces of media have a school setting or heavily feature teenagers but as I grow older and bitter and more cynical, my tolerance and patience towards those elements decreases with time. I guess this is my L for playing a video game aimed at a certain demographic of people and complaining about not being catered to but let’s see how the game execute that concept, afterall, I’m all for a good, funny, wholesome high-school slice of life from time to time and it seems like the main bulk of the game anyway.
Now ok, what is the single-most important aspect of any story ? Regardless of genre, regardless of conventions, regardless of scale or ambitions.
That’s right, it’s the characters, my rule of thumb is that you can make even the most basic mind-numbingly cliché story amazing if the characters are awesome (cf. Most of the “Tales of “ series) and boy we sure have characters this time around because guess what, you don’t just have 1, not 2 not 3, not 4 but 9 !
9 fucking playable characters in this game which compose your main party, as you can see this is a large cast of characters which I mean, fine, I don’t mind it but that’s a bit overkill this early into a story as you can’t possibly hope to make all of them standout by the end and you will run into the issues of having a few weak link amongst the party.
Heck even my favorite RPG, FFIX with its cast of 8 playable characters by the end of the game, ends up having 2 characters pretty much being slot fillers that don’t contribute much to the story as a whole and are just here to break the game in half with their abilities but at least you meet them progressively and not all of them dropped on you from the start so they can get a bit of breathing room for them to get introduced before they can wipe the floor with Death Blue Magic.
And you know at least, these characters have personalities, interesting dynamics, layers to them and their arc and even though not all the characters are special, at least the ones who stand out are some of the most compelling characters I’ve had the pleasure to accompany in an RPG.
This is something JRPG understood fairly early on when they started giving a shit about pushing deeper more ambitious narrative into the forefront of the experience, if you want people to spend hours in a game and getting invested into its world, lore and themes, you need good characters to channel those elements and make them shine more brightly.
Well let me tell you that Cold Steel spectacularly fails in epic proportion at making its cast of characters likable or at least interesting, they are the equivalent of paper cutouts with a ChatGPT prompt attached to their mouth and the depth of a glass of water that’s been half-emptied and then left unattended for 9 days straight.
While it is usually a pretty low criticism to say, here it is legit the truth, most of the characters in this game are just a collection of one note anime cliché with almost nothing more going for them beyond that initial first impression. And maybe you’d be like : “But Cani, maybe they start as clichés but then evolve into fully fledged characters through trials and tribulation”, they don’t and I wish I was kidding.
“But do they have like… conflicts with the world or between themselves to make them grow as characters ? Motives that drive them to do the things they do ?” At this point, you might just be grasping at straws trying to find gold. Falcom decided to do the novel idea of making you use your imagination to imagine what these characters could’ve been had they been handled by competent writers who actually cared about the topics they were trying to talk about.
So the context behind how our ragtag team of wet towels got together to become friends and maybe saving the world or some shit is fairly straightforward. At Thors Military academy, classes are usually separated between nobles and commoners with nobles getting extra privileges like exclusive rooms for them and an actual extended vacation period whereas the commoners have a whopping 5 days of break in the whole school year (terrible news, I know right ?) but this time, things are getting a bit wacky and experimental.
Usually the academy has 5 class but this year there’s a 6th one cleverly name “Class VII” (they make a joke about it but don’t expect it to make sense at least in this entry), in class VII members of the nobility and commoners are mixed together into one group to see if they can get along and be friends with each others, they also have a special curriculum which mostly consist of going on on field trips where they’ll fulfill request for the citizen of Erebonia (which is the convenient excuse this game found to justify its terrible structure and quest system more on that later).
This opposition between commoners and nobles is the main conflict of the narrative but it’s only crystalized by two of the most annoying characters I’ve seen in an RPG yet, Machias and Jusis. Machias HATES the nobility because of some old trauma about her sister being bullied into suicide or at least that’s what you learn about after 40h of the game in perhaps the game worst chapter and the dude just can’t stand having to team-up with nobles (rightfully so) so you’d think he’d have a problem with all the nobles but he only has issues with Jusis, a snarky, indifferent asshole, who’s a noble but doesn’t care about all the etiquette coming up with it.
These two character dynamics is the most annoying and cliché thing shit ever, it goes nowhere, they grew to tolerate each other in the span of one chapter but that’s about it and their dialogues might as well be sandpaper for my eyes, they literally have the dynamic of the “enjoyer vs fans” meme, if you liked poor people before, get ready to fucking hate them with Machias… or will you ?
See, you quickly realize that even in its own setup, the game cannot handle that conflict for shit, in Class VII there are only 9 members, 3 of which are nobles and the rest are all commoners, the ratio is a bit unbalanced but alas it gets worse. See because this is a JRPG, every character needs to be a super special character, so all the commoners in class VII do not actually fit the definition of commoners, if anything they’re a product of bourgeoisie.
The commoner characters are either the sons of important political figures, generals or CEO of a multinational company or in the case of Emma while the game doesn’t say it outright yet, she’s a member of a long lineage of secret guardians of the world which is meant to guide Rean (the chosen one of some prophecy we haven’t been briefed about yet but it might happen in the sequel). The only character in the party that can fit the definition is Gaius but that’s because he’s an immigrant from a society where social caste don’t even exist at all so the man is completely outside of that conflict except to show us a different point of view (and pointing out how dated Erebonia’s society is).
This of course gets even worse when around the 70h mark, you get 2 other party members who are also commoners and also have a deep secret past that make them super special (except one will turn out to be the main antagonist of the game real identity, woops, spoiler I guess), now mind you this is actually very thoughtful of the game to finally give us characters that are actually likable and endearing in our main party so late into the game, I’m fine with that but still it’s a bit too late on the uptake.
So you have nobles (who are for the most part not representative of the noble faction at all, nor nobles in general since they need to be “one of the good ones” to be in a JRPG party) and commoners who aren’t really commoners at all and never once represent the real struggle of the common everyday man, a great way to introduce this arc central conflict I guess but somehow it gets worse.
With this setup alone, you realize that what little conflict and themes the game had behind it is completely muddled by a confused writer who has no idea how class warfare even works, this is something I already noticed back when I reviewed yet another game by Kondo “Ys IX Monstrum Nox” which was also another boring slog of a game that shat on Ys’s entire legacy with empty fanservice and terribly bare bone gameplay and level design while trying to make a somewhat confused weirdly political point that just amounted to “Centrism the videogame”.
Chapter 4 of Cold Steel was perhaps one of the rare occasions while playing an RPG that I felt like somebody was ripping my brain apart. A whole lot of things happen in this chapter and a whole lot of nothing too, the gang goes to the capital for some annual festival. Two characters didn’t have an established character arc or any conflict yet so let’s just spawn one out of the blue despite these two characters barely interacting with each others for the past 40h so they have a bit of beef with one another which is this bizarre “I hate you because I love you, stop hiding shit from me” deal and like… what the fuck is this bizarre excuse to lead up to a character dumping their entire life story on you. I get that these are teenagers and teenagers tend to act irrationally at times but this felt very tacked on and was also presented in the lamest way possible (in the lamest in-engine combat cutscene I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing).
But on top of this, you also have more “Machias” moment who at this point of the story stopped being a shitty nerd with prejudice against the nobles and became an advocate for the #NotAllNoble movement, this scene where Machias explain his backstory and then proceed to explain how he changed his opinion made me cringe so hard that I let the game ran in the background for a solid hour and decided to take a shower and grab a beer at how asinine this take is.
Cold Steel, but I’d say Kondo is the kind of person that just runs on sophistry alone, Kondo is the type of person who is wholly uninterested in answering the political conflicts of his story that he will just either not address them or address them in the most out of touch way possible. See, the idea that a society is divided in two camps, one with privilege and the other without any is enough to set the stage for a revolution plotline but not in Kondo’s stories, Revolution is a brutal, outdated way of leading up to a deep change in power dynamics. Kondo prefers to stay in his position because there are good people in the dominant class, therefore, the system is fine and just needs some tweaking to flow better.
That is complete horseshit and sophistry of the highest level, we live a world right now where social divide is as steep as ever, people at the top are indifferent pedantic asshole with the power to get anything they want at the flick of a hand and can exploit millions of people just for being born under the right circumstances or because they stole assets and profited out of them. For as much as I’ve criticized Falcom’s villain for being corny Saturday Morning Cartoon characters, we now live in a world where these characters can be seen as almost realistic depictions of real life individuals.
Let me indulge in being a massive commie here, when people point out systemic issue in a general sense by saying X privileged group of people are responsible for the suffering of less fortunate people, if you answer is : “But not all of them are bad tho”, get ready to have my foot up in your ass because we simply do not care. What we care about is changing the system for the better or at best get rid of it entirely if its based on no solid foundation and the fact that noble exist in Erebonia don’t have solid foundation and that’s even something that the characters point out in the chapter right before it during one of the game many side-quest so why trying to push a narrative of common ground and acceptance, a so called “third” way that takes the best of both world when one side clearly is answering for the plies of the majority of the country’s population.
Mind you, this is just what I got from what little time the game actually brought up these topics up because and that’s the worst part about this game, Cold Steel seems to be wholly uninterested in its own setting and also in addressing the questions and themes they brought along with them, because this doesn’t constitute the bulk of the game and also because in order to make me even care about these topics, it would’ve been a good start to make us follow characters that are well written and likable and entertaining.
Because of the game's shitty structure, whenever tension arises in the story, the game just looks the other way and wants you to grind for more conclusions making it a game about nothing. Most of this game is just empty and void of any potential interest and is only interested in wasting the players time in pointless trivial matters like preparing for a school festival or retrieving someone’s hat (and I swear this is a mandatory quest, you need to do to progress through the game).
In great part due to the game’s structure and pacing.
As you’ve probably noticed by now, I’ve mentioned my game time at several point in my review, to contextualize when the stuff with the game I had problem with arose and that’s because I just wanted to point out that Trails of Cold Steel is a game that took me 100h to complete but since the in-game time is affected by turbo-mode, I will probably say it was closer to roughly 75-80h, nonetheless without turbo mode almost constantly on, this would’ve been the tangible reality of my game time with this game.
Trails games and this isn’t something that started with Cold Steel are long but they often struggle to justify their own length in a meaningful way. There is this common misconception in media analysis that the more time is spent on a piece of media is representative of its level of complexity and interest, that if a game takes its time to tell the things they have to tell then it must mean that it has a lot of things and a lot of interesting to either tell or to make us experience from a gameplay perspective.
Now it is no surprise that Trails game are very wordy, it’s a fact I already pointed out in the Crossbell arc which was a duology of game I’ve jokingly called “more of a visual novel than an RPG” especially for how long the cutscenes and dialogues were in comparison to the time you spend playing the game. Nonetheless, you do play the game, and the game lets you explore its gameworld to participate in classic JRPG affairs like combat, dungeons and of course side-quest that has always been the main point of contention of the game.
Now Trails of Cold Steel is the 6th entry in the Kiseki series, less than 10 years separate the first Trails in the Sky to Trails of Cold Steel so you’d naturally think that the formula has add a positive evolution from the rigid constant use of back and forth between segmented area of the first game, heck even Crossbell proposed an interesting change of pace by having an hub town attached to a bunch of adjacent routes you explore almost in its entirety in the first 15 to 20h of the game but that’s because Crossbell was a small country, here in Erebonia, to give you the sense that the country is large, you traverse the country by train. Meaning the game forces you to go where it wants you to go, but given that those games are linear by nature, it’s not all that terrible.
The problem is that the series already rigid structure has been more rigidified by some choice, each chapters and I mean each chapters plays exactly the same :
-A first day of going around talking to NPC
-A Free Day of going around doing quest and talking to NPC ending on the exploration of a new floor old school house (which is very mysterious place you visit multiple time which is just a reason to get one similarly boring se and repetitive sewer
dungeon to go through at the start of each chapters)
-Followed by a practical exam day which are literally small tutorial fights (and yes you get tutorial fight even in the final chapter 90h into the game)
-Followed by an exposition train trip where you play card games for extra bonding point (more on that later)
-2 (sometimes 3 when the game feel very spicy about it) days worth of pointless fetch quest inside one of the games many town and surrounding areas
-Concluded by (but only starting with Chapter 3) a terrorist attack where you beat the bad guy but they get away and then the news says “Damn, lots of shit happened heh?”
-Then it’s back to the start of the cycle repeat for 6 10 to 15 hours painfully long chapters
Rarely does the game ever deviate from that structure which makes every individual chapter more predictable than the last but also makes each instance of the game padding itself out even more obvious and increasingly annoying as time goes on.
In my previous review of Trails to Azure, I said that the game pacing was excellent but bogged down by the game constant need to pause its action to make us partake in pointless errant of various quality and for the first time ever some of these errant were mandatory to progress into the game with the game sometimes having a weird sense of priorities as what was considered important quest (and as such mandatory) and the ones that could be skipped (which sometimes were actually more story relevant).
And I suggested naively that if they wanted to go moving forward in that direction, they should make things more explicit as to avoid people missing out on important context and lore like that was the case with Azure and so they did the most logical move, make 90% of the side-quest in the game mandatory.
You’ve heard me right, long are the days of getting the luxury to skip on mediocre monster hunt side quests if you didn’t like going through them since this time around you WILL hunt these monsters inside sewers and you WILL enjoy it whether you like it or not. Oh sure the game still has a few game objectives that are completely optional (and even dares to still have secret side quests seriously how is it still a thing). And the worst thing is that they didn’t stop and thought for one second to change the way these games plays out, I hope you like having to arbitrarily do a random monster hunt to progress through the game because this is what most of the climatic big quest of this game consist of and it’s fucking terrible.
Let’s indulge in a bit of game design analysis and try to comprehend this sudden rise in rigidity in a series which already had an issue liberating itself from the shackles of its own faulty foundation.
See, with Trails Falcom has created a really cool world that they’re really proud of and one of the things they are probably even more proud of more than anything else is their NPC’s who constantly update their dialogues for every minor advancement in the story and help the world feel more lived in as you experience micro-level arc and the life of these random people alongside your own journey.
It is one of the core aspect of the series and one of its best idea ever since the original game but in order for this aspect to work on people, you need to condition people to participate in it and while some people are easier to convince than others when it comes to asking them to always recheck all the NPC’s every time you advance the story even in a minor way, others may not.
See most JRPG only ask you the bare minimum when exploring a JRPG town, usually you’re going to enter a town, talk to all the NPC’s to gather clues, learn more about the world or more broadly to advance the plot and maybe check the shops and explore the area to see what other thing might hide in between the streets of these bustling cities but in general this is a one and done thing and unless we’re talking about a semi or full hub town that you come back to constantly and change with time, most of the time it’s a one and done kinda deal, rarely do talking to NPC multiple time at different point worth the hassle.
But in Kiseki it is such a core aspect of the experience, so how do you unconsciously manipulate your player into partaking in such an activity ?
Well by designing the game in a way that will push the people toward that experience and it’s with this game that I finally understood the secret sauce behind what makes Trails side-quest so terrible, these fetch quest and not meant to be interesting, they aren’t meant to be fun, heck they aren’t even meant to fill out the game with content like you’d see in a lot of modern RPG’s.
They are meant to put you on a tour, each quest consist of you going back and forth around the areas the chapter take places in so that you will probably think unconsciously to re-check on all the NPC’s, it’s not about how good the side-quest are, it’s about how these side-quest will force you to a second, third, fourth or even fifth lap of the single area the chapter takes place in and as such, you will have the reflex (or not) to re-talk to the NPC who are on your path to complete these various objectives.
But then how do you encourage the people to even do the side-quest if they’re so boring ? Well before Cold Steel the main incentive behind them was to gather money, you see in Trails you can trade elemental crystal called “sepith” for money but Sepith are also used to create quartz and unlock orbment slot to make your character stronger so using too much Sepith for money means missing out on making your characters better in battle and they might be drag behind the game (very generous) difficulty curve, monsters do not drop money in this game so the only method to get money without trading Sepith were, you guessed it, the side-quest which always gave just the right amount of money to upgrade all of your characters gears as you proceed to the next chapter.
But the Sky games were smart about this by giving its players choice, you can choose to do the side-quest or not, so imagine if there’s a couple of quests that you didn’t want to do like let’s say the monster hunts which were always the most fillerish type of quest in any JRPG, well you can simply skip them, you might not obtain the money, or bracer point for 100% completion or the extra goodies that come along with them but you will spend less time doing unfun shit and you can always use some spare Sepith to fill the gap in your wallet.
But in Cold Steel a new type of Sepith was invented, Sepith Mass, the only purpose of Sepith Mass is to be sold for money, you can’t use them in any other ways (and at this point, why don’t the game simply give you money I hate that gameplay quirk) meaning that the game brought back regular money grinding into a series that has always structured its difficulty and gameplay loop around limiting the player sources of income to force them into doing things they might not have been willing to do in the first place.
Mind you, you can still use regular Sepith for money and by the midway point of the game where all your character are fully upgraded they make it so you never run out of money ever, but that risk vs reward between selling sepith over doing side-quest is completely gone and so with the main purpose of those side-quest being removed, people will be more inclined to skip them and we’ve already mentioned how Falcom doesn’t want to do that for the sake of not making the time spent on making all the NPC’s and their updated dialogues wasted because of the regular player unwillingness to be curious and it’s especially bad to lose your player, especially in a game that was meant to attract a new audience.
So what is the obvious solution ? Well if players won’t go to the side-quest, we’ll make the side-quest go to them and that’s how you end up with a game that has to pad out and fill the gap between important event with pointless errants that the players now MUST WITHOUT ANY QUESTIONS DO !
Oh sure they are still “optional quest” but they represent 10% of the quest this time around and also yes, you’re not rewarded with money for them so feel free to skip them, I did all the side-quest in this game and most of the optional quest reward was not worth the hassle of doing them, I did them just out of completionist sake and to get those sweet sweet AP bonus which are this time around the only thing pushing you towards those optional thing.
And so you’d think, maybe they would make those errant more entertaining, fun or enticing in any way, well no and most of the time the game will make you understand the definition of insanity when most of the quest in the game are regular monster hunt quest and this is how you end up with a game where you’re still rendered at killing monsters in sewers at the 40h mark of the game while the story has still gone nowhere interesting or is spectacularly avoiding to get you in on the good shit.
And this time around, this particular Trails cannot compensate for its shitty structure with good, entertaining or even charming writing for the life of it and can’t even do it through its gameplay either.
Oh yeah because it’s not enough that the game is a boring slog with almost nothing engaging or even charming going on for it, it’s also a boring slog that made the gameplay of the series worse somehow. Trails gameplay was always kinda fun, it was not the revolution of the century but you could see that the more the series progressed and they more they tweaked some of its elements to make more varied boss and monster encounter and make use of its excellent arts and craft system at the center of it all and one thing that lays the foundation of such a solid system were the Quartz system.
Well fuck me because they decided to make orbment and Quartz way worse in this game, see in the previous games in the series, you had to arrange quartz in certain way to gain access to new and more powerful spell, the players needed to struck a good balance to get access to the most move possible while still profiting of the advantages given by each individual quartz like stat increases or additional effect, the system allowed for a lot of customization and a bit of experimentation, often times limiting the player with the characters different align to push them into playing them a certain way or to try and overcome these limitations.
Not this time tho, now you have quartz that give you stat boost and additional effecst and now you have quartz who are specifically designed to give you one spell, no more messing around with crystal combination and doing math, our players don’t care about an actually good progression system or having fun with an RPG, they want to get through the shitty slog part of the game faster so they can get to the twisty twist turn shit faster. This change severely reduces the utility of Arts which used to be main meta of Trails especially on higher difficulty and as such render characters who are either full-caster or mixed-attacker in the game completely and utterly useless outside of spamming their support crafts which are for the most part absurdly good.
Now be ready to just jack your physical attackers with as much strength boosting accessories and quartz as well as passive status effect and spam the ever living shit out of AoE attack like it’s FC’s endgame on steroid, past the midway point of the game most fight can be trivialized by out-dps’ing or simply not let monsters and bosses take turn.
Because all of your characters have insanely broken crafts, the crafts are so broken in this game whether they’re offensive or support type that they render the use of certain arts completely useless, in fact most arts are useless after a while despite the game tutorial making you think that it wouldn’t be the case and that you’d still need to cast a spell and heck now with the Zero-Arts bonus in combat that can pop-up, you can still use them without any cost.
More than never, the determining factor towards victory now are the master quartz an element introduced in Azure that didn’t have much influence on combat and was this game attempt at a job system but now in a setting where Quartz have been jumbled up to favor just powermaxxing everything, Master Quartz are now going to be essential to mix up your gameplay… or not…
The one that are installed by default on your characters are for the most part the best quartz adapted to them and even if you can get new master quartz throughout your adventure, by the time you get them, you MQ would’ve already evolved past a point where it would be worth changing them (Rean and Laura Master Quartz makes them absolutely stupid from the early game all the way to the final boss)
Wow amazing how the game has 11 party members by the end but half of them are rendered almost useless by this change, what else do we have to do to save this mess of a change ?
Well the main new feature that Cold Steel adds to the gameplay of Trails is the addition of links, you can link your character between them for additional advantages in battle and by using certain type of weapons on enemies (with the damage type borrowed from at the time Ys Seven and Celceta), you can initiate a break and chained them with an additional attack.
As you progress through the game, chaining link attack become a good way to inflict serious amount of damages and after a certain point in the game, you can do the rush attack from the Crossbell titles after chaining 5 link attack (which I think is a good limitation over how Crossbell games handled that feature). The more characters are linked together and the more they gain link points and when their link levels up, they can do even more additional action like counter-attacking or protecting their allies or auto-healing.
This is a pretty neat system sadly not exploited to its full potential here in this title because outside of 2 notable exception, this game is painfully easy, ofc part of the blame is on me for playing on normal like always but no thoughts was put into most of the aside bare the 2nd fight against C which was a welcome raise in difficulty.
Sadly 2 things bog down the fun factor of the system for me, the first one is having to resettle the links everytime someone dies, resettling the link doesn’t sacrifice a turn but it’s something you can easily forgot to do until you’re 5 turns in wondering why you can’t break enemies and then realizing that you just forgot to re-link, I think link should be regenerated if one of the pair gets revived without having linked to another character in the meantime, it’d be a great way to do this, also regenerate the link after battles, it’s just kind of stupid but heh, a bit of QoL wouldn’t have hurt and the other thing is the fact than in order to make full use of this system well… you have to actually give enough of a shit about the character to bond with them and level them up faster.
Because yes, back to writing (and also gameplay).
CS1 seems to take a lot (perhaps a bit too much) inspiration from other popular RPGs at the times, the setting is like Final Fantasy Type-0 (to the point of plagiarism) and the way the game tells its story borrows a lot from the Persona series. I could make a commentary on why I don’t think NU-Persona (heck Rean strikes the same pose as Yu Narukami in battle if that isn’t enough proof) should be this influential on this market but that’s not the subject what I mean by this is that the already rigid structure of the game is completed by a bunch of mechanics and narrative trick ripped straight out of Persona without really understanding the point of them.
The game has a calendar system and even multiple time slot often mention each day but that’s about it, it only serves to place the events of the game on a timeline something that the other titles didn’t need to do in the first place so I don’t know why it’s here, there’s no time management, there’s no prioritizing activities or social link over the other, there’s no meta to that system. However what the game has is something similar to the Social Link from Persona called “Bonding events”.
Now Bonding Point and Bonding events was already an element I complained about in Azure but in that game it was sort of an hidden but hinted at feature that was sadly ruined by bad programming and also by Azure oftentimes bad sense of narrative priorities (hiding who character backstory behind the final bonding events for exemple).
I also said that while I don’t mind a bit of player agency and choice for a personalized experience in my JRPG, I also felt like this feature was a bit pointless in a game that is supposed to have one true canon and that there is no way any subsequent game especially from different arcs could follow through on the individual romantic (or not) choice of the players.
But in Azure, it was discreet, badly programmed and not implemented super thoughtfully but at least it was a subtle way to make the player experience with the game more unique depending on how he acted during the game. CS1 decides to fully embrace that aspect of the game and making it more explicit and I do not feel like it pulled that off successfully either and in fact because the characters in this game are rather dry and bland, I had a lot of trouble actually giving a shit about any of them during regular gameplay and I guess they expected me to like them more through their bonding event and fellas, let me tell that if this was the plan then I’m sorry to say that I see the vision but I feel like the vision is shit.
Persona at least try to make the characters and their dynamic compelling outside of their social link and even though the divide between Social Link and main story creates inconsistencies, at least you were probably more willing to learn more about these characters because they have fun interactions with one another that cement them as real people with personalities, doubts, feeling and not just a succession of one-dimensional anime trope with a character design.
I think a lot of CS problem also comes from the presentation of its story, being the first game of the series for the PS Vita and the first game in Full 3D, I can’t say that the change in arstyle brought with it a net positive, sure environments are in 3D but from the dungeons to the different towns and cities that doesn’t really make a difference since they seem structured in a similar fashion than in Azure except now the game presentation needs to rely on cinematography and I think that Falcom didn’t really nail that aspect at all, the scene composition and direction of the scenes and dialogues are so bad, because the party is so large a lot of cutscene just involve all of them sitting around and blocking each other from the view and it makes for very cluttered scene where not much emotions or anything could be displayed to full intensity.
While I was writing this review, I got curious and watched the CS1 musical adaptation and while it couldn’t fix the gaping ideological and thematic holes in the story it definitely did a better job in selling me on these characters in 2h than this game failed at doing in 80 and that’s saying something about how just a little change like characters being more expressive and proper stage direction can do wonder to an average/mediocre story (in fact RIP character portrait it legitimately hurt the game even more visually). I’m not criticizing the graphics here since Falcom probably wanted this game to sell to a wider audience and most of them can’t handle anything else in terms of artstyle but I will say that the transition to 3D wasn’t an improvement but could’ve been had Falcom would have cared more about directing than just dumping a bunch of text to fill textboxes and embrace other type of narration something they’ve always struggled to do even in the earlier titles.
In fact even the writing this time around I felt to be a bit stiff and lifeless which definitely didn’t help me care about what the game was trying to say, I think this is more of a prose issue this time around, I’m missing the charm and quirkiness of the writing in games like Sky (especially sky) and the Crossbell game. CS1 relies a bit too heavily on unfunny forced sex jokes because “anime” or make their character just have the most annoying dialogue ever like Machias, it’s like CS1 is Trails skinwalker because it’s trying to be like those legacy titles but can’t do it even in the NPC dialogues.
The game just doesn’t let the character group dynamic shine because it also feels the need for gameplay reason to separate the group in 2 in all field studies which makes you feel like you never get time to know these characters as people despite the game spending a considerable amount of time trying to make you care about their school activities.
Some people might say that finding CS1 boring but FC charming is gonna be up to my taste and while it is true, FC only got better with time and while FC has less things going on than CS1, at least it wasn’t trying to blueball you with a real story until the final moment which was genuinely hype as fuck, it was a game carried entirely by the relationship and complicity of its two main lead and the guest characters coming along the way.
CS1 has too many characters and doesn’t have time to spend for a lot of them, Trails work best with a smaller cast that grow larger as the game goes on but CS1 build such weak foundation that you’d rather do anything but waste your time desperately grasping at straws to find an ounce of quality to the game’s writing, atmosphere or structure which all works against him.
Even Rean, the main character of this game couldn’t be more barebone for the life of me, he’s a random LN default looking guy with a sword with the personality of a brick and the social awareness of a cloister and the narrative always try to propel him to be this incredible badass while also pushing a Shirou FSN narrative of him being reckless because he hates himself or has trauma or ofc has some sort of curse in his vein that turn him super saiyan from time to time because anime… he has almost no chemistry with any of the female characters even Alisa which is a character many people like but that I just found annoying the whole way through (definitely has at least character motives which is more than nothing I guess),
I just couldn’t bare to care about these characters or even the few good things borrowed from the series legacy had to offer, I think that after 6 games, effort should be made to improve a game formula and not making it worse in every conceivable way and a lot of the tool the game uses to keep you going and invested are really cheap including the ending.
Crow standout as a really cool character but the way the game foreshadow his twist couldn’t be more obvious and in general you feel like this game just care as much about me about all of the stuff it’s presenting to you, it’s infodumping you on stuff in the most bland way possible like in bar or classroom, it’s reflecting on subject matter it barely has any knowledge or deeper understanding of, it nullify all sense of urgency by showing and telling you that shit are happening but you’re doing things that has nothing to do with the shit happening despite having chapter names that make those story beat more badass than they actually are.
They give so little shit, that the final chapter of the game, I kid you not is the worst lead-up to a final dungeon and final boss I’ve ever seen, first of all the final chapter is about a school festival and preparing for a concert like it’s some bad Naruto level filler, you play freaking mini-games, you go on date, suddenly the old schoolhouse lights up and the characters take the whole situation super seriously, you got the epic music, you got the chuuni quotes, you got the weird surreal environment, yeup doesn’t feel like the climax of the game but it’s the final dungeon anyway and you’re going to fight the final bos which is just a really lame fight coming off of the last boss you fought which was the only genuine challenge of the game.
Then it’s followed by several hours of cutscenes to complete the school festival arc with the final concert which… I understand it was meant to be this emotional peak and a huge accomplishment for the characters solidifying their bonds but because of how badly the game managed to develop or make me care about them, this doesn’t feel earned at all and then…
Well
The only really well done part of the game happens in the last few hours, a roller coaster of twist and turn and melancholic vibe featuring child soldiers being scared of being deported and giant robots punching each other in … huh… let’s say … functioning gameplay ?
But even these last moments feel like a cheap way to make you stay and check out the sequel rather than something truly impactful and earned, like yeah sure if this was let’s say FC, I would be like “oh shit” but here, not really and it’s sad really.
Because that ending really slaps dick, it’s really cool, I just don’t feel like the game earn such a finale after failing at building all the foundations necessary to make this ending worth it, the game feel like a waste of my time, a waste of my energy, a waste of my mental health.
And then it just decides to blueball you like that, I just don’t really have much respect for this, even earlier it was doing it with the intro of the game being a flashforward to an event which was a red herring and nothing really major or important and it even dares make you replay through the intro again when you reach that part, gotta love reused content and padding, well played guys.
Mind you, I do plan on still checking the sequel one of these days, not out of excitement to know what will happen next but because I’m too deep into this to stop now and I’m also morbidly curious to see how low that ship could sink.
So…
Huh…
I forgot to mention the actual one positive of the game
IT’S TOWA HERSCHEL OMG, GUYS, GUYS, GUYS, I LOVE HER, SHE SAVED ME GUYS, ALL THE MOMENT WHERE SHE WAS ON THE SCREEN IS THE BEST MOMENT! SHE’S SO SMOL AND CUTE AND HARDWORKING AND I WANT TO GET HER OUT OF THIS GAME AND SHE’S THE ONLY REASON WHY THIS GAME IS A 2/10 INSTEAD OF A BIG FAT 1
FUCK AM I GETTING PSY-OPPED INTO PLAYING MORE OF THESE BECAUSE OF CUTE GIRLS ?
FUCK YOU KONDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO