Cani
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 !) !
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
The best thing to come out of Ys III Wanderers from Ys (look up the first level theme and then "A Searing Struggle" from Ys III)
Shoutouts to Bob Lennon
Shoutouts to Bob Lennon
Ys VI : A New Hope
After the release of Ys V and the mixed reception that it received, Falcom entered a bit of a creative slump not just when it came to the series but their general output as a company. None of the founding members were left at the company and the Falcom of the mid-90’s and onward was a vastly different studio than it was back then. Aside from releasing the next two games of the Gagharv trilogy which saw great success both in Japan and especially in South Korea, the company just wasn’t able to make new IP’s or even new games for that matter.
This was the start of a long era of Falcom just porting their old classics on newer hardware instead of making new games. During that time however, Falcom launched a lot of recruitment campaigns, boasting how great it was to work at Falcom (it was not, just for the record, there’s a reason literally all of the creative staff left the company and I’m pretty sure that even to this day it’s not a very pleasant work environment). These campaigns managed to bring on board a couple of really talented people notably two persons, one was Makoto Shinkai which we already mentioned in a previous review who did some stunning job animating and directing animated cutscenes for Falcom’s recent releases at the time.
Shinkai will leave the company shortly after the release of the PS2 version of Ys 1&2 to become the famous movie director that we know today but the other big guy Falcom recruited and perhaps the most important one was Toshihiro Kondo. Kondo was, like most of Falcom’s new recruit at the time, a massive fan of Falcom’s early output but he wasn’t just a mere fan, he was THE Falcom fan ! Ever since he was a child, Kondo loved playing RPGs such as Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy and while he has heard about Ys 1&2 through some of his friends talking about it at school, it’s when he picked up Ys III at a friends house that the trajectory of his life changed forever.
After the release of “Legend of Heroes 3 : Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch” which became his favorite game of all time, Kondo who was at university at the time decided to launch a website for Falcom fans to gather, discuss on-going news about the company and sharing tips and tricks for the different games. Kondo got enough of a reputation with his fan website that working at Falcom wasn’t a pipe-dream anymore but a tangible reality and so he applied at Falcom as an accountant. Falcom however knew about his activities online and how he managed his fansite and since he was the only guy at the time who knew anything about the Internet, he was tasked to code websites to promote the different new releases of the company.
But at the same time, the younger staff at Falcom including Kondo were starting to get fed up with just releasing ports of old games and localizing South Korean RPG’s, they wanted more, they were getting ambitious and thus they stopped working on yet another port of Ys III to ask the CEO if they could start working on new games. Masayuki Kato was skeptical about the process, it’s been a while since Falcom hasn’t released a genuinely ambitious banger and Falcom didn’t have any sort of brand recognition anymore so he wasn’t sure any new release would take off. But against all odds, he accepted, splitting the company in two to make a subsidiary entirely dedicated to the development of new games.
First order of business was releasing the first new Falcom IP since 1994 ending up in the release of “Zwei : The Arges Adventure '' in 2001 releasing alongside the latest release of Ys 1&2 which inspired the team to do one crazy thing. It was time to bring Ys back, it was time for Adol to set out for a new adventure, an adventure that could very well be its last if the game couldn’t meet sales potential and proof that people were still interested in the franchise. For Falcom, it was about going big or going home… and they went big !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zcI5-bhVyk
Released for PC in 2003 and in 2005 on the PS2 for the rest of the world (the first time a new entry in the series was released in the west since Ys III all the way back in the 80’s btw), this new entry served both as a continuation of Adol’s Adventure in Ys V (tho chronologically it is now placed after Ys VIII) but also a sort of soft-reboot for the series. The game dev division at Falcom was composed of a small number of employees so you can definitely guess that Ys VI wasn’t going to compete with the rest of the industry. In 2003 and especially in 2005, there were a lot of good or even great JRPG’s on the market, especially of the action variety.
The philosophy of Falcom at the time (and something that has just barely changed ever since) was that they were fully aware they were making cheap games of smaller technical ambition but what they didn’t had in graphical or game design prowess, they were compensating with original and experimental ideas and a fuck lot of generosity even in their smaller less ambitious titles ! And while Ys VI definitely is starting to show its age in some areas, it nonetheless follows that line of logic.
For Ys VI, Falcom decided to built an entirely new engine that will retrospectively be known as the “Ark Engine” in reference to Ys VI subtitle : “The Ark of Napishtim”, an engine they will use for a grand majority of both their Ys and Trails line-up of games until 2012. And with a new engine comes a brand new artstyle, the series abandon its traditional top-down view in favor of a blend of pre-rendered 2D sprites (not unlike those of Donkey Kong Country to make a comparison) and 3D environment with fixed camera angle, a style reminiscent of many games of the mid 90’s such as Grandia or Xenogears.
But a new engine also meant a drastic change in the gameplay department. Bump combat was already a thing of the past the series desperately clinged onto and couldn’t fully transition from in 1995 and even with the release of Ys 1&2 Eternal a year earlier which reboosted interest in Ys and its peculiar mechanics, it was time for change ! Big Changes ! Ys VI is for all intents and purposes an extension of what was done with Ys V.
Adol now swings his sword with an actual attack button and can jump for some good old platforming but contrary to Ys V which had very slow deliberate control putting Adol at a full stop each time he wants to attack, here in Ys VI, Adol rushes to the enemies with a fast 3 hit combo that can sometimes be completed by a different finisher based on which sword you currently have equipped. On top of that, you can do an aerial attack as well as a very effective down trust but also a weird kind of situational plunge attack with a very weird and strict activation process (you need to move, wait, then move and attack at the same time it’s really weird).
Later in your adventure you will be able to find 3 different elemental swords which are going to be your main arsenal for the adventure. Each of them changes your playstyle, the water sword keeps your regular moveset but adds a circular attack at the end of your combo, the flame sword makes your attack stronger at the cost of the combo being slower and the thunder sword allows you to attack faster at the cost of power. On top of that and replacing the cumbersome magic system of Ys V, your sword can unleash a powerful magic attack once their magic gauge is filled up, adding a bit more tool to your already new arsenal.
All of this results in a much more dynamic and fun battle system which captures the fast momentum of the older bump-style game while also adding more complexities to the different enemy encounters in the game who now have a vast array of different behaviors that isn't just “walking randomly on the map, aggroing you and sometimes launching a very easily dodgeable attack”. With the added platforming and the 3rd dimension, the level design is also much more complex and interesting than in the other titles and Ys VI boasts some of the best dungeon and overworld area design the series has seen up to that point which is definitely helped by the setting of this game.
In this new adventure, Adol is wanted by the Romun Empire who chases after him and Dogi as they are chilling at a bar. They’re saved in the nick of time by Terra, one of the pirate bandit girls from Ys V who was following Adol after reconciling herself with her father, a famous pirate by the name of Adoc. Adoc is searching for a treasure that seems to be found on an Island inside of something known as the vortex of Canaan in what could be this universe equivalent of the Bermudan Triangle. Dogi thought that it was crazy to attempt such an expedition as no ship has ever survived the Vortex but Adol is still interested by the process and accepts to cross the Vortex. As they approached the Vortex however, they’re attacked by the Romun empire once again and Adol ends up shipwrecked on the island of Canaan when 2 Elf-Like girls by the name of Isha an Olha find him and bring him to the village of the Redha, the indigenous species native to the island.
At first, Adol isn’t welcomed as the Redha are in some sort of a conflict with humans as some of the castaways built a human settlement near the village which has sparked up conflict between the two villages and created many tensions over ressources and such but as you progress through the came and find a common ground between the two factions, he starts warming up to you ! So you’re off on your adventure, trying to find a way out of the island, find your friends and uncover the mysteries which inhabit it.
Ys VI definitely makes a drastic shift towards a more narratively driven story than its predecessor, whereas the old games will sometimes just have a short intro to contextualize your adventure before immediately sending you off, here the game takes his time to establish the setting, the characters and the overall mystery of the Island. The Island of Canaan by itself is the most complex and thoroughly interesting setting in the entire setting up to that point not only from a gameplay level as the layout of the area is pretty open and let you go pretty much anywhere with the only limit being how much hit can you take from stronger enemies but also a ton of small secrets, puzzles and platforming challenges to participate in which makes the Canaan Island the most fun place to visit in the series this far.
But also in terms of its lore, Ys VI serves as some sort of semi-reboot of the series and pretty much serve the same purpose as “Dawn of Ys” when it comes to fleshing out the universe of the series by finding connections to older titles and re-contextualize certain parts of Adol’s previous adventure with some clever and pretty interesting retcons. In fact, some elements from Ys IV were kept to explain the origins of the two goddesses of Ys and their relationship to the Eldeen but instead of being a race of gods, you discover that the Eldeen was instead a technologically advanced civilization who managed to put their souls inside of artificial bodies made of Emelas, the new super metal the franchise has introduced to explain pretty much everything in the franchise.
During your exploration of the Island, you will meet with Geis, a mercenary in search of his brother Ernst and investigating the titular “Ark of Napishtim” the game story is centered around, I mention him because the guy becomes kind of a rival character to Adol, showing up in a couple of entries after this game. I like Geis, the dude’s cool and he has 3 homonculus fairies showing that Falcom isn’t fully erasing the possibility of revisiting Ys V in the future (and boy are they teasing that Ys V remake…). Overall, I really enjoyed the story in this one, it’s fun, it calls for your sense of wonder and adventures. It doesn’t fail to have a few really cool symbolic moments the likes of Ys 1&2 and I’d say that as far as reimagining the series lore for the modern age goes, this one does plenty of cool stuff with the established continuity while still being an excellent jumping point for newcomers.
But as much as I can praise Ys VI for reviving the franchise and mostly succeeding in the process, Ys VI definitely suffers from “1st game syndrome” at times which makes a lot of the execution of these ideas leaving a lot to be desired. For starters while the game is around the same length as your average Ys title at the time (around 10h I’d say) making it a somewhat short and sweet experience, the game suffers from a lot of padding mostly coming from gameplay decisions which can grind on your nerves over time. I mentioned that Ys VI was perhaps one of the more “free” Ys games to date because of all the exploration you can do and how the game allows you to visit certain areas before you can reasonably go there but the way the game gates your progression is a bit wack at times.
Ys has always put an emphasis on its leveling system, with levels pretty much serving both as a difficulty slider and a way to gate keep progress, except that Ys VI will ask of you to do a lot of grinding much more so than any titles. In fact not being at the appropriate level for an area means you’re going to do 0 damages to enemies and while you could be avoiding them just to reach a chest with a neat piece of equipment or a cool accessory or items earlier on, oftentimes the trouble isn’t really worth the effort which I can say for another annoying mechanic…
Dash Jumping…
Dash Jumping isn’t required to beat the game but if you’re like me and want to explore every nook and cranny of the world, you WILL have to master the ancient technique of Dash Jumping. Dash Jumping is a secret mechanic the game doesn’t actually tell you about and at first when I looked it up online, I thought it was just some weird speedrun tech but nope, it’s an actual mechanic that the developers intended you to interact with. To do a Dash Jump you have to move the stick to the direction you want, wait approximately a second, move the stick again while simultaneously pressing the attack and jump button.
I didn’t lie when I said this looks like some ancient speedrun tech because how is anyone supposed to figure that shit out ! Just mastering the damn technique took me a solid hour of training but then the game expects you to do some insanely precise platforming with it, and when I say precise, I mean, jumping from tiny platform to tiny platform, expecting the game slippery as fuck physics to bend to your will and doing so multiple times in a row.
There is another issue with the general platforming of this game though. I’m a big platforming guy and can handle the shittiest of platforming (I’ve become a master at navigating Deep Jungle in KH1 as a kid after all) but the main issue with platforming in Ys VI is that everytime you fall, you don’t simply fall to your doom and respawn with less health like in most games. Instead you get transported to a lower floor area and have to make the trip back to retry again which almost made me wish I played the PS2 version of the game with savestate (even if it looks uglier). This can make you waste tons of time if you’re not good with 3D platforming in a somewhat isometric view and the game is full of those. It’s a problem that’s common to most entries in the Ark Engine trilogy but at least they provide options for staying in the air longer and make platforming less tedious but here, screw double jumping and say hello to DASH JUMPING.
I will also say that as far as the combat system goes, Ys VI can still feel a little rough. While it’s still definitely more fast-paced and fun than Ys V, you quickly realize that the slow methodical approach to combat of that game isn’t fully gone yet. Enemies are brutal in this game and collisions and hitboxes combined with the traditional absence of invincibility frame in this series means you can get ganged to death by a bunch of smaller ennemies working together to fuck you in the ass ! I wouldn’t mind if the game provided enough tools for crowd control but sadly the closest it gets is the down thrust which deals multiple hits and as a hitbox that reaches wider than intended and well… you can guess how awkward that is to just jump and down trust everywhere to progress.
And don’t expect to rely on magic to save yourself either ! While I think the new magic system is definitely more on-point with the energy of the game than Ys V, I still think the way it’s used leaves a lot to be desired. Each sword can unleash a single big magic attack once their bars are filled up but just one time ! Then it’s back to charging it by killing enemies, heck there’s even a boss midway through the game which has an entire gimmick based on that mechanic and it’s easily the worst boss in the entire Ark Engine trilogy, not so much because it’s a hard boss but because it’s BORING.
Other than that, bosses usually are pretty good, the boss design clearly had a step-up in reactivity and there’s even a few humanoid bosses this time around. The patterns are pretty fun to learn but the main issue comes with the difficulty of them being on average quite easy. Ys VI allows you to equip healing items before entering the boss arena and for the record there’s a grand total of 9 tiers of healing items which is way too overkill, it also makes dungeon exploration a bit smoother with access to the inventory being unlimited. Ys VI, keeps a lot of its older RPG roots but I don’t really think it benefits the experience.
However for those still looking for a challenge, this game was the first game in the series (and the first game in Falcom’s catalog) to introduce various 4 difficulty options ranging from Easy to Nightmare and exclusive to this game is the catastrophe mode which prevents you from healing midway through battle and make every enemy drop less money in general.
Another personal opinion of mine also comes with the music, while I can’t pretend the soundtrack is bad, it’s definitely a bit different that what we’re used with the series, the OST is calmer and more atmospheric, sometimes keeping the high energy octane stuff for bosses and action segments. I don’t dislike it and there’s a few bangers here and there but it’s not the soundtrack I go back to the most imo.
You can feel Ys VI being a transitional episode between two eras of Ys (if we forgot about Ys III and V which were the odd ones of the bunch) and while a lot of things about Ys VI still holds up, I do wish that by the time they had re-released that one, they actually retroactively added a lot of the elements introduced in the later two games (which spoilers are amongst my favorite in the series and I’m really excited to talk about them !).
However the game still retains a lot of charm and soul and that trademark sense of Falcom storytelling they experimented with the Gagharv trilogy slowly creeping its way into their other properties. For a modern gamer today, Ys VI feels like a rough transition but to the people who got to witness the grand return of Adol and his friend on PC and home console, it was pretty much a revolution which somehow manages to stand out amongst the crowd.
Ys VI marked the grand return of both Ys and Falcom in the realms of game development and while Falcom isn’t the prestigious and genre defining company that they used to be in the 80’s, the new team made sure to live up to the studio’s legacy by delivering varied, original and surprisingly charming titles for years to the coming decade and the advent of a certain platform is gonna help Falcom stuck out of the niche and approach the realms of the hidden gems mine.
But for now, Ys is going to take a break from advancing its continuity as the next title in the series will be none other than a remake of one of the least revered game in the franchise up to that point, it’s time to go back to the past, to go back to Felghana !
After the release of Ys V and the mixed reception that it received, Falcom entered a bit of a creative slump not just when it came to the series but their general output as a company. None of the founding members were left at the company and the Falcom of the mid-90’s and onward was a vastly different studio than it was back then. Aside from releasing the next two games of the Gagharv trilogy which saw great success both in Japan and especially in South Korea, the company just wasn’t able to make new IP’s or even new games for that matter.
This was the start of a long era of Falcom just porting their old classics on newer hardware instead of making new games. During that time however, Falcom launched a lot of recruitment campaigns, boasting how great it was to work at Falcom (it was not, just for the record, there’s a reason literally all of the creative staff left the company and I’m pretty sure that even to this day it’s not a very pleasant work environment). These campaigns managed to bring on board a couple of really talented people notably two persons, one was Makoto Shinkai which we already mentioned in a previous review who did some stunning job animating and directing animated cutscenes for Falcom’s recent releases at the time.
Shinkai will leave the company shortly after the release of the PS2 version of Ys 1&2 to become the famous movie director that we know today but the other big guy Falcom recruited and perhaps the most important one was Toshihiro Kondo. Kondo was, like most of Falcom’s new recruit at the time, a massive fan of Falcom’s early output but he wasn’t just a mere fan, he was THE Falcom fan ! Ever since he was a child, Kondo loved playing RPGs such as Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy and while he has heard about Ys 1&2 through some of his friends talking about it at school, it’s when he picked up Ys III at a friends house that the trajectory of his life changed forever.
After the release of “Legend of Heroes 3 : Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch” which became his favorite game of all time, Kondo who was at university at the time decided to launch a website for Falcom fans to gather, discuss on-going news about the company and sharing tips and tricks for the different games. Kondo got enough of a reputation with his fan website that working at Falcom wasn’t a pipe-dream anymore but a tangible reality and so he applied at Falcom as an accountant. Falcom however knew about his activities online and how he managed his fansite and since he was the only guy at the time who knew anything about the Internet, he was tasked to code websites to promote the different new releases of the company.
But at the same time, the younger staff at Falcom including Kondo were starting to get fed up with just releasing ports of old games and localizing South Korean RPG’s, they wanted more, they were getting ambitious and thus they stopped working on yet another port of Ys III to ask the CEO if they could start working on new games. Masayuki Kato was skeptical about the process, it’s been a while since Falcom hasn’t released a genuinely ambitious banger and Falcom didn’t have any sort of brand recognition anymore so he wasn’t sure any new release would take off. But against all odds, he accepted, splitting the company in two to make a subsidiary entirely dedicated to the development of new games.
First order of business was releasing the first new Falcom IP since 1994 ending up in the release of “Zwei : The Arges Adventure '' in 2001 releasing alongside the latest release of Ys 1&2 which inspired the team to do one crazy thing. It was time to bring Ys back, it was time for Adol to set out for a new adventure, an adventure that could very well be its last if the game couldn’t meet sales potential and proof that people were still interested in the franchise. For Falcom, it was about going big or going home… and they went big !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zcI5-bhVyk
Released for PC in 2003 and in 2005 on the PS2 for the rest of the world (the first time a new entry in the series was released in the west since Ys III all the way back in the 80’s btw), this new entry served both as a continuation of Adol’s Adventure in Ys V (tho chronologically it is now placed after Ys VIII) but also a sort of soft-reboot for the series. The game dev division at Falcom was composed of a small number of employees so you can definitely guess that Ys VI wasn’t going to compete with the rest of the industry. In 2003 and especially in 2005, there were a lot of good or even great JRPG’s on the market, especially of the action variety.
The philosophy of Falcom at the time (and something that has just barely changed ever since) was that they were fully aware they were making cheap games of smaller technical ambition but what they didn’t had in graphical or game design prowess, they were compensating with original and experimental ideas and a fuck lot of generosity even in their smaller less ambitious titles ! And while Ys VI definitely is starting to show its age in some areas, it nonetheless follows that line of logic.
For Ys VI, Falcom decided to built an entirely new engine that will retrospectively be known as the “Ark Engine” in reference to Ys VI subtitle : “The Ark of Napishtim”, an engine they will use for a grand majority of both their Ys and Trails line-up of games until 2012. And with a new engine comes a brand new artstyle, the series abandon its traditional top-down view in favor of a blend of pre-rendered 2D sprites (not unlike those of Donkey Kong Country to make a comparison) and 3D environment with fixed camera angle, a style reminiscent of many games of the mid 90’s such as Grandia or Xenogears.
But a new engine also meant a drastic change in the gameplay department. Bump combat was already a thing of the past the series desperately clinged onto and couldn’t fully transition from in 1995 and even with the release of Ys 1&2 Eternal a year earlier which reboosted interest in Ys and its peculiar mechanics, it was time for change ! Big Changes ! Ys VI is for all intents and purposes an extension of what was done with Ys V.
Adol now swings his sword with an actual attack button and can jump for some good old platforming but contrary to Ys V which had very slow deliberate control putting Adol at a full stop each time he wants to attack, here in Ys VI, Adol rushes to the enemies with a fast 3 hit combo that can sometimes be completed by a different finisher based on which sword you currently have equipped. On top of that, you can do an aerial attack as well as a very effective down trust but also a weird kind of situational plunge attack with a very weird and strict activation process (you need to move, wait, then move and attack at the same time it’s really weird).
Later in your adventure you will be able to find 3 different elemental swords which are going to be your main arsenal for the adventure. Each of them changes your playstyle, the water sword keeps your regular moveset but adds a circular attack at the end of your combo, the flame sword makes your attack stronger at the cost of the combo being slower and the thunder sword allows you to attack faster at the cost of power. On top of that and replacing the cumbersome magic system of Ys V, your sword can unleash a powerful magic attack once their magic gauge is filled up, adding a bit more tool to your already new arsenal.
All of this results in a much more dynamic and fun battle system which captures the fast momentum of the older bump-style game while also adding more complexities to the different enemy encounters in the game who now have a vast array of different behaviors that isn't just “walking randomly on the map, aggroing you and sometimes launching a very easily dodgeable attack”. With the added platforming and the 3rd dimension, the level design is also much more complex and interesting than in the other titles and Ys VI boasts some of the best dungeon and overworld area design the series has seen up to that point which is definitely helped by the setting of this game.
In this new adventure, Adol is wanted by the Romun Empire who chases after him and Dogi as they are chilling at a bar. They’re saved in the nick of time by Terra, one of the pirate bandit girls from Ys V who was following Adol after reconciling herself with her father, a famous pirate by the name of Adoc. Adoc is searching for a treasure that seems to be found on an Island inside of something known as the vortex of Canaan in what could be this universe equivalent of the Bermudan Triangle. Dogi thought that it was crazy to attempt such an expedition as no ship has ever survived the Vortex but Adol is still interested by the process and accepts to cross the Vortex. As they approached the Vortex however, they’re attacked by the Romun empire once again and Adol ends up shipwrecked on the island of Canaan when 2 Elf-Like girls by the name of Isha an Olha find him and bring him to the village of the Redha, the indigenous species native to the island.
At first, Adol isn’t welcomed as the Redha are in some sort of a conflict with humans as some of the castaways built a human settlement near the village which has sparked up conflict between the two villages and created many tensions over ressources and such but as you progress through the came and find a common ground between the two factions, he starts warming up to you ! So you’re off on your adventure, trying to find a way out of the island, find your friends and uncover the mysteries which inhabit it.
Ys VI definitely makes a drastic shift towards a more narratively driven story than its predecessor, whereas the old games will sometimes just have a short intro to contextualize your adventure before immediately sending you off, here the game takes his time to establish the setting, the characters and the overall mystery of the Island. The Island of Canaan by itself is the most complex and thoroughly interesting setting in the entire setting up to that point not only from a gameplay level as the layout of the area is pretty open and let you go pretty much anywhere with the only limit being how much hit can you take from stronger enemies but also a ton of small secrets, puzzles and platforming challenges to participate in which makes the Canaan Island the most fun place to visit in the series this far.
But also in terms of its lore, Ys VI serves as some sort of semi-reboot of the series and pretty much serve the same purpose as “Dawn of Ys” when it comes to fleshing out the universe of the series by finding connections to older titles and re-contextualize certain parts of Adol’s previous adventure with some clever and pretty interesting retcons. In fact, some elements from Ys IV were kept to explain the origins of the two goddesses of Ys and their relationship to the Eldeen but instead of being a race of gods, you discover that the Eldeen was instead a technologically advanced civilization who managed to put their souls inside of artificial bodies made of Emelas, the new super metal the franchise has introduced to explain pretty much everything in the franchise.
During your exploration of the Island, you will meet with Geis, a mercenary in search of his brother Ernst and investigating the titular “Ark of Napishtim” the game story is centered around, I mention him because the guy becomes kind of a rival character to Adol, showing up in a couple of entries after this game. I like Geis, the dude’s cool and he has 3 homonculus fairies showing that Falcom isn’t fully erasing the possibility of revisiting Ys V in the future (and boy are they teasing that Ys V remake…). Overall, I really enjoyed the story in this one, it’s fun, it calls for your sense of wonder and adventures. It doesn’t fail to have a few really cool symbolic moments the likes of Ys 1&2 and I’d say that as far as reimagining the series lore for the modern age goes, this one does plenty of cool stuff with the established continuity while still being an excellent jumping point for newcomers.
But as much as I can praise Ys VI for reviving the franchise and mostly succeeding in the process, Ys VI definitely suffers from “1st game syndrome” at times which makes a lot of the execution of these ideas leaving a lot to be desired. For starters while the game is around the same length as your average Ys title at the time (around 10h I’d say) making it a somewhat short and sweet experience, the game suffers from a lot of padding mostly coming from gameplay decisions which can grind on your nerves over time. I mentioned that Ys VI was perhaps one of the more “free” Ys games to date because of all the exploration you can do and how the game allows you to visit certain areas before you can reasonably go there but the way the game gates your progression is a bit wack at times.
Ys has always put an emphasis on its leveling system, with levels pretty much serving both as a difficulty slider and a way to gate keep progress, except that Ys VI will ask of you to do a lot of grinding much more so than any titles. In fact not being at the appropriate level for an area means you’re going to do 0 damages to enemies and while you could be avoiding them just to reach a chest with a neat piece of equipment or a cool accessory or items earlier on, oftentimes the trouble isn’t really worth the effort which I can say for another annoying mechanic…
Dash Jumping…
Dash Jumping isn’t required to beat the game but if you’re like me and want to explore every nook and cranny of the world, you WILL have to master the ancient technique of Dash Jumping. Dash Jumping is a secret mechanic the game doesn’t actually tell you about and at first when I looked it up online, I thought it was just some weird speedrun tech but nope, it’s an actual mechanic that the developers intended you to interact with. To do a Dash Jump you have to move the stick to the direction you want, wait approximately a second, move the stick again while simultaneously pressing the attack and jump button.
I didn’t lie when I said this looks like some ancient speedrun tech because how is anyone supposed to figure that shit out ! Just mastering the damn technique took me a solid hour of training but then the game expects you to do some insanely precise platforming with it, and when I say precise, I mean, jumping from tiny platform to tiny platform, expecting the game slippery as fuck physics to bend to your will and doing so multiple times in a row.
There is another issue with the general platforming of this game though. I’m a big platforming guy and can handle the shittiest of platforming (I’ve become a master at navigating Deep Jungle in KH1 as a kid after all) but the main issue with platforming in Ys VI is that everytime you fall, you don’t simply fall to your doom and respawn with less health like in most games. Instead you get transported to a lower floor area and have to make the trip back to retry again which almost made me wish I played the PS2 version of the game with savestate (even if it looks uglier). This can make you waste tons of time if you’re not good with 3D platforming in a somewhat isometric view and the game is full of those. It’s a problem that’s common to most entries in the Ark Engine trilogy but at least they provide options for staying in the air longer and make platforming less tedious but here, screw double jumping and say hello to DASH JUMPING.
I will also say that as far as the combat system goes, Ys VI can still feel a little rough. While it’s still definitely more fast-paced and fun than Ys V, you quickly realize that the slow methodical approach to combat of that game isn’t fully gone yet. Enemies are brutal in this game and collisions and hitboxes combined with the traditional absence of invincibility frame in this series means you can get ganged to death by a bunch of smaller ennemies working together to fuck you in the ass ! I wouldn’t mind if the game provided enough tools for crowd control but sadly the closest it gets is the down thrust which deals multiple hits and as a hitbox that reaches wider than intended and well… you can guess how awkward that is to just jump and down trust everywhere to progress.
And don’t expect to rely on magic to save yourself either ! While I think the new magic system is definitely more on-point with the energy of the game than Ys V, I still think the way it’s used leaves a lot to be desired. Each sword can unleash a single big magic attack once their bars are filled up but just one time ! Then it’s back to charging it by killing enemies, heck there’s even a boss midway through the game which has an entire gimmick based on that mechanic and it’s easily the worst boss in the entire Ark Engine trilogy, not so much because it’s a hard boss but because it’s BORING.
Other than that, bosses usually are pretty good, the boss design clearly had a step-up in reactivity and there’s even a few humanoid bosses this time around. The patterns are pretty fun to learn but the main issue comes with the difficulty of them being on average quite easy. Ys VI allows you to equip healing items before entering the boss arena and for the record there’s a grand total of 9 tiers of healing items which is way too overkill, it also makes dungeon exploration a bit smoother with access to the inventory being unlimited. Ys VI, keeps a lot of its older RPG roots but I don’t really think it benefits the experience.
However for those still looking for a challenge, this game was the first game in the series (and the first game in Falcom’s catalog) to introduce various 4 difficulty options ranging from Easy to Nightmare and exclusive to this game is the catastrophe mode which prevents you from healing midway through battle and make every enemy drop less money in general.
Another personal opinion of mine also comes with the music, while I can’t pretend the soundtrack is bad, it’s definitely a bit different that what we’re used with the series, the OST is calmer and more atmospheric, sometimes keeping the high energy octane stuff for bosses and action segments. I don’t dislike it and there’s a few bangers here and there but it’s not the soundtrack I go back to the most imo.
You can feel Ys VI being a transitional episode between two eras of Ys (if we forgot about Ys III and V which were the odd ones of the bunch) and while a lot of things about Ys VI still holds up, I do wish that by the time they had re-released that one, they actually retroactively added a lot of the elements introduced in the later two games (which spoilers are amongst my favorite in the series and I’m really excited to talk about them !).
However the game still retains a lot of charm and soul and that trademark sense of Falcom storytelling they experimented with the Gagharv trilogy slowly creeping its way into their other properties. For a modern gamer today, Ys VI feels like a rough transition but to the people who got to witness the grand return of Adol and his friend on PC and home console, it was pretty much a revolution which somehow manages to stand out amongst the crowd.
Ys VI marked the grand return of both Ys and Falcom in the realms of game development and while Falcom isn’t the prestigious and genre defining company that they used to be in the 80’s, the new team made sure to live up to the studio’s legacy by delivering varied, original and surprisingly charming titles for years to the coming decade and the advent of a certain platform is gonna help Falcom stuck out of the niche and approach the realms of the hidden gems mine.
But for now, Ys is going to take a break from advancing its continuity as the next title in the series will be none other than a remake of one of the least revered game in the franchise up to that point, it’s time to go back to the past, to go back to Felghana !
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 !
Ys IV Part II : The Dawn of Peak Fiction
In the 80’s there were few developers who actually knew what they were doing more than Hudson Soft, these guys are probably single handedly responsible for Nintendo opening itself to third party developers to make the NES/Famicom the legendary console we know today. Hudson Soft first and foremost were people who didn’t just like video games as a way to make money on a newly expanding market, these guys were very passionate about new technology and the wonders of gaming as a whole.
But eventually, when you enjoy making games so much, you start to become ambitious and soon Hudson Soft will partner with NEC the prime micro-computer manufacturer (and creator of the famous “porn game machine” known as the PC-98) under a share common interest of building the game console of the future : The PC-Engine otherwise known as the Turbografx 16 outside of Japan. The PCE was a really impressive machine for the time and even today, I’m still kind of blown away by the technical capabilities of the console which only has an 8 bit processor but packs a lot of punch otherwise especially with the CD Add-on that they’ve adopted earlier than many other companies at the time.
However, they were releasing a new console on an highly competitive market, Sega and Nintendo were fiercely competing for domination and other companies who dared venture on hardware territory knew that it was complicated to stand out amongst the crowd and that’s when Hudson had a brilliant idea, they will partner with Falcom to port their classic Ys title to their console. Ys 1 and Ys 2 were already considered classic of NEC micro-computers system and they have already existed many ports of the game to pretty much all available platforms at the time including the NES and the Master System but Hudson’s version on their PC-Engine was going to be different, it wasn’t just going to be a port, it was going to be a full-on REMAKE !
Ys Book 1&2 took the first two games in the series and combined them together into a single one like it was originally planned for the first time and the game will receive the most premium treatment imaginable ! A graphical overhaul which put new life into the game, touched up gameplay that made the experience smoother to play, smoother leveling curves which mitigated the grinding, new tracks to accompany certain important moment with new remixes on the absurdly insane sounding PCE soundchip which was able to make freaking miracle happened, it had animated cutscenes and full fucking voice-acting for a game released in 1989 and they did it both in Japanese and in English as this was the first game in the series to be shipped internationally (not counting the weird European port of Ys 1 on the Master System) !
Everyone’s mind was freaking blown away by how much love and care was put into this new iteration, gamers who were alive to see it happen before their very eyes as children couldn’t believe their eyes ! It was a true epic adventure with all the proper care put into its presentation to heightened that sense of wonder. It’s clear that probably the reason why Ys even got so popular in the first place and managed to stay relevant was because of this port right there, the game was well received pretty much everywhere and magazines sang the tales of how Hudson made Ys 1 & 2 a legendary game going beyond its simple ambition !
And all of this before Zelda or any other company was able to release their next-gen titles !
The PC-Engine version of Ys 1&2 was a massive success and single-handedly was enough of a reason for people to even buy a PC-Engine in the first place. It was clear that Hudson Soft didn’t just enjoy Ys, they didn’t just like Ys heck they didn’t even love Ys ! THEY WERE TRULY PASSIONATE ABOUT YS ! So much so that Hudson was allowed to port Ys III for the PC-Engine too with the same level of care and polish as what they did for Ys 1&2 even tho no amount of polish managed to make the game any good in the end and they botched the localization of it but oh well…
So when Falcom couldn’t make Ys IV themselves, Hudson seemed like the obvious choice to direct and create a new entry in their series ! But making a game from scratch with only a design document full of concept arts, a few guidelines and no lines of code or any prototype was a vastly different task than just taking an already existing game and polishing it to completion but unlike Tonkin House who was this small no-name company playing with their turds trying to make a barely playable game to satisfy the guideline, Hudson had something that they didn’t, they had experiences with making successful cult classic games but most importantly they had PASSION
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCmsS8eD_XY
From the moment you boot up the game you understand that the level of production value here is through the fucking roof ! You ain’t playing some dinky ass, poopy ass, budget ass, Tonkin Ass, Cold Steel Era Falcom ass “product” ! YOU ARE PLAYING A REAL VIDEOGAME ! MADE BY REAL DEVELOPERS ! WITH REAL TALENT ! REAL PASSION AND A REAL BUDGET TO GIVE THEM THE MEAN TO PRODUCE A MASTERPIECE AND YOU BET YOUR ASS THEY WERE GONNA TAKE THE CHANCE ! THERE IS NO BRAKE ON THIS TRAIN ! DAWN OF YS IS A GAME THAT’S GOING TO SHOW MODERN FALCOM PLAYERS HOW WE USED TO DO IT BACK IN THE 9 TO THE TIES ! A PRODUCT MOLD IN THE VOLCANO OF LOVE AND FORGED BY THE FINEST SOUL-MAKER IN THE INDUSTRY !
What made Ys 1&2 so legendary already was the visual presentation of it all, it made the original script of those games popped even more than they originally did in spite of the limited presentation and the added animated character portrait, voice acting and even cutscenes really added a lot of flair to the original two games. But Ys 1&2 Hudson was merely adding on top of the original game. With Dawn of Ys, they had full control over the game's presentation and how it would fit inside of the game ! And I’m happy to report they did a phenomenal job on just the visual presentation and scene direction level !
The first few minutes of Dawn of Ys already introduce the game in a much better way than Tonkin's version did. After coming back from one of their travels, Adol and Dogi stop by Esteria. It's been 2 years since the event of their adventure there and everyone is waiting for them ! A lot of things have changed already, Goban has opened a shop, Lilia now lives among the people of Esteria and is constantly waiting for Adol’s return and her health got better too ! Sarah is alive and managed to survive the assault of Dark Fact and his army after mysteriously disappearing in Ys 1 ! As you walk toward the city, the title of the game fades on top of the screen, everyone is celebrating Adol’s return ! This section feels like a genuine victory lap and a great way to welcome us back to the world of Ys after so long and I love every single minute of it and it’s all done really well !
One thing that’s clear from the game’s visual presentation is that the game will put more of an emphasis on its narration and especially how it’s going to be told through its visuals, you have much more scripted events the likes of other RPGs at the time where you lose control of Adol’s character for a moment to witness dialogues and scenes ! The general artstyle of the game oozes of that timeless 90’s anime charm, the character design is pretty damn excellent and on par with the striking designs of the original game, many characters from the first two games even got a face lift for the occasion, each of the game’s portrait and cutscenes are superbly animated and full of details ! That recreation of Ys II final battle is only a technical flex before the game bombards you with an avalanche of colors which pops out of your screen and invites you to live the adventure of a lifetime !
While the in-game graphics might be less impressive than the anime style portrait, cg’s and animation I just love how colorful the game looks which complimented by the extremely varied environments the game make you go through from lush forest to snowy mountains to a creepy abandoned mansion and even more, the visuals manage sometimes to pull off some really cool things with the environment and it definitely make the journey feel more alive than ever !
One particularly impressive thing about Dawn of Ys is that while text boxes are still the norm for dialogues with regular NPC’s most of the big story scene are entirely dubbed with animated character portraits popping on the screen and sometimes even CG’s much like in visual novel to highlight some of the more important moments, the original Japanese performance is honestly pretty stellar and I’m still shocked at how cleanly the voice acting sound on such an old hardware.
However this raised an issue when it came to the availability of the game for the longest time as much like Mask of the Sun, Dawn of Ys remained a Japanese exclusive and in the case of Dawn while an english fan translation already existed for a while most of the important dialogue remained untranslated simply because they couldn’t display subtitles during the game numerous voiced only segments. Thankfully nowadays this is no longer an issue thanks to a group of talented but amateurish voice actors who banded together with the goal to bring a fandub of the entire game !
While it’s not quite as professionally well made as the official dub of Ys 1&2 with the only professional voice actor here being Alan Oppenheimer, third cousin of THE Oppenheimer and voice of Skeletor in the He-Man series giving his voice to Darm in the intro of the game. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the crew delivered a hack job and I think that on average, they did manage to at least capture the feel of that era of voice-acting. I think it was probably something the dubbing team wanted to transmit with their performance, something that sound like it was recorded by a bunch of voice actors going off way too much in a at times goofy, at times overly serious and badass tone and I just think it works really well and definitely feel like the game actually did came out in the west. The only issue with the English Dub however is that the general audio mixing is rather poor, you can feel each member of the team had different mike quality and the voice acting can sometimes be a bit muffled by the music or sound effect playing in the background and with no option to arrange the audio mixing yourself in the settings you’ll have to sometimes open your ear wide to understand what the hell are they saying. Be sure to check their website at : https://www.ysutopia.net/downloads/ys4/Ys%20IV%20Dub%20Readme/readme.html
But back to the story, as Adol is celebrating with his friends, Sara the local fortune teller tells him about the distant land of Celceta. While she was escaping the forces of Dark Fact she discovered a connection between the black pearl and some ruins recently found on the mainland and she asked Adol to investigate it ! Without losing a single minute, Adol answered the call to adventure and in the dark of night set out to Celceta the mysteries of this ancient land ! But in the shadows, a sinister group of individual are trying to perform a dark ritual shown in a metal as fuck way too fucking gory for this franchise animated cutscenes before the game starts off with this absolute BANGER !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK9JTh0gAXs
GODDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN MY DUDE THESE SAXOPHONES ARE MAKING MY ASS WETTER THAN A FOUNTAIN ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON JESUS CHRIST !
One of the strongest aspect of the Ys series ever since its infancy has always been its amazing soundtrack, baring some exceptions, you know that an Ys game is going to own several asses just going by the soundtrack alone and I must report that the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys is once again completely out of this world ! For the first time in the history of the franchise, it’s the Falcom Sound JDK team handling the soundtrack. The Falcom JDK team is Falcom's very own personal rock-band. Composed of many prominent members joining in and out as the company evolve with time, the JDK team was originally founded to make CD quality audio version of Falcom’s soundtrack to sell them as promotional material but eventually, the JDK team took a more prominent role in development and as the advent of technology and sound quality went on, the JDK team now started actually composing for Ys as well as other Falcom titles.
Ys IV soundtrack was composed before the game ever began development and most of the music were made on CD’s that were later released as the “Ys IV Perfect Collection” but while the original album is freaking phenomenal on its own, that doesn’t take away the excellent instrumentalisation that went into translating the original composition into something that could be played by the PCE absolutely insane sound chip ! It’s simple, the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys might be my favorite soundtrack in the entire series ! While Yuzo Koshiro’s soundtrack for the original 2 Ys games was already an absolute joy for the ear, his departure didn’t mean that the JDK team couldn’t up the ante and provide a soundtrack which tells a million words with only a few notes !
The synths, the guitars, the FREAKING SAXOPHONE in the intro of the game, everything about this OST oozes from pure 90’s funk and pop with a lot variety in the composition, of course you get your adventure tracks that make you pump to rush into battle like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWYZDs0ARqg but you also get more ambient music that makes you feel like you’re adventuring in a scary yet sacred place and you don’t belong there with ominous sound reverberating through the room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QRx_ZBoSrE then you fight a boss and the music goes : https://youtu.be/4HNEPXbNEK4?si=oaBREVaNcJIG7zqj !
There is so much variety and energy to the soundtrack that to me it easily rivals some of the greats like Final Fantasy, Megaman, Castlevania or even Donkey Kong Country with which Dawn of Ys shares its sense of harmony and insane instrumentalisation which seems impossible to do on such ancient hardware but yet it does !
And I even like a lot of the creative choice they make when remaking old tracks, Fountain of Love, Tears of Sylph and the Syonin for example is composed with an instrumentalisation closer to that of the PC-98 instead of how it was in the PCE version of Ys 1 to clearly separate the homely, familiar and old-school feeling of Adol’s quasi home-town which contrasts with the rest of the adventures which uses more elaborate instrumentalisation as Adol dives into the unknown, the same way Adol evolves and his adventure get more grandiose and epic, the soundtrack get crazier and more complex in return !
Heck at some point in the game, you return to Darm Tower which is about to crumble and fall, they could’ve done some weird melancholic version of the tune but nah, your return to Darm Tower is accompanied by some funky, jazzy upbeat version of the original tune, what once used to be the base of operation of a great evil and Adol’s greatest challenge yet is now a freaking dance party !!! You’re dancing to the beat of your old enemies main theme and desecrate their corpses because that’s how strong and confident Adol became through his adventure and to him the Darm Tower isn’t a place of challenge to him but a leisurely walk to the DANCEFLOOR BABY : https://youtu.be/hMnq4RSmZtI?si=mxLh4IP0a_1t2QcR
Theme of Adol 1993, Field, A Great Ordeal, Temple of The Sun, Karna, A Kiss from Eldeel, so many great tracks henched into my brain thanks to Ryo Yonemitsu exquisite arrangements of the JDK’s masterclass of a soundtrack for the PC-Engine ! I’m not a music theorist so I can’t really explain with technical terms how and why these tracks work for me but the vibes are genuinely immaculate !
The Ys franchise is first and foremost about adventure, about this intoxicating feeling of wanting to give everything up, grab our bags and journey to places unknown ! Pushing with relentless motion through the different places Adol visits on his journey and a soundtrack this energetic and varied only emphasize that feeling even more !
But fear not my friend because Dawn of Ys isn’t just a really cool aesthetic served on silver platter of banger tracks, it’s also first and foremost an EXCELLENT videogame ! Once again, we’re back to Bump Combat and I know that after everything I’ve just said that might’ve gotten you a little bit too excited you’ll probably say something of the likes of : “Oh really ? We’re doing this ancient ass, clunky ass, stupid ass bump system again ?” and ladies and gentle straw men who live in my head, I’ve heard your plight !
After all, Bump Combat is such an acquired taste that I had to spend two whole reviews talking about the strengths of a well executed version of such a system as well as its merits when it comes to the flow and the momentum of the game and the cracks that shows when this balance isn’t respected by badly coded hitboxes, stilted movement, terrible boss design and so forth. But Ok I know this can be a turn-off to some people but once again put your bias aside because Dawn of Ys took Bump Combat and made it EXCELLENT ! It’s easily the best game featuring bump combat in the entire series (it’s also the last one if we don’t count all of the countless ports of Ys 1&2 for modern platforms).
Dawn of Ys, much like Mask of The Sun, decides to take the same basic moveset as Ys II, with the same sets of magic to unlock too. One might think of this decision as lazy since the game doesn’t really offer much novelty from a strict gameplay sense but while your toolkit may be the same, the way Hudson uses that toolkit is much more different and the game is full of surprises at every turn. The only real difference now is that you now possess the power of DIAGONAL movement which is an actual god sent for fighting enemies or just traversing the map and offers a greater degree of freedom when it comes to positioning and even puzzles !
Unlike Tonkin House who understood so little of the appeal of the bump combat system they implemented elements of game design which came in contradiction to it, Hudson decided to play with that element of constant motion with sometimes really clever movement based puzzle making almost each dungeon in the game pop with creativity and flair they couldn’t really achieve back then. Like I said in my first review, the secret of the early Ys games was their simplicity and ease of access but also its constant sense of motion which made you rush into battle to the tunes of power metal ! But while simplicity is indeed charming, ambition is definitely more enthralling !
While Ys II chose the route of streamlining the game to be more accessible and focus more greatly on its narration by designing their game in a more linear fashion, Hudson decided to take the freedom of Ys 1 and the varied setpieces of Ys 2 to create the perfect synthesis of the Ys formula imaginable. Dawn of Ys is a game which never stops going and always comes up with new and exciting ideas for your adventure !
When you arrive on the mainland to start your adventure, boom you’re confronted by the Romun Empire and sent to prison where they take your cool ass equipment from your adventures in Ys II and you’re mad as shit about this but you break-out with the help of cool characters such as Durgen and Karna and you realize that sometimes the game will make you fight with ally who also deals with enemies the same as you ! One time you’re on a raft and have to survive an onslaught of enemies, one time you’re in a volcano ! One time you’re turned into a monster and have to find a way to turn back to normal ! One time you’re in Esher Space and the gravity is flipped upside down and so much more !
What about the bosses tho ? Well Hudson also pushed themselves on that front, Dawn of Ys possesses more than 15 bosses compared to Mask of The Sun mere 9 and it’s one more boss than both Ys 1&2 combined (proving once again that Dawn of Ys is the true Ys II if the first two games are combined into one complete experience). With bump combat and magic available much like in Ys II we can imagine that there would be an imbalance between the two mechanics but nope, each boss of Dawn of Ys is extremely well designed and fun to fight !
All of the bosses strike a good balance between having to use bump combat and magic to defeat them and when it comes to pattern and all, I have absolutely nothing to complain about here, some of the later bosses are true marvel of boss design which fully plays into the strength of the somewhat simple yet effective battle system of the series so far ! A friend of mine once told me that the Twin Head boss in Ys 1 was the best they could do with Bump Combat and he was immediately proven wrong upon playing Dawn of Ys for the first time and realizing that even the first boss of that games tops any boss from either Ys 1 or Ys 2. Dawn of Ys is a game of constant wonder that always finds a way to surprise you at every turn with its setpieces, and each one of them go by so fast that you don’t get to see the time pass ! This game's sense of flow and pacing is so immaculate that not a single moment of it is boring and you feel like you’re living a really epic adventure with twists and turns and revelations at every corner ! The game may be short, it can be completed in a little over 10 h but these 10h are so intense and filled with stuff that you feel like the adventure is 10 times more epic and grand than what you can imagine !
And this proves that a game can make us feel and experience many things with more intensity no matter the actual game time, something that Falcom seems to have forgotten with time ! It’s not about how long and how stuffed with content a game is, it’s not about how much you can pad out a game to give the illusion of something richer, deeper and more interesting. It’s about making the most of what the content you have to truly impact the minds of the player who experiences your art ! And if length and only length was a determining factor some medium like films wouldn’t be so successful and Hudson understood it perfectly.
The story of Dawn of Ys is also one that I wanted to give a lot of credit towards. While Mask of The Sun followed the guideline of the design document to a T without attempting anything fancy (and with how awkwardly the story was told here, they didn’t attempt to even follow it right imo), Hudson took the idea of a direct sequel to Ys 1&2 further and did a lot of really cool things with the continuity and the established lore at the time ! The game is called “The Dawn of Ys” because more than just a new adventure in a brand new land, Adol was about to discover the secret of what he went through in the first two games ! It seems that Celceta holds the answers to all the events that lead to the corruption of the Black Pearl and the fall of Ys before Adol’s arrival in the first game and as you explore Celceta, you find yourself uncovering these answers and I absolutely love the connections they made here !
From the relationship the twin goddesses had with the inhabitant of Celceta, to the origins of Darm and the Black Pearl, to how certain things in Esteria and Ys relate to things in Celceta and how everything played into one another. One of my absolute favorite moment of the game is when during one of the game many info-dump flashbacks, you not only learn the real name of Dark Fact but also it’s revealed to you that one of the items you’ve been using in Ys 1 is actually a super important item in the global lore of the series ! Meaning that you now have to depart for Esteria and revisit the map of Ys 1 now free of all the demons ! Can you imagine the absolute flex that it is ? They didn’t have to do this and yet they did ! And it’s so good seeing all the characters from the first two games but also the different places and what they became after Adol’s departure, Ys 1 which used to be so simple, is now relegated to a small chapter inside of a much more ambitious whole ! Sure, it’s not on the level of say, the second half of DQ3 or the Kanto reveal in Pokemon Gold and Silver to name a similar exemple but man I’m a sucker for that type of stuff !
Everything about Dawn of Ys to its presentation, to its music, to its story, to level design, to the way the game builds on the basis of Ys 1&2 and plays with its continuity make the game feel like a non-stop constantly moving grand epic to which we never see the time passes ! They took everything that made Ys 1&2 so iconic and perfected it, Hudson didn’t just want to create yet another title in the prestigious Ys saga, they wanted to create the Ultimate Ys game !
The game is a love letter to the series and what Masaya Hashimoto and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, now too busy to work on their own project accomplished years ago and in many ways they managed to surpass them (well at least as far as making a Ys game goes !) and I believe that no one understood the appeal of Ys more than the team at Hudson Soft.
However, Falcom had other plans for the franchises and didn’t want to let go of Adol and the series and with Hudson hopping a bit too much above the initial guidelines to make a conclusion to the series instead of yet another episode, they decided that the game would now be considered not canon and Mask of The Sun will therefore be the version of reference for every subsequent Ys title. On one hand, I get it, this isn’t Hudson’s series, it was Falcom’s and if they wanted to continue with this series they just couldn’t let something like the ending of Dawn of Ys happen and give the series the proper closure it deserves.
Personally speaking, while what Hudson Soft did can be compared to mere fanfiction, it’s really good fanfiction and aside from coming into conflicts with the modern lore of the series and offering an epilogue that could have easily been acknowledged by Falcom without actually hurting the continuity, I think that what Hudson did here is phenomenal, the ending of Dawn of Ys is perhaps my favorite ending in the series despite and never fail to make me emotional. So many of Hudson’s ideas for the lore and continuity of the series at least in my opinion could’ve been reworked into the main timeline as I do think that some ideas here are actually better than what Falcom will eventually do with them !
Much to my dismay, that means that for how excellent Dawn of Ys is, its legacy is now forgotten, even Falcom seems to be really keen on ignoring the game’s existence or any influence Hudson might’ve had on the franchise (in fact : in the modern port of the older titles, you can play every OST’s of each version of Ys 1,2 and 3 but not the PC-Engine version but I bet it’s due to copyright issues rather than pettiness) and I think this is a great injustice.
I really do implore you, if you enjoy Ys especially Ys 1&2, I urge yourself to try out Dawn of Ys even more so if you were disappointed by Falcom’s own take on the game they did 20 years later with “Memories of Celceta” (but that will be a story for another time !). It’s really a masterpiece and easily amongst the best the series has to offer, a true labor of love and passion made by people who probably loved and understood Ys more than its original creators.
The next game in the series will be handled by Falcom themselves and who knows, maybe they won’t fuck it up… right ?
See you next time, as we take a look at “Ys V” the game, the game which almost killed the Ys franchise !
In the 80’s there were few developers who actually knew what they were doing more than Hudson Soft, these guys are probably single handedly responsible for Nintendo opening itself to third party developers to make the NES/Famicom the legendary console we know today. Hudson Soft first and foremost were people who didn’t just like video games as a way to make money on a newly expanding market, these guys were very passionate about new technology and the wonders of gaming as a whole.
But eventually, when you enjoy making games so much, you start to become ambitious and soon Hudson Soft will partner with NEC the prime micro-computer manufacturer (and creator of the famous “porn game machine” known as the PC-98) under a share common interest of building the game console of the future : The PC-Engine otherwise known as the Turbografx 16 outside of Japan. The PCE was a really impressive machine for the time and even today, I’m still kind of blown away by the technical capabilities of the console which only has an 8 bit processor but packs a lot of punch otherwise especially with the CD Add-on that they’ve adopted earlier than many other companies at the time.
However, they were releasing a new console on an highly competitive market, Sega and Nintendo were fiercely competing for domination and other companies who dared venture on hardware territory knew that it was complicated to stand out amongst the crowd and that’s when Hudson had a brilliant idea, they will partner with Falcom to port their classic Ys title to their console. Ys 1 and Ys 2 were already considered classic of NEC micro-computers system and they have already existed many ports of the game to pretty much all available platforms at the time including the NES and the Master System but Hudson’s version on their PC-Engine was going to be different, it wasn’t just going to be a port, it was going to be a full-on REMAKE !
Ys Book 1&2 took the first two games in the series and combined them together into a single one like it was originally planned for the first time and the game will receive the most premium treatment imaginable ! A graphical overhaul which put new life into the game, touched up gameplay that made the experience smoother to play, smoother leveling curves which mitigated the grinding, new tracks to accompany certain important moment with new remixes on the absurdly insane sounding PCE soundchip which was able to make freaking miracle happened, it had animated cutscenes and full fucking voice-acting for a game released in 1989 and they did it both in Japanese and in English as this was the first game in the series to be shipped internationally (not counting the weird European port of Ys 1 on the Master System) !
Everyone’s mind was freaking blown away by how much love and care was put into this new iteration, gamers who were alive to see it happen before their very eyes as children couldn’t believe their eyes ! It was a true epic adventure with all the proper care put into its presentation to heightened that sense of wonder. It’s clear that probably the reason why Ys even got so popular in the first place and managed to stay relevant was because of this port right there, the game was well received pretty much everywhere and magazines sang the tales of how Hudson made Ys 1 & 2 a legendary game going beyond its simple ambition !
And all of this before Zelda or any other company was able to release their next-gen titles !
The PC-Engine version of Ys 1&2 was a massive success and single-handedly was enough of a reason for people to even buy a PC-Engine in the first place. It was clear that Hudson Soft didn’t just enjoy Ys, they didn’t just like Ys heck they didn’t even love Ys ! THEY WERE TRULY PASSIONATE ABOUT YS ! So much so that Hudson was allowed to port Ys III for the PC-Engine too with the same level of care and polish as what they did for Ys 1&2 even tho no amount of polish managed to make the game any good in the end and they botched the localization of it but oh well…
So when Falcom couldn’t make Ys IV themselves, Hudson seemed like the obvious choice to direct and create a new entry in their series ! But making a game from scratch with only a design document full of concept arts, a few guidelines and no lines of code or any prototype was a vastly different task than just taking an already existing game and polishing it to completion but unlike Tonkin House who was this small no-name company playing with their turds trying to make a barely playable game to satisfy the guideline, Hudson had something that they didn’t, they had experiences with making successful cult classic games but most importantly they had PASSION
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCmsS8eD_XY
From the moment you boot up the game you understand that the level of production value here is through the fucking roof ! You ain’t playing some dinky ass, poopy ass, budget ass, Tonkin Ass, Cold Steel Era Falcom ass “product” ! YOU ARE PLAYING A REAL VIDEOGAME ! MADE BY REAL DEVELOPERS ! WITH REAL TALENT ! REAL PASSION AND A REAL BUDGET TO GIVE THEM THE MEAN TO PRODUCE A MASTERPIECE AND YOU BET YOUR ASS THEY WERE GONNA TAKE THE CHANCE ! THERE IS NO BRAKE ON THIS TRAIN ! DAWN OF YS IS A GAME THAT’S GOING TO SHOW MODERN FALCOM PLAYERS HOW WE USED TO DO IT BACK IN THE 9 TO THE TIES ! A PRODUCT MOLD IN THE VOLCANO OF LOVE AND FORGED BY THE FINEST SOUL-MAKER IN THE INDUSTRY !
What made Ys 1&2 so legendary already was the visual presentation of it all, it made the original script of those games popped even more than they originally did in spite of the limited presentation and the added animated character portrait, voice acting and even cutscenes really added a lot of flair to the original two games. But Ys 1&2 Hudson was merely adding on top of the original game. With Dawn of Ys, they had full control over the game's presentation and how it would fit inside of the game ! And I’m happy to report they did a phenomenal job on just the visual presentation and scene direction level !
The first few minutes of Dawn of Ys already introduce the game in a much better way than Tonkin's version did. After coming back from one of their travels, Adol and Dogi stop by Esteria. It's been 2 years since the event of their adventure there and everyone is waiting for them ! A lot of things have changed already, Goban has opened a shop, Lilia now lives among the people of Esteria and is constantly waiting for Adol’s return and her health got better too ! Sarah is alive and managed to survive the assault of Dark Fact and his army after mysteriously disappearing in Ys 1 ! As you walk toward the city, the title of the game fades on top of the screen, everyone is celebrating Adol’s return ! This section feels like a genuine victory lap and a great way to welcome us back to the world of Ys after so long and I love every single minute of it and it’s all done really well !
One thing that’s clear from the game’s visual presentation is that the game will put more of an emphasis on its narration and especially how it’s going to be told through its visuals, you have much more scripted events the likes of other RPGs at the time where you lose control of Adol’s character for a moment to witness dialogues and scenes ! The general artstyle of the game oozes of that timeless 90’s anime charm, the character design is pretty damn excellent and on par with the striking designs of the original game, many characters from the first two games even got a face lift for the occasion, each of the game’s portrait and cutscenes are superbly animated and full of details ! That recreation of Ys II final battle is only a technical flex before the game bombards you with an avalanche of colors which pops out of your screen and invites you to live the adventure of a lifetime !
While the in-game graphics might be less impressive than the anime style portrait, cg’s and animation I just love how colorful the game looks which complimented by the extremely varied environments the game make you go through from lush forest to snowy mountains to a creepy abandoned mansion and even more, the visuals manage sometimes to pull off some really cool things with the environment and it definitely make the journey feel more alive than ever !
One particularly impressive thing about Dawn of Ys is that while text boxes are still the norm for dialogues with regular NPC’s most of the big story scene are entirely dubbed with animated character portraits popping on the screen and sometimes even CG’s much like in visual novel to highlight some of the more important moments, the original Japanese performance is honestly pretty stellar and I’m still shocked at how cleanly the voice acting sound on such an old hardware.
However this raised an issue when it came to the availability of the game for the longest time as much like Mask of the Sun, Dawn of Ys remained a Japanese exclusive and in the case of Dawn while an english fan translation already existed for a while most of the important dialogue remained untranslated simply because they couldn’t display subtitles during the game numerous voiced only segments. Thankfully nowadays this is no longer an issue thanks to a group of talented but amateurish voice actors who banded together with the goal to bring a fandub of the entire game !
While it’s not quite as professionally well made as the official dub of Ys 1&2 with the only professional voice actor here being Alan Oppenheimer, third cousin of THE Oppenheimer and voice of Skeletor in the He-Man series giving his voice to Darm in the intro of the game. That doesn’t mean that the rest of the crew delivered a hack job and I think that on average, they did manage to at least capture the feel of that era of voice-acting. I think it was probably something the dubbing team wanted to transmit with their performance, something that sound like it was recorded by a bunch of voice actors going off way too much in a at times goofy, at times overly serious and badass tone and I just think it works really well and definitely feel like the game actually did came out in the west. The only issue with the English Dub however is that the general audio mixing is rather poor, you can feel each member of the team had different mike quality and the voice acting can sometimes be a bit muffled by the music or sound effect playing in the background and with no option to arrange the audio mixing yourself in the settings you’ll have to sometimes open your ear wide to understand what the hell are they saying. Be sure to check their website at : https://www.ysutopia.net/downloads/ys4/Ys%20IV%20Dub%20Readme/readme.html
But back to the story, as Adol is celebrating with his friends, Sara the local fortune teller tells him about the distant land of Celceta. While she was escaping the forces of Dark Fact she discovered a connection between the black pearl and some ruins recently found on the mainland and she asked Adol to investigate it ! Without losing a single minute, Adol answered the call to adventure and in the dark of night set out to Celceta the mysteries of this ancient land ! But in the shadows, a sinister group of individual are trying to perform a dark ritual shown in a metal as fuck way too fucking gory for this franchise animated cutscenes before the game starts off with this absolute BANGER !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK9JTh0gAXs
GODDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN MY DUDE THESE SAXOPHONES ARE MAKING MY ASS WETTER THAN A FOUNTAIN ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON JESUS CHRIST !
One of the strongest aspect of the Ys series ever since its infancy has always been its amazing soundtrack, baring some exceptions, you know that an Ys game is going to own several asses just going by the soundtrack alone and I must report that the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys is once again completely out of this world ! For the first time in the history of the franchise, it’s the Falcom Sound JDK team handling the soundtrack. The Falcom JDK team is Falcom's very own personal rock-band. Composed of many prominent members joining in and out as the company evolve with time, the JDK team was originally founded to make CD quality audio version of Falcom’s soundtrack to sell them as promotional material but eventually, the JDK team took a more prominent role in development and as the advent of technology and sound quality went on, the JDK team now started actually composing for Ys as well as other Falcom titles.
Ys IV soundtrack was composed before the game ever began development and most of the music were made on CD’s that were later released as the “Ys IV Perfect Collection” but while the original album is freaking phenomenal on its own, that doesn’t take away the excellent instrumentalisation that went into translating the original composition into something that could be played by the PCE absolutely insane sound chip ! It’s simple, the soundtrack for Dawn of Ys might be my favorite soundtrack in the entire series ! While Yuzo Koshiro’s soundtrack for the original 2 Ys games was already an absolute joy for the ear, his departure didn’t mean that the JDK team couldn’t up the ante and provide a soundtrack which tells a million words with only a few notes !
The synths, the guitars, the FREAKING SAXOPHONE in the intro of the game, everything about this OST oozes from pure 90’s funk and pop with a lot variety in the composition, of course you get your adventure tracks that make you pump to rush into battle like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWYZDs0ARqg but you also get more ambient music that makes you feel like you’re adventuring in a scary yet sacred place and you don’t belong there with ominous sound reverberating through the room https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QRx_ZBoSrE then you fight a boss and the music goes : https://youtu.be/4HNEPXbNEK4?si=oaBREVaNcJIG7zqj !
There is so much variety and energy to the soundtrack that to me it easily rivals some of the greats like Final Fantasy, Megaman, Castlevania or even Donkey Kong Country with which Dawn of Ys shares its sense of harmony and insane instrumentalisation which seems impossible to do on such ancient hardware but yet it does !
And I even like a lot of the creative choice they make when remaking old tracks, Fountain of Love, Tears of Sylph and the Syonin for example is composed with an instrumentalisation closer to that of the PC-98 instead of how it was in the PCE version of Ys 1 to clearly separate the homely, familiar and old-school feeling of Adol’s quasi home-town which contrasts with the rest of the adventures which uses more elaborate instrumentalisation as Adol dives into the unknown, the same way Adol evolves and his adventure get more grandiose and epic, the soundtrack get crazier and more complex in return !
Heck at some point in the game, you return to Darm Tower which is about to crumble and fall, they could’ve done some weird melancholic version of the tune but nah, your return to Darm Tower is accompanied by some funky, jazzy upbeat version of the original tune, what once used to be the base of operation of a great evil and Adol’s greatest challenge yet is now a freaking dance party !!! You’re dancing to the beat of your old enemies main theme and desecrate their corpses because that’s how strong and confident Adol became through his adventure and to him the Darm Tower isn’t a place of challenge to him but a leisurely walk to the DANCEFLOOR BABY : https://youtu.be/hMnq4RSmZtI?si=mxLh4IP0a_1t2QcR
Theme of Adol 1993, Field, A Great Ordeal, Temple of The Sun, Karna, A Kiss from Eldeel, so many great tracks henched into my brain thanks to Ryo Yonemitsu exquisite arrangements of the JDK’s masterclass of a soundtrack for the PC-Engine ! I’m not a music theorist so I can’t really explain with technical terms how and why these tracks work for me but the vibes are genuinely immaculate !
The Ys franchise is first and foremost about adventure, about this intoxicating feeling of wanting to give everything up, grab our bags and journey to places unknown ! Pushing with relentless motion through the different places Adol visits on his journey and a soundtrack this energetic and varied only emphasize that feeling even more !
But fear not my friend because Dawn of Ys isn’t just a really cool aesthetic served on silver platter of banger tracks, it’s also first and foremost an EXCELLENT videogame ! Once again, we’re back to Bump Combat and I know that after everything I’ve just said that might’ve gotten you a little bit too excited you’ll probably say something of the likes of : “Oh really ? We’re doing this ancient ass, clunky ass, stupid ass bump system again ?” and ladies and gentle straw men who live in my head, I’ve heard your plight !
After all, Bump Combat is such an acquired taste that I had to spend two whole reviews talking about the strengths of a well executed version of such a system as well as its merits when it comes to the flow and the momentum of the game and the cracks that shows when this balance isn’t respected by badly coded hitboxes, stilted movement, terrible boss design and so forth. But Ok I know this can be a turn-off to some people but once again put your bias aside because Dawn of Ys took Bump Combat and made it EXCELLENT ! It’s easily the best game featuring bump combat in the entire series (it’s also the last one if we don’t count all of the countless ports of Ys 1&2 for modern platforms).
Dawn of Ys, much like Mask of The Sun, decides to take the same basic moveset as Ys II, with the same sets of magic to unlock too. One might think of this decision as lazy since the game doesn’t really offer much novelty from a strict gameplay sense but while your toolkit may be the same, the way Hudson uses that toolkit is much more different and the game is full of surprises at every turn. The only real difference now is that you now possess the power of DIAGONAL movement which is an actual god sent for fighting enemies or just traversing the map and offers a greater degree of freedom when it comes to positioning and even puzzles !
Unlike Tonkin House who understood so little of the appeal of the bump combat system they implemented elements of game design which came in contradiction to it, Hudson decided to play with that element of constant motion with sometimes really clever movement based puzzle making almost each dungeon in the game pop with creativity and flair they couldn’t really achieve back then. Like I said in my first review, the secret of the early Ys games was their simplicity and ease of access but also its constant sense of motion which made you rush into battle to the tunes of power metal ! But while simplicity is indeed charming, ambition is definitely more enthralling !
While Ys II chose the route of streamlining the game to be more accessible and focus more greatly on its narration by designing their game in a more linear fashion, Hudson decided to take the freedom of Ys 1 and the varied setpieces of Ys 2 to create the perfect synthesis of the Ys formula imaginable. Dawn of Ys is a game which never stops going and always comes up with new and exciting ideas for your adventure !
When you arrive on the mainland to start your adventure, boom you’re confronted by the Romun Empire and sent to prison where they take your cool ass equipment from your adventures in Ys II and you’re mad as shit about this but you break-out with the help of cool characters such as Durgen and Karna and you realize that sometimes the game will make you fight with ally who also deals with enemies the same as you ! One time you’re on a raft and have to survive an onslaught of enemies, one time you’re in a volcano ! One time you’re turned into a monster and have to find a way to turn back to normal ! One time you’re in Esher Space and the gravity is flipped upside down and so much more !
What about the bosses tho ? Well Hudson also pushed themselves on that front, Dawn of Ys possesses more than 15 bosses compared to Mask of The Sun mere 9 and it’s one more boss than both Ys 1&2 combined (proving once again that Dawn of Ys is the true Ys II if the first two games are combined into one complete experience). With bump combat and magic available much like in Ys II we can imagine that there would be an imbalance between the two mechanics but nope, each boss of Dawn of Ys is extremely well designed and fun to fight !
All of the bosses strike a good balance between having to use bump combat and magic to defeat them and when it comes to pattern and all, I have absolutely nothing to complain about here, some of the later bosses are true marvel of boss design which fully plays into the strength of the somewhat simple yet effective battle system of the series so far ! A friend of mine once told me that the Twin Head boss in Ys 1 was the best they could do with Bump Combat and he was immediately proven wrong upon playing Dawn of Ys for the first time and realizing that even the first boss of that games tops any boss from either Ys 1 or Ys 2. Dawn of Ys is a game of constant wonder that always finds a way to surprise you at every turn with its setpieces, and each one of them go by so fast that you don’t get to see the time pass ! This game's sense of flow and pacing is so immaculate that not a single moment of it is boring and you feel like you’re living a really epic adventure with twists and turns and revelations at every corner ! The game may be short, it can be completed in a little over 10 h but these 10h are so intense and filled with stuff that you feel like the adventure is 10 times more epic and grand than what you can imagine !
And this proves that a game can make us feel and experience many things with more intensity no matter the actual game time, something that Falcom seems to have forgotten with time ! It’s not about how long and how stuffed with content a game is, it’s not about how much you can pad out a game to give the illusion of something richer, deeper and more interesting. It’s about making the most of what the content you have to truly impact the minds of the player who experiences your art ! And if length and only length was a determining factor some medium like films wouldn’t be so successful and Hudson understood it perfectly.
The story of Dawn of Ys is also one that I wanted to give a lot of credit towards. While Mask of The Sun followed the guideline of the design document to a T without attempting anything fancy (and with how awkwardly the story was told here, they didn’t attempt to even follow it right imo), Hudson took the idea of a direct sequel to Ys 1&2 further and did a lot of really cool things with the continuity and the established lore at the time ! The game is called “The Dawn of Ys” because more than just a new adventure in a brand new land, Adol was about to discover the secret of what he went through in the first two games ! It seems that Celceta holds the answers to all the events that lead to the corruption of the Black Pearl and the fall of Ys before Adol’s arrival in the first game and as you explore Celceta, you find yourself uncovering these answers and I absolutely love the connections they made here !
From the relationship the twin goddesses had with the inhabitant of Celceta, to the origins of Darm and the Black Pearl, to how certain things in Esteria and Ys relate to things in Celceta and how everything played into one another. One of my absolute favorite moment of the game is when during one of the game many info-dump flashbacks, you not only learn the real name of Dark Fact but also it’s revealed to you that one of the items you’ve been using in Ys 1 is actually a super important item in the global lore of the series ! Meaning that you now have to depart for Esteria and revisit the map of Ys 1 now free of all the demons ! Can you imagine the absolute flex that it is ? They didn’t have to do this and yet they did ! And it’s so good seeing all the characters from the first two games but also the different places and what they became after Adol’s departure, Ys 1 which used to be so simple, is now relegated to a small chapter inside of a much more ambitious whole ! Sure, it’s not on the level of say, the second half of DQ3 or the Kanto reveal in Pokemon Gold and Silver to name a similar exemple but man I’m a sucker for that type of stuff !
Everything about Dawn of Ys to its presentation, to its music, to its story, to level design, to the way the game builds on the basis of Ys 1&2 and plays with its continuity make the game feel like a non-stop constantly moving grand epic to which we never see the time passes ! They took everything that made Ys 1&2 so iconic and perfected it, Hudson didn’t just want to create yet another title in the prestigious Ys saga, they wanted to create the Ultimate Ys game !
The game is a love letter to the series and what Masaya Hashimoto and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, now too busy to work on their own project accomplished years ago and in many ways they managed to surpass them (well at least as far as making a Ys game goes !) and I believe that no one understood the appeal of Ys more than the team at Hudson Soft.
However, Falcom had other plans for the franchises and didn’t want to let go of Adol and the series and with Hudson hopping a bit too much above the initial guidelines to make a conclusion to the series instead of yet another episode, they decided that the game would now be considered not canon and Mask of The Sun will therefore be the version of reference for every subsequent Ys title. On one hand, I get it, this isn’t Hudson’s series, it was Falcom’s and if they wanted to continue with this series they just couldn’t let something like the ending of Dawn of Ys happen and give the series the proper closure it deserves.
Personally speaking, while what Hudson Soft did can be compared to mere fanfiction, it’s really good fanfiction and aside from coming into conflicts with the modern lore of the series and offering an epilogue that could have easily been acknowledged by Falcom without actually hurting the continuity, I think that what Hudson did here is phenomenal, the ending of Dawn of Ys is perhaps my favorite ending in the series despite and never fail to make me emotional. So many of Hudson’s ideas for the lore and continuity of the series at least in my opinion could’ve been reworked into the main timeline as I do think that some ideas here are actually better than what Falcom will eventually do with them !
Much to my dismay, that means that for how excellent Dawn of Ys is, its legacy is now forgotten, even Falcom seems to be really keen on ignoring the game’s existence or any influence Hudson might’ve had on the franchise (in fact : in the modern port of the older titles, you can play every OST’s of each version of Ys 1,2 and 3 but not the PC-Engine version but I bet it’s due to copyright issues rather than pettiness) and I think this is a great injustice.
I really do implore you, if you enjoy Ys especially Ys 1&2, I urge yourself to try out Dawn of Ys even more so if you were disappointed by Falcom’s own take on the game they did 20 years later with “Memories of Celceta” (but that will be a story for another time !). It’s really a masterpiece and easily amongst the best the series has to offer, a true labor of love and passion made by people who probably loved and understood Ys more than its original creators.
The next game in the series will be handled by Falcom themselves and who knows, maybe they won’t fuck it up… right ?
See you next time, as we take a look at “Ys V” the game, the game which almost killed the Ys franchise !
Ys IV Part 1 : Mask of the Flop
After the troublesome development of Ys III, the development team composed of developer Masaya Hashimoto and scenario writer Tomoyoshi Miyazaki as well as all the other less known employees who worked on the first three titles, decided to leave Falcom for greener pastures by forming an independent studio by the name of “Quintet” under the guise of Enix one of the most prominent gaming publishers at the time responsible for publishing several hit like EVO, Star Ocean and of course the worldwide phenomenon that is the Dragon Quest series. Here they will make a few cult classics on the Super Nintendo such as Actraiser, the “Heaven and Earth Trilogy” (Soul Blazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terranigma) or even Robotrek before slowly fading into obscurity in the middle of the PS1 era with most of its staff never to be seen again after filing for bankruptcy in 2003.
Around the same time, Falcom will know another developers exodus, this time the development team behind the first person dungeon crawler Dinosaur (a game which disappointingly has no actual dinosaurs in it, Dinosaur being the name of the antagonist) left the company to also become a new studio by the name of “Studio Alex” where they’ll make the Lunar Series before filing for bankruptcy after some unfortunate controversy regarding the animation of one of the series third and entry and most of the employees where then forced to move on to Game Arts (the company who co-developed the Lunar Series) where they’ll create the Grandia series before Game Arts started dwindling in the mid 2000’s only now releasing HD ports of their past hits.
Around the end of the 80’s, the work environment at Falcom wasn’t really the best, they went from frontrunners of the RPG industry to second fiddle in a matter of years which is actually fascinating to me because there’s definitely a universe where Falcom did succeed and became a legendary game developers the likes of Squaresoft or even Atlus instead of that one scrimblo company who to this day still struggles for relevance. I mean for crying out loud, Falcom was a studio full of talented people and while the 2 we mentioned earlier made a few bangers before going into a whiff, some of them like Tetsuya Takahashi or later down the line Makoto Shinkai will know fruitful careers after departing from Falcom, one as the genius behind the Xeno Series beloved by all RPG fans who respects themselves a little and one as a successful worldwide known anime filmmaker (can you imagine that there’s a parallel universe where Makoto Shinkai, the director of “Your Name” could’ve been the Tetsuya Nomura of Falcom ? Crazy to think about isn’t it ?).
Suffice to say that with 3⁄4th of their staff gone to the wind and the few remaining members of the A-Team focusing on making games in the ever so expanding Dragon Slayer franchise which wasn’t seeing much success either, the future of Falcom and most topically for this review Ys was in trouble. But Falcom had a few trick up their sleeves but most importantly they had connections, the next game in the Ys series “Ys IV” was already in preparation but without a development team ready to work on it, Falcom had to rely on two of its most reliable ally : Tonkin House and Hudson Soft.
Both companies helped port the Ys franchise on console, Tonkin House was responsible for porting them on Nintendo and Sega’s hardware and Hudson Soft had the rights to publish straight up remakes of these titles to promote their very own console : The PC-Engine.
After being given a design document on what Ys IV was supposed to look like as well as a complete sheet of original composition by Falcom at the time newly formed “Sound JDK” team, both teams set up to create their own version of Ys IV with full creative liberties from Falcom to add or take away anything they wanted as long as they followed the rough outline of the original script and kept the initial gameplay planned for this episode intact.
And that’s how we ended up with two versions of Ys IV which seems similar at first glance as they were released roughly at the same time in 1991 but are vastly different in their execution enough so that they’re completely different games only sharing similar plot beats and characters. These wouldn’t be the only version of Ys IV however, there’s a grand total of 4 version of Ys IV with one developed by Taito in 2005 for the PS2 and which is supposed to be a remake of the SNES version we’re going to talk about today and finally another version this time actually developed by Falcom for the PS Vita roughly 20 years after the release of the first two version of Ys IV.
Since Tonkin House is the first one to release their take on Ys IV, this review will cover “Ys IV : Mask of the Sun”, released exclusively for the Super Famicom and in the second part of this review we’ll take a look at Hudson’s version named “Ys IV : The Dawn of Ys” !
Tonkin House, as previously mentioned is the company which ported the older Ys titles on console but if we take a look at their history with both the franchise and the rest of their catalog, it doesn’t bode well for this game at all. Unlike Hudson Soft which was a renowned game developer and console manufacturer at the time, Tonkin House was a relatively smaller studio even smaller than Falcom was at the time. They’ve released a few titles, mostly sports games which have seen moderate success and helped other companies on other titles in fact their port of Ys III for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo is one of the few rare time when they actually had full-hands on a project and it was for a port and how did that well ?
Bad
Ys III on both the Sega Genesis but especially on the Super Nintendo are really bad and that’s saying a lot considering what I had to say about Ys III in its best version, the SNES version is commonly accepted as the worst version of Ys III with even wankier controls, even wankier collision errors, glitches up the wazoo (but tbf, one allows you to level up instantly to max level so it’s kind of a neat feature lol) and with terrible ear-bleeding renditions of the soundtrack on a console that’s known for having one of the best sound chip in the history of gaming.
You know how people are impressed by Nobuo Uematsu when he manages to compose a 17 minutes long prog-rock symphonic masterpiece on the equivalent of a box of Crayola ? Well I’m similarly impressed at Tonkin House for taking that box of Crayola and just spectacularly set it out on fire ! Fucking up music on the Genesis is one thing, only a few god-like composer like Yuzo Koshiro or Michael Jackson (assuming he was the one doing the music for Sonic 3, I’m never sure) can make something out of the piece of scrap metal that is the YM2612 but the Super Nintendo soundchip ? That’s just insane, just listen and compare to the PC-Engine version. It's wild https://youtu.be/BxkElFJb5zI?si=ERx3kIU64vCZMz4F !
The reason I’m saying this is because the first thing you’re going to realize when booting up Ys IV : Mask of the Sun is how poor the sound quality, in a series that’s mostly known for its excellent soundtrack, Mask of the Sun just doesn’t bring homage to the series legacy on that front. The music themselves aren’t badly composed, in fact like I said earlier, the team was given a full sheet of original composition by the JDK team, it’s almost the exact same soundtrack as Hudson’s version and if you go and listen to the perfect edition of the soundtrack, you’ll realize it’s one of Falcom’s best OST album to date ! If your first experience with Ys IV soundtrack is the Super Famicom version then I’m deeply sorry for you because the way it’s compressed and crunched up is so messy that it will make the snail inside your ear commit seppuku just playing the game for an extended period of time. There’s a few original compositions made specifically for this version of the game and they’re the only stand-out track but even then, the general quality of the arrangements doesn’t help them shine the way they should.
But bad music aside, which already deals a huge blow to the franchise core identity, how does the game or heck even the story hold up ?
Well… not good…
When developing Ys IV, it was decided after the harsh feedback Ys III received for its gameplay system to go back to a more classical top-down adventure and surprisingly although everybody was moving on to the Zelda style of having an attack button which became the norm, it was decided that Ys IV returned to the tried and true bump system from the original 2 games, this return to form for Ys was also shown through the story and most importantly how Ys IV places itself in the continuity, taking place between Ys II and Ys III and as such acting as a direct continuation to Adol’s adventure in Esteria.
While both Mask of The Sun and Hudson follows some rough outlines when it comes to the story, their execution is pretty different, Tonkin House didn’t take any real risk when it comes to the story and decided to follow the guideline of Falcom’s original document but I feel like when it comes to Mask of The Sun at least, they read the synopsis, the concept and roughly the big ideas and set pieces of Ys IV but forgot to actually add… an actually coherent storyline to tie all these conceptual elements together ???
In this version of Ys IV, Adol is wandering on the beach of Esteria thinking back on his adventure in Ys I&II until suddenly he finds a letter in a bottle in a language he doesn’t understand, after getting it translated by Luther (a character from Ys 1) the letter reveals that the distant land of Celceta is in danger ! And someone is asking for a hero to save the day. Adol, hearing the call for adventure once more, decides to hop on his boat to explore Celceta and figure out what’s going on over there…
And then… well…
The story sort of just… happens ?
Yeah that’s probably my main issue with Mask of the Sun storytelling, there’s a few notable high points connected by various steps along the way which didn’t seem all that well thought out and seem to be more of an excuse to pad the game time more than telling a story.
The progression of the story and how you explore Celceta feels very disjointed and while the fan translation of the game courtesy of Aeon Genesis is rather excellent and in fact much better than what a typical localization for a game of this era should be, I don’t necessarily think the actual script at play deserved such premium treatment ! Story beats really just happens at random with the only real narrative arc holding the game together being Dr.Flair accompanying Adol on his quest to find Celceta’s flower to prepare medicine for Lilia until the actual story about Eldeel, Lisa and his three goons starts out of genuinely nowhere leading you on a scavenger quest for a bunch of McGuffin needed to obtain a special sword to defeat the big bad guy of the week and really, don’t even ask me the entire process of behind the plot because I don’t really remember much of what you actually do in the game…
And when I say the actual plot kicks off out of nowhere, I really mean it, Adol goes inside a random forest, gets struck by lightning, taken into a castle and witness a conversation between the villains of the game before being discovered and comedically beaten out to death in gloriously limited Super Nintendo scene direction ! It’s genuinely hysterical how the game goes from 0 to a 100, at some point the characters are like “let’s go back to Esteria !” which is a cool way to let you visit the map from Ys I but it’s terribly limited and done very poorly and also comes out of genuinely nowhere or when Lilia gets randomly kidnapped and die but thanks to some random thingamajig, you’re able to bring her back to life (tho fighting through hordes of enemy while carrying Lilia’s lifeless body is one of the few standout moment of the game !).
The scene direction is pretty hilarious too with people jumping around, spinning, interrupting each others (thankfully the text is colored to follow who says who in this mess of dialogue bubble overlapping each others) but even with those funny SNES limitations, the story in it of itself while not lacking in striking moment or even good idea to extend on the universe of the series comes off as pretty awkward and at the end we’re only left with a confused feeling of having experience only the rough draft of something that could if given the proper care actually be amazing and thankfully we’ll see that in the next review when we’ll talk about Dawn.
Also Adol talks in this game, and he talks a lot more than he did in Ys III, it’s the last time the franchise will attempt at giving Adol somewhat of a personality until Memories of Celceta and I’m glad they dropped the idea quickly. I know there’s some debate on the internet on whether or not silent protagonist are even needed in the gaming sphere anymore but I think everyone would agree that I’d rather Adol being a mute and speaking most of his words through actions rather than just stating some flat platitude about the next step of his quest or random answer to NPC which feels more randomly generated than anything, the gameplay and the general narration sells Adol more than any piece of dialogue ever can in my opinion.
But Ys stories have always pretty much been secondary, most of the time the game excels more at narration and telling a story through gameplay, subtle hints and clues and this more direct approach definitely needed to be perfected to compensate for the abysmal gameplay of Mask of The Sun…
Yeah Tonkin House didn’t really learn anything from how wack their version of Ys III on console were and if they could fuck up a gameplay system which just needed to be adapted imagine the results when you task them to actually make a fun return to bump combat.
Following the harsh criticism of Ys III gameplay, Falcom tasked both developers to create something closer to Ys I&II, so close in fact that virtually speaking almost nothing change, you still have the same bump system, the same magics, the same equipment and accessories and aside from a few oddball novelties which are barely noticeable, it plays… roughly the same as Ys I&II…
Or does it ?
There’s a common criticism of Bump Combat amongst people going back to the older titles. That it feels jank, unpolished, outdated, unfair even, that it’s not natural, that the hitboxes are wack and the system itself has no real qualities to it whatsoever and feels more limiting than anything and for many people Bump Combat is the relic of a bygone era that should never see the light of day again. And while I personally agree that Bump Combat doesn’t necessarily have a place in the modern action-rpg scene, I will disagree with the sometimes harsh and unwarranted criticism toward such a system because one, it’s not without its merits and I went over them in detail in my first review and two because Ys 1&2 doing it so well means that there’s room for fucking it up royally and that’s what Tonkin House managed to do !!!
I want you to take your bias against Ys 1&2 and I’m inviting you to play Mask of The Sun for at least 10 minutes ! Just 10 minutes is enough to realize how good you bunch of ungrateful pricks had it with the original title and now look how they’ve massacred my bumpy boy…
First off, it's still only 4 directional movement, but that’s ok because Ys 1&2 had enemies designed around that limitation and positioning was a core aspect of the combat system but not in Mask of the Sun ! Enemies goes super fast, zooming on the screen erratically, shooting projectiles off center guaranteeing you to take a hit and their hitboxes are out of this world, they are simply no rules to how hitboxes behave in this game, you will systematically at least 7 times out of 10 take a hit and not even understanding why you did take a hit ! Also if you thought bump combat was bad, imagine bump combat but now with STATUS EFFECTS. Because yes, some enemies can inflict you status effects including but not limited to poison !
I repeat, in a game where the ENTIRE POINT is to go in direct contact with the enemies to hurt them, you can randomly get poisoned and how does poison behave in Mask of the Sun ? Well much like every classic JRPG of course ! By losing health with every step when we stated in our first review that the core strength and entire point of the bump system was that it was based on CONSTANTLY MOVING !
There is a special kind of hell for design decisions like this which completely disregard any notion of common sense and goes against the initial main philosophy behind the series core game design philosophy ! It’s really hard to make you understand through text the immediate stark contrast between how it feels to play Ys 1&2 and how it feels to play Mask of the Sun especially if you weren’t particularly convinced by the bump system in the original 2 games and rightfully so since it’s already a pretty acquired taste ! Thankfully magic is back and while it’s ineffective on bosses, it makes a lot of regular combat encounters much smoother to go through and speaking of bosses…
WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE BOSSES ?
I swear, if the combat struggles to function in regular combat encounters, wait until you reach a boss in this mess of a game ! It’s crazy how Ys 1 bosses even in all of their wack sometimes, still managed to play to the strength of the bump system but not here ! There is zero telling on when they’re vulnerable, they’re completely immune to magic which means that it has the opposite balancing issue as Ys II and most of all their patterns just… are not real ! Sometimes they’ll shoot a projectile and you’ll get his when you’re clearly not being hit, one boss in the early game drops the framerate like crazy (oh yeah the game also run terribly btw) and the flames you need to dodge becomes invisible because of SPRITE FLICKERING ! ON THE SUPER NINTENDO !!!! Another boss is so badly designed, that you need to stay in the middle of his two lasers but guess what, staying in the middle gets you hit so the boss is literally a DPS check on whether you can kill him before it kills you !
Grinding is especially obnoxious too, early Ys game always had a bit of an issue with grinding but here, it’s not really good at all and if the battle system would not want to make you want to kill yourself, it’s absolutely the level design !
It’s simple, the level design, is non-existent, it feels like each areas was randomly generated using an RPG maker “generate random dungeon” tool, areas are way too big and the enemy spawn is fucking obnoxious as fuck with the fucked up scrolling and how much of them they are in a single place ! The areas are big and don’t have any striking landmarks to navigate through them and sometimes the themes repeat themselves for no reason later in the game ! However I’ll say that geographically, the world is coherent and cohesive and gives a bigger degree of liberty for explorations compared to Ys II but the actual areas are a nightmare to go through and you will absolutely dread the final dungeon of the game…
It’s 3 part dungeon, one is a fairly straight line, the other is a gigantic maze where you have to go back and forth from places to places in the dark, where rooms have 8 exits but only one of them leads to the rest of the dungeon and the other 7 to dead end but not like you could understand at first glance because the whole thing is in the dark !!! And the last part is the golden tower which is yet another maze but ! WITH TELEPORTERS YEEPEE WHAT A FUN VIDEO GAME !
Mask of the Sun is a shockingly incompetent game and let’s be fair, after the dud that was Ys III, the last thing I wanted to cover was another crappy game but at least Ys III was rushed and was experimenting with what Ys could be. Tonkin House wasn’t and they were tasked to just recreate a game like Ys 1 and 2 which doesn’t sound so impossible to do but yet they did, Tonkin House are genuinely incompetent and it’s no wonder that the company was lost into depth of history and fell off quickly into bankruptcy a little after releasing this awful mess !
The worst part is that since Tonkin House followed the guideline more closely than Hudson, Mask of the Sun was deemed the canonical version of Ys IV for years to come meaning that for how shitty the game is, it left a bigger legacy than Hudson’s game and it makes me mad because Dawn of Ys… is one of the best game in the entire franchise ! (see you in Part 2 to talk about how Hudson managed to bring Ys into new height while leaving little impacts…)
After the troublesome development of Ys III, the development team composed of developer Masaya Hashimoto and scenario writer Tomoyoshi Miyazaki as well as all the other less known employees who worked on the first three titles, decided to leave Falcom for greener pastures by forming an independent studio by the name of “Quintet” under the guise of Enix one of the most prominent gaming publishers at the time responsible for publishing several hit like EVO, Star Ocean and of course the worldwide phenomenon that is the Dragon Quest series. Here they will make a few cult classics on the Super Nintendo such as Actraiser, the “Heaven and Earth Trilogy” (Soul Blazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terranigma) or even Robotrek before slowly fading into obscurity in the middle of the PS1 era with most of its staff never to be seen again after filing for bankruptcy in 2003.
Around the same time, Falcom will know another developers exodus, this time the development team behind the first person dungeon crawler Dinosaur (a game which disappointingly has no actual dinosaurs in it, Dinosaur being the name of the antagonist) left the company to also become a new studio by the name of “Studio Alex” where they’ll make the Lunar Series before filing for bankruptcy after some unfortunate controversy regarding the animation of one of the series third and entry and most of the employees where then forced to move on to Game Arts (the company who co-developed the Lunar Series) where they’ll create the Grandia series before Game Arts started dwindling in the mid 2000’s only now releasing HD ports of their past hits.
Around the end of the 80’s, the work environment at Falcom wasn’t really the best, they went from frontrunners of the RPG industry to second fiddle in a matter of years which is actually fascinating to me because there’s definitely a universe where Falcom did succeed and became a legendary game developers the likes of Squaresoft or even Atlus instead of that one scrimblo company who to this day still struggles for relevance. I mean for crying out loud, Falcom was a studio full of talented people and while the 2 we mentioned earlier made a few bangers before going into a whiff, some of them like Tetsuya Takahashi or later down the line Makoto Shinkai will know fruitful careers after departing from Falcom, one as the genius behind the Xeno Series beloved by all RPG fans who respects themselves a little and one as a successful worldwide known anime filmmaker (can you imagine that there’s a parallel universe where Makoto Shinkai, the director of “Your Name” could’ve been the Tetsuya Nomura of Falcom ? Crazy to think about isn’t it ?).
Suffice to say that with 3⁄4th of their staff gone to the wind and the few remaining members of the A-Team focusing on making games in the ever so expanding Dragon Slayer franchise which wasn’t seeing much success either, the future of Falcom and most topically for this review Ys was in trouble. But Falcom had a few trick up their sleeves but most importantly they had connections, the next game in the Ys series “Ys IV” was already in preparation but without a development team ready to work on it, Falcom had to rely on two of its most reliable ally : Tonkin House and Hudson Soft.
Both companies helped port the Ys franchise on console, Tonkin House was responsible for porting them on Nintendo and Sega’s hardware and Hudson Soft had the rights to publish straight up remakes of these titles to promote their very own console : The PC-Engine.
After being given a design document on what Ys IV was supposed to look like as well as a complete sheet of original composition by Falcom at the time newly formed “Sound JDK” team, both teams set up to create their own version of Ys IV with full creative liberties from Falcom to add or take away anything they wanted as long as they followed the rough outline of the original script and kept the initial gameplay planned for this episode intact.
And that’s how we ended up with two versions of Ys IV which seems similar at first glance as they were released roughly at the same time in 1991 but are vastly different in their execution enough so that they’re completely different games only sharing similar plot beats and characters. These wouldn’t be the only version of Ys IV however, there’s a grand total of 4 version of Ys IV with one developed by Taito in 2005 for the PS2 and which is supposed to be a remake of the SNES version we’re going to talk about today and finally another version this time actually developed by Falcom for the PS Vita roughly 20 years after the release of the first two version of Ys IV.
Since Tonkin House is the first one to release their take on Ys IV, this review will cover “Ys IV : Mask of the Sun”, released exclusively for the Super Famicom and in the second part of this review we’ll take a look at Hudson’s version named “Ys IV : The Dawn of Ys” !
Tonkin House, as previously mentioned is the company which ported the older Ys titles on console but if we take a look at their history with both the franchise and the rest of their catalog, it doesn’t bode well for this game at all. Unlike Hudson Soft which was a renowned game developer and console manufacturer at the time, Tonkin House was a relatively smaller studio even smaller than Falcom was at the time. They’ve released a few titles, mostly sports games which have seen moderate success and helped other companies on other titles in fact their port of Ys III for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo is one of the few rare time when they actually had full-hands on a project and it was for a port and how did that well ?
Bad
Ys III on both the Sega Genesis but especially on the Super Nintendo are really bad and that’s saying a lot considering what I had to say about Ys III in its best version, the SNES version is commonly accepted as the worst version of Ys III with even wankier controls, even wankier collision errors, glitches up the wazoo (but tbf, one allows you to level up instantly to max level so it’s kind of a neat feature lol) and with terrible ear-bleeding renditions of the soundtrack on a console that’s known for having one of the best sound chip in the history of gaming.
You know how people are impressed by Nobuo Uematsu when he manages to compose a 17 minutes long prog-rock symphonic masterpiece on the equivalent of a box of Crayola ? Well I’m similarly impressed at Tonkin House for taking that box of Crayola and just spectacularly set it out on fire ! Fucking up music on the Genesis is one thing, only a few god-like composer like Yuzo Koshiro or Michael Jackson (assuming he was the one doing the music for Sonic 3, I’m never sure) can make something out of the piece of scrap metal that is the YM2612 but the Super Nintendo soundchip ? That’s just insane, just listen and compare to the PC-Engine version. It's wild https://youtu.be/BxkElFJb5zI?si=ERx3kIU64vCZMz4F !
The reason I’m saying this is because the first thing you’re going to realize when booting up Ys IV : Mask of the Sun is how poor the sound quality, in a series that’s mostly known for its excellent soundtrack, Mask of the Sun just doesn’t bring homage to the series legacy on that front. The music themselves aren’t badly composed, in fact like I said earlier, the team was given a full sheet of original composition by the JDK team, it’s almost the exact same soundtrack as Hudson’s version and if you go and listen to the perfect edition of the soundtrack, you’ll realize it’s one of Falcom’s best OST album to date ! If your first experience with Ys IV soundtrack is the Super Famicom version then I’m deeply sorry for you because the way it’s compressed and crunched up is so messy that it will make the snail inside your ear commit seppuku just playing the game for an extended period of time. There’s a few original compositions made specifically for this version of the game and they’re the only stand-out track but even then, the general quality of the arrangements doesn’t help them shine the way they should.
But bad music aside, which already deals a huge blow to the franchise core identity, how does the game or heck even the story hold up ?
Well… not good…
When developing Ys IV, it was decided after the harsh feedback Ys III received for its gameplay system to go back to a more classical top-down adventure and surprisingly although everybody was moving on to the Zelda style of having an attack button which became the norm, it was decided that Ys IV returned to the tried and true bump system from the original 2 games, this return to form for Ys was also shown through the story and most importantly how Ys IV places itself in the continuity, taking place between Ys II and Ys III and as such acting as a direct continuation to Adol’s adventure in Esteria.
While both Mask of The Sun and Hudson follows some rough outlines when it comes to the story, their execution is pretty different, Tonkin House didn’t take any real risk when it comes to the story and decided to follow the guideline of Falcom’s original document but I feel like when it comes to Mask of The Sun at least, they read the synopsis, the concept and roughly the big ideas and set pieces of Ys IV but forgot to actually add… an actually coherent storyline to tie all these conceptual elements together ???
In this version of Ys IV, Adol is wandering on the beach of Esteria thinking back on his adventure in Ys I&II until suddenly he finds a letter in a bottle in a language he doesn’t understand, after getting it translated by Luther (a character from Ys 1) the letter reveals that the distant land of Celceta is in danger ! And someone is asking for a hero to save the day. Adol, hearing the call for adventure once more, decides to hop on his boat to explore Celceta and figure out what’s going on over there…
And then… well…
The story sort of just… happens ?
Yeah that’s probably my main issue with Mask of the Sun storytelling, there’s a few notable high points connected by various steps along the way which didn’t seem all that well thought out and seem to be more of an excuse to pad the game time more than telling a story.
The progression of the story and how you explore Celceta feels very disjointed and while the fan translation of the game courtesy of Aeon Genesis is rather excellent and in fact much better than what a typical localization for a game of this era should be, I don’t necessarily think the actual script at play deserved such premium treatment ! Story beats really just happens at random with the only real narrative arc holding the game together being Dr.Flair accompanying Adol on his quest to find Celceta’s flower to prepare medicine for Lilia until the actual story about Eldeel, Lisa and his three goons starts out of genuinely nowhere leading you on a scavenger quest for a bunch of McGuffin needed to obtain a special sword to defeat the big bad guy of the week and really, don’t even ask me the entire process of behind the plot because I don’t really remember much of what you actually do in the game…
And when I say the actual plot kicks off out of nowhere, I really mean it, Adol goes inside a random forest, gets struck by lightning, taken into a castle and witness a conversation between the villains of the game before being discovered and comedically beaten out to death in gloriously limited Super Nintendo scene direction ! It’s genuinely hysterical how the game goes from 0 to a 100, at some point the characters are like “let’s go back to Esteria !” which is a cool way to let you visit the map from Ys I but it’s terribly limited and done very poorly and also comes out of genuinely nowhere or when Lilia gets randomly kidnapped and die but thanks to some random thingamajig, you’re able to bring her back to life (tho fighting through hordes of enemy while carrying Lilia’s lifeless body is one of the few standout moment of the game !).
The scene direction is pretty hilarious too with people jumping around, spinning, interrupting each others (thankfully the text is colored to follow who says who in this mess of dialogue bubble overlapping each others) but even with those funny SNES limitations, the story in it of itself while not lacking in striking moment or even good idea to extend on the universe of the series comes off as pretty awkward and at the end we’re only left with a confused feeling of having experience only the rough draft of something that could if given the proper care actually be amazing and thankfully we’ll see that in the next review when we’ll talk about Dawn.
Also Adol talks in this game, and he talks a lot more than he did in Ys III, it’s the last time the franchise will attempt at giving Adol somewhat of a personality until Memories of Celceta and I’m glad they dropped the idea quickly. I know there’s some debate on the internet on whether or not silent protagonist are even needed in the gaming sphere anymore but I think everyone would agree that I’d rather Adol being a mute and speaking most of his words through actions rather than just stating some flat platitude about the next step of his quest or random answer to NPC which feels more randomly generated than anything, the gameplay and the general narration sells Adol more than any piece of dialogue ever can in my opinion.
But Ys stories have always pretty much been secondary, most of the time the game excels more at narration and telling a story through gameplay, subtle hints and clues and this more direct approach definitely needed to be perfected to compensate for the abysmal gameplay of Mask of The Sun…
Yeah Tonkin House didn’t really learn anything from how wack their version of Ys III on console were and if they could fuck up a gameplay system which just needed to be adapted imagine the results when you task them to actually make a fun return to bump combat.
Following the harsh criticism of Ys III gameplay, Falcom tasked both developers to create something closer to Ys I&II, so close in fact that virtually speaking almost nothing change, you still have the same bump system, the same magics, the same equipment and accessories and aside from a few oddball novelties which are barely noticeable, it plays… roughly the same as Ys I&II…
Or does it ?
There’s a common criticism of Bump Combat amongst people going back to the older titles. That it feels jank, unpolished, outdated, unfair even, that it’s not natural, that the hitboxes are wack and the system itself has no real qualities to it whatsoever and feels more limiting than anything and for many people Bump Combat is the relic of a bygone era that should never see the light of day again. And while I personally agree that Bump Combat doesn’t necessarily have a place in the modern action-rpg scene, I will disagree with the sometimes harsh and unwarranted criticism toward such a system because one, it’s not without its merits and I went over them in detail in my first review and two because Ys 1&2 doing it so well means that there’s room for fucking it up royally and that’s what Tonkin House managed to do !!!
I want you to take your bias against Ys 1&2 and I’m inviting you to play Mask of The Sun for at least 10 minutes ! Just 10 minutes is enough to realize how good you bunch of ungrateful pricks had it with the original title and now look how they’ve massacred my bumpy boy…
First off, it's still only 4 directional movement, but that’s ok because Ys 1&2 had enemies designed around that limitation and positioning was a core aspect of the combat system but not in Mask of the Sun ! Enemies goes super fast, zooming on the screen erratically, shooting projectiles off center guaranteeing you to take a hit and their hitboxes are out of this world, they are simply no rules to how hitboxes behave in this game, you will systematically at least 7 times out of 10 take a hit and not even understanding why you did take a hit ! Also if you thought bump combat was bad, imagine bump combat but now with STATUS EFFECTS. Because yes, some enemies can inflict you status effects including but not limited to poison !
I repeat, in a game where the ENTIRE POINT is to go in direct contact with the enemies to hurt them, you can randomly get poisoned and how does poison behave in Mask of the Sun ? Well much like every classic JRPG of course ! By losing health with every step when we stated in our first review that the core strength and entire point of the bump system was that it was based on CONSTANTLY MOVING !
There is a special kind of hell for design decisions like this which completely disregard any notion of common sense and goes against the initial main philosophy behind the series core game design philosophy ! It’s really hard to make you understand through text the immediate stark contrast between how it feels to play Ys 1&2 and how it feels to play Mask of the Sun especially if you weren’t particularly convinced by the bump system in the original 2 games and rightfully so since it’s already a pretty acquired taste ! Thankfully magic is back and while it’s ineffective on bosses, it makes a lot of regular combat encounters much smoother to go through and speaking of bosses…
WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE BOSSES ?
I swear, if the combat struggles to function in regular combat encounters, wait until you reach a boss in this mess of a game ! It’s crazy how Ys 1 bosses even in all of their wack sometimes, still managed to play to the strength of the bump system but not here ! There is zero telling on when they’re vulnerable, they’re completely immune to magic which means that it has the opposite balancing issue as Ys II and most of all their patterns just… are not real ! Sometimes they’ll shoot a projectile and you’ll get his when you’re clearly not being hit, one boss in the early game drops the framerate like crazy (oh yeah the game also run terribly btw) and the flames you need to dodge becomes invisible because of SPRITE FLICKERING ! ON THE SUPER NINTENDO !!!! Another boss is so badly designed, that you need to stay in the middle of his two lasers but guess what, staying in the middle gets you hit so the boss is literally a DPS check on whether you can kill him before it kills you !
Grinding is especially obnoxious too, early Ys game always had a bit of an issue with grinding but here, it’s not really good at all and if the battle system would not want to make you want to kill yourself, it’s absolutely the level design !
It’s simple, the level design, is non-existent, it feels like each areas was randomly generated using an RPG maker “generate random dungeon” tool, areas are way too big and the enemy spawn is fucking obnoxious as fuck with the fucked up scrolling and how much of them they are in a single place ! The areas are big and don’t have any striking landmarks to navigate through them and sometimes the themes repeat themselves for no reason later in the game ! However I’ll say that geographically, the world is coherent and cohesive and gives a bigger degree of liberty for explorations compared to Ys II but the actual areas are a nightmare to go through and you will absolutely dread the final dungeon of the game…
It’s 3 part dungeon, one is a fairly straight line, the other is a gigantic maze where you have to go back and forth from places to places in the dark, where rooms have 8 exits but only one of them leads to the rest of the dungeon and the other 7 to dead end but not like you could understand at first glance because the whole thing is in the dark !!! And the last part is the golden tower which is yet another maze but ! WITH TELEPORTERS YEEPEE WHAT A FUN VIDEO GAME !
Mask of the Sun is a shockingly incompetent game and let’s be fair, after the dud that was Ys III, the last thing I wanted to cover was another crappy game but at least Ys III was rushed and was experimenting with what Ys could be. Tonkin House wasn’t and they were tasked to just recreate a game like Ys 1 and 2 which doesn’t sound so impossible to do but yet they did, Tonkin House are genuinely incompetent and it’s no wonder that the company was lost into depth of history and fell off quickly into bankruptcy a little after releasing this awful mess !
The worst part is that since Tonkin House followed the guideline more closely than Hudson, Mask of the Sun was deemed the canonical version of Ys IV for years to come meaning that for how shitty the game is, it left a bigger legacy than Hudson’s game and it makes me mad because Dawn of Ys… is one of the best game in the entire franchise ! (see you in Part 2 to talk about how Hudson managed to bring Ys into new height while leaving little impacts…)
Ys III : A Misguided Imitation
Yeah, I’m feeling like doing some sort of Ys retrospective on this account, it might not work as much as my Trails reviews (much to my dismay, Trails is the more popular series of the two) but since I’ve already marathoned these games a while ago and never properly gave my opinion on them, I’d figure why not do it and spread some positivity back into my life !
That’s what I would’ve said if the game we’re going to talk about today wasn’t amongst the worst titles in the series…
Back when I played the Ys franchise, I did them in a peculiarly fucked up order, jumping from eras to eras and chronology from chronology. After playing Oath in Felgahna and loving the ever living fuck out of that game, I was curious to see the original title the game was based on, after all if the remake is this phenomenal it might be because the original game has some strength to it even if it will inevitably be more dated and after playing it, I was kinda shocked that this wasn’t straight up the game that killed the franchise for good because man that game sure is a stinker.
The first version of Ys III was released in 1989, a solid year after the release of the original 2 Ys titles, Ys was never planned to be a full franchise and in fact in all of the 16 games which compose the franchise (including remakes, and additional versions) only Ys II actually takes place in the eponymous floating island of Ys and only 3 games has Ys and its lore as part of its central plot point. I suppose the series kept the title for consistency reason but the initial plan was to end the series at Ys II (ironically subtitled “The Final Chapter”) since Falcom had other plans (like expanding their Dragon Slayer series into one billion subseries which will spawn other subseries like Trails a subseries of Legend of Heroes and a Subseries of the wider Dragon Slayer series).
In fact Ys III didn’t start its development as an Ys title, the team responsible for the game didn’t plan to turn the game into an Ys game but a totally new project but like I said in my previous review, something happened that dramatically changed the trajectory of Ys and Falcom as a studio for the coming decades, the release of a certain title called “The Legend of Zelda”, not only that but in 1989, we’d see the burgeoning of many other games that will define the industry and as much as Ys is considered a cult classic by many, it never truly became a classic, its impact on the industry being snuffed by the Big N corporation. As it’s usually commonplace in the industry whenever a game becomes popular enough to set a standard, lots of people rush to the occasion to imitate its formula and twist it in their own way to make a quick buck and you bet your ass Falcom was going to take a piece of the sweet Zelda pie !
The last Zelda game at the time was Zelda II a start departure from the original game, trading its top down action RPG style for a 2D action platformers with an heavier emphasis on RPG elements (it’s the only Zelda game with anything resembling experience points and a leveling system after all and towns behave pretty much like your typical RPG town) and for many people Ys was already a Zelda imitator, having released a couple of months after the original Zelda game, Ys 1 was already living in Zelda’s shadow but unlike the aforementioned title, Ys shined in other areas such as storytelling, pacing, music and was at least in my opinion a generally more ambitious game.
So Falcom told the development team to change their project midway through development to turn it into an Ys game, the game was still planned to be a 2D action game but now it was decided, Adol will be the Luigi to Zelda’s Mario and Ys was set up to become a long-running franchise (one that will sadly always stay in the shadow of its main rival). The development of Ys III as you could probably guess was rough, changing a bunch of shit last minute to fit the aesthetic of a previous project onto a new almost already finished product wasn’t an easy task and it definitely shows in the final result of the game. Now mind you, back in the day, the gaming industry was a lot more fringe and the standard for what constitutes a “good” or a “bad” game was wildly different than it is today. I must assume that there’s a reason why to this day Ys III still has its fans amongst an older audience of people, if you enjoyed Zelda II and wanted more Zelda II your option was either this or well a whole bunch of action-platformers, it really wasn’t a niche genre at all so it doesn’t really excuse Ys III being this bad and it still makes me confused on how anybody could find this game good enough to make it successful, sometimes the market works in mysterious ways.
Once again, to keep it consistent with my Ys Book 1&2 review, I’m going to mainly talk about the PC-Engine version, it’s easily the best version of the game with the best overall presentation and most importantly for me the best version of the soundtrack only comparable to its modern remake (which is a completely different game we’ll talk about at a later date). However, while all of this is true, one thing you will quickly realize about this version of the game if you’re playing it in English is how noticeably awful the localization for this game is. Ys 1&2’s localization was honestly rather excellent with some exquisitely competent voice acting and a translation that managed to transmit how rich and detailed the world of Ys was and even stand tall against the more fleshed out script of the Chronicles edition of the game. But Ys III sadly did not get such a premium treatment, the voice acting is corny as shit with all the characters speaking like they’re in some sort of Shakespearian play and everything is like 10 times more epic and dramatic than they actually are which I wouldn’t mind if the story of the game wasn’t also kind of a dud…
But the way it’s translated is also so sloppy, some name got changed like there was a big demon dude called Galbalan in the original script but renamed to (I shit you not) FUCKING DEMONICUS ! During the intro of the game, the narrator attributes the sealing of this ancient creature to Adol when it is in fact an entirely different character called Genos… I mean they confused it so hard in fact that Genos is the character depicted on the American release of the game, a choice they’ll correct for the Genesis and SNES port who just has Adol in some sort of old pulp fantasy Conan the Barbarian artstyle supposedly to sell more copies to American children who can’t handle all that anime nonsense they got as the original cover art for the game (it’s not the first time this was done in the series, some ports of Ys 1&2 have some … questionable artstyle change to say the least). The game has some really corny dub but also ADOL TALKS and not just a little, he talks A LOT, it’s the most talkative Adol has ever been and will ever be and thank fuck they later decided to not let him speak cause his character arc is pretty damn dry but also while everyone is fully dubbed, Adol only speaks in speech bubbles which is so awkward in terms of presentation and is as expected very jarring !
But if it was only the localization of the game that was terrible then I wouldn’t be ranking it so low in comparison to other titles… no Ys III is also bad but like really freaking bad as a 2D Action-Game and I will explain why.
As previously stated, Ys III was trying to compete with Zelda II and I want to take your bias against that very divisive title on the side because after playing Ys III you’ll think that Zelda II was a masterpiece (it’s severely underrated and I will stand my ground on those position). Ys III replaces its tried and true bump system in favor of something a little more standard, a 2D side-scrolling action game. And at first, one would believe that it looks like an improvement, Adol has a lot of moves, can stab his swords in multiple directions, crouch, jump and all that jazz but it does not play well at all I’m afraid.
Adol controls like a broom on a stick navigating on a strange planet where gravity and physics seems to be weirdly fucked up, the hitboxes on all of his moves are ridiculously tiny and put you at risk of getting hurt very easily if you just do anything as to approach the enemy, the only move that seems to be consistent is rushing head strong while keeping the attack button on but even like that you will end up receiving unwarranted damages because of how the enemies are coded. Everything moves so chaotically on the screen at all times that it’s hard to avoid anything, tanking your way through the game is going to be your main option that at this point it might’ve as well be a game with bump combat !
It’s really hard to conceptualize but take some of the most basic 2D Action-Platformer you can think of and imagine if everything was moving at 10 times the speed, everything moved super erratically and there’s no invincibility frame so if an enemy follows you, it’s gonna keep siping your blood pool like a goddamn Capri Sun and your character controls like he’s on Mars and there’s no precision in any of your movement and believe me, you will not progress further than maybe the first screen of the first dungeon without a copious amount of grinding because it’s the only way you could physically conceived getting through this shit !
The first dungeon is a cave full of spiders, bees and all sorts of colorful insects and sometimes trolls which are either at feet height forcing you to crouch or up in the air forcing you to jump constantly and they also keep respawning everytime the scrolling goes away from their spawn point like in Megaman only slightly worse and you got a cocktail of issues plaguing this game combat to make it as unpleasant as possible. The level design is also pretty poor on average consisting of straight corridors which sometimes deviate a little for a secret room. We are far from the complex maze-like dungeons of Zelda II with a lot of variety in its challenges even for an NES game and it was released 2 years earlier ! Heck this isn’t even the first time Falcom worked on a title like this ! Faxanadu was released on the Famicom along the same year as Ys III and yet plays way better and has more interesting and intricate level design and a far more interesting world to explore !
So there really is no excuses for Ys III playing this badly and having such uninspired level design but on top of all that jank, there’s also the tedium of all the mechanics and the grinding making the game more of a slog that it actually is, I mean the game is only 6h long but you can at least expect 2 of these hours dedicated to either grinding for money and experience or managing your health by getting out of the dungeon after every boss fight because the people at Falcom had the brilliant idea to make the healing ring cost magic power which you will inevitably need to equip the Attack ring in order to defeat the onslaught of god awful bosses punctuating your adventure.
The bosses in Ys III are certainly the bosses of all time, they certainly have patterns but it’s about as wanky and badly programmed as the rest of the game so equip on your attack ring and pray to all the gods you kill the boss faster than it can kill you making a damageless run simply not happening. There’s also the magic system of the game which has been made worse, instead of cool super power you can unlock and add to Adol’s moveset, you get a set of ring giving you passive boost to your stats like more attack power or more defense at the cost of mana dropping every time they’re active, the only 3 rings which works are the attack, defense and healing ring, there are 2 more rings in the game but they have barely noticeable effects or outright don’t work in most situations ! You can now heal midway through battle with herbs but only one though, meaning that if it runs out, you can get your sorry ass back to the only town in the game to refill on your mana and herbs !
Speaking of which, all the incessant back and forth between the only village of the game, Redmont and the dungeons are also pretty godawful, Redmont is a truly forgettable places, its inhabitant complete no names and the badly translated slew of dialogues will make you bored out of your mind, they are about as helpful as using a spoon to cut a steak and they provide no flavor to the game’s world setting or god forbid the story ! The story is… pretty dry but with the corny ass voice acting and some odd localization choices, it kinda goes into so bad it’s good territory.
3 years after the events of Ys II, Adol leaves Lilia to go on a blowjob brother adventure with Dogi ! As they wander around the world (get it ? cause they’re the wanderers from Ys !) they eventually reach the shores of Felghana, Dogi’s home country. They go to meet Elena and Dogi immediately is a jerk to his childhood friends for no reasons at all but tbf I understand since Elena isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and has the intellect of your stereotypical blonde gal from the late 80’s. In the land of Felghana, there’s a bunch of monsters roaming around the place, rumor talk about the resurrection of Demonicus, an ancient demon which troubled the peace and tranquility of the land a couple of centuries ago and that the tyrannical Lord McGuire is trying to get his hands on the power of Demonicus thanks to the help of a mysterious mage by the name of Garland (no relationship to Jack Garland, the Chaos assweeper from FF1 and strangers of paradise), while exploring, Adol will also get confronted by Chester, Lord McGuire’s right hand man and brother of Elena but he’s working for his own personal agenda on getting revenge on McGuire for killing his parents as a child.
While the story is a bit dry and uneventful making the game progression very arbitrary with Adol getting swooped left and right from places to places on the world map (which is now a level select screen instead of an overworld which is incredibly lame) seemingly for no reasons to pad out the gametime (something Falcom will become champions at doing in the future), the way it's delivered through the dub is simply sublime and sometimes the plot just goes super off the wall like when at the end of the game for no reasons at all Elena who got captured by Demonicus, this eldritch abomination from ancient past, look at her brother trying to save her and telling him straight to his eyes “Chester please, stop this ceaseless cycle of violence, both you and DEMONICUS are living being with feelings !!!” which made me drop my controller and made me freaking hysterical for a solid 10 minutes before facing another shit ass boss to finish this shit ass game !
Suffice to say that I did not enjoyed Ys III, which will probably also prove that I’m not simply a mental boomer gassing up ancient games while shitting on modern ones but that I’m living being capable of critical thinking no matter the era and I will say it, Ys III is not a game worth experiencing in any capacity unless you’re really curious about the history of the franchise and have 6 hours of precious spare time to waste (which you could’ve wasted on better short experiences or filing your taxes which ultimately would be a more fulfilling experience than playing through it !).
It seems that with Ys III, Falcom learned zero lesson on what made the original two titles so beloved by many people. Instead it was a shallow imitation of a much better game and it even pales in comparison to other shallow imitations of Zelda II which were at least mildly competent ! A soulless cash grab which took a toll on the development team, a toll so bad they’ll eventually decide to leave the company to pursue greener pastures at Enix where they’ll operate for a short couple of years as Studio Quintet (one of my favorite gaming studio if you ask me which definitely deserved better than to be forgotten by time) where they’ll make a much better 2D side-scrolling action game combining all of the good elements of their previous titles narratively speaking but spice it up with some new and innovative ideas.
People will remember Actraiser, Illusion of Gaia or even Terranigma but most people will forget Ys III was even a thing and so should you and Falcom agrees since they made a remake of the game in the mid 2000’s which is miles better, changed everything about the original and is considered by many as one of the best Ys title.
So go play Oath in Felghana, I haven’t made a review of it yet but trust me, it’s freaking excellent and well worth experiencing over this piece of doodoo !
The one thing worth celebrating about this blight on the action genre is the music, this time mostly composed by the really talented Mieko Ishikawa successfully managing to hold her ground against Yuzo Koshiro more than excellent soundtrack from the first two game, Valestein Castle especially kicks so much freaking ass and is easily like my favorite track in the whole franchise if you ask me ! The soundtrack definitely captures the spirit of Ys better than everything else in this game !
But without the original development team to work on these titles what does the future hold for Ys as a franchise ? Well it’s a bit complicated, so complicated in fact it might be a two-parter with some additional parts down the line !
Stay tuned as next time, we’ll be talking about Mask of The sun which is… huh… certainly a video game…
Yeah, I’m feeling like doing some sort of Ys retrospective on this account, it might not work as much as my Trails reviews (much to my dismay, Trails is the more popular series of the two) but since I’ve already marathoned these games a while ago and never properly gave my opinion on them, I’d figure why not do it and spread some positivity back into my life !
That’s what I would’ve said if the game we’re going to talk about today wasn’t amongst the worst titles in the series…
Back when I played the Ys franchise, I did them in a peculiarly fucked up order, jumping from eras to eras and chronology from chronology. After playing Oath in Felgahna and loving the ever living fuck out of that game, I was curious to see the original title the game was based on, after all if the remake is this phenomenal it might be because the original game has some strength to it even if it will inevitably be more dated and after playing it, I was kinda shocked that this wasn’t straight up the game that killed the franchise for good because man that game sure is a stinker.
The first version of Ys III was released in 1989, a solid year after the release of the original 2 Ys titles, Ys was never planned to be a full franchise and in fact in all of the 16 games which compose the franchise (including remakes, and additional versions) only Ys II actually takes place in the eponymous floating island of Ys and only 3 games has Ys and its lore as part of its central plot point. I suppose the series kept the title for consistency reason but the initial plan was to end the series at Ys II (ironically subtitled “The Final Chapter”) since Falcom had other plans (like expanding their Dragon Slayer series into one billion subseries which will spawn other subseries like Trails a subseries of Legend of Heroes and a Subseries of the wider Dragon Slayer series).
In fact Ys III didn’t start its development as an Ys title, the team responsible for the game didn’t plan to turn the game into an Ys game but a totally new project but like I said in my previous review, something happened that dramatically changed the trajectory of Ys and Falcom as a studio for the coming decades, the release of a certain title called “The Legend of Zelda”, not only that but in 1989, we’d see the burgeoning of many other games that will define the industry and as much as Ys is considered a cult classic by many, it never truly became a classic, its impact on the industry being snuffed by the Big N corporation. As it’s usually commonplace in the industry whenever a game becomes popular enough to set a standard, lots of people rush to the occasion to imitate its formula and twist it in their own way to make a quick buck and you bet your ass Falcom was going to take a piece of the sweet Zelda pie !
The last Zelda game at the time was Zelda II a start departure from the original game, trading its top down action RPG style for a 2D action platformers with an heavier emphasis on RPG elements (it’s the only Zelda game with anything resembling experience points and a leveling system after all and towns behave pretty much like your typical RPG town) and for many people Ys was already a Zelda imitator, having released a couple of months after the original Zelda game, Ys 1 was already living in Zelda’s shadow but unlike the aforementioned title, Ys shined in other areas such as storytelling, pacing, music and was at least in my opinion a generally more ambitious game.
So Falcom told the development team to change their project midway through development to turn it into an Ys game, the game was still planned to be a 2D action game but now it was decided, Adol will be the Luigi to Zelda’s Mario and Ys was set up to become a long-running franchise (one that will sadly always stay in the shadow of its main rival). The development of Ys III as you could probably guess was rough, changing a bunch of shit last minute to fit the aesthetic of a previous project onto a new almost already finished product wasn’t an easy task and it definitely shows in the final result of the game. Now mind you, back in the day, the gaming industry was a lot more fringe and the standard for what constitutes a “good” or a “bad” game was wildly different than it is today. I must assume that there’s a reason why to this day Ys III still has its fans amongst an older audience of people, if you enjoyed Zelda II and wanted more Zelda II your option was either this or well a whole bunch of action-platformers, it really wasn’t a niche genre at all so it doesn’t really excuse Ys III being this bad and it still makes me confused on how anybody could find this game good enough to make it successful, sometimes the market works in mysterious ways.
Once again, to keep it consistent with my Ys Book 1&2 review, I’m going to mainly talk about the PC-Engine version, it’s easily the best version of the game with the best overall presentation and most importantly for me the best version of the soundtrack only comparable to its modern remake (which is a completely different game we’ll talk about at a later date). However, while all of this is true, one thing you will quickly realize about this version of the game if you’re playing it in English is how noticeably awful the localization for this game is. Ys 1&2’s localization was honestly rather excellent with some exquisitely competent voice acting and a translation that managed to transmit how rich and detailed the world of Ys was and even stand tall against the more fleshed out script of the Chronicles edition of the game. But Ys III sadly did not get such a premium treatment, the voice acting is corny as shit with all the characters speaking like they’re in some sort of Shakespearian play and everything is like 10 times more epic and dramatic than they actually are which I wouldn’t mind if the story of the game wasn’t also kind of a dud…
But the way it’s translated is also so sloppy, some name got changed like there was a big demon dude called Galbalan in the original script but renamed to (I shit you not) FUCKING DEMONICUS ! During the intro of the game, the narrator attributes the sealing of this ancient creature to Adol when it is in fact an entirely different character called Genos… I mean they confused it so hard in fact that Genos is the character depicted on the American release of the game, a choice they’ll correct for the Genesis and SNES port who just has Adol in some sort of old pulp fantasy Conan the Barbarian artstyle supposedly to sell more copies to American children who can’t handle all that anime nonsense they got as the original cover art for the game (it’s not the first time this was done in the series, some ports of Ys 1&2 have some … questionable artstyle change to say the least). The game has some really corny dub but also ADOL TALKS and not just a little, he talks A LOT, it’s the most talkative Adol has ever been and will ever be and thank fuck they later decided to not let him speak cause his character arc is pretty damn dry but also while everyone is fully dubbed, Adol only speaks in speech bubbles which is so awkward in terms of presentation and is as expected very jarring !
But if it was only the localization of the game that was terrible then I wouldn’t be ranking it so low in comparison to other titles… no Ys III is also bad but like really freaking bad as a 2D Action-Game and I will explain why.
As previously stated, Ys III was trying to compete with Zelda II and I want to take your bias against that very divisive title on the side because after playing Ys III you’ll think that Zelda II was a masterpiece (it’s severely underrated and I will stand my ground on those position). Ys III replaces its tried and true bump system in favor of something a little more standard, a 2D side-scrolling action game. And at first, one would believe that it looks like an improvement, Adol has a lot of moves, can stab his swords in multiple directions, crouch, jump and all that jazz but it does not play well at all I’m afraid.
Adol controls like a broom on a stick navigating on a strange planet where gravity and physics seems to be weirdly fucked up, the hitboxes on all of his moves are ridiculously tiny and put you at risk of getting hurt very easily if you just do anything as to approach the enemy, the only move that seems to be consistent is rushing head strong while keeping the attack button on but even like that you will end up receiving unwarranted damages because of how the enemies are coded. Everything moves so chaotically on the screen at all times that it’s hard to avoid anything, tanking your way through the game is going to be your main option that at this point it might’ve as well be a game with bump combat !
It’s really hard to conceptualize but take some of the most basic 2D Action-Platformer you can think of and imagine if everything was moving at 10 times the speed, everything moved super erratically and there’s no invincibility frame so if an enemy follows you, it’s gonna keep siping your blood pool like a goddamn Capri Sun and your character controls like he’s on Mars and there’s no precision in any of your movement and believe me, you will not progress further than maybe the first screen of the first dungeon without a copious amount of grinding because it’s the only way you could physically conceived getting through this shit !
The first dungeon is a cave full of spiders, bees and all sorts of colorful insects and sometimes trolls which are either at feet height forcing you to crouch or up in the air forcing you to jump constantly and they also keep respawning everytime the scrolling goes away from their spawn point like in Megaman only slightly worse and you got a cocktail of issues plaguing this game combat to make it as unpleasant as possible. The level design is also pretty poor on average consisting of straight corridors which sometimes deviate a little for a secret room. We are far from the complex maze-like dungeons of Zelda II with a lot of variety in its challenges even for an NES game and it was released 2 years earlier ! Heck this isn’t even the first time Falcom worked on a title like this ! Faxanadu was released on the Famicom along the same year as Ys III and yet plays way better and has more interesting and intricate level design and a far more interesting world to explore !
So there really is no excuses for Ys III playing this badly and having such uninspired level design but on top of all that jank, there’s also the tedium of all the mechanics and the grinding making the game more of a slog that it actually is, I mean the game is only 6h long but you can at least expect 2 of these hours dedicated to either grinding for money and experience or managing your health by getting out of the dungeon after every boss fight because the people at Falcom had the brilliant idea to make the healing ring cost magic power which you will inevitably need to equip the Attack ring in order to defeat the onslaught of god awful bosses punctuating your adventure.
The bosses in Ys III are certainly the bosses of all time, they certainly have patterns but it’s about as wanky and badly programmed as the rest of the game so equip on your attack ring and pray to all the gods you kill the boss faster than it can kill you making a damageless run simply not happening. There’s also the magic system of the game which has been made worse, instead of cool super power you can unlock and add to Adol’s moveset, you get a set of ring giving you passive boost to your stats like more attack power or more defense at the cost of mana dropping every time they’re active, the only 3 rings which works are the attack, defense and healing ring, there are 2 more rings in the game but they have barely noticeable effects or outright don’t work in most situations ! You can now heal midway through battle with herbs but only one though, meaning that if it runs out, you can get your sorry ass back to the only town in the game to refill on your mana and herbs !
Speaking of which, all the incessant back and forth between the only village of the game, Redmont and the dungeons are also pretty godawful, Redmont is a truly forgettable places, its inhabitant complete no names and the badly translated slew of dialogues will make you bored out of your mind, they are about as helpful as using a spoon to cut a steak and they provide no flavor to the game’s world setting or god forbid the story ! The story is… pretty dry but with the corny ass voice acting and some odd localization choices, it kinda goes into so bad it’s good territory.
3 years after the events of Ys II, Adol leaves Lilia to go on a blowjob brother adventure with Dogi ! As they wander around the world (get it ? cause they’re the wanderers from Ys !) they eventually reach the shores of Felghana, Dogi’s home country. They go to meet Elena and Dogi immediately is a jerk to his childhood friends for no reasons at all but tbf I understand since Elena isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and has the intellect of your stereotypical blonde gal from the late 80’s. In the land of Felghana, there’s a bunch of monsters roaming around the place, rumor talk about the resurrection of Demonicus, an ancient demon which troubled the peace and tranquility of the land a couple of centuries ago and that the tyrannical Lord McGuire is trying to get his hands on the power of Demonicus thanks to the help of a mysterious mage by the name of Garland (no relationship to Jack Garland, the Chaos assweeper from FF1 and strangers of paradise), while exploring, Adol will also get confronted by Chester, Lord McGuire’s right hand man and brother of Elena but he’s working for his own personal agenda on getting revenge on McGuire for killing his parents as a child.
While the story is a bit dry and uneventful making the game progression very arbitrary with Adol getting swooped left and right from places to places on the world map (which is now a level select screen instead of an overworld which is incredibly lame) seemingly for no reasons to pad out the gametime (something Falcom will become champions at doing in the future), the way it's delivered through the dub is simply sublime and sometimes the plot just goes super off the wall like when at the end of the game for no reasons at all Elena who got captured by Demonicus, this eldritch abomination from ancient past, look at her brother trying to save her and telling him straight to his eyes “Chester please, stop this ceaseless cycle of violence, both you and DEMONICUS are living being with feelings !!!” which made me drop my controller and made me freaking hysterical for a solid 10 minutes before facing another shit ass boss to finish this shit ass game !
Suffice to say that I did not enjoyed Ys III, which will probably also prove that I’m not simply a mental boomer gassing up ancient games while shitting on modern ones but that I’m living being capable of critical thinking no matter the era and I will say it, Ys III is not a game worth experiencing in any capacity unless you’re really curious about the history of the franchise and have 6 hours of precious spare time to waste (which you could’ve wasted on better short experiences or filing your taxes which ultimately would be a more fulfilling experience than playing through it !).
It seems that with Ys III, Falcom learned zero lesson on what made the original two titles so beloved by many people. Instead it was a shallow imitation of a much better game and it even pales in comparison to other shallow imitations of Zelda II which were at least mildly competent ! A soulless cash grab which took a toll on the development team, a toll so bad they’ll eventually decide to leave the company to pursue greener pastures at Enix where they’ll operate for a short couple of years as Studio Quintet (one of my favorite gaming studio if you ask me which definitely deserved better than to be forgotten by time) where they’ll make a much better 2D side-scrolling action game combining all of the good elements of their previous titles narratively speaking but spice it up with some new and innovative ideas.
People will remember Actraiser, Illusion of Gaia or even Terranigma but most people will forget Ys III was even a thing and so should you and Falcom agrees since they made a remake of the game in the mid 2000’s which is miles better, changed everything about the original and is considered by many as one of the best Ys title.
So go play Oath in Felghana, I haven’t made a review of it yet but trust me, it’s freaking excellent and well worth experiencing over this piece of doodoo !
The one thing worth celebrating about this blight on the action genre is the music, this time mostly composed by the really talented Mieko Ishikawa successfully managing to hold her ground against Yuzo Koshiro more than excellent soundtrack from the first two game, Valestein Castle especially kicks so much freaking ass and is easily like my favorite track in the whole franchise if you ask me ! The soundtrack definitely captures the spirit of Ys better than everything else in this game !
But without the original development team to work on these titles what does the future hold for Ys as a franchise ? Well it’s a bit complicated, so complicated in fact it might be a two-parter with some additional parts down the line !
Stay tuned as next time, we’ll be talking about Mask of The sun which is… huh… certainly a video game…
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 !
I was listening to a Siivagunner rip of the game because I saw a cute blonde anime girl with something that look like either a facemask or glasses (turns out it was makeup, wtv it's cute) and then I saw it was free on steam and decided to try it.
My fondness for quirky blonde anime girls with facemask aside, the game was actually a surprisingly fun and charming game with a lot of really neat ideas, I mean I never coded in JavaScript and this bitch taught me how to code in JavaScript to play a little puzzle game how neat is that ?
You can feel this is a small project made by a relatively small team on their free time and it's most likely you would've found this on Newgrounds in the late 2000's and in fact that's how the weirdoe forced 2D platforming segments of the game felt like, they're weird, floaty, janky and smells of amateurism, if you can't accept a videogame to not be 200% playable or haven't grow up on the golden age of Flash Games with fucked up physics, these segments will probably make you strike a few nerves.
It doesn't help the fact the game's humour falls into the "quirky for the sake of quirk" category, some jokes landed due to how random they were and some were "hey did you get that reference ?" (often time to other game with a meta element to it, mostly the popular ones like Undertale or DDLC if you ain't tired of them yet) level of low-bro internet humour and sadly this is a significant part of the game since these platforming segment far overstay they're welcome in my opinion.
I kinda wish they pushed the "desktop adventure" aspect further and didn't feel the need to add "an actual videogame" in the middle for all that was worth honestly.
The final boss segment is really creative ! I'm not going to spoil anything but be sure to have a few icons on your desktop for some fun surprises, I dunno how much app the game can detects for that segment but my mind was blown that it was part of the final boss.
And again, Lumi (the main character) is cute enough and the game is dank. It's free anyway so give it a shot and maybe support the devs via donation if you end up enjoying it !
My fondness for quirky blonde anime girls with facemask aside, the game was actually a surprisingly fun and charming game with a lot of really neat ideas, I mean I never coded in JavaScript and this bitch taught me how to code in JavaScript to play a little puzzle game how neat is that ?
You can feel this is a small project made by a relatively small team on their free time and it's most likely you would've found this on Newgrounds in the late 2000's and in fact that's how the weirdoe forced 2D platforming segments of the game felt like, they're weird, floaty, janky and smells of amateurism, if you can't accept a videogame to not be 200% playable or haven't grow up on the golden age of Flash Games with fucked up physics, these segments will probably make you strike a few nerves.
It doesn't help the fact the game's humour falls into the "quirky for the sake of quirk" category, some jokes landed due to how random they were and some were "hey did you get that reference ?" (often time to other game with a meta element to it, mostly the popular ones like Undertale or DDLC if you ain't tired of them yet) level of low-bro internet humour and sadly this is a significant part of the game since these platforming segment far overstay they're welcome in my opinion.
I kinda wish they pushed the "desktop adventure" aspect further and didn't feel the need to add "an actual videogame" in the middle for all that was worth honestly.
The final boss segment is really creative ! I'm not going to spoil anything but be sure to have a few icons on your desktop for some fun surprises, I dunno how much app the game can detects for that segment but my mind was blown that it was part of the final boss.
And again, Lumi (the main character) is cute enough and the game is dank. It's free anyway so give it a shot and maybe support the devs via donation if you end up enjoying it !
2021
The saddest attempt at a live service game that I've ever seen, it's been 2 years and the game is still stuck in early access, still doesn't have co-op and still plays like shit.
The fact they spent most of their budget for this piece of crap on getting an English dub that nobody in the fandom gave a shit about instead of making the game playable or having interesting features that will actually compel people to spend time on their shitty battle pass (because yes, the game isn't finished but putting micro-transaction was an absolute priority).
The main campaign might as well be a placeholder, so little effort has been put into it that it's not worth the grind, you're just playing Muv-Luv Alternative but without its brillant narrative and direction and with shitty gameplay segment which forces you to grind to continue the story.
This game is a pure scam of the highest degree that it died faster than it lived with only 4 active player on the damn thing who probably can't afford a copy of Armored Core 6
Easily one of the worst mecha-game I've ever played and the worst Muv-Luv related title ever released easily
The fact they spent most of their budget for this piece of crap on getting an English dub that nobody in the fandom gave a shit about instead of making the game playable or having interesting features that will actually compel people to spend time on their shitty battle pass (because yes, the game isn't finished but putting micro-transaction was an absolute priority).
The main campaign might as well be a placeholder, so little effort has been put into it that it's not worth the grind, you're just playing Muv-Luv Alternative but without its brillant narrative and direction and with shitty gameplay segment which forces you to grind to continue the story.
This game is a pure scam of the highest degree that it died faster than it lived with only 4 active player on the damn thing who probably can't afford a copy of Armored Core 6
Easily one of the worst mecha-game I've ever played and the worst Muv-Luv related title ever released easily
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
Trails of Cold Steel IV : End Of Saga (and my sanity)
Before properly starting this review, I wanted to tell you a little story about myself.
In 2019, there was a game by the name of Kingdom Hearts III, now I know this is gonna sound off topic but bear with me for a second. Kingdom Hearts as a franchise was really important in my formative years of gaming, I received the first entry on Christmas of 2003 (the same year I got my PS2) probably because my mom saw Donald and Goofy on the cover and thought it was just one of many Disney games that she already brought home to keep me occupied during her busy hours.
What she didn’t know is that this single event was going to change the trajectory of my life forever and was going to trigger my biggest most long-running autistic hyper obsession I’ll ever have in my life. I’d say that KH1 is the most important game in my life because as funny as it’s going to sound, it was the game that taught me that games could be so much more than electronic distractions, more than just a virtual toy to lose a few hours on. Oh sure I did have games that could’ve also done that in my library such as “Link’s Awakening” or “Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver” but as excellent as these games were, they were a bit too “cerebral” for my younger self and I only got to finish them several years down the line when I was intellectually inclined to do so.
KH1 was this perfect blend of complex yet simple, engaging yet straightforward, beautifully poetic and epic. And of course being attached to Disney properties definitely did help. Exploring worlds based on some of my childhood favorite movies was like a dream come true and all of this packed in a great deal of mystery and a seemingly deeper lore that one might not expect from a crossover game. By the end of KH1, I was so charmed, so starstruck by how magic the experience was that I said to myself : “I don’t know what this is, but I need more of whatever this is !” and thankfully enough, KH1 was also an amazing gateway title to the wider world of JRPG’s. It was thanks to KH1 (and a neighbour who was deep into RPG) that I got to play FFIX, my first Final Fantasy game for the first time, my aunt brought me Dark Cloud 2 and so forth and so forth, combine this with me discovering the internet and the wonderful world of emulation and I was set for life catching up on all the amazing games I’ve missed out on over the years and still am catching up to this day.
But KH was different, unlike many JRPG series Kingdom Hearts had its own mythology, its own internal lore and hinged heavily on its continuity. It was in fact one of the series main selling points, you came for the Disney shenanigans and you stayed to hear about the next chapter in Tetsuya Nomura’s wild ride. And while I skipped Chain of Memories when it came out (only to come back to it, to understand KH2 a lil better), I played KH2 and holy shit that game got me hooked for good and I was set for life ! Between the Mickey letter at the end and the awesome secret ending with these badass knights holding keyblade in some sort of desert, I knew that whenever KH3 was going to come out, it was going to be the best fucking game in my life.
Now KH2 was released in 2005 and KH3 eventually released in 2019…
When Square eventually announced that we’ll get not just one, not two but three KH games before the release of KH3, I was going insane !
But deep in my mind all I really wanted was KH3, the fabled conclusion to the epic saga that I was now a part of because in the end that’s one of the reasons I even got obsessed with KH in the first place. It felt like I was becoming a part of something ! I was witnessing the birth of a cult-classic franchise and I was witnessing first hand the continuous creation of its bigger story…
This excitement lasted for a while… but then an event happened which started instilling doubt into my faith in this franchise, this was the release of a little game known as Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance. As a videogame, KH3D is probably one of the most serviceable games in the franchise but its story is where I started realizing that the writers were kind of stuck in a corner with this whole “seeker of darkness” arc. The plot started going off the rails with retcons on previous antagonist coming back for plot contrivance reasons, the 2 main lead were going through the same character arc they did in the previous mainline title only served on a different plate and fucking Time-Travel was a thing and made an already convoluted story even more convoluted and everything felt like it’ll lead to all the tragedies in the series and the investment I had in said tragedies being ruined for cheap fanservice down the line.
And yet, I didn’t give up, I still waited for the day KH3 would be mine. But 15 years is a long time, in 15 years a lot of things happened and the little boy who was having fun pushing the triangle button to get on the Hydra’s back in 2005 has went through a lot, I graduated from elementary school and high school, I’ve entered college then dropped out of college, I had a stomach surgery, lost my virginity, experienced many other games and many other media and sadly developed something known as : critical thinking. Since then, I replayed all the KH games through the HD collection discovering the Final Mix version of these games for the first time and realizing that KH2 wasn’t just “great”, it was “a masterpiece” and easily the single best Action-RPG ever released even almost 20 years after its release and while I still hold a lot of fondness for both KH1 and KH2 (and 358/2 days to a lesser extend), the same couldn’t be said for the portable entries.
I tried to get back into BBS but I found the game to be a boring slog with terrible writing, a bland trio of characters, a battle system that was fundamentally broken and became monotonous very fast once I understood the “cracks” in the code and a story that’s full of good ideas but executed sloppily and had to resolve to using a shit load of retcon about how the Keyblade worked in order to expand the universe which killed a bit of the magic of the first game’s plot in my opinion. Suffice to say that while I don’t find BBS bad, it’s definitely a game that aged like piss in my mind because it was trying to make the world too complex while not delivering where it mattered (aka : the character writing, the main plot and having a fun complex battle system).
When KH3 finally came out, I was a changed man and part of me still couldn’t believe this game was real and I could actually purchase it at my local game store. So I did play KH3, spending roughly 40 or so hours completing it and to say that my disappointment was immeasurable and my day was ruined was an understatement. KH3 was indeed the big conclusive finale of the franchise and as such it’s the converging point of everything the series has built up to this point but sadly, it was also the culmination of all the bullshit the series has accumulated over the years and has slowly but surely transformed a once beloved and respected cult classic JRPG series into some sort of a running joke.
I kinda live with the disappointment nowadays and the Re:Mind DLC probably helped mitigate some of my issues I had with the game initially but I simply couldn’t believe in the “KH plan” anymore. The problem with Kingdom Hearts is that what was once the game series that taught me that games can have genuinely great and engaging writing on top of fun gameplay became just this confused mess of shitty fanservice and lore-flopping. Like the series forgot that it was supposed to tell a story with themes and shit and instead just became a collection of cliché and lore stuff thrown haphazardly into a semi-coherent mess and in the end, it wasn’t even conclusive enough, most of it was set up for the next arc which is going to be based on the story explored in the mobile game and … man I just couldn’t care less.
I already invested so much time and energy with this franchise but nowadays, I can’t even gather the energy to recommend it to anybody anymore. I think KH is very different for the people who discovered the franchise now without any nostalgic childhood attachment to it, the early games are a bit janky and most of the portable entry are not the height of gaming promised by your peers, only KH2 stands out amongst the rest for just being some sort of miracle accident which ended up creating one of the most fun and versatile action-rpg ever released (but only if you’re playing on critical mode, why would you play KH2 on anything but Critical is beyond me)
The reason I went on this tangent about KH is to tell you that after KH, I always seeked for something else that I could claim as my new hyper-obsession and at the time I was playing KH3, a friend of mine was talking about the Trails Series and hearing about it made me jump out of my chair, it sounded too good to be true ! An expensive multi-generational epic journey through multiple connected entries with an insane amount of attention dedicated to worldbuilding and continuity ? Damn, maybe I found what I wanted. So over the past 3-4 years, I caught up with the series and I did find my new hyper-obsession… well not with Trails… but with another less “respectable” franchise that I already mentioned in my CS2 review but that’s a story for another time.
I really wish I could’ve become a true super highly obsessed fan of Trails who couldn’t help but marathon these games, but the story of my relationship with Trails was a rocky one, full of powerful highs and unfortunate lows. Full of missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential, not everyone can be the next Matsuno and with the last few entries I kinda gave up on the series giving me something meaningful to latch myself onto, I never became a fan of Trails but I can somewhat empathize with Trails fans due to my experience with the KH series and how it went from my lifeblood to my favorite gaming toxic relationship.
And these problems, these minor issues that I reported in detail back during my Azure review kinda grew out of proportions like a big cancerous tumor filling itself with pus and dead cells and it all culminated in me playing Cold Steel IV.
The worst JRPG, I’ve ever played
Not “one” of the worst, that was true for all the previous entries but this one, easily takes the cake as “THE” worst experience I’ve ever had playing a JRPG.
This is quite a bold claim especially for someone like me who has well over 5000 games logged on my account, I can already smell the comments coming from a mile away.
“But CaaaaaaaaaaAAAaaaaani, you can’t possibly say this is worst than the likes of stuff like FF2, Sonic Chronicles, Any Compile Heart Games ever made, Lagoon, Lunar : Dragon Song or wtv… if you say Cold Steel IV is the worst, you should really start considering playing more truly bad games !”
And here’s the thing my dear readers, I do play bad games, sometimes by choice and sometimes by accident, I’ve had my fair share of experience with bonafide turds ! From games that are barely playable, those with awful game and level design flaws, bad controls, bad music, gameplay, completely nonsensical plot and generally an experience in which all of these elements combined into something truly awful !
I remember fondly when my mom got me “Realplay : PuzzleSphere” on Christmas and I ended using the “PuzzleSphere” in question more as a mace to hit my brother on the head with than an actual controller because of how much the game sucked ass, or getting “Space Chimp” and “Zatura” on the PS2 (bet you don’t even remember Zatura ! It was a shitty sci-fi rip-off of Jumanji that was released in theaters for some reason) ! And don’t get me started on Shrek Fairytale Freakdown for the Game Boy Color ugh. Heck I even gladly played bad games from franchises I love, Megaman X6 and X7 comes to mind as two different flavors of bad games, several Castlevania entries too and to stay on topic with the subject of this review : Ys IV Mask of The Sun and Ys III Wanderers From Ys are legitimately worse games than CS4 !
To me there’s layers to bad video games and to quote Yahtzee from the Escapist : It’s not the bad games that are the worst to review, it’s the bland ones ! The one that just takes ideas from several places and mish-mash them into a semi-functional but seemingly indistinguishable mess, the kind of games that makes you feel “nothing” at the end of the day and might make you hate the medium or genre they came from more by their sheer laziness and incompetence !
I usually love playing bad games because to me every experience is worth having, I have a lot of fondness for bad videogames. I don’t think people make bad games on purpose and you can learn a lot about your own taste or learn a lot more about what not to do when making a game from playing bad video games ! Bad games have cultural values because you can teach about their failures at game design school to teach younger devs what not to do when making a video game ! I sometimes think that some bad games have some “soul” to them, like the developers made it as a labor of love and not a labor of pure exploitation to get a paycheck at the end of the month. So yeah ! I love bad games ! Some pure exquisite kusoge of the highest level !
But even amongst BAD and I mean BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD games, Cold Steel IV, heck even more so the entire Cold Steel saga stands out in the sea of forgettable throwaway garbage that the industry pulls out on a monthly basis thanks in no small part to being part of a larger series and in doing so and failing completely at everything it does retroactively ruin my enjoyment of the entire Trails franchise up to that point ! And you may think that my little KH3 tangent at the start was to pad out time ! Well, you’re right !
But it wouldn’t be a Trails game without a copious dose of pointless padding now wouldn’t it ? (and don’t worry, it’s not just an elaborated meta joke, there’s a lot more in common between KH3 and Cold Steel IV than meets the eyes)
This time I won’t make you sit through an entire slew of paragraphs talking about the gameplay this time around because unsurprisingly, it hasn’t changed, like at all. Aside from being able to stack 2 additional BP on top of the 5 you could already stack in previous games, there is no change to the battle system this time around. That doesn’t mean that CS4 improves on the battle system, the enemy design, the boss design or god forbid the exploration but we’ll talk in due time when I’d talk about how basic the entire thing is and how it ruined my enjoyment of the entire experience.
On a more minor notes, there’s a few QoL improvements here and there especially when it comes to NPC, now every new dialogues are notified by a “NEW” next to the area you want to quick travel to which makes it easier to do an NPC sweep but also makes it harder to ignore that part of the game if you’re autistic like me and can’t stand looking at unfinished business.
In fact, unlike most games in the series, I actually did manage to get a full rank of AP point this time around by just fucking around completing side quest ! Was that necessary ? No, did it make my suffering last for longer than necessary ? Absolutely ! But I’m glad that at least in midst of all of the game’s issues, there are smudges of brilliance thrown here and there and I’d say that not making the 100% completion requirement as cryptic and obtuse as the other titles for no reasons (especially due to the needlessly padded out nature of these games preventing me from ever wanting to replay any of them, even the ones I did enjoy) was for once something that I did appreciate (now as for the actual quality of the side content, we’ll talk about that in a minute).
The game starts on probably the only good part of the game until a long while, the game teases you on being good by bringing back the playable cast members of the previous two arcs and even opens up by a shot of Estelle brand new PS4 HD Graphics ass, showing that the priorities and demographic of this game changed a lot since the last time Estelle was relevant in anything and was actually a respectfully written female character unlike most of the cast of this mess of an arc.
This section which seemingly serves as a tutorial to the game mechanics (you know, the one’s that hasn’t changed from the previous game) will let you play as husks of your favorite characters pretending to have any relevance into this game plot, a running theme throughout the entire thing but we’ll get to that later down the line (and I’ve been saying this a lot already HUH ?). After a boss fight against two of the worst antagonist ever written in the series, the game can actually continue
In the last episode of Rean Schwarzer epic Schwarzin adventure, our boy turned completely schizo after sniffing too much of the gnomes racist perfume infusion therefore triggering the release of said gaz throughout the entire country and activating the cheap cliffhanger protocol that’s so near and dear to Falcom’s writing team to make you play another 80-90 hours slog of a game where only 30 of said hours (assuming I’m being generous here) will be of any significance thanks to the power of cockblocking !
After this gnome endeavor from last time, our heroes got teleported to Eryn village, the hometown of Emma (the plot delivery glasses girl) and the base of operation of the ancient Hexen Clan aka the Witches aka Ancient Guardians of the world who lives like Internet hasn’t been invented yet like in the funny wizard boy book written by a notorious transphobe. It’s here that the rest of Class VII realizes that their teacher has gone missing and is stuck in some sort of gnome BDSM dungeon at least according to a few cutscenes and the deliciously edgy title screen of the game and thus they need to save him !
But how will they do it ?
Well by going through all the places you’ve already slogged and backtracked too with next to no change to the level layout of enemy types of course ! But don’t worry, you’re not just going around planting magic needles on the ground for plot reasons, you’re also doing this to find your missing friend and yes
Yes, you’ve been waiting for this one haven’t you ?
It’s time for yet another epic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onXp-Ft404E
“Final Fantasy VI Search For Your Friends Rip-Off moment™ !”
Yes because the same way CS3 was pretty much a repurposed CS1, the same goes for CS4 being a repurposed CS2 ! Because here at Falcom, we love recycling our own ideas (borrowed from several other franchises which did it miles better anyway) and running them to the ground because you bitches have no standard and will eat anything up and accept how stagnant the franchise has become by now !
So after another tutorial dungeon to re-teach you about all the mechanics you already experienced with in the prologue (I shit you not) in one of the series now titular “Tartarus rip-off which looks randomly generated but isn’t actually randomly generated” dungeon (aka : Old Schoolhouse 3 : Revenge of the Sith) you’re out in the world to plant some magic needle to find the Gnome Headquarters, repeat that in a pattern of 3 times, get one party member back and experience what’s happening to the world in the eve of a full-scale war.
I’m going to give credit where credit is due with Act 1, starting off the game without its titular main character is actually a pretty cool idea in a “passing of the torch” kind of way. Rean has always been the strongest, baddest party member in all 3 previous Cold Steel games (if you didn’t have Laura to one-shot everything and anything that is). So it creates an interesting power imbalance which forces you to play with how well NC7 plays out of one another, this balance is pretty cool and makes for some cool moments. At that point, the story hasn’t really devolved into full crayon-eater mode either so it’s alright, I do wish that Act 1 or at least the idea that the game featured NC7 as the new lead party member actually lasted for longer because Act 1 is going to be one of the last time outside of bonding events that the characters will get to shine in any particular way with some insanely cool character moment and interesting arc.
However, I must insist that this part of the game is still relatively boring to go through. Since this is the sequel to a previous Trails game, most of the environments are ripped straight out of CS3 and with little change to the environment (aside from the skybox because that’s what war does to you) and…
Ok I think I need to come clean about the padding issues in this franchise because it is genuinely going out of control the more I advance throughout the series. See the issue with Trails isn’t that the games are too long because BIG NEWS !
JRPG’s ARE LONG !
…
Right ?
No, it’s just that in been long, these games really don’t offer much in terms of actual proper game design, while there was some effort made all the way back in the Crosbell duology to mitigate those issues, in the end, Trails has never been a series known for how excellent its gameplay loop and game design was. Ultimately, the problem with Trails is a fundamental issue with how these titles are constructed and this isn’t something I only recently started complaining about in this arc, it’s something true for the entire series up to that point. That the first game is a slow burn to get yourself familiar with the world and the setting ? Fine ! But why in the absolute living fuck does that slow pacing need to translate to every title regardless of whether or not it’s an intro title or not ?
I swear to god, it’s something you start getting numb to because of how much the game tries to find ways to make the act of playing them less of a chore, by adding more quick travel points or even turbo mode or things of the sort but it never really solves the issues ! These game structures are so rigid and artificial that you can almost see and feel where they pointlessly added stuff to artificially make the game last longer ! But I can already hear you say :
“Well if these games are so long, it’s because it’s to establish the atmosphere and the worldbuilding and the” blah blah blah cut the crap already, you know it’s not true !
You know that most of these games could be cut in half and only get better for it in terms of rhythm if you only keeping in it the actual meaningful content and that’s the problem because we’ve all been fooled into thinking that it was actually necessary to be like that in order to communicate the plot better but it’s not even fucking true is it ?
Even less so when all of the actual good scenes and character moments are contained almost exclusively in the bonding events scene which for the record are both some of the best and some of the worst in the series for reasons we’ll get into later.
These games barely evolved their formula and I’m getting tired of them, as an RPG it’s also some of the milquetoast RPG structure you could ever eat. What’s your favorite dungeon in CS4 ? The series of corridors with brown bricks or the ones with blue bricks ? SO MUCH VARIETY IT’S STAGGERING !
It’s crazy how much I managed to put out and how much so many people managed to put out with how dull and boring the loop of battle, exploration, fetch quest and cutscenes gets in this series, it’s literally driving me nuts at how fucking dull this shit it, I’m going insane !
The only thing that’s carrying this series is just text since the “cutscenes” (if you wanna even call it that) have always been so fucking low budget, badly directed and animated that you might as well make it a visual novel instead and I’ve seen Visual Novels with better staging and direction than most of the dialogue scenes in this game !
God it’s also so fucking predictable, you can make a freaking drinking game out of this !
The characters are in a pinch ? Take a shot as they get their ass saved by a random third actor that was seemingly in the room this whole time and solve the situation on their own while “Sword of Biting Gale” plays !
Take another shot when the characters are done talking about their next step and a villain that was positioned on a roof or a hill was observing them menacingly saying “Nyeheheh, class VII, We’ll see about that !”
Take another shot when the progression is stopped by Rean doing another unwarranted and frankly unnecessary pep-talk friendship speech for no fucking reasons !
Ludo-Narration ? Staging ? Direction ? Not using every repetitive character trope and cheap narrative tool in the book to tell your story through what the medium can offer instead ? I never heard that shit from a freaking Falcom game ! Good god, this is the lowest of lows, you know some games have good direction, others have bad direction but Welcome to the Kiseki series where we just won’t direct our cutscenes at all…
And fuck there is so many characters now, each dialogue and cutscene take fucking forever because Billy, Eddy, Mandy and Roger all have their snarky little comment to make on the situation and often time there’s like 60 or so character on screen and they all have to say something and it’s always the driest, blandest, most unimportant piece of dialogue why did you fucking Talk Elliot Craig ? NOBODY ASKED YOUR WHITE ASS OPINION ABOUT WAR ! YOU ARE A NOTHING CHARACTER SAYING NOTHING AND I HATE YOU ! AND ALL OF OLD CLASS VII FOR THAT MATTER ! GOD WHAT A BUNCH OF BORING USELESS CUNT I SWEAR TO GOD !
Act 2 is probably where the game starts hitting the shitting fan with this !
After saving Rean, the game’s overall quality and pacing take a complete nosedive never to return. I said in the last review that if we dug deeper we might reach China ?
But holy fucking shit, we haven’t just reached China, in fact, We dug so deep that there was no more ground to dig up and we’ve now entered an alternate dimension where the laws of physics have been broken and now everything works in “Kiseki Hours” where a single hour of gameplay progress amounts to 5 IRL time and nothing freaking happened !
Act 2 is just a pure narrative void, there is nothing of note that happen in Act 2, you’re just doing a lot of fetch questing, each worst than the last and you enter pointless conflicts with characters because this game is so starved for time and content that it starts throwing boss fight against some of the most random individuals, in fact most of the setup for boss fights in this game make no sense at all. As I was playing through the game I was even wondering half of the time : “Why are we fighting this person ? It’s completely pointless ? Why are we doing this ?” and that my friend is thanks to a really useful tool the authors have come up with to artificially spawn conflicts out of the blue !
Introducing
The Curse !
The Curse is a fascinating tool of narrative design that allows the writers to do whatever the fuck they want and justify any actions any characters at any moments might take !
In the text, it is said that the curse is something that acts on the human brain and forces them to obey their deeper instinct, but what it essentially does for the most part is turn everyone evil, violent and racist for seemingly no goddamn reasons. It also make characters act in completely uncharacteristic ways so you can have a fight with them or they can fuck you over to pad out more freaking time and justify you going through another boring ass dungeon and fighting another pointless boss fight !
But in reality, the curse is whatever the writers want it to be, yes sometimes it does make people evil and racist but sometimes it can make them addicted to gambling, sometimes it can erase memories, sometimes it can make animals aggressive and turn them into demons, sometimes it can make somebody mess their paperwork or lose their key, sometimes it can make a nun break a pot, sometimes it can force a child to run head first into the nearest kidnapper, sometimes it can power-up robots and machines and most importantly of all, sometimes it can turn your jacuzzi into purple goo which is fucking terrible isn’t it ?
The curse has no rules and no consistency whatsoever, the curse is seemingly the cause and the consequences of everything in the plot ! In fact, doing the sidequests makes the curse even worse as you realize that there are no concrete rules to the curse nor are there any concrete rules to how it works, how it affects certain people and not others or even how you’re supposed to cure people from it !
Elliot will use the power of music to turn a demon into a regular horse again and it’s never brought up ever in the actual main plot ? Bro if you can just get rid of demons like that why are we still busy fighting them in the first place ? The curse can also seemingly get cured by just “talking it out” with the person who’s affected like ok sure why not but also sometimes the curse just heals… by itself ! Magically ! With no real reasons behind it ! One time there’s a little girl who forgets who the SSS is but later without any side quest or extra scenes or anything, the girl just randomly remembers who they are and it’s ???
The only consistent thing about the curse is that it only spreads across the empire and respects the state's border but they never actually give a proper explanation as to why it works like this in the first place ? Why in the absolute living goddamn fuck is an ancient demonic curse from aeons past cares about the modern state borders of some bum ass country ? Like boohoo, poor little curse, it can’t get past a silly barrier ! I thought the Sept-Terrions were supposed to transcend the rules of the mortal realms and be these super-powerful artifacts !
I mean for fuck sake, the previous Sept-Terrion was LITERALLY ABLE TO REWRITE REALITY ! The Power Creep ceiling has already been met ! You can’t make something crazier than something which literally can ignore the rules of physics and rewrite reality how they see fit ! And yet, the game will always try to pretend that the Great One and the curse is the most dangerous fucking threat to have ever existed and seemingly the reason why the entire series happened up to this point !
Oh yeah because yeah, how about that ?
How about this franchise lore and worlbuilding being completely fucking wasted in favor of shitty JRPG plot number 5840 ?
Yeah, remember the gnome shit from CS3 ? That was already pretty fucking bad wasn’t it ? Well get a kick out of this !
Every
Single
Event
In
The
Series
Was all part of some
ANCIENT
RACIST
GUNDAM
GOD
To rebuild itself and become ultra-mega powerful, Ishmelga is the name of the robot and the one who wants to bring the world to an end, with Black…. oh wait no silly, let’s make this antagonist even more of a fucking joke than he already is by making it a Dr.Jekyl and Mr Gnome situation, yes the leader of the gnome, the absolute mastermind behind everything, is just a random sockpuppet for Ishmelga ! And even Osborne is a sockpuppet for Ishmelga, but you see he did all the evil shit ever so he can STOP Ishmelga thanks to his son Rean Chad ThunderCock Schwarzer !
Remember the cool duality between Olivert and Osborne ? The whole class warfare story ? The Imperialism ?
Get the fuck out of here man, it was NEVER ABOUT ALL OF THAT !
It’s all a setup for a shitty mech battle tournament arc with the most non-existent stake possible.
None of the villains actually wants to win most of the time, you fight people that are sometimes evil, sometimes virtuous and sometimes nothing at all thanks to the curse making things more confusing
Osborne is a wet fart of a character and a complete disapointment, the guy went from a cunning manipulator to literally a bootleg Xehanort from KH3 with the exact same end goal of “doing all of this for the good of the world” which is just “stop the racism god to spread more racism”
Oh yeah, because speaking of Olivier ?
Well fuck you he’s alive, in fact everyone who died or disappeared at the end of CS3 are alive and they’re alive because GEORGE NOME actually saved them because GEORGE NOME is not all bad guys, he has good heart inside of his tiny lil gnome heart. Everyone gets revived and sometimes they even get shitty mind control masks and have chuuni names like “Red Rosweil” who is a resurrected Angelica with her memories erased but her PEDOPHILIA STILL INTACT
FUCK YEAH LET’S GO I LOVE THIS CLOWN ASS FRANCHISE !
Yeah right, let’s make all the characters make jokes about pairing minors and adult in the same franchise that has an honest to god CHILD BROTHEL SUB-PLOT ! Hey !
How about we make said CSA victim a victim of jokey funny lol super funky sexual harassment heh ?
Ah Angelica, she ain’t just a pedophile ! SHE’S OUR PEDOPHILE !
As for Olivier, well if character assassination was a sport, the guy would be a gold fucking medalist because goddamn what have they done to my man.
To be frank it’s either getting character assassinated so thoroughly that you might actually file a complaint for manslaughter or seeing all of your favorite characters come back with their personality stripped down to a mere caricature of what they once was just for empty fanservice moment that will only work on the lowest common denominator to try and make people think this game has anything of value as the “END OF SAGA” ! When in fact absolutely nothing of value is to be found here
The story is empty, the characters are empty, the themes are bland and generic, the villains are a joke and half of them don’t even want to win because of the shitty reasons they even do all of this in the first place !
Every part of the plot is an excuse to either pad out more time or to have a “cool” boss fight against some of the most random people ever that has no reason to happen
Irina, why are you evil ?
Oh you’re not evil anymore ? Ok let’s hug it out and forget about it
THIS GAME WAS WRITTEN FOR LITERAL 5 YEAR OLD
Everytime you think the story is doing something cool or half-decent, it’s canceled out by the game doing something stupid
And don’t get me started on fucking Rean
Rean, Rean, Rean, Rean…
Oh boy, you…
You fucking pointless, annoying shallow simulacrum of a character ! You are the worst of them all, I fucking despise your sorry Narou-Kei Light Novel Default Ass ever since the first game and even in this fucking game where you saw little to no actual development and even worse actually regressed just to have the same “your friends love you” magic friendship crystal thing plot from the second game !
You are everything that’s wrong with Japanese entertainment and the genre as a whole ! You’re like a pompous little snob that gets everything he wants, an harem of cute girl wanting to suck his dick at a moments noticed, a cool giant robot ready to get him out of any bad situation, some ancient cool edgy super power that often benefit you more than it nerfs you !
You’re the chosen hero of some sort of prophecy, the ultimate sacrifice and probably the sole reason why the world go round ! And yet, you ask me to feel pity for your sorry ass ? You stubbed your toe once and made it personal and now suddenly you go from shitty power fantasy guy to a relatable virtuous misunderstood hero !
YOU ARE NOTHING REAN
JUST A SHITTY LITTLE CENTRIST CUCK WITH LITTLE TO NO ACTUAL AGENCY AND NO IDEOLOGY TO CALL YOUR OWN ! YOU’RE TRYING TO FIND THE “THIRD PATH” AND WHAT EVEN IS THE THIRD PATH HUH ? WHAT IS IT ? THE THIRD PATH THROUGH ONE OF YOUR 3 ROMANCEABLE STUDENTS CUNT ? ARE YOU A DISCORD MOD REAN ? ARE YOU DONE BEING A SISCON BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY SMIDGE OF PERSONALITY THE WRITERS HAS GIVEN TO YOU ???? OH I SHOULD’VE PROBABLY ROMANCED ELISE ! YOU CERTAINLY WOULD’VE LIKED THAT YOU SACCHARINE PUPPY PERVERT !
FUCK OFF REAN
YOU ARE THE WORST
FUCK YOU !
WHY SHOULD I KNEEL TO SUCH A SHITTY CHARACTER LIKE YOU !
YOU’VE EARNED NONE OF MY SYMPATHY
YOU’VE EARNE NONE OF THOSE FUCKING DOGSHIT FRIENDSHIP SPEECH !
YOU’RE SO COOL AND SO STRONG AND MAYBE EVEN STRONGER THAN CASSIUS BUT YOUR HEART IS BROKEN WELL MAYBE YOUR ASS SHOULD’VE ALSO BEEN BROKEN BY BAITING ALL THE FUJOSHI INTO TURNING INTO CROW’S PERSONAL POWER BOTTOM ONAHOLE BECAUSE THAT’S ALL YOUR FUCKING WORTH !
YOU SHOULD’VE DIED ! OH I WISH YOU HAD DIED AND THE NORMAL ENDING WAS THE CANON ONE SO THAT YOUR FUCKING FACE WOULD NEVER FUCKING SHOW UP IN ANYTHING EVER AGAIN !
God and all of the bonding events, god what happened to this franchise man ? It used to actually be about something and now it’s all gone, it’s all a mess for dirty perverted otakus to fap to !
AND I’M A DIRTY PERVERTED OTAKU WHO FAPS TO THIS STUFF !
This game wants to be an eroge so fucking bad man and I swear to god, this game would’ve been better off dropping the pretense and have H-Scenes
The bonding events in this game are a lil more fleshed out thanks to them being the conclusion to some arcs
BUT WHY IN THE FUCK MUST IT ALMOST ALL END WITH THE VAGINA EQUIPPED INDIVIDUALS WANTING REAN’S COCK ? LIKE WOW THAT FUCKING LAURA BONDING EVENT IS SO BAD ! Rean’s all like “I wanna kms” and Laura push him against the wall AND FORCE KISS HIM
THIS GAME IS A COMEDY ! IT’S A PARODY ! IT’S NOT SERIOUS ! IT HAS NEVER BEEN SERIOUS FOR A SINGLE SECOND !
And it ruined several previous entries, because it can’t just be a shitty game on its own, it’s a shitty game that ruins the credibility and my attachment to this world ! No I don’t care what’s the deal with McBurn, he was the very definition of some 14 years old OC and his presence in the narrative is amount to nothing and you fight this guy FUCKING 11 TIMES LIKE FUCKING CHRIST AND IT’S ALWAYS THE EASIEST SHIT !
Man the ending is also a fucking mess bro what the fuck is this ! You need to collect some magic crystal in some deadass cavern so it can help you contain the racism god in your friendship crystal so you can kill him and end racism forever ISTG, I’ve seen scooby-doo episodes which are more thought out like this
Man I’ve wasted so much time on this franchise and all for this ?
And you can’t even be too mad at this because they’ve put some genuine effort sometimes, they’ve put some effort in how the story is told through the NPC points of view and everything but why should I care about Falcom’s nailing the details when they fail so fucking miserably in the things that actually matter ?
Fuck Trails man…
You guys are the scientology church of JRPG fandom
It’s all those great promises of grand epic storytelling, political writing on par with Gundam and Legend of the Galactic Heroes, an endless amount of depth and generosity and attention to detail
But all you get is disappointment, all you get for your investment is some shitty ass JRPG plot that’s borrowed from like 10 different sources that did all the things that Trails did but miles better, it’s the oatmeal of JRPG !
Cold Steel made me understand why Nintendo Youtubers don't like JRPG's
Cold Steel made me understand the POV of people who started KH with the HD collection and didn't like/get it because they never grew an autistic attachment to it when they were young
Cold Steel made me even more of a leftoid than I ACTUALLY am
Cold Steel made me trauma dump to my therapist about it
Cold Steel is my videogame on a stick that's the rival of all those AVGN rip-off
Cold Steel actually worsen my mood the more I played it
Cold Steel reminded me that anime can be cool but they can also be mad cringe
I’m done writing this review, I was going to do a serious one but get a shitty rant instead, just talking about this game puts me in a bad mood !
I don’t care if Reverie or Kuro gets better ! I don’t want to touch another one of those games for a long time if ever ! I’m not even invested anymore ! Not even ironically ! This game is a mess ! And this series is a mess !
STAY AWAY FROM THIS SERIES ! IT'S POISON IT'S ALL POISON ! THERE'S SO MUCH BETTER THINGS OUT THERE ! I SWEAR AND BEG AND CRY FUCK THIS !
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
ASSBALLS
FUCK
Anyway…
Hop on Rance
Before properly starting this review, I wanted to tell you a little story about myself.
In 2019, there was a game by the name of Kingdom Hearts III, now I know this is gonna sound off topic but bear with me for a second. Kingdom Hearts as a franchise was really important in my formative years of gaming, I received the first entry on Christmas of 2003 (the same year I got my PS2) probably because my mom saw Donald and Goofy on the cover and thought it was just one of many Disney games that she already brought home to keep me occupied during her busy hours.
What she didn’t know is that this single event was going to change the trajectory of my life forever and was going to trigger my biggest most long-running autistic hyper obsession I’ll ever have in my life. I’d say that KH1 is the most important game in my life because as funny as it’s going to sound, it was the game that taught me that games could be so much more than electronic distractions, more than just a virtual toy to lose a few hours on. Oh sure I did have games that could’ve also done that in my library such as “Link’s Awakening” or “Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver” but as excellent as these games were, they were a bit too “cerebral” for my younger self and I only got to finish them several years down the line when I was intellectually inclined to do so.
KH1 was this perfect blend of complex yet simple, engaging yet straightforward, beautifully poetic and epic. And of course being attached to Disney properties definitely did help. Exploring worlds based on some of my childhood favorite movies was like a dream come true and all of this packed in a great deal of mystery and a seemingly deeper lore that one might not expect from a crossover game. By the end of KH1, I was so charmed, so starstruck by how magic the experience was that I said to myself : “I don’t know what this is, but I need more of whatever this is !” and thankfully enough, KH1 was also an amazing gateway title to the wider world of JRPG’s. It was thanks to KH1 (and a neighbour who was deep into RPG) that I got to play FFIX, my first Final Fantasy game for the first time, my aunt brought me Dark Cloud 2 and so forth and so forth, combine this with me discovering the internet and the wonderful world of emulation and I was set for life catching up on all the amazing games I’ve missed out on over the years and still am catching up to this day.
But KH was different, unlike many JRPG series Kingdom Hearts had its own mythology, its own internal lore and hinged heavily on its continuity. It was in fact one of the series main selling points, you came for the Disney shenanigans and you stayed to hear about the next chapter in Tetsuya Nomura’s wild ride. And while I skipped Chain of Memories when it came out (only to come back to it, to understand KH2 a lil better), I played KH2 and holy shit that game got me hooked for good and I was set for life ! Between the Mickey letter at the end and the awesome secret ending with these badass knights holding keyblade in some sort of desert, I knew that whenever KH3 was going to come out, it was going to be the best fucking game in my life.
Now KH2 was released in 2005 and KH3 eventually released in 2019…
When Square eventually announced that we’ll get not just one, not two but three KH games before the release of KH3, I was going insane !
But deep in my mind all I really wanted was KH3, the fabled conclusion to the epic saga that I was now a part of because in the end that’s one of the reasons I even got obsessed with KH in the first place. It felt like I was becoming a part of something ! I was witnessing the birth of a cult-classic franchise and I was witnessing first hand the continuous creation of its bigger story…
This excitement lasted for a while… but then an event happened which started instilling doubt into my faith in this franchise, this was the release of a little game known as Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance. As a videogame, KH3D is probably one of the most serviceable games in the franchise but its story is where I started realizing that the writers were kind of stuck in a corner with this whole “seeker of darkness” arc. The plot started going off the rails with retcons on previous antagonist coming back for plot contrivance reasons, the 2 main lead were going through the same character arc they did in the previous mainline title only served on a different plate and fucking Time-Travel was a thing and made an already convoluted story even more convoluted and everything felt like it’ll lead to all the tragedies in the series and the investment I had in said tragedies being ruined for cheap fanservice down the line.
And yet, I didn’t give up, I still waited for the day KH3 would be mine. But 15 years is a long time, in 15 years a lot of things happened and the little boy who was having fun pushing the triangle button to get on the Hydra’s back in 2005 has went through a lot, I graduated from elementary school and high school, I’ve entered college then dropped out of college, I had a stomach surgery, lost my virginity, experienced many other games and many other media and sadly developed something known as : critical thinking. Since then, I replayed all the KH games through the HD collection discovering the Final Mix version of these games for the first time and realizing that KH2 wasn’t just “great”, it was “a masterpiece” and easily the single best Action-RPG ever released even almost 20 years after its release and while I still hold a lot of fondness for both KH1 and KH2 (and 358/2 days to a lesser extend), the same couldn’t be said for the portable entries.
I tried to get back into BBS but I found the game to be a boring slog with terrible writing, a bland trio of characters, a battle system that was fundamentally broken and became monotonous very fast once I understood the “cracks” in the code and a story that’s full of good ideas but executed sloppily and had to resolve to using a shit load of retcon about how the Keyblade worked in order to expand the universe which killed a bit of the magic of the first game’s plot in my opinion. Suffice to say that while I don’t find BBS bad, it’s definitely a game that aged like piss in my mind because it was trying to make the world too complex while not delivering where it mattered (aka : the character writing, the main plot and having a fun complex battle system).
When KH3 finally came out, I was a changed man and part of me still couldn’t believe this game was real and I could actually purchase it at my local game store. So I did play KH3, spending roughly 40 or so hours completing it and to say that my disappointment was immeasurable and my day was ruined was an understatement. KH3 was indeed the big conclusive finale of the franchise and as such it’s the converging point of everything the series has built up to this point but sadly, it was also the culmination of all the bullshit the series has accumulated over the years and has slowly but surely transformed a once beloved and respected cult classic JRPG series into some sort of a running joke.
I kinda live with the disappointment nowadays and the Re:Mind DLC probably helped mitigate some of my issues I had with the game initially but I simply couldn’t believe in the “KH plan” anymore. The problem with Kingdom Hearts is that what was once the game series that taught me that games can have genuinely great and engaging writing on top of fun gameplay became just this confused mess of shitty fanservice and lore-flopping. Like the series forgot that it was supposed to tell a story with themes and shit and instead just became a collection of cliché and lore stuff thrown haphazardly into a semi-coherent mess and in the end, it wasn’t even conclusive enough, most of it was set up for the next arc which is going to be based on the story explored in the mobile game and … man I just couldn’t care less.
I already invested so much time and energy with this franchise but nowadays, I can’t even gather the energy to recommend it to anybody anymore. I think KH is very different for the people who discovered the franchise now without any nostalgic childhood attachment to it, the early games are a bit janky and most of the portable entry are not the height of gaming promised by your peers, only KH2 stands out amongst the rest for just being some sort of miracle accident which ended up creating one of the most fun and versatile action-rpg ever released (but only if you’re playing on critical mode, why would you play KH2 on anything but Critical is beyond me)
The reason I went on this tangent about KH is to tell you that after KH, I always seeked for something else that I could claim as my new hyper-obsession and at the time I was playing KH3, a friend of mine was talking about the Trails Series and hearing about it made me jump out of my chair, it sounded too good to be true ! An expensive multi-generational epic journey through multiple connected entries with an insane amount of attention dedicated to worldbuilding and continuity ? Damn, maybe I found what I wanted. So over the past 3-4 years, I caught up with the series and I did find my new hyper-obsession… well not with Trails… but with another less “respectable” franchise that I already mentioned in my CS2 review but that’s a story for another time.
I really wish I could’ve become a true super highly obsessed fan of Trails who couldn’t help but marathon these games, but the story of my relationship with Trails was a rocky one, full of powerful highs and unfortunate lows. Full of missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential, not everyone can be the next Matsuno and with the last few entries I kinda gave up on the series giving me something meaningful to latch myself onto, I never became a fan of Trails but I can somewhat empathize with Trails fans due to my experience with the KH series and how it went from my lifeblood to my favorite gaming toxic relationship.
And these problems, these minor issues that I reported in detail back during my Azure review kinda grew out of proportions like a big cancerous tumor filling itself with pus and dead cells and it all culminated in me playing Cold Steel IV.
The worst JRPG, I’ve ever played
Not “one” of the worst, that was true for all the previous entries but this one, easily takes the cake as “THE” worst experience I’ve ever had playing a JRPG.
This is quite a bold claim especially for someone like me who has well over 5000 games logged on my account, I can already smell the comments coming from a mile away.
“But CaaaaaaaaaaAAAaaaaani, you can’t possibly say this is worst than the likes of stuff like FF2, Sonic Chronicles, Any Compile Heart Games ever made, Lagoon, Lunar : Dragon Song or wtv… if you say Cold Steel IV is the worst, you should really start considering playing more truly bad games !”
And here’s the thing my dear readers, I do play bad games, sometimes by choice and sometimes by accident, I’ve had my fair share of experience with bonafide turds ! From games that are barely playable, those with awful game and level design flaws, bad controls, bad music, gameplay, completely nonsensical plot and generally an experience in which all of these elements combined into something truly awful !
I remember fondly when my mom got me “Realplay : PuzzleSphere” on Christmas and I ended using the “PuzzleSphere” in question more as a mace to hit my brother on the head with than an actual controller because of how much the game sucked ass, or getting “Space Chimp” and “Zatura” on the PS2 (bet you don’t even remember Zatura ! It was a shitty sci-fi rip-off of Jumanji that was released in theaters for some reason) ! And don’t get me started on Shrek Fairytale Freakdown for the Game Boy Color ugh. Heck I even gladly played bad games from franchises I love, Megaman X6 and X7 comes to mind as two different flavors of bad games, several Castlevania entries too and to stay on topic with the subject of this review : Ys IV Mask of The Sun and Ys III Wanderers From Ys are legitimately worse games than CS4 !
To me there’s layers to bad video games and to quote Yahtzee from the Escapist : It’s not the bad games that are the worst to review, it’s the bland ones ! The one that just takes ideas from several places and mish-mash them into a semi-functional but seemingly indistinguishable mess, the kind of games that makes you feel “nothing” at the end of the day and might make you hate the medium or genre they came from more by their sheer laziness and incompetence !
I usually love playing bad games because to me every experience is worth having, I have a lot of fondness for bad videogames. I don’t think people make bad games on purpose and you can learn a lot about your own taste or learn a lot more about what not to do when making a game from playing bad video games ! Bad games have cultural values because you can teach about their failures at game design school to teach younger devs what not to do when making a video game ! I sometimes think that some bad games have some “soul” to them, like the developers made it as a labor of love and not a labor of pure exploitation to get a paycheck at the end of the month. So yeah ! I love bad games ! Some pure exquisite kusoge of the highest level !
But even amongst BAD and I mean BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD games, Cold Steel IV, heck even more so the entire Cold Steel saga stands out in the sea of forgettable throwaway garbage that the industry pulls out on a monthly basis thanks in no small part to being part of a larger series and in doing so and failing completely at everything it does retroactively ruin my enjoyment of the entire Trails franchise up to that point ! And you may think that my little KH3 tangent at the start was to pad out time ! Well, you’re right !
But it wouldn’t be a Trails game without a copious dose of pointless padding now wouldn’t it ? (and don’t worry, it’s not just an elaborated meta joke, there’s a lot more in common between KH3 and Cold Steel IV than meets the eyes)
This time I won’t make you sit through an entire slew of paragraphs talking about the gameplay this time around because unsurprisingly, it hasn’t changed, like at all. Aside from being able to stack 2 additional BP on top of the 5 you could already stack in previous games, there is no change to the battle system this time around. That doesn’t mean that CS4 improves on the battle system, the enemy design, the boss design or god forbid the exploration but we’ll talk in due time when I’d talk about how basic the entire thing is and how it ruined my enjoyment of the entire experience.
On a more minor notes, there’s a few QoL improvements here and there especially when it comes to NPC, now every new dialogues are notified by a “NEW” next to the area you want to quick travel to which makes it easier to do an NPC sweep but also makes it harder to ignore that part of the game if you’re autistic like me and can’t stand looking at unfinished business.
In fact, unlike most games in the series, I actually did manage to get a full rank of AP point this time around by just fucking around completing side quest ! Was that necessary ? No, did it make my suffering last for longer than necessary ? Absolutely ! But I’m glad that at least in midst of all of the game’s issues, there are smudges of brilliance thrown here and there and I’d say that not making the 100% completion requirement as cryptic and obtuse as the other titles for no reasons (especially due to the needlessly padded out nature of these games preventing me from ever wanting to replay any of them, even the ones I did enjoy) was for once something that I did appreciate (now as for the actual quality of the side content, we’ll talk about that in a minute).
The game starts on probably the only good part of the game until a long while, the game teases you on being good by bringing back the playable cast members of the previous two arcs and even opens up by a shot of Estelle brand new PS4 HD Graphics ass, showing that the priorities and demographic of this game changed a lot since the last time Estelle was relevant in anything and was actually a respectfully written female character unlike most of the cast of this mess of an arc.
This section which seemingly serves as a tutorial to the game mechanics (you know, the one’s that hasn’t changed from the previous game) will let you play as husks of your favorite characters pretending to have any relevance into this game plot, a running theme throughout the entire thing but we’ll get to that later down the line (and I’ve been saying this a lot already HUH ?). After a boss fight against two of the worst antagonist ever written in the series, the game can actually continue
In the last episode of Rean Schwarzer epic Schwarzin adventure, our boy turned completely schizo after sniffing too much of the gnomes racist perfume infusion therefore triggering the release of said gaz throughout the entire country and activating the cheap cliffhanger protocol that’s so near and dear to Falcom’s writing team to make you play another 80-90 hours slog of a game where only 30 of said hours (assuming I’m being generous here) will be of any significance thanks to the power of cockblocking !
After this gnome endeavor from last time, our heroes got teleported to Eryn village, the hometown of Emma (the plot delivery glasses girl) and the base of operation of the ancient Hexen Clan aka the Witches aka Ancient Guardians of the world who lives like Internet hasn’t been invented yet like in the funny wizard boy book written by a notorious transphobe. It’s here that the rest of Class VII realizes that their teacher has gone missing and is stuck in some sort of gnome BDSM dungeon at least according to a few cutscenes and the deliciously edgy title screen of the game and thus they need to save him !
But how will they do it ?
Well by going through all the places you’ve already slogged and backtracked too with next to no change to the level layout of enemy types of course ! But don’t worry, you’re not just going around planting magic needles on the ground for plot reasons, you’re also doing this to find your missing friend and yes
Yes, you’ve been waiting for this one haven’t you ?
It’s time for yet another epic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onXp-Ft404E
“Final Fantasy VI Search For Your Friends Rip-Off moment™ !”
Yes because the same way CS3 was pretty much a repurposed CS1, the same goes for CS4 being a repurposed CS2 ! Because here at Falcom, we love recycling our own ideas (borrowed from several other franchises which did it miles better anyway) and running them to the ground because you bitches have no standard and will eat anything up and accept how stagnant the franchise has become by now !
So after another tutorial dungeon to re-teach you about all the mechanics you already experienced with in the prologue (I shit you not) in one of the series now titular “Tartarus rip-off which looks randomly generated but isn’t actually randomly generated” dungeon (aka : Old Schoolhouse 3 : Revenge of the Sith) you’re out in the world to plant some magic needle to find the Gnome Headquarters, repeat that in a pattern of 3 times, get one party member back and experience what’s happening to the world in the eve of a full-scale war.
I’m going to give credit where credit is due with Act 1, starting off the game without its titular main character is actually a pretty cool idea in a “passing of the torch” kind of way. Rean has always been the strongest, baddest party member in all 3 previous Cold Steel games (if you didn’t have Laura to one-shot everything and anything that is). So it creates an interesting power imbalance which forces you to play with how well NC7 plays out of one another, this balance is pretty cool and makes for some cool moments. At that point, the story hasn’t really devolved into full crayon-eater mode either so it’s alright, I do wish that Act 1 or at least the idea that the game featured NC7 as the new lead party member actually lasted for longer because Act 1 is going to be one of the last time outside of bonding events that the characters will get to shine in any particular way with some insanely cool character moment and interesting arc.
However, I must insist that this part of the game is still relatively boring to go through. Since this is the sequel to a previous Trails game, most of the environments are ripped straight out of CS3 and with little change to the environment (aside from the skybox because that’s what war does to you) and…
Ok I think I need to come clean about the padding issues in this franchise because it is genuinely going out of control the more I advance throughout the series. See the issue with Trails isn’t that the games are too long because BIG NEWS !
JRPG’s ARE LONG !
…
Right ?
No, it’s just that in been long, these games really don’t offer much in terms of actual proper game design, while there was some effort made all the way back in the Crosbell duology to mitigate those issues, in the end, Trails has never been a series known for how excellent its gameplay loop and game design was. Ultimately, the problem with Trails is a fundamental issue with how these titles are constructed and this isn’t something I only recently started complaining about in this arc, it’s something true for the entire series up to that point. That the first game is a slow burn to get yourself familiar with the world and the setting ? Fine ! But why in the absolute living fuck does that slow pacing need to translate to every title regardless of whether or not it’s an intro title or not ?
I swear to god, it’s something you start getting numb to because of how much the game tries to find ways to make the act of playing them less of a chore, by adding more quick travel points or even turbo mode or things of the sort but it never really solves the issues ! These game structures are so rigid and artificial that you can almost see and feel where they pointlessly added stuff to artificially make the game last longer ! But I can already hear you say :
“Well if these games are so long, it’s because it’s to establish the atmosphere and the worldbuilding and the” blah blah blah cut the crap already, you know it’s not true !
You know that most of these games could be cut in half and only get better for it in terms of rhythm if you only keeping in it the actual meaningful content and that’s the problem because we’ve all been fooled into thinking that it was actually necessary to be like that in order to communicate the plot better but it’s not even fucking true is it ?
Even less so when all of the actual good scenes and character moments are contained almost exclusively in the bonding events scene which for the record are both some of the best and some of the worst in the series for reasons we’ll get into later.
These games barely evolved their formula and I’m getting tired of them, as an RPG it’s also some of the milquetoast RPG structure you could ever eat. What’s your favorite dungeon in CS4 ? The series of corridors with brown bricks or the ones with blue bricks ? SO MUCH VARIETY IT’S STAGGERING !
It’s crazy how much I managed to put out and how much so many people managed to put out with how dull and boring the loop of battle, exploration, fetch quest and cutscenes gets in this series, it’s literally driving me nuts at how fucking dull this shit it, I’m going insane !
The only thing that’s carrying this series is just text since the “cutscenes” (if you wanna even call it that) have always been so fucking low budget, badly directed and animated that you might as well make it a visual novel instead and I’ve seen Visual Novels with better staging and direction than most of the dialogue scenes in this game !
God it’s also so fucking predictable, you can make a freaking drinking game out of this !
The characters are in a pinch ? Take a shot as they get their ass saved by a random third actor that was seemingly in the room this whole time and solve the situation on their own while “Sword of Biting Gale” plays !
Take another shot when the characters are done talking about their next step and a villain that was positioned on a roof or a hill was observing them menacingly saying “Nyeheheh, class VII, We’ll see about that !”
Take another shot when the progression is stopped by Rean doing another unwarranted and frankly unnecessary pep-talk friendship speech for no fucking reasons !
Ludo-Narration ? Staging ? Direction ? Not using every repetitive character trope and cheap narrative tool in the book to tell your story through what the medium can offer instead ? I never heard that shit from a freaking Falcom game ! Good god, this is the lowest of lows, you know some games have good direction, others have bad direction but Welcome to the Kiseki series where we just won’t direct our cutscenes at all…
And fuck there is so many characters now, each dialogue and cutscene take fucking forever because Billy, Eddy, Mandy and Roger all have their snarky little comment to make on the situation and often time there’s like 60 or so character on screen and they all have to say something and it’s always the driest, blandest, most unimportant piece of dialogue why did you fucking Talk Elliot Craig ? NOBODY ASKED YOUR WHITE ASS OPINION ABOUT WAR ! YOU ARE A NOTHING CHARACTER SAYING NOTHING AND I HATE YOU ! AND ALL OF OLD CLASS VII FOR THAT MATTER ! GOD WHAT A BUNCH OF BORING USELESS CUNT I SWEAR TO GOD !
Act 2 is probably where the game starts hitting the shitting fan with this !
After saving Rean, the game’s overall quality and pacing take a complete nosedive never to return. I said in the last review that if we dug deeper we might reach China ?
But holy fucking shit, we haven’t just reached China, in fact, We dug so deep that there was no more ground to dig up and we’ve now entered an alternate dimension where the laws of physics have been broken and now everything works in “Kiseki Hours” where a single hour of gameplay progress amounts to 5 IRL time and nothing freaking happened !
Act 2 is just a pure narrative void, there is nothing of note that happen in Act 2, you’re just doing a lot of fetch questing, each worst than the last and you enter pointless conflicts with characters because this game is so starved for time and content that it starts throwing boss fight against some of the most random individuals, in fact most of the setup for boss fights in this game make no sense at all. As I was playing through the game I was even wondering half of the time : “Why are we fighting this person ? It’s completely pointless ? Why are we doing this ?” and that my friend is thanks to a really useful tool the authors have come up with to artificially spawn conflicts out of the blue !
Introducing
The Curse !
The Curse is a fascinating tool of narrative design that allows the writers to do whatever the fuck they want and justify any actions any characters at any moments might take !
In the text, it is said that the curse is something that acts on the human brain and forces them to obey their deeper instinct, but what it essentially does for the most part is turn everyone evil, violent and racist for seemingly no goddamn reasons. It also make characters act in completely uncharacteristic ways so you can have a fight with them or they can fuck you over to pad out more freaking time and justify you going through another boring ass dungeon and fighting another pointless boss fight !
But in reality, the curse is whatever the writers want it to be, yes sometimes it does make people evil and racist but sometimes it can make them addicted to gambling, sometimes it can erase memories, sometimes it can make animals aggressive and turn them into demons, sometimes it can make somebody mess their paperwork or lose their key, sometimes it can make a nun break a pot, sometimes it can force a child to run head first into the nearest kidnapper, sometimes it can power-up robots and machines and most importantly of all, sometimes it can turn your jacuzzi into purple goo which is fucking terrible isn’t it ?
The curse has no rules and no consistency whatsoever, the curse is seemingly the cause and the consequences of everything in the plot ! In fact, doing the sidequests makes the curse even worse as you realize that there are no concrete rules to the curse nor are there any concrete rules to how it works, how it affects certain people and not others or even how you’re supposed to cure people from it !
Elliot will use the power of music to turn a demon into a regular horse again and it’s never brought up ever in the actual main plot ? Bro if you can just get rid of demons like that why are we still busy fighting them in the first place ? The curse can also seemingly get cured by just “talking it out” with the person who’s affected like ok sure why not but also sometimes the curse just heals… by itself ! Magically ! With no real reasons behind it ! One time there’s a little girl who forgets who the SSS is but later without any side quest or extra scenes or anything, the girl just randomly remembers who they are and it’s ???
The only consistent thing about the curse is that it only spreads across the empire and respects the state's border but they never actually give a proper explanation as to why it works like this in the first place ? Why in the absolute living goddamn fuck is an ancient demonic curse from aeons past cares about the modern state borders of some bum ass country ? Like boohoo, poor little curse, it can’t get past a silly barrier ! I thought the Sept-Terrions were supposed to transcend the rules of the mortal realms and be these super-powerful artifacts !
I mean for fuck sake, the previous Sept-Terrion was LITERALLY ABLE TO REWRITE REALITY ! The Power Creep ceiling has already been met ! You can’t make something crazier than something which literally can ignore the rules of physics and rewrite reality how they see fit ! And yet, the game will always try to pretend that the Great One and the curse is the most dangerous fucking threat to have ever existed and seemingly the reason why the entire series happened up to this point !
Oh yeah because yeah, how about that ?
How about this franchise lore and worlbuilding being completely fucking wasted in favor of shitty JRPG plot number 5840 ?
Yeah, remember the gnome shit from CS3 ? That was already pretty fucking bad wasn’t it ? Well get a kick out of this !
Every
Single
Event
In
The
Series
Was all part of some
ANCIENT
RACIST
GUNDAM
GOD
To rebuild itself and become ultra-mega powerful, Ishmelga is the name of the robot and the one who wants to bring the world to an end, with Black…. oh wait no silly, let’s make this antagonist even more of a fucking joke than he already is by making it a Dr.Jekyl and Mr Gnome situation, yes the leader of the gnome, the absolute mastermind behind everything, is just a random sockpuppet for Ishmelga ! And even Osborne is a sockpuppet for Ishmelga, but you see he did all the evil shit ever so he can STOP Ishmelga thanks to his son Rean Chad ThunderCock Schwarzer !
Remember the cool duality between Olivert and Osborne ? The whole class warfare story ? The Imperialism ?
Get the fuck out of here man, it was NEVER ABOUT ALL OF THAT !
It’s all a setup for a shitty mech battle tournament arc with the most non-existent stake possible.
None of the villains actually wants to win most of the time, you fight people that are sometimes evil, sometimes virtuous and sometimes nothing at all thanks to the curse making things more confusing
Osborne is a wet fart of a character and a complete disapointment, the guy went from a cunning manipulator to literally a bootleg Xehanort from KH3 with the exact same end goal of “doing all of this for the good of the world” which is just “stop the racism god to spread more racism”
Oh yeah, because speaking of Olivier ?
Well fuck you he’s alive, in fact everyone who died or disappeared at the end of CS3 are alive and they’re alive because GEORGE NOME actually saved them because GEORGE NOME is not all bad guys, he has good heart inside of his tiny lil gnome heart. Everyone gets revived and sometimes they even get shitty mind control masks and have chuuni names like “Red Rosweil” who is a resurrected Angelica with her memories erased but her PEDOPHILIA STILL INTACT
FUCK YEAH LET’S GO I LOVE THIS CLOWN ASS FRANCHISE !
Yeah right, let’s make all the characters make jokes about pairing minors and adult in the same franchise that has an honest to god CHILD BROTHEL SUB-PLOT ! Hey !
How about we make said CSA victim a victim of jokey funny lol super funky sexual harassment heh ?
Ah Angelica, she ain’t just a pedophile ! SHE’S OUR PEDOPHILE !
As for Olivier, well if character assassination was a sport, the guy would be a gold fucking medalist because goddamn what have they done to my man.
To be frank it’s either getting character assassinated so thoroughly that you might actually file a complaint for manslaughter or seeing all of your favorite characters come back with their personality stripped down to a mere caricature of what they once was just for empty fanservice moment that will only work on the lowest common denominator to try and make people think this game has anything of value as the “END OF SAGA” ! When in fact absolutely nothing of value is to be found here
The story is empty, the characters are empty, the themes are bland and generic, the villains are a joke and half of them don’t even want to win because of the shitty reasons they even do all of this in the first place !
Every part of the plot is an excuse to either pad out more time or to have a “cool” boss fight against some of the most random people ever that has no reason to happen
Irina, why are you evil ?
Oh you’re not evil anymore ? Ok let’s hug it out and forget about it
THIS GAME WAS WRITTEN FOR LITERAL 5 YEAR OLD
Everytime you think the story is doing something cool or half-decent, it’s canceled out by the game doing something stupid
And don’t get me started on fucking Rean
Rean, Rean, Rean, Rean…
Oh boy, you…
You fucking pointless, annoying shallow simulacrum of a character ! You are the worst of them all, I fucking despise your sorry Narou-Kei Light Novel Default Ass ever since the first game and even in this fucking game where you saw little to no actual development and even worse actually regressed just to have the same “your friends love you” magic friendship crystal thing plot from the second game !
You are everything that’s wrong with Japanese entertainment and the genre as a whole ! You’re like a pompous little snob that gets everything he wants, an harem of cute girl wanting to suck his dick at a moments noticed, a cool giant robot ready to get him out of any bad situation, some ancient cool edgy super power that often benefit you more than it nerfs you !
You’re the chosen hero of some sort of prophecy, the ultimate sacrifice and probably the sole reason why the world go round ! And yet, you ask me to feel pity for your sorry ass ? You stubbed your toe once and made it personal and now suddenly you go from shitty power fantasy guy to a relatable virtuous misunderstood hero !
YOU ARE NOTHING REAN
JUST A SHITTY LITTLE CENTRIST CUCK WITH LITTLE TO NO ACTUAL AGENCY AND NO IDEOLOGY TO CALL YOUR OWN ! YOU’RE TRYING TO FIND THE “THIRD PATH” AND WHAT EVEN IS THE THIRD PATH HUH ? WHAT IS IT ? THE THIRD PATH THROUGH ONE OF YOUR 3 ROMANCEABLE STUDENTS CUNT ? ARE YOU A DISCORD MOD REAN ? ARE YOU DONE BEING A SISCON BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY SMIDGE OF PERSONALITY THE WRITERS HAS GIVEN TO YOU ???? OH I SHOULD’VE PROBABLY ROMANCED ELISE ! YOU CERTAINLY WOULD’VE LIKED THAT YOU SACCHARINE PUPPY PERVERT !
FUCK OFF REAN
YOU ARE THE WORST
FUCK YOU !
WHY SHOULD I KNEEL TO SUCH A SHITTY CHARACTER LIKE YOU !
YOU’VE EARNED NONE OF MY SYMPATHY
YOU’VE EARNE NONE OF THOSE FUCKING DOGSHIT FRIENDSHIP SPEECH !
YOU’RE SO COOL AND SO STRONG AND MAYBE EVEN STRONGER THAN CASSIUS BUT YOUR HEART IS BROKEN WELL MAYBE YOUR ASS SHOULD’VE ALSO BEEN BROKEN BY BAITING ALL THE FUJOSHI INTO TURNING INTO CROW’S PERSONAL POWER BOTTOM ONAHOLE BECAUSE THAT’S ALL YOUR FUCKING WORTH !
YOU SHOULD’VE DIED ! OH I WISH YOU HAD DIED AND THE NORMAL ENDING WAS THE CANON ONE SO THAT YOUR FUCKING FACE WOULD NEVER FUCKING SHOW UP IN ANYTHING EVER AGAIN !
God and all of the bonding events, god what happened to this franchise man ? It used to actually be about something and now it’s all gone, it’s all a mess for dirty perverted otakus to fap to !
AND I’M A DIRTY PERVERTED OTAKU WHO FAPS TO THIS STUFF !
This game wants to be an eroge so fucking bad man and I swear to god, this game would’ve been better off dropping the pretense and have H-Scenes
The bonding events in this game are a lil more fleshed out thanks to them being the conclusion to some arcs
BUT WHY IN THE FUCK MUST IT ALMOST ALL END WITH THE VAGINA EQUIPPED INDIVIDUALS WANTING REAN’S COCK ? LIKE WOW THAT FUCKING LAURA BONDING EVENT IS SO BAD ! Rean’s all like “I wanna kms” and Laura push him against the wall AND FORCE KISS HIM
THIS GAME IS A COMEDY ! IT’S A PARODY ! IT’S NOT SERIOUS ! IT HAS NEVER BEEN SERIOUS FOR A SINGLE SECOND !
And it ruined several previous entries, because it can’t just be a shitty game on its own, it’s a shitty game that ruins the credibility and my attachment to this world ! No I don’t care what’s the deal with McBurn, he was the very definition of some 14 years old OC and his presence in the narrative is amount to nothing and you fight this guy FUCKING 11 TIMES LIKE FUCKING CHRIST AND IT’S ALWAYS THE EASIEST SHIT !
Man the ending is also a fucking mess bro what the fuck is this ! You need to collect some magic crystal in some deadass cavern so it can help you contain the racism god in your friendship crystal so you can kill him and end racism forever ISTG, I’ve seen scooby-doo episodes which are more thought out like this
Man I’ve wasted so much time on this franchise and all for this ?
And you can’t even be too mad at this because they’ve put some genuine effort sometimes, they’ve put some effort in how the story is told through the NPC points of view and everything but why should I care about Falcom’s nailing the details when they fail so fucking miserably in the things that actually matter ?
Fuck Trails man…
You guys are the scientology church of JRPG fandom
It’s all those great promises of grand epic storytelling, political writing on par with Gundam and Legend of the Galactic Heroes, an endless amount of depth and generosity and attention to detail
But all you get is disappointment, all you get for your investment is some shitty ass JRPG plot that’s borrowed from like 10 different sources that did all the things that Trails did but miles better, it’s the oatmeal of JRPG !
Cold Steel made me understand why Nintendo Youtubers don't like JRPG's
Cold Steel made me understand the POV of people who started KH with the HD collection and didn't like/get it because they never grew an autistic attachment to it when they were young
Cold Steel made me even more of a leftoid than I ACTUALLY am
Cold Steel made me trauma dump to my therapist about it
Cold Steel is my videogame on a stick that's the rival of all those AVGN rip-off
Cold Steel actually worsen my mood the more I played it
Cold Steel reminded me that anime can be cool but they can also be mad cringe
I’m done writing this review, I was going to do a serious one but get a shitty rant instead, just talking about this game puts me in a bad mood !
I don’t care if Reverie or Kuro gets better ! I don’t want to touch another one of those games for a long time if ever ! I’m not even invested anymore ! Not even ironically ! This game is a mess ! And this series is a mess !
STAY AWAY FROM THIS SERIES ! IT'S POISON IT'S ALL POISON ! THERE'S SO MUCH BETTER THINGS OUT THERE ! I SWEAR AND BEG AND CRY FUCK THIS !
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
FUCK
ASSBALLS
FUCK
Anyway…
Hop on Rance
Trails of Cold Steel 3 : The Troubles of Continuity
As I’m playing through this series and writing these reviews, I came to actually question my own sanity.
Why do I keep up with this ? “This makes no sense” I ask myself, there’s so many games out there, so many experiences that I’d rather be having than playing through these titles. Some of my friends who have followed my journey and have shown much more appreciation than me towards this franchise all told me to stop.
“You’re simply not getting it” they say, “You nitpick every aspect and don’t let the games enthrall you by its simple yet sophisticated beauty” they say, “It was never about class warfare but rather imperialism, you literally have reading comprehension issue you fat fuck” some of the more virulent people said.
And yet, here I am, still on the grind, still trying to find out the appeal of this admittedly niche RPG series made by the video game company equivalent of your local Pakistani Store Clerk selling you its finest expired bottle of room temperature sangria for you and your friends at 1am on a Tuesday. If this wasn’t apparent on the tone of my previous two reviews as well as my admittedly less vitriolic but similarly mixed reviews on other titles in the series (“Trails the 3rd” aside), I don’t particularly hold this one close to my heart and by that I mean that despite this being the 8th entry in the series, I never became a “fan” of Trails.
“Fan” is a strong word to describe my relationship to this game series. I appreciate a lot of what the series tries to establish though. The scope and ambition on such a multi-generational scale is something almost never before seen in the history of Japanese Role-Playing games. The only 2 exemple that comes to mind is the Suikoden series that I’ve mentioned countless time in my reviews (and I still advise many Trails fans who haven’t got the chance to try it out to do so expeditiously) and the Rance series that I’ve also mentioned in my previous post and which you can even get to see a review of its ninth episode on this very account (and this one is a bit touchy to fully recommend unless you are really as open-minded and shameless as myself).
But these 2 cases never really reached quasi-mainstream appeal, Suikoden is appreciated by many people in the old-school JRPG community but less so people who grew up on more modern hardware and even so, the Suikoden franchise got discontinued by its own developer Konami because they’re still in the top 3 worst gaming company in history. As for Rance, well, after 30 years of services it finally ended its run in 2018 in one finale conclusive episode that has yet to be translated (and which I’m extremely excited for) and even then the franchise had to pretty much reboot itself in the early 2000’s to reach a wider audience and recalibrate its lore (which is mostly contained outside of the games themselves).
Trails for now has existed since 2004 meaning that next year, the series will celebrate its 20th anniversary and ever since the release of the first title, they’ve pretty much been super consistent on releasing these games to the point that starting with Cold Steel 3, the games will release on an almost yearly basis.
No other JRPG series has this much potential for quasi-autistic level of brain rot. It’s also interesting to note that all of the franchise's thorough worldbuilding and lore is contained entirely within the games themselves. Each games comes with its set of NPC’s who changes dialogues for every minor advancement in the plot, there’s an almost nuclear level of attention to detail and little easter eggs to find (some of them missable through pretty cryptic conditions), entire Skyrim book size novels you can gather as collectibles in each titles to get the characters final weapons and which foreshadows events to come.
Other franchises would make you do extra-homework to get the juice out of that stuff but here all of that extra-homework is integrated into the actual gameplay loop, you don’t usually have to reach for an obscure novel or interview where the author says all elves are gay or something like this to get juicy tidbits on the world around you and it helps those games feel more lived in and fleshed out than any other setting in the history of RPG. And at the core of it all, it’s a human story, it’s called “Legends of Heroes” not because you play as heroes but because you hear about them constantly, you just play as the random little people who yes are going to save the world from impending doom but you’re never going to be on the same level as the heroes of old.
In Sky FC, all of that game is spent running around the world and hearing how much of a badass your dad is, how much good he has done for people and how inspiring such a person is and yet he’s a military general. To some he probably is a war criminal but to his people, he’s a hero and you’re just playing as his kids. It’s a very Dragon Quest V approach although that game was more thorough on one’s journey to adulthood.
And yet, I never found myself to be attached to the point of autistic obsession (and for context, I’m literally autistic, I swear I’m not just using that term as a meter for how addicting fictional crack can be) and it’s weird isn’t it ? I should be all over a series like this, I should be celebrating its ideas and hailing those games as an example for JRPG’s to follow like it seems to be the case with most of the people who play these games but for the most part I don’t and I can’t really explain myself why.
The lore and on-going mysteries of the universe are only marginally interesting to me as they are attached to some elements I’m not super crazy about (aka : Ouroboros and their “plan” more on that later). The themes the series explores can be fascinating in spurt but the actual execution always finds itself lacking and I guess most importantly it’s the general package that I find to be a tiring drag at best and a grind at worst.
Many hail these titles as hidden gems or even must-play masterpieces of the genre but I don’t see it myself and for cause, I think they’re lacking in several areas where most other RPG franchises or individual games don’t. Trails is so derivative of the trend of its different eras and not always to the series benefit. I know the JRPG genre is a big hodgepodge of mutual influences that keeps bouncing from another but that still doesn’t mean a series can’t have a solid identity on top of it all and Trails definitely has one… and then immediately abandons it to follow the next popular trends and causing the series to lose its sense of consistency.
At times, it’s hard to imagine CS1 and CS2 were either planned or thought out by the same minds who imagined the Sky or Crossbell saga and yet here we are. I guess this is also due to the fact that the series main head lead Toshihiro Kondo doesn't actually have much control or hold over the actual development of these games, perhaps due to the fact he’s too busy running the company than actually working on titles himself. So this series despite being this long sprawling tapestry of ideas that are meant to fit into one another don’t actually have anything resembling a true solid artistic vision.
And that’s what happens usually when a series goes for so long, people change, people get older, teams are reformed, priorities and aims get rethought and eventually you end up with something that divides people rather than unite them under a common front.
There’s a reason why many enduring franchises in the history of JRPG don’t usually do the whole continuity thing or when they do, it’s very sparse and almost a non-factor. It’s because titles such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Tales Of, Shin Megami Tensei always try to reinvent their wheel, proposing new settings, new universes, new lore so that everyone can jump on any titles and get a fully complete experience and also allowing new creative leads to put their spin on them without compromising the sanctity of other titles.
Yes of course, some of the game in the Final Fantasy series had sequels but most people agrees that their often times inferior and an hindrance on the original game legacy (hi collection of FF VII) but Trails is different because unlike those franchise it decides to stick to its gun and have this continuity play a big part of its development history and that means that this game series more than any other JRPG franchise need a strong vision to hold itself together.
You can say that despite me not being a fan of Trails, I’m still somewhat fascinated by its ever-growing popularity and the sheer praise all across the board the series get (even for Cold Steel believe it or not), if anything it’s fun to discuss about these games, to theorize about them, to talk about what they did wrong, what they did right. For how much vitriol I gave the first 2 Cold Steel games, they still occupied a masochistic part of my brain, I couldn’t think about anything else.
More than anything, when I dislike something beloved by many, I find myself questioning “why can’t I like this ?” Especially something like Trails that literally has almost all of the ingredients to make for the perfect blend of JRPG goodness because I really want to like Trails. I'm jealous that I can’t be a part of this cultural effervescence, being a Trails fan is like a commitment, it’s a promise, it’s like being a part of something.
This franchise somehow has put a curse in my brain that forces me to desire more, even when I know I’m going to probably end up frustrated or disappointed. If anything, the promise of Trails is a beautiful one ! It’s the promise of being a part of something bigger than yourself, something that will follow you for how much longer it wants to be, even running to the grave. It’s grand, it’s infinite, even at its worst it's presented with such confidence that you can’t help but want it to succeed and you want it to be at its best because I know it can work, I know how good these games can be when they actually try and by god… I WANT TO LIKE TRAILS AND IT FRUSTRATES ME THAT I CAN’T ! IT’S LIKE BEING A KH FAN ALL OVER AGAIN FOR ME ! IT’S A ROAD PAVED OF GOOD INTENTIONS AND FRUSTRATIONS !
Trails is like a toxic relationship, it hurts but somehow you can’t get away from it, it’s a slow acting poison that hurts your brain and every Trails fan, as cult-like as they are, feel like crypto-scammers pulling off a successful rugpull. I don’t know why I keep going with this franchise but I sure am too deep into this to back down, I should’ve probably done so years ago.
Do I think the Trails promise is fulfilled or is it a promise filled with lies and self-sabotage ?
Today, I want this review to be less of a review and more of a thought piece on my troubled yet loving relationship to this beloved series.
Because if anything, Trails of Cold Steel III finds itself in an interesting spot when it comes to the history of its own franchise and in many ways feels like a turning point that the franchise will have trouble ever coming back from.
Trails of Cold Steel III was released 3 years after the end of the previous episode, funnily enough that’s also the length of the time separating the event of CS2 to the event of that game in canon. Yes ladies and gentlemen this game is a timeskip arc much like One Piece did midway through its run. As such Trails of Cold Steel 3 had the time to actually think about ways to actually improve its formula and also its presentation and in many ways let me put it briefly, I did actually enjoy Cold Steel III more than its two predecessors at least on some of its more frivolous elements.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first, CS3 is the first game in the series to be entirely designed for home consoles, specifically the PS4, while the game isn’t winning any medals in technical prowess, the game is overall kinda pretty and has an overall nice art direction. Some people might write the entire thing off as generic anime bullshit and they’ll be right, but at least it doesn’t look like a PS Vita game with “cutscenes” that looks like a puppet show by the world's worst puppeteer. The environment design allows itself to be much more detailed and creative, most of Western Erebonia’s location are far more striking visually and more memorable as a result than any town or cities from the first 2 games and while the dungeon design can be up to discussion, I’d say the roads and the more “natural” environment definitely are more pretty to look at.
CS1/CS2 had awful direction when it comes to its many cutscenes or extended dialogue section which wasn’t helped by the absolutely colossal size of the character roster which didn’t help setting up these scenes especially with the limited budget and that problem definitely carries over in the late game of CS3 when the party is fully complete and you get an especially hilarious scene where Rean enters an hotel room followed by 14 character model slowly walking and trying to fit somewhere onto the screen. Here most of the scenes actually have proper stage direction and feel more cinematic which is what one could expect from a 3D video game from the year 2017 and is probably the results of Falcom’s experimentation on their previous title (and most successful title in their line-up) “Ys VIII : Lacrimosa of Dana”, which already significantly improved the presentation from that series.
The action segment are hype, there’s multiple camera angle and some pretty creative use of direction to convey certain feelings or emotions even during the more intimate moments and while we’re not reaching Square’s level of cinematography (this ain’t this series forte anyway) it’s definitely cool to see that Falcom is finally coming into their own to match the rest of the industry instead of falling behind as their status as a double AA studio would’ve suggested (even if the most technically impressive thing about that upgrade is the addition of bouncing physics on the ladies which were… certainly an interesting priority from the studio to say the least…). Another cool thing I could mention about the presentation is how seamless the battle transition are, previously in the series you’d be teleported to a different area entirely here Trails decide to take on the more standardly modern approach of having the battles take place directly on the field and while it doesn’t really matter from a strategic perspective (or at least very little) it’s a pretty cool thing to see and speaking of battles.
A lot of things actually changed between CS2 and CS3 when it comes to the battle system, in my review of Cold Steel 1, I’ve mentioned that while the general fluidity of the battles has improved I still felt like the game was a significant downgrade compared to the series earlier output because of how it streamlined the customisation process to an almost baffling degree making for a less fun and engaging battle system (definitely not helped by the series jump to 3D) that was easily breakable and rendered many of the series core mechanic (namely its magic system) completely obsolete. CS2 in particular was a broken mess of a game, thanks to this game being balanced around late game abilities which made most of that game an easily breakable one even by accident.
CS3’s takes a lot of the more solid elements of the battle and progression system of its two predecessors and expands on them in surprising and interesting ways. First off, the battle UI has changed from a circular menu system to something similar to Super Mario RPG or Persona 5 where each button corresponds to a menu. It needs a little getting used to after so many games of using a similar UI but the change really is welcome and greatly improves the fluidity of battle. Links and Brave points are back and better than ever. First off, Links aren’t tied to bonding points anymore and while it removes the gameplay reward of bonding events I don’t think it really matters because it’s definitely an improvement. Now links levels ups by having the characters linked to one another which was already the case in the previous two games but here it grows much faster and makes it so that pairing any characters with one another instead of just Rean a much more viable option.
But now chaining link attack to obtain brave point actually is more interesting this time around, in the previous game chaining attack had two purposes :
-Triggering passive abilities to help you in battle
-Gaining brave points that could be used to unleash a small combo attack known as “rush attack” for the price of 3 BP or an all-out attack known as a “Burst” which makes the entire attack the opposing team.
While these mechanics are still present, they’re now counterbalanced by the addition of a second use for Brave Points : Brave Orders. Brave Orders are instant buffs that can be applied for a set number of turns and stays active for the remainder of those turns and are only canceled out by the end of that order or the activation of another.
A mechanic quite reminiscent of Master Arts from Trails to Azure which sadly were not all that relevant as they were tied to the rather slow growth rate of Master Quartz in that game and were as such an entire mechanic relegated to the endgame (and even then, more so the final dungeon).
Brave Orders are a fantastic addition to the game battle system as it makes them more dynamic and offers new options to approach fights or get yourself out of tough situations and this game has plenty of those especially early on to make their usage more than necessary to bypass some of the game's tougher challenges. In fact, due to some nerf to crafts (especially support ones mostly replaced by an equivalent in Brave Order) and the addition of some brave orders encouraging that playstyle, Arts are now more relevant than they used to with some brave orders outright removing casting time or boosting magical damage output to absurd degrees. Arts were always presented as the best option to deal huge damage but because of the way CS1 and CS2 were balanced more in favor of crafts (which were plenty in that game with most of Class VII being absolute beast on that front), arts became completely irrelevant and the way the orbment system was changed as to give you less flexibility when it comes to getting spells and the available pool of spell selections, literally there was no real reason to give a shit about it.
In fact, Orbment have also been slightly touched up to go in that direction, now instead of one master quartz, each characters can equip up to two master quartz and stacking their effects to one another, you can even set another character main master quartz as its sub-MQ in order to do interesting combo builds which greatly improves the flexibility that was lost with the orbment system. Unfortunately this means a lot of Quartz who are simply giving out spells (most of the time the ones you get early on in the game) becomes complete filler as 2 MQ fully leveled Master Quartz on one character is more than enough to give you a full kit of Offensive and Support Crafts at your leisure.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean than sticking to a strict craft-centric playstyle isn’t viable (especially on normal difficulty which is how I’ve played the game) but it’s really cool to see Arts make such a comeback which also ties to a new combat mechanic in this game known as “break”. If you’ve played FFXIII (or any JRPG released since 2009 who seem to have ripped off that mechanic) then you’re probably familiar with this. On top of having a HP bar, enemies now have a break gauge that you need to deplete in order to “break” their stance which cancels out any buffs they might have, delay their turn as well as skipping it when reached and of course making them more vulnerable to attack and receive extra damages.
So now the objective is less going to be about strictly depleting the enemies HP’s and debuffing them when necessary (since debuffs unfortunately still doesn’t work on most enemies sadly) but breaking their gauge to then chain their asses with your most powerful abilities by combining all of your tools to make tons of damage and even not make them play at all (by the end of the game, it becomes quite ridiculous when some bosses just straight up did NOT attack me for the entire duration of the fight).
Some enemies such as bosses can enter a “enhanced” state that makes them stronger encouraging you to break them as fast as possible as to not get your ass kicked and it’s overall a pretty fun system that keep each encounter engaging and the customization aspect being put in the front of the battle system once again truly makes it a really fun game to play.
Unfortunately, some elements within the game kinda ruins the fun of such a system and I’m going to cite them for good measure :
The boss design in CS3 is noticeably god awful in more ways than none, almost all boss encounters have the tendency to have an instantaneous un-cancellable healing spell (which also acts as an all-encompassing stat buff) they just randomly spam whenever they feel the need to, that’s pretty much true of 80% of the numerous boss encounters in this game and it becomes so tiring that eventually most of the boss-fight will make you want to cheese them rather than engage with this rather annoying mechanic.
On the topic of boss fights, there’s definitely some weird power creep when it comes to the speed stat of most of the game major bosses, what I mean by this is that for some reasons a lot of bosses have an insane amount of speed and can just play for multiple turn without letting you play at all. One of the bosses late into the game (the Dark Dragon) on top of having annoying healing spells, also summons a shit load of minions which are all faster than you but worst than that, all of his attack are meant to delay your turn or force you into a state of slow agonizing death as your turn gets skipped because of a random status effect which forced me to just endlessly tank hit with damage resistance order and spam S-Craft for survival and it wasn’t fun at all. A non-negligible number of bosses and even regular encounters operate on the same logic, so if you’re willing to play these games, I suggest finding ways to upgrade the speed of your characters as soon as possible as it is perhaps the single most important stat in the game.
I also said the game was more focused on giving priorities to Arts but for a good chunk of the early game all the way to almost the end of the second chapter is pretty stingy when it comes to giving you Sepith the currency that allows you to upgrade your orbment and customize your characters more. This makes a lot of the early game encounter stupidly difficult because of a clear lack of option rather than because it’s a fair challenge and on the opposite side, the late game gives you an over-abundance of options thanks to the roster of playable characters growing exponentially to eventually attain a number of playable character that’s somehow higher than what Trails the 3rd gave you and that game was built around the idea of having so many party member to switch from whenever necessary.
I say this because the initial cast of characters, namely New Class VII, are overall pretty well-balanced and work in pretty good synergy with one another. Their brave orders are not too stupidly broken and encourages you to make strategic use of all of your available option but rather quickly in some segment of the story and during almost the entirety of the end-game, you will be joined by several characters most of which have absolutely stupidly unbalanced battle orders that completely nullify any semblance of challenge in the last few hours of the game sometimes to a ridiculous degree as it’s simply going against established power-gap between some characters inside of its own lore (namely McBurn who is always claimed to be the strongest baddest motherfucker around but melts when Laura equipped with the domination quartz does little as to breathe in his general direction).
On that last point, the game does mitigate that issue a little bit by having many fights where the requirement to finish them is not to beat the enemy but to reduce its health to a certain percentage. It’s kind of an artificial way to keep the consistency between gameplay and lore power-level but the game completely forgets about it by the end which makes it pointless.
Lastly and coming back from CS2 are the mech battles and this time around they’ve been vastly expanded upon than its original incarnation and as such feels like proper boss fights with actual strategy involved. For starters, Valimar isn’t the only playable unit during those fights and you can be joined by two other characters with their own mechs and their own playstyle. The game keeps a lot of the fundamentals of the original system where it’s a guessing game of touching the enemy in certain area of their body to unbalance them and chaining attacks but it’s definitely less arbitrary and with more characters on the field, some of those encounters become much more strategic and the system also incorporate the burst and break system from regular fights which makes them much more dynamic.
Most of the mech fights in these games aren’t particularly difficult tho and much like CS2 mostly serves as some sort of victory lap to conclude certain key point of the story but it’s also terribly badass to get to fight the 3 Aions from Trails to Azure in giant mech fights when they didn’t have the luxury to have those in the game they originally came from which makes for some nice bit of fanservice in a game already filled to the brim with it.
In fact let’s segway into my next segment right away and talk about CS3’s approach to storytelling, worldbuilding, exploration, game structure and fanservice and the reason why I think CS3 is both a return to form for the series who chooses to heavily embrace its legacy and an unfortunate turnover that may as well stopped me from being fully engaged with its main proposition.
CS3 is a game which is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its own arc and even the whole series as whole. On the surface CS3 is both a continuation of what came before it and some sort of a soft reboot of its own arc bouncing off of new foundation and re-focusing on establishing a new story arc within the Cold Steel Saga. What this entails is that unlike the other arcs in the series which were constructed in a “Build-Up” and a “Pay-Off” game similarly to how old PS1 games divided their stories on multiple discs due to space limitation except each disc is its own fully complete game experience.
In the case of the Sky Arc this resulted in a trilogy in which its first 2 games constituted the main bulk of the story they wanted to tell and the appropriately titled “Sky the 3rd” was an isolated story set in more or less the same premise and served more the purpose of an anthology title expanding on minor plotlines and characters from the previous two game while preparing the terrain for the future (and despite its very derivative, experimental and budget direct to dvd nature is arguably the best game in the entire series but you’ll have to check my review on Sky the 3rd that I probably plan to re-write at some point to truly understand my position). The Crossbell Arc stuck to a duology format and skipped the anthological third game in favor of a more tight and complete experience (even if Azure ends on a pretty sour note which obviously sets up the events to come in the Cold Steel series regarding Crossbell).
Cold Steel on the other hand is 4 games long and instead of being a huge game divided in 4 discs, it’s rather 2 games both with different aims and themes which are loosely connected by the throughline of Osborne Shenanigans and Rean Schwarzer doing some Rean Schwarzing. What that means is that CS3 is less a sequel to CS2 than it is a second intro game in the middle of the arc (which creates some issues down the line, more on that later).
This can be explained by 2 factors, Falcom troublesome development cycle when it comes to these titles and an excess of ambition due to the scope of the region presented in the arc (Erebonia is a much bigger territory with a long running history draught in different war, conflicts and different cults and even other races running the place, Erebonia being “the land of fairytales” as the game says at some point). Initially Cold Steel should’ve been 2 games one focusing on the eastern part and one focusing on the western part but due to the games becoming too long for their own good and Falcom having trouble transitioning to the HD era like most of their contemporaries (which hit them even bigger due to the company smaller size) both of these titles were separated into four rather than 2 and we already see how that became an issue with Cold Steel 2 which had very little to say with its plot in comparison to the actual length of the game (which was filled with countless hours of fetch questing in a quest hub in the mid-point of the game reminiscent of FF VI’s World of Ruin).
As such CS3 being an intro game feels somewhat like a repeat of CS1 both in its ambition but also its story structure. We go back to the rigid chapter based structure of CS1 and the rest of the series ditching the three act structure of CS2 and we also go back to a very similar repetitive routine of “Fetch questing at school then fetch questing on road trips” with all the same stop of “old school house, free day, practical exam day and train trip” that made CS1 a drag to play for most of its runtime but this time around CS3 has less chapter and as such less places we actually go to, you could think this would mean that the game would be much shorter and you’d be wrong because each of the game 4 main chapters last for an ungodly amount of hours and could each constitute and entire SNES RPG length by themselves and I mean that both for the better and for the worst.
So all of the ingredient were there to make this game a terribly boring and mindless experience, the mandatory spinach to go for the desert and while it is true on some level and we’ll develop that in a bit, I can say that this game at least make an actual effort in an area Cold Steel traditionally spectacularly failed at and its : The Characters.
I can’t believe I have to state this as a major improvement because you’d assume than any games of that length would at least put some effort in its characters but the first 2 Cold Steel might as well had the worst cast of characters of any RPG that I’ve played and that’s saying something when I played some pretty heavy stinker. In many RPG’s, there would usually be a few weak link or some characters you simply can’t fucking stand, for CS1 and CS2, if you go back to my review of those games, you’d realize ALL and I mean ALL of them were underwhelming, annoying or outright bad to the point that the side characters (like my sweet and beloved Towa who actually gets to play a bigger role in this game and I’m happy for it) and even the fucking NPC’s were miles more likeable and interesting despite not being the main focus of the story. It was a failure on all levels and even the sequel couldn’t elevate them to anything other than a nuisance to the story and this was also not helped by how Rean was characterized in CS2 which ended up killing all the interest I had in the character and gave me a lot of disdain for him.
In comparison New Class VII looks like they came from a completely different dimension and had a completely different narrative design philosophy behind their writing to the point that I’m actually shocked they belong into the same series as characters such as Machias or fucking Laura of all thing. Let me put it simply, I love New Class VII and I love them to bits. It's not my favorite cast in the series but they definitely reach the same standard as the SSS.
Probably in response to the criticism made to the cast of the first two entries as well as other technical difficulties of having such a large roster from the get go, the initial cast of CS3 is composed of only 4 characters (Rean included) later joined down the line by two other additional party members during the midway point of the game (and which aren’t really a surprise since they show up in the opening) for a total of 6 characters, a far cry from the 9 initial party members of the party that evolves into 11 by the second game. What that means is that unlike CS1, there’s no real necessity to separate the team for balancing issues or to procedurally introduce their gameplay style over the course of multiple hours and that’s great because that means that New Class VII can have something the original never actually had : An actual group dynamic.
New Class VII actually talk to each others, take actions together sometimes without needing Rean’s approval on everything, not all of their relationship involves sucking Rean’s dick off (well outside of Musse that is but that’s because she’s an horndog which is set on making Rean fired) and they even develop relationship with one another. There’s even a slight hint at a potential romantic pairing with Juna and Kurt and while I’m not especially crazy about it, it’s been a while in this series where romance was allowed to exist outside of the main character in the available vagina equipped individual breathing in their general direction for more than 5 seconds. The interactions between these characters are really nice, they have cool back and forth with one another, they feel like an actual group of friends and you get to actually see their relationship form and grow unlike Class VII which they tell you these characters care for each others but really they just all collectively care about Rean and that’s about it.
They also are much more nuanced and fleshed out characters than their senior counterpart, you feel like these characters weren’t just made with one word making up their entire personality this time around. Juna is definitely the outlier of the bunch in my opinion, she’s probably my favorite character in this game (probably because she’s literally Lloyd with tits and more personality woops) and some of the scenes later on definitely cements her as one of my favorite character in the series, she could’ve easily taken the protagonist seat instead of Rean and I wouldn’t have minded. The only unfortunate thing about Juna is that her entire existence is a retcon, she feels like Graggle from the Simpson when they talk about how she’s super buddies with the SSS (but really only with Randy tbf) when she wasn’t even a playable character or even an existing one in some version of the Crossbell arc. I would’ve much preferred if Juna was just an SSS super fan and a Lloyd Larper trying to find an identity of their own to carry on the fight that the SSS couldn’t continue themselves as a real passing of the torch moment, it’s a missed opportunity but she’s still an amazing character nonetheless.
The other cast members are also nothing to shy on about, Ash is a punk with attitude who constantly disobey the rules, gambles and partake in underage drinking while still having a soft spot from time to time, he’s definitely the most entertaining character and his problematic behavior contrast well with Rean’s new position as a teacher trying to set him straight and speaking of setting thing straight let’s talk about Musse.
Musse is not the most well appreciated character in the game simply because the entire schtick about her is that she’s a 16 year old temptress trying to bait Rean into the dark side of Discord moderation. Personally, I like Musse, they could’ve made a character like this much more awkward if they wanted but thankfully Rean’s newfound maturity allows him to quickly set boundaries between him and her which creates a somewhat fun dynamic of playful one sided flirting between the two that got a few chuckle out of me since Rean is trying really hard not to get fired and I just kinda like her mischievous little devil attitude which actually hides her real identity as this game version of Lelouch VI Britannia funnily enough that I’m curious to see more developed in the upcoming game (actually one of the only thing I’m excited to see developed in the sequel… because… well we’re not there yet so let’s move on).
Altina is a daughter type character, in this game you learn that her and Millium are artificial beings known as homunculus and while Milium is this peppy little girl who jumps around everywhere and feels a wide array of emotion, Altina is closer to a robot and is only learning through being around her classmate and Rean that she’s more than just a tool for war and she can be an actual human being with feeling. Some people might say that she’s just Tio again and yeah, she kinda is a K-Mart brand Tio but I don’t really mind it as much as her arc differs in some areas and since she’s also the closest character to Rean by that point, it makes for some interesting retroactive commentaries on what happened in the first two games (and probably the only relevant connective tissue from 2 to 3 aside from the late game revelations of CS2).
Lastly there’s Kurt…
Kurt…
Well…
He… exists I guess ?
Yeah sorry, I got nothing on Kurt, all JRPG parties need to have a few weak links and he’s definitely one of them. His entire deal is trying to live up to his family’s legacy and … yeah his existence makes you wish Mueller wasn’t completely shafted by the developers of the game honestly, I don’t know Kurt is kinda there, he’s inoffensive and has a few cool moment but he’s as basic as a “boy with sword” archetype could get.
BUT WHAT ABOUT REAN THOUGHT ????
In the last episode of my Kiseki journey, I said that Rean went from a character I was neutral about to one who actively grinded my gears for the entirety of CS2. I still don’t really care much about Rean, I still think he’s one of the weakest aspects of this arc and since he’s the main protagonist so much of the element in the story revolves around him. However, I will say that the premise of his character in this game at least makes him more tolerable. Rean is now a teacher at Thors Academy instead of being a student, this new position of power alongside his experience in the first two games at least makes him somewhat wiser and is a more interesting foundation for his character and the relation he’ll have with the rest of the cast.
Rean is also directly punished for his lack of decision making and spine in the original game, so he’s now pretty much tied on a leash by Osborne who uses him to do his bidding. Rean, of course being the little bitch that he is, agrees to play into the Ironbloods game and is forced to do shit against his will. That lack of agency coupled with Rean not really knowing what Osborne is cooking is going to be the main hook of CS3 and I’d say that for once it’s a good thing. Rean being forced to do stuff that he doesn’t want to do well… Actively forces him to take a position and do stuff rather than bitching about not doing stuff and bullshitting his way into acting up anyway without really thinking about the consequences of his action and when you know how Rean is when he actually HAS agency over his actions, you can’t help but think that it’s a better outcome for his character rather than the contrary.
That doesn’t stop Rean from being spectacularly flat in this game, not helped by the plot tendency not to clues us in or develop what’s the deal with him and Osborne in this episode and only playing cat and mouse with your expectations once again to make you excited for the sequel (as all of those Intro games tend to do just be gigantic teaser for their sequel anyway).
The plot also completely gave up on Rean being a nuanced character whatsoever, he seems to have troubles due to some events that happened in North Ambria and some level of trauma from losing Crow in the previous game but much like CS2 these elements are not strong enough to counterbalance how much of an absolute unstoppable giga chad he is at any occasion, in fact because Rean is an instructor now, everyone thinks he’s this real badass mf that can’t do no wrong and multiple time within the narrative are meant to show just how strong Rean has become and how heroic he is. There’s a hilariously out of touch scene rushing at super speed to stop some soldiers from killing themselves and I’m sorry but it’s so over the top and corny that it makes it impossible for me to take this seriously. I’m also pretty sure that Rean is slowly but surely repeating his self-doubt arc from the previous two game on the pretense that his traumas are lil bit more believable than killing a bear as a child but since the game never expands on what happened in North Ambria and all dialogs points out to him having done nothing wrong because god forbid Rean doing war crimes while actually killing people in war to actually affect his mind and give him PTSD, what do you think this is a mature video game ?
But I think that’s enough about talking positively about the game here, I’ve promised a thought piece, not a review and I just wanted to get most of the positives out of the way first to prove to you that while I’m on the side of the game being a general improvement over the first two Cold Steel games, it doesn’t mean that the game was a success in delivering on all of its ideas and that’s probably why CS3 won’t end up joining its brethren in keeping the series afloat and bring back the standard of quality brought by the older entries as the shadow of Falcom’s wacky game and narrative design philosophy come creeping its way back on the soup no matter how fresh the ingredients are.
CS3 has a bit of an identity crisis because it's both a sequel to what came before it but also seems to want to wipe the slate clean and build off on new foundations. We already stated how CS1 was a game designed for a new generation of players who wants to be introduced to the wonderful world of Kiseki and as such it kept most of the reference to earlier entry to a minimal and didn’t really dare involve elements from older title too much (sometimes very inelegantly, such as Ouroboros being first introduced in a throwaway line in the mid-game).
What I mean by that is that the game isn’t really a sequel to Cold Steel 1 or Cold Steel 2 and the main conflict that was the central piece of these two games (the class warfare between commoners and nobles) is only a foot-note within the story. The Civil war did happen and is mentioned at several points throughout the game but the actual main conflict which started the whole thing and how it affected the country is completely glossed over and never mentioned again. CS3 doesn’t seem to be interested in bouncing back from how poorly it handled its political themes in the original two games and it’s really strange how little CS2 and the events that transpired in that game actually matters in the plot of CS3.
Perhaps Falcom realized how poorly it handled the entire thing and seem to want to sweep all of it under the rug but it’s nonetheless very bizarre that the game never actually properly addresses the consequences of the civil war and how it could’ve probably affected the public's perception on nobility and how the noble faction got punished from such careless action and seems to only want to pretend that the very existence of the noble alliance and its action wasn’t the result of some deeply rooted systemic issue but rather the folly of a couple of bad apples within the noble faction namely Duke Cayenne and Lord Albarea (which btw, CS2 explicitly said was the bad apple of the noble alliance and the noble alliance didn’t claim and actively wanted to stop this man from committing the atrocities he committed in Celdic so that’s even fucking crazier).
Heck one of the first character you meet in CS3 is Aurelia Le Guin, a former general of the Noble Alliance and a pretty minor character from CS2 who has been appointed as the principal of the branch campus and was even said to be a major player in the annexation of North Ambria a couple of years prior to the events of the game. The game will rarely if ever explain how Aurelia never got punished for her crimes, if she still believes in the ideals of the noble alliance, if she has some resentment for Rean (she seems to have none) for stealing the glory of the alliance, none of that shit is explored, Aurelia just seems to exist to be badass and steals the character arc Laura should’ve had in this game.
Another thing that CS2 spectacularly fucked over is how it portrayed the civil war and by that I mean that it didn’t portray it at all since most of the action took place in the western region and what part of Erebonia are you visiting in this game ? Well of course, it’s the western region ! And yet, the civil war is only a passing thought, everything seems to be normal, no citizens seems to have been harmed by the situation, no citizens seems to hold resentment towards the nobles, no citizens seems to try and heal from potential traumas or loss brought forth by this seemingly pointless conflict. Absolutely none of that thing is explored even when you are actually visiting the Province who belonged to Duke Cayenne himself (remember ? The Antagonist of the previous game ?) where the only thing that seems to matter is to try and elect a new Duke Cayenne (in fact Musse later reveals herself to be Duke Cayenne’s niece like what is going on with the world ?!?!) and trying to gain the favors of the population.
This is such a bizarre turn over and seemingly makes CS2 an even bigger waste of time than it actually was since it seems to matter very little into the plot of this game. In fact the only conflicts that seems to matter for the game’s plot is the annexation of North Ambria, a war that isn’t explored or explained to you at all unless you’re reaching for an optional book found in Towa’s house and was only ever shown in an anime released 6 WHOLE DAMN YEARS after the release of Cold Steel 3 and it’s weird as shit since it seems that it was a pretty big deal. But the game does not really care and wants to start over on new foundation.
I must ask myself how did they plan out this scenario sometimes because making it so none of the important stuff from the previous 2 games actually matters into its third entry is pretty wild, you could literally be skipping CS1 and CS2 and just read a summary of them and you will have almost the same level of comprehension as someone who actually got through the games. WHAT IS GOING ON ?
A friend of mine who actually like these games (and we’re still in good contact despite his dubious taste in video games) was constantly repeating to me that I was looking at the Cold Steel arc wrong and that it really wasn’t a story about the division of social class and how these dynamics affects and changes society, but rather about the “fear of imperialism and how to act against it” which is represented by the Osborne faction. And while he’s definitely right on some level (because I don’t think CS3’s handling of this topic is particularly stellar either but I’ll develop this further down this already long essay)
You may think that maybe Falcom did this as to make this entry more accessible to newcomers who might want to start the series with this one in spite of this being the third entry in the series or to focus on the new conflict of this new sub-arc without having to deal with the dust left by their failure at delivering anything of substance for 2 whole damn games but surprisingly and that’s the whole paradox of this episode, despite wanting to act as a soft-reboot of its own arc and a potential new jumping point to the series for newcomers, this game more so than any other entry in the series hinges heavily on the series everlasting continuity and constantly referencing past events from older entry in the franchise and in fact the main conflict of the narrative this time around is definitely more focus on the lore of the franchise rather than a singular theme or even political stakes like it was the case with Azure and the first Cold Steel duology.
You see many returning faces, you get to visit places that were mentioned previously in the franchise and heck one chapter takes place entirely within a new 3D rendition of Crossbell which despite how dumb that’s going to sound made me smile despite this being just an obvious overly expanded technical flex by the developers but hell if it didn’t work on me.
These moments are also treated with the utmost respect for their legacy, at one point you visit Hamel a place where one of the most tragic event in the series happened and you get to visit the grave of Loewe the second main antagonist of Sky SC and the most memorable character from that game and its treated as this solemn quiet moment like you’ve just stepped into sacred ground and as a somber melancholic rendition of Silver Will plays over flashbacks from SC, you feel some level of faint nostalgia mixed with uncertainty as you walk towards that gravestone and it’s probably one of the best story segment in the series.
At one point, you get a boss fight with Arianrodh in a setting similar to the moment you fight her in Azure complete with the same theme song from that game and an equally high step in difficulty and it’s literally so freaking hype it’s insane.
So yeah, I think that on average, I didn’t completely loose any kind of attachment to the series continuity since literally all of these moments made me enjoy the game significantly more than its predecessors and made me happy I stuck with the series despite it all but here lies another issue of … what do you even do between these member berries moments that are obviously meant to please old time fans of the series ?
Well…
That’s something we’re going to discuss now to observe how Falcom pretty much lost control of their own ambition once again and ended a game that could’ve been the long awaited return to form the series needed into pretty much its death sentence.
Cold Steel 3 suffers from what I will refer to as “Tales of Syndrome” (and please don’t see a criticism of that franchise as I happen to have a lot of sympathy for it). Like I mentioned in my first review of CS1, “Tales of” tend to compensate a passable/mediocre story with other things such as a great combat system, some technically impressive stuff for their time (I’m still blown the fuck away by Tales of Phantasia technical flexes like what the shit) and most importantly, incredible cast of characters and amazing characterization which its “skits” system is no stranger too. Oftentimes, it’s not surprising to see a “Tales Of” story fumble near the end or heck even in the middle of it, Vesperia is an amazing game up until its last 10h or so which completely annihilate any credibility the story had left.
However, the “Tales Of” series is different in one key element : It’s standalone. It’s easier to forgive a Tales Of game for not delivering because at least it’s not going to ruin your enjoyment of other entries in the series (“Graces F” corny ass writing ain’t going to ruin how stellar “Abyss” was for exemple.) and more generally it’s not going to feel like all the hours you’ve spent playing these titles weren’t worth it. “Trails” on the other hand and especially the one puts a higher emphasis on its world building and its different geopolitical stakes. Trails will always go in excruciating detail about how almost every facet of its universe works (I mean for fuck sake, how many JRPG series will stop you to infodump you on freaking Tax laws) and as such, you expect the series to do something with all of the stuff it’s setting up and as such expect nothing but excellence from it (and with this series, excellence is always close but never reached).
You can’t just disguise yourself as Yasumi Matsuno to be Yasumi Matsuno, Cold Steel and the Trails series has a whole has a rich universe but for the most part I feel like the franchise likes to use all of that as a carrot at the end of a stick to make you keep playing rather than something that truly wants to say anything and what is a rich detailed universe if it’s wasted on shitty character trope and weak stories.
Cold Steel 3 abandons the main conflict it desperately tries to establish for over 2 games in favor of another more lore-centric conflict. Instead of Noble and Commoners, the story revolves around Ironbloods vs Ouroboros which is less risky but also not as interesting because… well… if you think about it for a second… What does the game even want to say with this conflict ?
For the first time since Trails in the Sky SC, Ouroboros take center stages in the narrative of Cold Steel 3, I’ve ranted multiple times about how I don’t care much for Ouroboros but I think in this particular case since they’re in the forefront of the narrative, I will probably make my position a little more clearer on them.
I think Ouroboros is a hindrance to the series' ability to tell intriguing and interesting stories with its universe since their very first appearance.
First introduced in Sky SC, Ouroboros has quickly been presented as the main antagonistic force of that game but the ending of SC and some elements from Sky 3rd showed that Ouroboros are not done yet and they’re here to stay. Trails in the Sky FC had probably what is in my opinion the only good villain that the series ever had : Richard. Richard’s motivations in that game were believable, understandable and worked in tandem with the kind of setting the original Trails in the Sky wanted to portray. In fact, Richard is a character that only gets better with time because all of the stuff he warned us about and the very reason why he did the things that he did pretty much became true as the series moved forward.
However, Richard’s much like many other similar villains in the series (all of varying quality : Dieter was pretty much like Richard but was robbed due to Azure’s obsession with introducing a bigger fish to raise the stakes even when those were already pretty high and it wasn’t necessary to do so) was used as a pawn for Ouroboros which were the people who helped but most importantly used and manipulated Richard to further their own agenda.
What agenda you may ask ?
Well wouldn't you like to know ? Haha…
Ouroroboros to me is a complete enigma, it’s like their very presence exist solely to make the story worse and it’s not helped that most of the lore surrounding the more supernatural aspect of the universe (and thus what the villains will eventually seek to further their goals) are sought after by them too. Ouroboros introduction in Sky SC was dubious at best, they forced the game into a repetitive sluggish structure for most of its run and their saturday morning cartoon personality which only existed to prop up other characters in your party didn’t really help. And whether or not you like Weissman, I also think it was a mistake to make him the first big shot of Organization XIII since apparently according to the game, he was a renegade to the cause and to the plan.
But what plan ? What cause ?
Well… wouldn’t you like to know ? Haha…
Ouroboros are, for lack of a better term, annoying. Falcom really wants you to think of them as this chaotic organization with people of all horizon working together towards a certain goal but then it also wants most of its members to be a free atom that can do and think whatever they want and even temporarily or permanently leave them without any consequences especially for its enforcers since the Anguis (Team Magma Admins type of beat) seems to be all obedient to their grandmaster. A lot of fans told me that I’ve always misread Ouroboros as just “mustache twirling villains” but to be frank… there’s not much elements pointing to the contrary so far in the series ? And even if they want us to think that their cause and their cause is just… maybe a hint towards that cause would help.
But Falcom refuses to let us know, Falcom will just forcefully put them inside of a game’s plot and since they’re the main antagonistic force driving the overall plot forward that means that they’re always going to be the bigger fish in the room, the only antagonist that matter because in the end any new villains no matter their motivations or how elaborate their plans are will always end up as a new pawn for Ourobozos, they’re not interesting villains to me.
Ouroboros are just cryptic and bizarre, they’re just chaotic for the sake of being chaotic. Sometimes they will help you defeat the local bad guy, sometimes they will join them, sometimes they will oppose the villain or join them when they don’t fit their agenda anymore. And it’s really hard to take them for anything but random villain of the week when that’s exactly how they behave and present themselves for most of the series only for them to make you go : “WHAT IS THE SOCIETY UP TO” and the answer always being something like….
Well… wouldn’t you like to know ?
These villains have far outstayed their welcome for me and I’m just tired of their existence and their continued influence on the franchise. It’s impossible to take any stake, any other villains seriously when they are in the middle of the arena selling you on empty promises and “mysteries” which aren’t even that interesting to begin with. In SC at least, there were personal stakes in going against them but in CS3, you only fight Ouroboros because Rean is forced to by Osborne… but other than that… this conflict is pointless and meaningless and worst of all… actually wants to tell nothing.
CS3 has the same repetitive plot structure for all of its chapters, some people say that CS3 isn’t boring because a lot of stuff happens this time around but does it really ?
You still do a lot of pointless stuff that end up accomplishing nothing not just on a micro-level but also on a macro-level. Stopping Ouroboros isn’t an inherently interesting thing to center your plot around and it feels like a distraction at best, CS3 legitimately has nothing to say and nothing interesting to either tell or make us experience with everything that we’re doing in its main plot aside from some carrots at the end of a stick based on complete “trust the plan” rhetoric that leads to more frustration and some nostalgia bait to keep old time fans from snoozing too much at everything happening here.
I don’t know why they felt that the third game in a quadrilogy must be so light in actual substance, heck making this another intro game is also kind of an ass backward narrative choice because there’s not many things left to introduce so they need to pad the story out with the same boring structure as CS1 (which feels even less justified here than it did in that game) and new characters which, yes, are more interesting but feels like a band-aid on an open wound.
And even then, this identity crisis continues, between wanting to be a fresh start and hinging on its continuity.
At some key points in the narrative, some of your old squadmates from the first two games will get you out of a tough situation and temporarily join your party. This reunion with old characters is the emotional core of some of the game's more intimate moment but it hinges heavily on you buying into Class VII as a group and as we stated in the first two games, these titles did nothing to make me care about them in the first place and when they’re put in contrast to the new characters in this game, it’s even worse because despite some dubious attempt at making them more interesting (like Gaius being a Gralsritter which is just ???), they never get any better than what they were before and continue to be a weak narrative element of the story and steal the show of characters I’d rather be playing as.
A friend of mine insisted on telling me this game is supposedly about “the fear of imperialism and how to act against it” but for a game about imperialism, the game really doesn’t seem to want to make any sort of deep thoughtful commentary on the subject or even address it heck most of the time it tries to lowball the issues in multiple ways. Osborne is said to be an expansionist but yet all of the wars he launched to annex neighboring countries have been explicitly stated to have happened without bloodshed which to me is just a strange fact to put in the forefront of the narrative. While Trails has often been afraid to kill off important characters (to the point of extreme absurdity cf : Illya in Azure) it wasn’t really afraid to portray death of civilians or even main characters committing or being the victims of atrocious crime.
But here, you have a seemingly fascist dictator who… conquers the world…pacifically … and makes decisions who… benefits most people ? And make the old nobility fold ? And reducing taxes ? And make Rean do things against his will like… stopping random terrorists from doing terrorist shit ?
Wow that man is awful… I wonder how Crossbell is doing in the ending of Azure. It looked kinda dire and… wait… what do you mean it’s doing better than it ever did on its own ? And what do you mean everything about the ending of Azure was retconned and they didn’t respect continuity just to have Randy chill in a giant robot and Tio being an important searcher ? Weren’t they supposed to be fugitives ?
Oh wait only Lloyd, KeA and … ARIOS ??? Are ?
I mean what about Rean, he seems to be pretty troubled to have lost the control of his abilities and that’s like a main theme of this new arc about him and… wait… what do you mean he just lost control of himself for 5 seconds and didn’t actually kill anyone ? Wait but… huh ?
Hey if this is a story about imperialism, maybe they’re going to finally address why we haven’t seen the emperor yet and why he let his chancellor and the nobles do a bunch of shit while he’s supposed to be ruling the country and …
Oh… you mean he read a bunch of books that predict the future and decided… not to do anything about it and just let things burn ? Because what … What do you mean ?
“There is something in Erebonia”
Oh no
…
Can you hear it ?
The trumpets of the bullshit writing apocalypse are ringing ! The deads are rising from their graves and pretend to have a secret identity, an ancient dragon is awakening out of nowhere and forces you to do a dungeon that looks like the final dungeon but will later be revealed to have nothing to do with the actual main threat of the plot… and… oh no… are these…
GNOMES ???
GNOMES…. GNOMES…. GNOMES…
Nobody’s going to read this fucking review this far so might as well just fucking lashes out. So there’s actually a third faction in this Ironbloods vs Ouroboros thing the plot has going for it and these are…
God…
The Gnomes…
So huh… the gnomes (yes the fucking gnomes, not the dwarves, not the elven, not the any potentially cooler pick for a villain faction just FUCKING GNOMES) are this MyStErIoUs faction working in the shadow of everything with their black workshop, they do all sort of cray thing like bringing people back from the dead and killing all tension and stakes in the narrative, have incredibly obvious secret identity like…
Man…
GEORGE NOME
THEY MADE THE DOINKY SPLOINKY FAT GUY FROM THE FIRST TWO GAMES A VILLAIN BUT NOT JUST A VILLAIN HE’S A GNOME AND HIS FUCKING NAME IS GEORGE NOME GET IT BECAUSE HE’S A GNOME AND HE HAS A GUN AND KILLS ANGELICA (I hope she stays dead) BECAUSE HE’S A GNOME !
BUT WAIT THAT’S NOT IT !
DING DONG
Hey ! It’s me ! Kondo-San !
You wanna come inside my clubhouse ?
KINDA KONDA KONDO-SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57oU-xqiXek
Suddenly the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse rises from the grounds and nothing starts to make sense anymore. The game lore dumps you on a bunch of shit that it already info dumped you on if you read most of the book in the game like I did so thanks… collecting these was pointless I guess. You fought a dragon ? It Does not matter there’s an eviler bigger dragon now, all the villains who've been fighting against each other start teaming up for no reason. People start switching allegiance left and right, Ash is now the secret 3rd Hamel child and HE SHOT THE EMPEROR WHAT THE HELL LET’S GO TO WAR BUT FIRST YOU GOTTA GO DOWN THE LAMEST FINAL DUNGEON IN HISTORY AND ONE-SHOTTING EVERYONE BECAUSE POWER-SCALING ? CREDIBLE THREATS ? NOT IN MY JRPG !
And…
As you enter the door to the final boss…
You prepare yourself…
For the shittiest
Most brain melting succession of events you’ve ever seen.
Put on the music : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3G5IXn0K7A&t
Ok so get this, there was a hobo looking scholar who showed up regularly so of course the guy is a villain because that’s like the 4th time they did this in this series already. His name is actually
BLACK ALBERICH CHIEF OF THE GNOMES (I’m not even kidding, that's his full name and title) and he’s also Alisa’s Seemingly Dead Father who came back from the dead OH BUT GET THIS !
This random guy who hasn’t existed in the series until this episode, he was actually the one behind EVERYTHING, that’s right EVERYTHING, he looks at the camera and tell you to your face “Hamel ? I did that shit, the Orbal shutdown ? I did that shit, EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED IN CROSSBELL AND THE CIVIL WAR ! I DID THAT SHIT”
THE GNOMES MANIPULATED EVERYONE FROM THE SHADOWS ! THEY EVEN MANIPULATED THE MASTERMINDS OUROBOROS AND OSBORNE AND ALL THE EVIL PEOPLE IN THE SERIES OH AND GUESS WHAT
REFILL YOUR POPCORN YOU’RE GONNA LOVE THIS NEXT PART
FLASH NEWS :
DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE’S NO REAL REASON FOR WAR HAPPENING ? DID YOU KNOW THAT PEOPLE AREN’T EVIL ? THEY’RE JUST DRIVEN TO DO EVIL THINGS AND KILL EACH OTHERS BECAUSE … wait what do you mean clearly established and believable reasons according to the series clearly established geopolitical stakes ?
NO SILLY ! IT’S BECAUSE OF THE CURSE !
WHAT’S THE CURSE ?
WELL IT’S A TOXIC GAZ THAT WAS FARTED BY THIS ANCIENT GUNDAM WHO ALSO MANIPULATED EVERYONE BTW AND WHICH TURN PEOPLE EVIL AND RACIST !
EVEN THE CAT TURNS RACIST ! OH NO REAN HAS TURNED INTO SUPER RACISM WHAT THE FUCK QUICK EVERYONE STOPS HIM ALSO OOMFIE IS DEAD NO CLIFFHANGER “THIS STORY IS AS DARK AS INK, SEE YOU NEXT TIME IN CS4”
COLD STEEL 3
IS A SCAM
THIS FRANCHISE
IS A SCAM
THEY SHOWED YOU IMPROVEMENTS BUT IT WAS ALL A LIE !
FUCK AND I WROTE 21 PAGES FOR WHAT
FOR THIS
OH MY GOD
This is amazing…
I…
I need to play CS4…
This is fraud writing, the kind you only see once every 15 billion years when the planet aligns !
I was supposed to have like a conclusion about how Trails doesn’t deliver on its promises and I’ve tried to approach these games in good faith but holy shit…
GNOMES
GNOMES
GNOMES
GNOMES
GNOMES
GNOMES
GNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMES
(Towa is still really cute tho)
As I’m playing through this series and writing these reviews, I came to actually question my own sanity.
Why do I keep up with this ? “This makes no sense” I ask myself, there’s so many games out there, so many experiences that I’d rather be having than playing through these titles. Some of my friends who have followed my journey and have shown much more appreciation than me towards this franchise all told me to stop.
“You’re simply not getting it” they say, “You nitpick every aspect and don’t let the games enthrall you by its simple yet sophisticated beauty” they say, “It was never about class warfare but rather imperialism, you literally have reading comprehension issue you fat fuck” some of the more virulent people said.
And yet, here I am, still on the grind, still trying to find out the appeal of this admittedly niche RPG series made by the video game company equivalent of your local Pakistani Store Clerk selling you its finest expired bottle of room temperature sangria for you and your friends at 1am on a Tuesday. If this wasn’t apparent on the tone of my previous two reviews as well as my admittedly less vitriolic but similarly mixed reviews on other titles in the series (“Trails the 3rd” aside), I don’t particularly hold this one close to my heart and by that I mean that despite this being the 8th entry in the series, I never became a “fan” of Trails.
“Fan” is a strong word to describe my relationship to this game series. I appreciate a lot of what the series tries to establish though. The scope and ambition on such a multi-generational scale is something almost never before seen in the history of Japanese Role-Playing games. The only 2 exemple that comes to mind is the Suikoden series that I’ve mentioned countless time in my reviews (and I still advise many Trails fans who haven’t got the chance to try it out to do so expeditiously) and the Rance series that I’ve also mentioned in my previous post and which you can even get to see a review of its ninth episode on this very account (and this one is a bit touchy to fully recommend unless you are really as open-minded and shameless as myself).
But these 2 cases never really reached quasi-mainstream appeal, Suikoden is appreciated by many people in the old-school JRPG community but less so people who grew up on more modern hardware and even so, the Suikoden franchise got discontinued by its own developer Konami because they’re still in the top 3 worst gaming company in history. As for Rance, well, after 30 years of services it finally ended its run in 2018 in one finale conclusive episode that has yet to be translated (and which I’m extremely excited for) and even then the franchise had to pretty much reboot itself in the early 2000’s to reach a wider audience and recalibrate its lore (which is mostly contained outside of the games themselves).
Trails for now has existed since 2004 meaning that next year, the series will celebrate its 20th anniversary and ever since the release of the first title, they’ve pretty much been super consistent on releasing these games to the point that starting with Cold Steel 3, the games will release on an almost yearly basis.
No other JRPG series has this much potential for quasi-autistic level of brain rot. It’s also interesting to note that all of the franchise's thorough worldbuilding and lore is contained entirely within the games themselves. Each games comes with its set of NPC’s who changes dialogues for every minor advancement in the plot, there’s an almost nuclear level of attention to detail and little easter eggs to find (some of them missable through pretty cryptic conditions), entire Skyrim book size novels you can gather as collectibles in each titles to get the characters final weapons and which foreshadows events to come.
Other franchises would make you do extra-homework to get the juice out of that stuff but here all of that extra-homework is integrated into the actual gameplay loop, you don’t usually have to reach for an obscure novel or interview where the author says all elves are gay or something like this to get juicy tidbits on the world around you and it helps those games feel more lived in and fleshed out than any other setting in the history of RPG. And at the core of it all, it’s a human story, it’s called “Legends of Heroes” not because you play as heroes but because you hear about them constantly, you just play as the random little people who yes are going to save the world from impending doom but you’re never going to be on the same level as the heroes of old.
In Sky FC, all of that game is spent running around the world and hearing how much of a badass your dad is, how much good he has done for people and how inspiring such a person is and yet he’s a military general. To some he probably is a war criminal but to his people, he’s a hero and you’re just playing as his kids. It’s a very Dragon Quest V approach although that game was more thorough on one’s journey to adulthood.
And yet, I never found myself to be attached to the point of autistic obsession (and for context, I’m literally autistic, I swear I’m not just using that term as a meter for how addicting fictional crack can be) and it’s weird isn’t it ? I should be all over a series like this, I should be celebrating its ideas and hailing those games as an example for JRPG’s to follow like it seems to be the case with most of the people who play these games but for the most part I don’t and I can’t really explain myself why.
The lore and on-going mysteries of the universe are only marginally interesting to me as they are attached to some elements I’m not super crazy about (aka : Ouroboros and their “plan” more on that later). The themes the series explores can be fascinating in spurt but the actual execution always finds itself lacking and I guess most importantly it’s the general package that I find to be a tiring drag at best and a grind at worst.
Many hail these titles as hidden gems or even must-play masterpieces of the genre but I don’t see it myself and for cause, I think they’re lacking in several areas where most other RPG franchises or individual games don’t. Trails is so derivative of the trend of its different eras and not always to the series benefit. I know the JRPG genre is a big hodgepodge of mutual influences that keeps bouncing from another but that still doesn’t mean a series can’t have a solid identity on top of it all and Trails definitely has one… and then immediately abandons it to follow the next popular trends and causing the series to lose its sense of consistency.
At times, it’s hard to imagine CS1 and CS2 were either planned or thought out by the same minds who imagined the Sky or Crossbell saga and yet here we are. I guess this is also due to the fact that the series main head lead Toshihiro Kondo doesn't actually have much control or hold over the actual development of these games, perhaps due to the fact he’s too busy running the company than actually working on titles himself. So this series despite being this long sprawling tapestry of ideas that are meant to fit into one another don’t actually have anything resembling a true solid artistic vision.
And that’s what happens usually when a series goes for so long, people change, people get older, teams are reformed, priorities and aims get rethought and eventually you end up with something that divides people rather than unite them under a common front.
There’s a reason why many enduring franchises in the history of JRPG don’t usually do the whole continuity thing or when they do, it’s very sparse and almost a non-factor. It’s because titles such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Tales Of, Shin Megami Tensei always try to reinvent their wheel, proposing new settings, new universes, new lore so that everyone can jump on any titles and get a fully complete experience and also allowing new creative leads to put their spin on them without compromising the sanctity of other titles.
Yes of course, some of the game in the Final Fantasy series had sequels but most people agrees that their often times inferior and an hindrance on the original game legacy (hi collection of FF VII) but Trails is different because unlike those franchise it decides to stick to its gun and have this continuity play a big part of its development history and that means that this game series more than any other JRPG franchise need a strong vision to hold itself together.
You can say that despite me not being a fan of Trails, I’m still somewhat fascinated by its ever-growing popularity and the sheer praise all across the board the series get (even for Cold Steel believe it or not), if anything it’s fun to discuss about these games, to theorize about them, to talk about what they did wrong, what they did right. For how much vitriol I gave the first 2 Cold Steel games, they still occupied a masochistic part of my brain, I couldn’t think about anything else.
More than anything, when I dislike something beloved by many, I find myself questioning “why can’t I like this ?” Especially something like Trails that literally has almost all of the ingredients to make for the perfect blend of JRPG goodness because I really want to like Trails. I'm jealous that I can’t be a part of this cultural effervescence, being a Trails fan is like a commitment, it’s a promise, it’s like being a part of something.
This franchise somehow has put a curse in my brain that forces me to desire more, even when I know I’m going to probably end up frustrated or disappointed. If anything, the promise of Trails is a beautiful one ! It’s the promise of being a part of something bigger than yourself, something that will follow you for how much longer it wants to be, even running to the grave. It’s grand, it’s infinite, even at its worst it's presented with such confidence that you can’t help but want it to succeed and you want it to be at its best because I know it can work, I know how good these games can be when they actually try and by god… I WANT TO LIKE TRAILS AND IT FRUSTRATES ME THAT I CAN’T ! IT’S LIKE BEING A KH FAN ALL OVER AGAIN FOR ME ! IT’S A ROAD PAVED OF GOOD INTENTIONS AND FRUSTRATIONS !
Trails is like a toxic relationship, it hurts but somehow you can’t get away from it, it’s a slow acting poison that hurts your brain and every Trails fan, as cult-like as they are, feel like crypto-scammers pulling off a successful rugpull. I don’t know why I keep going with this franchise but I sure am too deep into this to back down, I should’ve probably done so years ago.
Do I think the Trails promise is fulfilled or is it a promise filled with lies and self-sabotage ?
Today, I want this review to be less of a review and more of a thought piece on my troubled yet loving relationship to this beloved series.
Because if anything, Trails of Cold Steel III finds itself in an interesting spot when it comes to the history of its own franchise and in many ways feels like a turning point that the franchise will have trouble ever coming back from.
Trails of Cold Steel III was released 3 years after the end of the previous episode, funnily enough that’s also the length of the time separating the event of CS2 to the event of that game in canon. Yes ladies and gentlemen this game is a timeskip arc much like One Piece did midway through its run. As such Trails of Cold Steel 3 had the time to actually think about ways to actually improve its formula and also its presentation and in many ways let me put it briefly, I did actually enjoy Cold Steel III more than its two predecessors at least on some of its more frivolous elements.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first, CS3 is the first game in the series to be entirely designed for home consoles, specifically the PS4, while the game isn’t winning any medals in technical prowess, the game is overall kinda pretty and has an overall nice art direction. Some people might write the entire thing off as generic anime bullshit and they’ll be right, but at least it doesn’t look like a PS Vita game with “cutscenes” that looks like a puppet show by the world's worst puppeteer. The environment design allows itself to be much more detailed and creative, most of Western Erebonia’s location are far more striking visually and more memorable as a result than any town or cities from the first 2 games and while the dungeon design can be up to discussion, I’d say the roads and the more “natural” environment definitely are more pretty to look at.
CS1/CS2 had awful direction when it comes to its many cutscenes or extended dialogue section which wasn’t helped by the absolutely colossal size of the character roster which didn’t help setting up these scenes especially with the limited budget and that problem definitely carries over in the late game of CS3 when the party is fully complete and you get an especially hilarious scene where Rean enters an hotel room followed by 14 character model slowly walking and trying to fit somewhere onto the screen. Here most of the scenes actually have proper stage direction and feel more cinematic which is what one could expect from a 3D video game from the year 2017 and is probably the results of Falcom’s experimentation on their previous title (and most successful title in their line-up) “Ys VIII : Lacrimosa of Dana”, which already significantly improved the presentation from that series.
The action segment are hype, there’s multiple camera angle and some pretty creative use of direction to convey certain feelings or emotions even during the more intimate moments and while we’re not reaching Square’s level of cinematography (this ain’t this series forte anyway) it’s definitely cool to see that Falcom is finally coming into their own to match the rest of the industry instead of falling behind as their status as a double AA studio would’ve suggested (even if the most technically impressive thing about that upgrade is the addition of bouncing physics on the ladies which were… certainly an interesting priority from the studio to say the least…). Another cool thing I could mention about the presentation is how seamless the battle transition are, previously in the series you’d be teleported to a different area entirely here Trails decide to take on the more standardly modern approach of having the battles take place directly on the field and while it doesn’t really matter from a strategic perspective (or at least very little) it’s a pretty cool thing to see and speaking of battles.
A lot of things actually changed between CS2 and CS3 when it comes to the battle system, in my review of Cold Steel 1, I’ve mentioned that while the general fluidity of the battles has improved I still felt like the game was a significant downgrade compared to the series earlier output because of how it streamlined the customisation process to an almost baffling degree making for a less fun and engaging battle system (definitely not helped by the series jump to 3D) that was easily breakable and rendered many of the series core mechanic (namely its magic system) completely obsolete. CS2 in particular was a broken mess of a game, thanks to this game being balanced around late game abilities which made most of that game an easily breakable one even by accident.
CS3’s takes a lot of the more solid elements of the battle and progression system of its two predecessors and expands on them in surprising and interesting ways. First off, the battle UI has changed from a circular menu system to something similar to Super Mario RPG or Persona 5 where each button corresponds to a menu. It needs a little getting used to after so many games of using a similar UI but the change really is welcome and greatly improves the fluidity of battle. Links and Brave points are back and better than ever. First off, Links aren’t tied to bonding points anymore and while it removes the gameplay reward of bonding events I don’t think it really matters because it’s definitely an improvement. Now links levels ups by having the characters linked to one another which was already the case in the previous two games but here it grows much faster and makes it so that pairing any characters with one another instead of just Rean a much more viable option.
But now chaining link attack to obtain brave point actually is more interesting this time around, in the previous game chaining attack had two purposes :
-Triggering passive abilities to help you in battle
-Gaining brave points that could be used to unleash a small combo attack known as “rush attack” for the price of 3 BP or an all-out attack known as a “Burst” which makes the entire attack the opposing team.
While these mechanics are still present, they’re now counterbalanced by the addition of a second use for Brave Points : Brave Orders. Brave Orders are instant buffs that can be applied for a set number of turns and stays active for the remainder of those turns and are only canceled out by the end of that order or the activation of another.
A mechanic quite reminiscent of Master Arts from Trails to Azure which sadly were not all that relevant as they were tied to the rather slow growth rate of Master Quartz in that game and were as such an entire mechanic relegated to the endgame (and even then, more so the final dungeon).
Brave Orders are a fantastic addition to the game battle system as it makes them more dynamic and offers new options to approach fights or get yourself out of tough situations and this game has plenty of those especially early on to make their usage more than necessary to bypass some of the game's tougher challenges. In fact, due to some nerf to crafts (especially support ones mostly replaced by an equivalent in Brave Order) and the addition of some brave orders encouraging that playstyle, Arts are now more relevant than they used to with some brave orders outright removing casting time or boosting magical damage output to absurd degrees. Arts were always presented as the best option to deal huge damage but because of the way CS1 and CS2 were balanced more in favor of crafts (which were plenty in that game with most of Class VII being absolute beast on that front), arts became completely irrelevant and the way the orbment system was changed as to give you less flexibility when it comes to getting spells and the available pool of spell selections, literally there was no real reason to give a shit about it.
In fact, Orbment have also been slightly touched up to go in that direction, now instead of one master quartz, each characters can equip up to two master quartz and stacking their effects to one another, you can even set another character main master quartz as its sub-MQ in order to do interesting combo builds which greatly improves the flexibility that was lost with the orbment system. Unfortunately this means a lot of Quartz who are simply giving out spells (most of the time the ones you get early on in the game) becomes complete filler as 2 MQ fully leveled Master Quartz on one character is more than enough to give you a full kit of Offensive and Support Crafts at your leisure.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean than sticking to a strict craft-centric playstyle isn’t viable (especially on normal difficulty which is how I’ve played the game) but it’s really cool to see Arts make such a comeback which also ties to a new combat mechanic in this game known as “break”. If you’ve played FFXIII (or any JRPG released since 2009 who seem to have ripped off that mechanic) then you’re probably familiar with this. On top of having a HP bar, enemies now have a break gauge that you need to deplete in order to “break” their stance which cancels out any buffs they might have, delay their turn as well as skipping it when reached and of course making them more vulnerable to attack and receive extra damages.
So now the objective is less going to be about strictly depleting the enemies HP’s and debuffing them when necessary (since debuffs unfortunately still doesn’t work on most enemies sadly) but breaking their gauge to then chain their asses with your most powerful abilities by combining all of your tools to make tons of damage and even not make them play at all (by the end of the game, it becomes quite ridiculous when some bosses just straight up did NOT attack me for the entire duration of the fight).
Some enemies such as bosses can enter a “enhanced” state that makes them stronger encouraging you to break them as fast as possible as to not get your ass kicked and it’s overall a pretty fun system that keep each encounter engaging and the customization aspect being put in the front of the battle system once again truly makes it a really fun game to play.
Unfortunately, some elements within the game kinda ruins the fun of such a system and I’m going to cite them for good measure :
The boss design in CS3 is noticeably god awful in more ways than none, almost all boss encounters have the tendency to have an instantaneous un-cancellable healing spell (which also acts as an all-encompassing stat buff) they just randomly spam whenever they feel the need to, that’s pretty much true of 80% of the numerous boss encounters in this game and it becomes so tiring that eventually most of the boss-fight will make you want to cheese them rather than engage with this rather annoying mechanic.
On the topic of boss fights, there’s definitely some weird power creep when it comes to the speed stat of most of the game major bosses, what I mean by this is that for some reasons a lot of bosses have an insane amount of speed and can just play for multiple turn without letting you play at all. One of the bosses late into the game (the Dark Dragon) on top of having annoying healing spells, also summons a shit load of minions which are all faster than you but worst than that, all of his attack are meant to delay your turn or force you into a state of slow agonizing death as your turn gets skipped because of a random status effect which forced me to just endlessly tank hit with damage resistance order and spam S-Craft for survival and it wasn’t fun at all. A non-negligible number of bosses and even regular encounters operate on the same logic, so if you’re willing to play these games, I suggest finding ways to upgrade the speed of your characters as soon as possible as it is perhaps the single most important stat in the game.
I also said the game was more focused on giving priorities to Arts but for a good chunk of the early game all the way to almost the end of the second chapter is pretty stingy when it comes to giving you Sepith the currency that allows you to upgrade your orbment and customize your characters more. This makes a lot of the early game encounter stupidly difficult because of a clear lack of option rather than because it’s a fair challenge and on the opposite side, the late game gives you an over-abundance of options thanks to the roster of playable characters growing exponentially to eventually attain a number of playable character that’s somehow higher than what Trails the 3rd gave you and that game was built around the idea of having so many party member to switch from whenever necessary.
I say this because the initial cast of characters, namely New Class VII, are overall pretty well-balanced and work in pretty good synergy with one another. Their brave orders are not too stupidly broken and encourages you to make strategic use of all of your available option but rather quickly in some segment of the story and during almost the entirety of the end-game, you will be joined by several characters most of which have absolutely stupidly unbalanced battle orders that completely nullify any semblance of challenge in the last few hours of the game sometimes to a ridiculous degree as it’s simply going against established power-gap between some characters inside of its own lore (namely McBurn who is always claimed to be the strongest baddest motherfucker around but melts when Laura equipped with the domination quartz does little as to breathe in his general direction).
On that last point, the game does mitigate that issue a little bit by having many fights where the requirement to finish them is not to beat the enemy but to reduce its health to a certain percentage. It’s kind of an artificial way to keep the consistency between gameplay and lore power-level but the game completely forgets about it by the end which makes it pointless.
Lastly and coming back from CS2 are the mech battles and this time around they’ve been vastly expanded upon than its original incarnation and as such feels like proper boss fights with actual strategy involved. For starters, Valimar isn’t the only playable unit during those fights and you can be joined by two other characters with their own mechs and their own playstyle. The game keeps a lot of the fundamentals of the original system where it’s a guessing game of touching the enemy in certain area of their body to unbalance them and chaining attacks but it’s definitely less arbitrary and with more characters on the field, some of those encounters become much more strategic and the system also incorporate the burst and break system from regular fights which makes them much more dynamic.
Most of the mech fights in these games aren’t particularly difficult tho and much like CS2 mostly serves as some sort of victory lap to conclude certain key point of the story but it’s also terribly badass to get to fight the 3 Aions from Trails to Azure in giant mech fights when they didn’t have the luxury to have those in the game they originally came from which makes for some nice bit of fanservice in a game already filled to the brim with it.
In fact let’s segway into my next segment right away and talk about CS3’s approach to storytelling, worldbuilding, exploration, game structure and fanservice and the reason why I think CS3 is both a return to form for the series who chooses to heavily embrace its legacy and an unfortunate turnover that may as well stopped me from being fully engaged with its main proposition.
CS3 is a game which is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to its own arc and even the whole series as whole. On the surface CS3 is both a continuation of what came before it and some sort of a soft reboot of its own arc bouncing off of new foundation and re-focusing on establishing a new story arc within the Cold Steel Saga. What this entails is that unlike the other arcs in the series which were constructed in a “Build-Up” and a “Pay-Off” game similarly to how old PS1 games divided their stories on multiple discs due to space limitation except each disc is its own fully complete game experience.
In the case of the Sky Arc this resulted in a trilogy in which its first 2 games constituted the main bulk of the story they wanted to tell and the appropriately titled “Sky the 3rd” was an isolated story set in more or less the same premise and served more the purpose of an anthology title expanding on minor plotlines and characters from the previous two game while preparing the terrain for the future (and despite its very derivative, experimental and budget direct to dvd nature is arguably the best game in the entire series but you’ll have to check my review on Sky the 3rd that I probably plan to re-write at some point to truly understand my position). The Crossbell Arc stuck to a duology format and skipped the anthological third game in favor of a more tight and complete experience (even if Azure ends on a pretty sour note which obviously sets up the events to come in the Cold Steel series regarding Crossbell).
Cold Steel on the other hand is 4 games long and instead of being a huge game divided in 4 discs, it’s rather 2 games both with different aims and themes which are loosely connected by the throughline of Osborne Shenanigans and Rean Schwarzer doing some Rean Schwarzing. What that means is that CS3 is less a sequel to CS2 than it is a second intro game in the middle of the arc (which creates some issues down the line, more on that later).
This can be explained by 2 factors, Falcom troublesome development cycle when it comes to these titles and an excess of ambition due to the scope of the region presented in the arc (Erebonia is a much bigger territory with a long running history draught in different war, conflicts and different cults and even other races running the place, Erebonia being “the land of fairytales” as the game says at some point). Initially Cold Steel should’ve been 2 games one focusing on the eastern part and one focusing on the western part but due to the games becoming too long for their own good and Falcom having trouble transitioning to the HD era like most of their contemporaries (which hit them even bigger due to the company smaller size) both of these titles were separated into four rather than 2 and we already see how that became an issue with Cold Steel 2 which had very little to say with its plot in comparison to the actual length of the game (which was filled with countless hours of fetch questing in a quest hub in the mid-point of the game reminiscent of FF VI’s World of Ruin).
As such CS3 being an intro game feels somewhat like a repeat of CS1 both in its ambition but also its story structure. We go back to the rigid chapter based structure of CS1 and the rest of the series ditching the three act structure of CS2 and we also go back to a very similar repetitive routine of “Fetch questing at school then fetch questing on road trips” with all the same stop of “old school house, free day, practical exam day and train trip” that made CS1 a drag to play for most of its runtime but this time around CS3 has less chapter and as such less places we actually go to, you could think this would mean that the game would be much shorter and you’d be wrong because each of the game 4 main chapters last for an ungodly amount of hours and could each constitute and entire SNES RPG length by themselves and I mean that both for the better and for the worst.
So all of the ingredient were there to make this game a terribly boring and mindless experience, the mandatory spinach to go for the desert and while it is true on some level and we’ll develop that in a bit, I can say that this game at least make an actual effort in an area Cold Steel traditionally spectacularly failed at and its : The Characters.
I can’t believe I have to state this as a major improvement because you’d assume than any games of that length would at least put some effort in its characters but the first 2 Cold Steel might as well had the worst cast of characters of any RPG that I’ve played and that’s saying something when I played some pretty heavy stinker. In many RPG’s, there would usually be a few weak link or some characters you simply can’t fucking stand, for CS1 and CS2, if you go back to my review of those games, you’d realize ALL and I mean ALL of them were underwhelming, annoying or outright bad to the point that the side characters (like my sweet and beloved Towa who actually gets to play a bigger role in this game and I’m happy for it) and even the fucking NPC’s were miles more likeable and interesting despite not being the main focus of the story. It was a failure on all levels and even the sequel couldn’t elevate them to anything other than a nuisance to the story and this was also not helped by how Rean was characterized in CS2 which ended up killing all the interest I had in the character and gave me a lot of disdain for him.
In comparison New Class VII looks like they came from a completely different dimension and had a completely different narrative design philosophy behind their writing to the point that I’m actually shocked they belong into the same series as characters such as Machias or fucking Laura of all thing. Let me put it simply, I love New Class VII and I love them to bits. It's not my favorite cast in the series but they definitely reach the same standard as the SSS.
Probably in response to the criticism made to the cast of the first two entries as well as other technical difficulties of having such a large roster from the get go, the initial cast of CS3 is composed of only 4 characters (Rean included) later joined down the line by two other additional party members during the midway point of the game (and which aren’t really a surprise since they show up in the opening) for a total of 6 characters, a far cry from the 9 initial party members of the party that evolves into 11 by the second game. What that means is that unlike CS1, there’s no real necessity to separate the team for balancing issues or to procedurally introduce their gameplay style over the course of multiple hours and that’s great because that means that New Class VII can have something the original never actually had : An actual group dynamic.
New Class VII actually talk to each others, take actions together sometimes without needing Rean’s approval on everything, not all of their relationship involves sucking Rean’s dick off (well outside of Musse that is but that’s because she’s an horndog which is set on making Rean fired) and they even develop relationship with one another. There’s even a slight hint at a potential romantic pairing with Juna and Kurt and while I’m not especially crazy about it, it’s been a while in this series where romance was allowed to exist outside of the main character in the available vagina equipped individual breathing in their general direction for more than 5 seconds. The interactions between these characters are really nice, they have cool back and forth with one another, they feel like an actual group of friends and you get to actually see their relationship form and grow unlike Class VII which they tell you these characters care for each others but really they just all collectively care about Rean and that’s about it.
They also are much more nuanced and fleshed out characters than their senior counterpart, you feel like these characters weren’t just made with one word making up their entire personality this time around. Juna is definitely the outlier of the bunch in my opinion, she’s probably my favorite character in this game (probably because she’s literally Lloyd with tits and more personality woops) and some of the scenes later on definitely cements her as one of my favorite character in the series, she could’ve easily taken the protagonist seat instead of Rean and I wouldn’t have minded. The only unfortunate thing about Juna is that her entire existence is a retcon, she feels like Graggle from the Simpson when they talk about how she’s super buddies with the SSS (but really only with Randy tbf) when she wasn’t even a playable character or even an existing one in some version of the Crossbell arc. I would’ve much preferred if Juna was just an SSS super fan and a Lloyd Larper trying to find an identity of their own to carry on the fight that the SSS couldn’t continue themselves as a real passing of the torch moment, it’s a missed opportunity but she’s still an amazing character nonetheless.
The other cast members are also nothing to shy on about, Ash is a punk with attitude who constantly disobey the rules, gambles and partake in underage drinking while still having a soft spot from time to time, he’s definitely the most entertaining character and his problematic behavior contrast well with Rean’s new position as a teacher trying to set him straight and speaking of setting thing straight let’s talk about Musse.
Musse is not the most well appreciated character in the game simply because the entire schtick about her is that she’s a 16 year old temptress trying to bait Rean into the dark side of Discord moderation. Personally, I like Musse, they could’ve made a character like this much more awkward if they wanted but thankfully Rean’s newfound maturity allows him to quickly set boundaries between him and her which creates a somewhat fun dynamic of playful one sided flirting between the two that got a few chuckle out of me since Rean is trying really hard not to get fired and I just kinda like her mischievous little devil attitude which actually hides her real identity as this game version of Lelouch VI Britannia funnily enough that I’m curious to see more developed in the upcoming game (actually one of the only thing I’m excited to see developed in the sequel… because… well we’re not there yet so let’s move on).
Altina is a daughter type character, in this game you learn that her and Millium are artificial beings known as homunculus and while Milium is this peppy little girl who jumps around everywhere and feels a wide array of emotion, Altina is closer to a robot and is only learning through being around her classmate and Rean that she’s more than just a tool for war and she can be an actual human being with feeling. Some people might say that she’s just Tio again and yeah, she kinda is a K-Mart brand Tio but I don’t really mind it as much as her arc differs in some areas and since she’s also the closest character to Rean by that point, it makes for some interesting retroactive commentaries on what happened in the first two games (and probably the only relevant connective tissue from 2 to 3 aside from the late game revelations of CS2).
Lastly there’s Kurt…
Kurt…
Well…
He… exists I guess ?
Yeah sorry, I got nothing on Kurt, all JRPG parties need to have a few weak links and he’s definitely one of them. His entire deal is trying to live up to his family’s legacy and … yeah his existence makes you wish Mueller wasn’t completely shafted by the developers of the game honestly, I don’t know Kurt is kinda there, he’s inoffensive and has a few cool moment but he’s as basic as a “boy with sword” archetype could get.
BUT WHAT ABOUT REAN THOUGHT ????
In the last episode of my Kiseki journey, I said that Rean went from a character I was neutral about to one who actively grinded my gears for the entirety of CS2. I still don’t really care much about Rean, I still think he’s one of the weakest aspects of this arc and since he’s the main protagonist so much of the element in the story revolves around him. However, I will say that the premise of his character in this game at least makes him more tolerable. Rean is now a teacher at Thors Academy instead of being a student, this new position of power alongside his experience in the first two games at least makes him somewhat wiser and is a more interesting foundation for his character and the relation he’ll have with the rest of the cast.
Rean is also directly punished for his lack of decision making and spine in the original game, so he’s now pretty much tied on a leash by Osborne who uses him to do his bidding. Rean, of course being the little bitch that he is, agrees to play into the Ironbloods game and is forced to do shit against his will. That lack of agency coupled with Rean not really knowing what Osborne is cooking is going to be the main hook of CS3 and I’d say that for once it’s a good thing. Rean being forced to do stuff that he doesn’t want to do well… Actively forces him to take a position and do stuff rather than bitching about not doing stuff and bullshitting his way into acting up anyway without really thinking about the consequences of his action and when you know how Rean is when he actually HAS agency over his actions, you can’t help but think that it’s a better outcome for his character rather than the contrary.
That doesn’t stop Rean from being spectacularly flat in this game, not helped by the plot tendency not to clues us in or develop what’s the deal with him and Osborne in this episode and only playing cat and mouse with your expectations once again to make you excited for the sequel (as all of those Intro games tend to do just be gigantic teaser for their sequel anyway).
The plot also completely gave up on Rean being a nuanced character whatsoever, he seems to have troubles due to some events that happened in North Ambria and some level of trauma from losing Crow in the previous game but much like CS2 these elements are not strong enough to counterbalance how much of an absolute unstoppable giga chad he is at any occasion, in fact because Rean is an instructor now, everyone thinks he’s this real badass mf that can’t do no wrong and multiple time within the narrative are meant to show just how strong Rean has become and how heroic he is. There’s a hilariously out of touch scene rushing at super speed to stop some soldiers from killing themselves and I’m sorry but it’s so over the top and corny that it makes it impossible for me to take this seriously. I’m also pretty sure that Rean is slowly but surely repeating his self-doubt arc from the previous two game on the pretense that his traumas are lil bit more believable than killing a bear as a child but since the game never expands on what happened in North Ambria and all dialogs points out to him having done nothing wrong because god forbid Rean doing war crimes while actually killing people in war to actually affect his mind and give him PTSD, what do you think this is a mature video game ?
But I think that’s enough about talking positively about the game here, I’ve promised a thought piece, not a review and I just wanted to get most of the positives out of the way first to prove to you that while I’m on the side of the game being a general improvement over the first two Cold Steel games, it doesn’t mean that the game was a success in delivering on all of its ideas and that’s probably why CS3 won’t end up joining its brethren in keeping the series afloat and bring back the standard of quality brought by the older entries as the shadow of Falcom’s wacky game and narrative design philosophy come creeping its way back on the soup no matter how fresh the ingredients are.
CS3 has a bit of an identity crisis because it's both a sequel to what came before it but also seems to want to wipe the slate clean and build off on new foundations. We already stated how CS1 was a game designed for a new generation of players who wants to be introduced to the wonderful world of Kiseki and as such it kept most of the reference to earlier entry to a minimal and didn’t really dare involve elements from older title too much (sometimes very inelegantly, such as Ouroboros being first introduced in a throwaway line in the mid-game).
What I mean by that is that the game isn’t really a sequel to Cold Steel 1 or Cold Steel 2 and the main conflict that was the central piece of these two games (the class warfare between commoners and nobles) is only a foot-note within the story. The Civil war did happen and is mentioned at several points throughout the game but the actual main conflict which started the whole thing and how it affected the country is completely glossed over and never mentioned again. CS3 doesn’t seem to be interested in bouncing back from how poorly it handled its political themes in the original two games and it’s really strange how little CS2 and the events that transpired in that game actually matters in the plot of CS3.
Perhaps Falcom realized how poorly it handled the entire thing and seem to want to sweep all of it under the rug but it’s nonetheless very bizarre that the game never actually properly addresses the consequences of the civil war and how it could’ve probably affected the public's perception on nobility and how the noble faction got punished from such careless action and seems to only want to pretend that the very existence of the noble alliance and its action wasn’t the result of some deeply rooted systemic issue but rather the folly of a couple of bad apples within the noble faction namely Duke Cayenne and Lord Albarea (which btw, CS2 explicitly said was the bad apple of the noble alliance and the noble alliance didn’t claim and actively wanted to stop this man from committing the atrocities he committed in Celdic so that’s even fucking crazier).
Heck one of the first character you meet in CS3 is Aurelia Le Guin, a former general of the Noble Alliance and a pretty minor character from CS2 who has been appointed as the principal of the branch campus and was even said to be a major player in the annexation of North Ambria a couple of years prior to the events of the game. The game will rarely if ever explain how Aurelia never got punished for her crimes, if she still believes in the ideals of the noble alliance, if she has some resentment for Rean (she seems to have none) for stealing the glory of the alliance, none of that shit is explored, Aurelia just seems to exist to be badass and steals the character arc Laura should’ve had in this game.
Another thing that CS2 spectacularly fucked over is how it portrayed the civil war and by that I mean that it didn’t portray it at all since most of the action took place in the western region and what part of Erebonia are you visiting in this game ? Well of course, it’s the western region ! And yet, the civil war is only a passing thought, everything seems to be normal, no citizens seems to have been harmed by the situation, no citizens seems to hold resentment towards the nobles, no citizens seems to try and heal from potential traumas or loss brought forth by this seemingly pointless conflict. Absolutely none of that thing is explored even when you are actually visiting the Province who belonged to Duke Cayenne himself (remember ? The Antagonist of the previous game ?) where the only thing that seems to matter is to try and elect a new Duke Cayenne (in fact Musse later reveals herself to be Duke Cayenne’s niece like what is going on with the world ?!?!) and trying to gain the favors of the population.
This is such a bizarre turn over and seemingly makes CS2 an even bigger waste of time than it actually was since it seems to matter very little into the plot of this game. In fact the only conflicts that seems to matter for the game’s plot is the annexation of North Ambria, a war that isn’t explored or explained to you at all unless you’re reaching for an optional book found in Towa’s house and was only ever shown in an anime released 6 WHOLE DAMN YEARS after the release of Cold Steel 3 and it’s weird as shit since it seems that it was a pretty big deal. But the game does not really care and wants to start over on new foundation.
I must ask myself how did they plan out this scenario sometimes because making it so none of the important stuff from the previous 2 games actually matters into its third entry is pretty wild, you could literally be skipping CS1 and CS2 and just read a summary of them and you will have almost the same level of comprehension as someone who actually got through the games. WHAT IS GOING ON ?
A friend of mine who actually like these games (and we’re still in good contact despite his dubious taste in video games) was constantly repeating to me that I was looking at the Cold Steel arc wrong and that it really wasn’t a story about the division of social class and how these dynamics affects and changes society, but rather about the “fear of imperialism and how to act against it” which is represented by the Osborne faction. And while he’s definitely right on some level (because I don’t think CS3’s handling of this topic is particularly stellar either but I’ll develop this further down this already long essay)
You may think that maybe Falcom did this as to make this entry more accessible to newcomers who might want to start the series with this one in spite of this being the third entry in the series or to focus on the new conflict of this new sub-arc without having to deal with the dust left by their failure at delivering anything of substance for 2 whole damn games but surprisingly and that’s the whole paradox of this episode, despite wanting to act as a soft-reboot of its own arc and a potential new jumping point to the series for newcomers, this game more so than any other entry in the series hinges heavily on the series everlasting continuity and constantly referencing past events from older entry in the franchise and in fact the main conflict of the narrative this time around is definitely more focus on the lore of the franchise rather than a singular theme or even political stakes like it was the case with Azure and the first Cold Steel duology.
You see many returning faces, you get to visit places that were mentioned previously in the franchise and heck one chapter takes place entirely within a new 3D rendition of Crossbell which despite how dumb that’s going to sound made me smile despite this being just an obvious overly expanded technical flex by the developers but hell if it didn’t work on me.
These moments are also treated with the utmost respect for their legacy, at one point you visit Hamel a place where one of the most tragic event in the series happened and you get to visit the grave of Loewe the second main antagonist of Sky SC and the most memorable character from that game and its treated as this solemn quiet moment like you’ve just stepped into sacred ground and as a somber melancholic rendition of Silver Will plays over flashbacks from SC, you feel some level of faint nostalgia mixed with uncertainty as you walk towards that gravestone and it’s probably one of the best story segment in the series.
At one point, you get a boss fight with Arianrodh in a setting similar to the moment you fight her in Azure complete with the same theme song from that game and an equally high step in difficulty and it’s literally so freaking hype it’s insane.
So yeah, I think that on average, I didn’t completely loose any kind of attachment to the series continuity since literally all of these moments made me enjoy the game significantly more than its predecessors and made me happy I stuck with the series despite it all but here lies another issue of … what do you even do between these member berries moments that are obviously meant to please old time fans of the series ?
Well…
That’s something we’re going to discuss now to observe how Falcom pretty much lost control of their own ambition once again and ended a game that could’ve been the long awaited return to form the series needed into pretty much its death sentence.
Cold Steel 3 suffers from what I will refer to as “Tales of Syndrome” (and please don’t see a criticism of that franchise as I happen to have a lot of sympathy for it). Like I mentioned in my first review of CS1, “Tales of” tend to compensate a passable/mediocre story with other things such as a great combat system, some technically impressive stuff for their time (I’m still blown the fuck away by Tales of Phantasia technical flexes like what the shit) and most importantly, incredible cast of characters and amazing characterization which its “skits” system is no stranger too. Oftentimes, it’s not surprising to see a “Tales Of” story fumble near the end or heck even in the middle of it, Vesperia is an amazing game up until its last 10h or so which completely annihilate any credibility the story had left.
However, the “Tales Of” series is different in one key element : It’s standalone. It’s easier to forgive a Tales Of game for not delivering because at least it’s not going to ruin your enjoyment of other entries in the series (“Graces F” corny ass writing ain’t going to ruin how stellar “Abyss” was for exemple.) and more generally it’s not going to feel like all the hours you’ve spent playing these titles weren’t worth it. “Trails” on the other hand and especially the one puts a higher emphasis on its world building and its different geopolitical stakes. Trails will always go in excruciating detail about how almost every facet of its universe works (I mean for fuck sake, how many JRPG series will stop you to infodump you on freaking Tax laws) and as such, you expect the series to do something with all of the stuff it’s setting up and as such expect nothing but excellence from it (and with this series, excellence is always close but never reached).
You can’t just disguise yourself as Yasumi Matsuno to be Yasumi Matsuno, Cold Steel and the Trails series has a whole has a rich universe but for the most part I feel like the franchise likes to use all of that as a carrot at the end of a stick to make you keep playing rather than something that truly wants to say anything and what is a rich detailed universe if it’s wasted on shitty character trope and weak stories.
Cold Steel 3 abandons the main conflict it desperately tries to establish for over 2 games in favor of another more lore-centric conflict. Instead of Noble and Commoners, the story revolves around Ironbloods vs Ouroboros which is less risky but also not as interesting because… well… if you think about it for a second… What does the game even want to say with this conflict ?
For the first time since Trails in the Sky SC, Ouroboros take center stages in the narrative of Cold Steel 3, I’ve ranted multiple times about how I don’t care much for Ouroboros but I think in this particular case since they’re in the forefront of the narrative, I will probably make my position a little more clearer on them.
I think Ouroboros is a hindrance to the series' ability to tell intriguing and interesting stories with its universe since their very first appearance.
First introduced in Sky SC, Ouroboros has quickly been presented as the main antagonistic force of that game but the ending of SC and some elements from Sky 3rd showed that Ouroboros are not done yet and they’re here to stay. Trails in the Sky FC had probably what is in my opinion the only good villain that the series ever had : Richard. Richard’s motivations in that game were believable, understandable and worked in tandem with the kind of setting the original Trails in the Sky wanted to portray. In fact, Richard is a character that only gets better with time because all of the stuff he warned us about and the very reason why he did the things that he did pretty much became true as the series moved forward.
However, Richard’s much like many other similar villains in the series (all of varying quality : Dieter was pretty much like Richard but was robbed due to Azure’s obsession with introducing a bigger fish to raise the stakes even when those were already pretty high and it wasn’t necessary to do so) was used as a pawn for Ouroboros which were the people who helped but most importantly used and manipulated Richard to further their own agenda.
What agenda you may ask ?
Well wouldn't you like to know ? Haha…
Ouroroboros to me is a complete enigma, it’s like their very presence exist solely to make the story worse and it’s not helped that most of the lore surrounding the more supernatural aspect of the universe (and thus what the villains will eventually seek to further their goals) are sought after by them too. Ouroboros introduction in Sky SC was dubious at best, they forced the game into a repetitive sluggish structure for most of its run and their saturday morning cartoon personality which only existed to prop up other characters in your party didn’t really help. And whether or not you like Weissman, I also think it was a mistake to make him the first big shot of Organization XIII since apparently according to the game, he was a renegade to the cause and to the plan.
But what plan ? What cause ?
Well… wouldn’t you like to know ? Haha…
Ouroboros are, for lack of a better term, annoying. Falcom really wants you to think of them as this chaotic organization with people of all horizon working together towards a certain goal but then it also wants most of its members to be a free atom that can do and think whatever they want and even temporarily or permanently leave them without any consequences especially for its enforcers since the Anguis (Team Magma Admins type of beat) seems to be all obedient to their grandmaster. A lot of fans told me that I’ve always misread Ouroboros as just “mustache twirling villains” but to be frank… there’s not much elements pointing to the contrary so far in the series ? And even if they want us to think that their cause and their cause is just… maybe a hint towards that cause would help.
But Falcom refuses to let us know, Falcom will just forcefully put them inside of a game’s plot and since they’re the main antagonistic force driving the overall plot forward that means that they’re always going to be the bigger fish in the room, the only antagonist that matter because in the end any new villains no matter their motivations or how elaborate their plans are will always end up as a new pawn for Ourobozos, they’re not interesting villains to me.
Ouroboros are just cryptic and bizarre, they’re just chaotic for the sake of being chaotic. Sometimes they will help you defeat the local bad guy, sometimes they will join them, sometimes they will oppose the villain or join them when they don’t fit their agenda anymore. And it’s really hard to take them for anything but random villain of the week when that’s exactly how they behave and present themselves for most of the series only for them to make you go : “WHAT IS THE SOCIETY UP TO” and the answer always being something like….
Well… wouldn’t you like to know ?
These villains have far outstayed their welcome for me and I’m just tired of their existence and their continued influence on the franchise. It’s impossible to take any stake, any other villains seriously when they are in the middle of the arena selling you on empty promises and “mysteries” which aren’t even that interesting to begin with. In SC at least, there were personal stakes in going against them but in CS3, you only fight Ouroboros because Rean is forced to by Osborne… but other than that… this conflict is pointless and meaningless and worst of all… actually wants to tell nothing.
CS3 has the same repetitive plot structure for all of its chapters, some people say that CS3 isn’t boring because a lot of stuff happens this time around but does it really ?
You still do a lot of pointless stuff that end up accomplishing nothing not just on a micro-level but also on a macro-level. Stopping Ouroboros isn’t an inherently interesting thing to center your plot around and it feels like a distraction at best, CS3 legitimately has nothing to say and nothing interesting to either tell or make us experience with everything that we’re doing in its main plot aside from some carrots at the end of a stick based on complete “trust the plan” rhetoric that leads to more frustration and some nostalgia bait to keep old time fans from snoozing too much at everything happening here.
I don’t know why they felt that the third game in a quadrilogy must be so light in actual substance, heck making this another intro game is also kind of an ass backward narrative choice because there’s not many things left to introduce so they need to pad the story out with the same boring structure as CS1 (which feels even less justified here than it did in that game) and new characters which, yes, are more interesting but feels like a band-aid on an open wound.
And even then, this identity crisis continues, between wanting to be a fresh start and hinging on its continuity.
At some key points in the narrative, some of your old squadmates from the first two games will get you out of a tough situation and temporarily join your party. This reunion with old characters is the emotional core of some of the game's more intimate moment but it hinges heavily on you buying into Class VII as a group and as we stated in the first two games, these titles did nothing to make me care about them in the first place and when they’re put in contrast to the new characters in this game, it’s even worse because despite some dubious attempt at making them more interesting (like Gaius being a Gralsritter which is just ???), they never get any better than what they were before and continue to be a weak narrative element of the story and steal the show of characters I’d rather be playing as.
A friend of mine insisted on telling me this game is supposedly about “the fear of imperialism and how to act against it” but for a game about imperialism, the game really doesn’t seem to want to make any sort of deep thoughtful commentary on the subject or even address it heck most of the time it tries to lowball the issues in multiple ways. Osborne is said to be an expansionist but yet all of the wars he launched to annex neighboring countries have been explicitly stated to have happened without bloodshed which to me is just a strange fact to put in the forefront of the narrative. While Trails has often been afraid to kill off important characters (to the point of extreme absurdity cf : Illya in Azure) it wasn’t really afraid to portray death of civilians or even main characters committing or being the victims of atrocious crime.
But here, you have a seemingly fascist dictator who… conquers the world…pacifically … and makes decisions who… benefits most people ? And make the old nobility fold ? And reducing taxes ? And make Rean do things against his will like… stopping random terrorists from doing terrorist shit ?
Wow that man is awful… I wonder how Crossbell is doing in the ending of Azure. It looked kinda dire and… wait… what do you mean it’s doing better than it ever did on its own ? And what do you mean everything about the ending of Azure was retconned and they didn’t respect continuity just to have Randy chill in a giant robot and Tio being an important searcher ? Weren’t they supposed to be fugitives ?
Oh wait only Lloyd, KeA and … ARIOS ??? Are ?
I mean what about Rean, he seems to be pretty troubled to have lost the control of his abilities and that’s like a main theme of this new arc about him and… wait… what do you mean he just lost control of himself for 5 seconds and didn’t actually kill anyone ? Wait but… huh ?
Hey if this is a story about imperialism, maybe they’re going to finally address why we haven’t seen the emperor yet and why he let his chancellor and the nobles do a bunch of shit while he’s supposed to be ruling the country and …
Oh… you mean he read a bunch of books that predict the future and decided… not to do anything about it and just let things burn ? Because what … What do you mean ?
“There is something in Erebonia”
Oh no
…
Can you hear it ?
The trumpets of the bullshit writing apocalypse are ringing ! The deads are rising from their graves and pretend to have a secret identity, an ancient dragon is awakening out of nowhere and forces you to do a dungeon that looks like the final dungeon but will later be revealed to have nothing to do with the actual main threat of the plot… and… oh no… are these…
GNOMES ???
GNOMES…. GNOMES…. GNOMES…
Nobody’s going to read this fucking review this far so might as well just fucking lashes out. So there’s actually a third faction in this Ironbloods vs Ouroboros thing the plot has going for it and these are…
God…
The Gnomes…
So huh… the gnomes (yes the fucking gnomes, not the dwarves, not the elven, not the any potentially cooler pick for a villain faction just FUCKING GNOMES) are this MyStErIoUs faction working in the shadow of everything with their black workshop, they do all sort of cray thing like bringing people back from the dead and killing all tension and stakes in the narrative, have incredibly obvious secret identity like…
Man…
GEORGE NOME
THEY MADE THE DOINKY SPLOINKY FAT GUY FROM THE FIRST TWO GAMES A VILLAIN BUT NOT JUST A VILLAIN HE’S A GNOME AND HIS FUCKING NAME IS GEORGE NOME GET IT BECAUSE HE’S A GNOME AND HE HAS A GUN AND KILLS ANGELICA (I hope she stays dead) BECAUSE HE’S A GNOME !
BUT WAIT THAT’S NOT IT !
DING DONG
Hey ! It’s me ! Kondo-San !
You wanna come inside my clubhouse ?
KINDA KONDA KONDO-SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57oU-xqiXek
Suddenly the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse rises from the grounds and nothing starts to make sense anymore. The game lore dumps you on a bunch of shit that it already info dumped you on if you read most of the book in the game like I did so thanks… collecting these was pointless I guess. You fought a dragon ? It Does not matter there’s an eviler bigger dragon now, all the villains who've been fighting against each other start teaming up for no reason. People start switching allegiance left and right, Ash is now the secret 3rd Hamel child and HE SHOT THE EMPEROR WHAT THE HELL LET’S GO TO WAR BUT FIRST YOU GOTTA GO DOWN THE LAMEST FINAL DUNGEON IN HISTORY AND ONE-SHOTTING EVERYONE BECAUSE POWER-SCALING ? CREDIBLE THREATS ? NOT IN MY JRPG !
And…
As you enter the door to the final boss…
You prepare yourself…
For the shittiest
Most brain melting succession of events you’ve ever seen.
Put on the music : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3G5IXn0K7A&t
Ok so get this, there was a hobo looking scholar who showed up regularly so of course the guy is a villain because that’s like the 4th time they did this in this series already. His name is actually
BLACK ALBERICH CHIEF OF THE GNOMES (I’m not even kidding, that's his full name and title) and he’s also Alisa’s Seemingly Dead Father who came back from the dead OH BUT GET THIS !
This random guy who hasn’t existed in the series until this episode, he was actually the one behind EVERYTHING, that’s right EVERYTHING, he looks at the camera and tell you to your face “Hamel ? I did that shit, the Orbal shutdown ? I did that shit, EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED IN CROSSBELL AND THE CIVIL WAR ! I DID THAT SHIT”
THE GNOMES MANIPULATED EVERYONE FROM THE SHADOWS ! THEY EVEN MANIPULATED THE MASTERMINDS OUROBOROS AND OSBORNE AND ALL THE EVIL PEOPLE IN THE SERIES OH AND GUESS WHAT
REFILL YOUR POPCORN YOU’RE GONNA LOVE THIS NEXT PART
FLASH NEWS :
DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE’S NO REAL REASON FOR WAR HAPPENING ? DID YOU KNOW THAT PEOPLE AREN’T EVIL ? THEY’RE JUST DRIVEN TO DO EVIL THINGS AND KILL EACH OTHERS BECAUSE … wait what do you mean clearly established and believable reasons according to the series clearly established geopolitical stakes ?
NO SILLY ! IT’S BECAUSE OF THE CURSE !
WHAT’S THE CURSE ?
WELL IT’S A TOXIC GAZ THAT WAS FARTED BY THIS ANCIENT GUNDAM WHO ALSO MANIPULATED EVERYONE BTW AND WHICH TURN PEOPLE EVIL AND RACIST !
EVEN THE CAT TURNS RACIST ! OH NO REAN HAS TURNED INTO SUPER RACISM WHAT THE FUCK QUICK EVERYONE STOPS HIM ALSO OOMFIE IS DEAD NO CLIFFHANGER “THIS STORY IS AS DARK AS INK, SEE YOU NEXT TIME IN CS4”
COLD STEEL 3
IS A SCAM
THIS FRANCHISE
IS A SCAM
THEY SHOWED YOU IMPROVEMENTS BUT IT WAS ALL A LIE !
FUCK AND I WROTE 21 PAGES FOR WHAT
FOR THIS
OH MY GOD
This is amazing…
I…
I need to play CS4…
This is fraud writing, the kind you only see once every 15 billion years when the planet aligns !
I was supposed to have like a conclusion about how Trails doesn’t deliver on its promises and I’ve tried to approach these games in good faith but holy shit…
GNOMES
GNOMES
GNOMES
GNOMES
GNOMES
GNOMES
GNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMES
(Towa is still really cute tho)
Crash Bandicoot 4 : It's about time is actually 2 different videogames in one.
On one hand, Crash 4 is easily the most polished, most well-rounded, most imaginative and most creative Crash game to have ever released.
The developers at Toys for Bob did an absolute wonderful job looking at the original trilogy and turbo-charged all of the good elements while adding the expertise of years of platforming craftmanship with the game following pretty much the same school of thought as Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze (one of the single best 2D platformer ever created) and applied it to Crash Bandicoot which for all intents and purposes were already kinda like Donkey Kong Country games with a different angles in a sense.
The game has levels that are insanely varied and creative, one world theme is never static and constantly evolves telling a story of its own while introducing new and innovative way to platform around and enjoy the level design.
The main Crash Trilogy wasn't necessary known for the creativity or cohesiveness of their different levels (aside from maybe the first one which had the issue of being a stupidly hard game) but here it's totally different and I'm absolutely happy for it.
Just playing that game from start to finish will give you a decently challenging but fair game that yes can get a bit tough at times (much like Crash 1 was) but never to an unfair degree....
Right ?
Well not exactly...
Because on the other hand, Crash 4 is also the absolute biggest nightmare of a 3D platformer the second you consider going for full completion percentage and turns what is essentially the best Crash game ever into the worst fucking game you've ever fucking played.
Getting the secret and the true ending in this game requires DK64 level of dedication and Rayman 1 level of tolerances to bullshit because this game is downright EVIL at times with full percentage completion requirements.
On top of the game being outright more challenging than any previous game in the series just playing through it casually, you now must be an absolute freaking GOD at Crash Bandicoot to complete it.
Each stages has 6 gems, 3 for collecting 80% of the Wumpa Fruits in a given level, one for breaking all the boxes, one for finishing the level without dying less than 3 times and one that is simply hidden inside the level.
The wumpa and hidden ones are not really all that problematic since you will likely get 80% of the wumpa playing through a stage casually and as for the hidden gems while some of them are truly really well hidden (and will recquire a guide for some of the more egregious one) they change they way you're looking at the levels and you can even stumble upon them on accident. It's just a matter of dedication.
But those box gems ?
Oh god fuck those box gems
See one of the most fun aspect in the older crash games was getting the gems for breaking all the boxes but sometimes it could lead to some frustration when you finish a level and one or two boxes are missing which usually isn't that bad since none of them are truly hidden and there's not that many boxes in a level anyway.
But here the number of boxes per level can get absurd, the first level alone has 107 boxes to break some stages have over fucking 500 of them and it's not even taking into consideration the new types of boxes introduced in this game which makes it more annoying.
AND SOME OF THOSE BOXES ARE HIDDEN IN THE MOST OBNOXIOUS "WHO THOUGHT OF THIS ?" AREAS OF THE STAGE POSSIBLE ! It's already enough to hunt for hidden gems why did they feel the need to hide freaking boxes ! Just so you finish a level and starts developing terminal cancer at the count missing 1 or 3 boxes and then replaying the level and find out they were waaaaaaaay out of reach in places you'd never ever think of looking to.
Oh but that's not all ! Remember the not dying 3 times gem ?
Forget the Dying 3 times thing
This game has an extra bonus collectibles for doing everything aforementioned WITHOUT DYING ONCE
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME ?
The game just randomly expects perfection for you and with all the repetitions, and the addition of N.Verted levels which doubles the amount of stages by Two and the Tape levels this is a 3D platformer that will take you Skyrim level of game time to complete.
Completing crash games has always been 80% of the fun in those games but that was never that much of a daunting task, here it's just bullshit and while the game expects perfection from you, the game isn't entirely perfect either.
Sure it looks and feels polished but the slight freaking inconsistency becomes a mountain once you're trying to be perfect.
I'd say, just play the game regularly, yes you will be missing on 80% of the content but you'll thank me later, it's not WORTH IT IN THE SLIGHTEST
The developers at Toys for Bob need to freaking chill and stop designing their freaking game like goddamn Kaizo hacks because it's hands down the single most Sisyphean videogame ever conceived.
I still recommend it tho... mostly for what I said at the start but good god, save yourself from hell if you can
On one hand, Crash 4 is easily the most polished, most well-rounded, most imaginative and most creative Crash game to have ever released.
The developers at Toys for Bob did an absolute wonderful job looking at the original trilogy and turbo-charged all of the good elements while adding the expertise of years of platforming craftmanship with the game following pretty much the same school of thought as Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze (one of the single best 2D platformer ever created) and applied it to Crash Bandicoot which for all intents and purposes were already kinda like Donkey Kong Country games with a different angles in a sense.
The game has levels that are insanely varied and creative, one world theme is never static and constantly evolves telling a story of its own while introducing new and innovative way to platform around and enjoy the level design.
The main Crash Trilogy wasn't necessary known for the creativity or cohesiveness of their different levels (aside from maybe the first one which had the issue of being a stupidly hard game) but here it's totally different and I'm absolutely happy for it.
Just playing that game from start to finish will give you a decently challenging but fair game that yes can get a bit tough at times (much like Crash 1 was) but never to an unfair degree....
Right ?
Well not exactly...
Because on the other hand, Crash 4 is also the absolute biggest nightmare of a 3D platformer the second you consider going for full completion percentage and turns what is essentially the best Crash game ever into the worst fucking game you've ever fucking played.
Getting the secret and the true ending in this game requires DK64 level of dedication and Rayman 1 level of tolerances to bullshit because this game is downright EVIL at times with full percentage completion requirements.
On top of the game being outright more challenging than any previous game in the series just playing through it casually, you now must be an absolute freaking GOD at Crash Bandicoot to complete it.
Each stages has 6 gems, 3 for collecting 80% of the Wumpa Fruits in a given level, one for breaking all the boxes, one for finishing the level without dying less than 3 times and one that is simply hidden inside the level.
The wumpa and hidden ones are not really all that problematic since you will likely get 80% of the wumpa playing through a stage casually and as for the hidden gems while some of them are truly really well hidden (and will recquire a guide for some of the more egregious one) they change they way you're looking at the levels and you can even stumble upon them on accident. It's just a matter of dedication.
But those box gems ?
Oh god fuck those box gems
See one of the most fun aspect in the older crash games was getting the gems for breaking all the boxes but sometimes it could lead to some frustration when you finish a level and one or two boxes are missing which usually isn't that bad since none of them are truly hidden and there's not that many boxes in a level anyway.
But here the number of boxes per level can get absurd, the first level alone has 107 boxes to break some stages have over fucking 500 of them and it's not even taking into consideration the new types of boxes introduced in this game which makes it more annoying.
AND SOME OF THOSE BOXES ARE HIDDEN IN THE MOST OBNOXIOUS "WHO THOUGHT OF THIS ?" AREAS OF THE STAGE POSSIBLE ! It's already enough to hunt for hidden gems why did they feel the need to hide freaking boxes ! Just so you finish a level and starts developing terminal cancer at the count missing 1 or 3 boxes and then replaying the level and find out they were waaaaaaaay out of reach in places you'd never ever think of looking to.
Oh but that's not all ! Remember the not dying 3 times gem ?
Forget the Dying 3 times thing
This game has an extra bonus collectibles for doing everything aforementioned WITHOUT DYING ONCE
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME ?
The game just randomly expects perfection for you and with all the repetitions, and the addition of N.Verted levels which doubles the amount of stages by Two and the Tape levels this is a 3D platformer that will take you Skyrim level of game time to complete.
Completing crash games has always been 80% of the fun in those games but that was never that much of a daunting task, here it's just bullshit and while the game expects perfection from you, the game isn't entirely perfect either.
Sure it looks and feels polished but the slight freaking inconsistency becomes a mountain once you're trying to be perfect.
I'd say, just play the game regularly, yes you will be missing on 80% of the content but you'll thank me later, it's not WORTH IT IN THE SLIGHTEST
The developers at Toys for Bob need to freaking chill and stop designing their freaking game like goddamn Kaizo hacks because it's hands down the single most Sisyphean videogame ever conceived.
I still recommend it tho... mostly for what I said at the start but good god, save yourself from hell if you can