2361: Up to Date on Ys

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Just in time to cover it extensively this month over on MoeGamer, I’m finally up to date on the Ys series, as I finished Memories of Celceta tonight.

I’m glad I finally took the time to play through it all, as it really is a remarkable series that has evolved considerably since its humble beginnings. I’ll save the history lesson for MoeGamer, though, and talk a bit about Memories of Celceta specifically.

Memories of Celceta builds on what Ys Seven started, and does it very well. While Ys Seven felt a little bit clunky at times — at least partly due to the fact that it was running on the crusty old PSP hardware — Celceta feels much more fluid and refined. It’s not perfect — the poor old Vita struggles to keep the framerate up when there’s lots happening on screen, but it never really becomes a problem. No, I’m talking more about the gameplay; combat is fluid and satisfying, and the skills each character has all feel a lot more distinct than the rather feeble ones you had for the majority of Seven. Different characters have clear purposes, both in and out of combat, and each one is enjoyable to fight as.

The thing I liked the most about it, I think, was the emphasis on exploration. The central concept of the game is that protagonist Adol is exploring the uncharted forest of Celceta, a job well suited to an adventurer such as he. Indeed, your progress in the game roughly corresponds to your progress uncovering the surprisingly sprawling map, and by the end of the game you’ll be at, or at least close to, 100% of the forest being mapped out.

And it’s an interesting forest, too, with plenty of distinct areas rather than remaining uniformly green and leafy throughout. There are plains-like clearings, towering mountains, crystalline lakes and damp, soggy marshland. Later in the game there’s the Ashen Forest, which is a beautiful, almost otherworldly area bathed in a curious sparkling, purple mist.

I found myself missing the “jump” button from Oath in Felghana and its ilk less in Celceta than I did in Ys Seven. This is because the maps were overall better designed and more interesting to explore. Ys Seven’s dungeons in particular weren’t bad as such, but it’s clear that technological limitations, at times, held Falcom’s designers back a bit from making some really interesting levels.

I particularly liked the various “artifacts” you acquire throughout Celceta, many of which provide you with new traversal abilities in true Metroidvania tradition. The Hydra Scales, for example, allow you to swim underwater and reach otherwise inaccessible chests and areas, while the Gale Boots allow you to run incredibly fast, even straight up certain walls. The controls for some of these non-standard means of traversal are occasionally a bit wobbly — steering the Gale Boots is near-impossible, so you better line up before you unleash them, for example, and combat underwater is a terrible experience proving that Falcom, unfortunately, didn’t learn anything from Ys Origin’s excellent underwater section — but they never get in the way of gameplay, because they’re usually required only to bypass a particular obstacle, at which point you can just get back to doing what Adol does best — hacking and slashing through hordes of enemies.

I won’t spoil anything, but the finale was fantastic, too. The Ys games have all had excellent finales so far, and Celceta certainly didn’t disappoint with a particularly strong final confrontation and the unusual move of having a few things extra to do after the “final” boss. It was dramatic, exciting — and, perhaps most importantly, extremely relevant to the overall Ys lore, which, again, is something that Falcom excels at. By now, the lore of the world of Ys is extremely well-realised, with each new game bringing us new information about a region or country; effectively, we learn about these lands alongside Adol as he continues his quest to see every part of the world “without shortcuts”.

I’m a total convert to Ys, then, and you better believe I’ll be all over Ys VIII when it inevitably comes West. In the meantime, have a rest, Adol Christin, you’ve definitely earned it.

2354: They’re Both for Monsters

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(yes, I found a way to put a beard on my model in ComiPo! Woo!)

I’ve been playing a bit of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt lately. I’ve been meaning to give it a go for ages, but it’s never quite dropped in price enough for me to want to jump on board; thankfully, the combination of the Steam Summer Sale and Andie generously buying me a copy as an anniversary present means that I can now explore this game to my heart’s content.

Playing Witcher 3 alongside Ys: Memories of Celceta is an interesting experience, because it’s a study in contrasts between Western and Eastern game design philosophy. Both of them have a surprising number of elements in common: they’re both action RPGs, they both involve exploring a large overworld, fighting monsters and completing quests, they both feature a muscle-bound man with white hair tied back in a ponytail (though he’s not the protagonist in Celceta, instead acting as a Dogi-substitute and cipher for the ever-mute Adol) and they’re both very good. But they’re both very different.

Celceta is fast-paced and action-packed. Its combat is very arcadey, with lots of flashy special effects, overblown sound effects, rockin’ music and celebratory messages flashing up on the screen as you do things like use the right attack type to take advantage of enemy weaknesses. In contrast, Witcher 3 feels almost sedate in its pacing, even in combat, which, thanks to its excellent animations and fluid movement, has an almost dance-like feeling about it as opposed to the frenetic leaping around of Celceta.

The upshot of this is that Witcher 3 is a surprisingly relaxing game to play. This might sound strange, given that the setting for the Witcher series is one of the darkest, bleakest takes on Western fantasy out there, but I’ve absolutely found it to be the case. While in Celceta you can’t relax for a moment when you’re out in the overworld because everything is trying to kill you, in Witcher 3 there’s plenty of opportunity to explore, wander off the path into the bushes and just start walking in a direction to see what’s there. Worthwhile things are marked on the map so you’re not wandering completely aimlessly — unless you want to — but for the most part the game’s rather sedate pacing has the pleasant feeling of a walk in the countryside or the woods rather than constantly fighting for your life, even though the countrysides and woods of Witcher 3’s world are far more dangerous than what your average rambler might have to contend with.

Both games have their place, then, and I’m enjoying them both a great deal. I feel like on the whole, I tend to enjoy the more frenetic, chaotic, joyful pace and tone of the Japanese approach to RPGs more — they cheer me up with their sheer energy — but there’s most definitely something very appealing and oddly relaxing about the more sedate pacing and carefully crafted periods of solitude in games like The Witcher 3.

2348: I Beat Ys Seven

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I beat Ys Seven tonight. That leaves just one more Ys game to play through before I’ve beaten every one of the currently available games in the series, making me eminently ready for Ys VIII, whenever that makes its way West, because it almost certainly (hopefully) will.

Ys Seven is an interesting change after the three games built on the Ys VI engine — Ys VI, Oath in Felghana and Ys Origin. I kind of miss some of the defining aspects of those three games — most notably the platforming elements, which are completely absent from Seven — but Seven very much does its own thing and takes ownership of it, creating an experience that is satisfying in its own right, even if it’s a slightly jarring change of pace initially.

The first thing to note about Ys Seven is that it’s at least twice the length of previous Ys games. This still puts it at well under the average length of a typical JRPG these days — it took me 24 hours to beat on Normal — but makes it feel significantly longer than the previous titles. This isn’t a bad thing, though; along with the greater length comes greater scope: Ys Seven’s narrative feels more ambitious and, for want of a better word, epic than its predecessors; while past Ys games felt very much like you were taking care of business in a small, localised area, Ys Seven does a good job of making you feel like the fate of a whole country is at stake. There’s a sprawling overworld to explore, and several villages, each with their own unique aesthetic.

This rather more sprawling scale comes at a slight cost: while past Ys games’ small geographical area meant that pretty much every character in the game had a name and a story to tell, Ys Seven’s NPCs, for the most part, feel quite a bit more generic. This is partly due to the fact that none of them have names, instead being called things like “Obliging Maid” and suchlike — with the curious exception of questgivers, who all have very Western names like “Kevin Lassiter” — but I suppose it does help keep the focus on the main cast, which, in keeping with the rest of the experience, is significantly bigger than previous Ys games.

Even your party is bigger. Adol is no longer alone, bringing up to two companions in tow this time, and there’s a reason for this: enemies now have various resistances, meaning you need a balanced party that can cover all types of damage, otherwise you simply won’t be able to kill some enemies. For most of the game, there’s little reason to switch out from the default party of Adol, longtime companion (but first time playable) Dogi and whoever fills the third slot at that point in the party, but upon reaching the final boss the reason for the total squad size being seven members becomes clear. Be sure to keep everyone’s equipment up to date — thankfully, inactive characters gain experience at the same rate as the front line, so there’s no need to go out of your way to grind too much.

One aspect of the game that feels very different comes when you’re fighting a boss. Whereas in past Ys games boss fights were almost puzzles and dexterity challenges, where you’d have to dodge incoming attacks and take advantage of openings, Ys Seven’s bosses are often damage sponges that, at least on Normal difficulty, feel like they can be beaten more through brute force than anything. On the harder difficulty levels I can see them being stiffer challenges, because you’re more limited in the healing items you can carry, but certainly on Normal, I could get through most bosses without too much difficulty by just making sure I had enough potions on hand. It wasn’t until the final boss, which has significantly more complex mechanics than any of the other fights in the game, that I found myself having to be a bit more careful with what I was doing.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Ys Seven’s boss fights are enjoyably hard work and feel like you’re struggling against a powerful opponent. Like a lot of other things in the game, though, coming straight off Oath in Felghana, Origin and Ark of Napishtim, it’s a bit of an adjustment for sure.

Above all, though, Ys Seven keeps the heart of Ys firmly intact. It’s wonderfully sincere about everything, but isn’t afraid to show a sense of humour now and again. That said, it’s overall considerably darker than any of the previous installments, particularly around the middle of the story, giving it a distinctive feel. It’s not overly grimdark or anything — it’s still a bright, colourful, earnest quest featuring a silent protagonist who quite literally lives for adventure — but it was a little surprising to see things like a shirtless Adol getting tortured in a jail cell after a particularly dramatic revelation partway through.

I enjoyed it a lot, in other words. Now I just have Memories of Celceta to go and I’m up to date. And then I will have to physically restrain myself from going back to the beginning and doing a Nightmare run, I feel…

2339: Adol Wins Again

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I finished Ys: The Oath in Felghana tonight, after a bit less swearing at the initially unassailable-seeming final boss than I anticipated.

That was an absolutely brilliant game. Well-paced, enjoyable to play, challenging but never insurmountable and certainly didn’t outstay its welcome; my game clock read just over 12 hours at the end, although GOG Galaxy claims I actually played it for 24 hours, which can probably be accounted for with a number of boss fights that took a significant number of attempts to clear.

Make no mistake, Oath was a difficult game, but it never felt overly punishing. Indeed, any time that I found myself staring at a Game Over screen, I always knew that it was my fault. Specifically, it was usually the result of overconfidence: charging headlong into a group of powerful enemies, hoping to obliterate them all quickly and gain a ton of XP, but instead getting torn to shreds. Or, in the case of boss fights, it was a matter of learning the attack patterns and then being able to execute suitable countermeasures.

The boss fights were a particular highlight, because they featured an absolute ton of variety and mechanics to pay attention to. The first couple of bosses were very much about dodging and timing, while others were about inventive use of your skills to avoid damage. What I particularly liked were the several encounters that initially seemed absolutely impossible to complete, but which after a bit of practice and careful observation proved to be somewhat less of a problem than I initially believed they would be.

Oath is old-school in its sensibilities in that failure is part of the experience. When you first encounter a boss, you pretty much need to fail in order to understand what it’s doing and how it affects you. I’ve said this before, but in many ways it reminds me of fighting fast-paced versions of Final Fantasy XIV bosses: all mechanics can be countered and dealt with in some way, whether that’s through dodging, skill use or various ways of protecting yourself. There are always clear visual and auditory cues as to what’s about to happen, allowing you to prepare yourself appropriately, and in situations where you’re expected to perform more complex actions such as switching between skills in the heat of battle, the encounters are designed in such a way that you always have time to perform the actions you need to rather than suffering under a relentless assault. Indeed, it’s certainly possible to defeat the final boss without taking any damage because there’s an Achievement for doing so, and I imagine most of the others can also be handled in such a manner.

I also enjoyed the plot a great deal. While I missed the presence of Feena and Reah from Ys I, II and Origin, the new characters were well-defined and interesting. The villains in particular had some interesting plot arcs, and the game threw up several unexpected curveballs towards its conclusion.

Character highlights for me included series recurring character Dogi, who despite being big enough to crush walls comes across as one of the nicest people in the world, and this game’s vaguely implied romantic interest Elena, who was both adorably cute and a genuinely likeable character. I felt a bit bad leaving her behind at the end of the game, but I’m getting the impression protagonist Adol is a bit of a player; I’m anticipating a variety of other cute girls over the course of the games in the series that I’m yet to play.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again; I’m sorry that I haven’t checked out this series sooner. I’m having an absolute blast with it, and I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming Ys VIII, which I’ll be very surprised if we don’t see come West courtesy of Xseed Games in the near future. Given how much I’ve enjoyed the series so far, I feel fairly confident saying that I’ll probably be there day one when it finally comes out.

2332: A Musical Journey

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Let’s try a little experiment, shall we? I’m going to start with a YouTube video of a piece of music I really like. Given that I’ve just come off a session of Ys Origin, let’s make it a piece from Ys Origin. After that I’m going to see where the Related Videos take us, and we’ll go on a little journey. I’ll try and give a bit of useless trivia for each track.

To give things a bit of variety (though I’m not promising quite how much!) I’ll pick the first Related video that isn’t 1) a Recommendation for me based on past viewing and 2) from the same game, movie, whatever as the previous one.

Ready? Here we go.

This is the theme that plays in the final area of Ys Origin, and I particularly like it because it uses one of my favourite soundtrack techniques: making use of the main theme in a different way to how it sounded originally. When used in a finale sequence, as it is here, it gives the whole thing a nice feeling of “closure” — or at least of approaching the end, anyway.

To put it more simply, effective use of this technique can get you seriously pumped for the final battle. And Ys Origin certainly does it well.

Onward!

I haven’t played Ys: The Oath in Felghana yet, but it’s probably next up after I finish with Ys Origin. As such, this is the first time I’ve heard this piece, and I’m pleased to hear that it has Falcom’s distinctive prog rock-inspired sound about it. While I don’t really know a lot about prog rock itself, I do like the sound of music inspired by it, and it seems there are a number of Japanese groups that do it very well — Falcom’s sound team being one. (Nobuo Uematsu’s bands The Black Mages and The Earthbound Papas are some others, though they do arrangements of game music rather than directly soundtracking games for the most part.)

Unsurprisingly, YouTube is taking us on a distinctly Ys-ian journey. Again, I haven’t played this game, so it’s my first time hearing this track, and initial impressions are good. Again, it has the melodic rock sound to it, but it also makes use of some violin melodies, which I often find sound really nice in the context of instruments you might not typically associate violin with. Other examples of this being done well include its combination with electronic instruments in Final Fantasy XIII’s main battle theme, and as part of a distinctly modern-sounding pop ensemble in Omega Quintet’s two battle themes.

Yet another Ys I’m yet to get to, and I know I have at least a couple of friends who count this soundtrack among their favourites. The timbre of this one’s soundtrack is a little “cleaner” and perhaps more artificial-sounding; there’s certainly some synthesised brass going on, but the guitars and solo violins sound fairly convincing.

The slightly more artificial sound of the music is presumably down to Ys VI being an earlier release than Oath in Felghana and Origin, and Falcom’s sound team still refining and developing their sound with new tech and capabilities.

We’ve escaped the Ys series! And we find ourselves involved with another Japanese video game company’s internal sound team that is world-renowned as being Rather Good. In this case, we’re with Gust, developers of the Atelier and Ar Tonelico series, both of which have simply lovely soundtracks.

This particular piece is from one of their slightly lesser known games, Mana Khemia, which is often regarded as part of the Atelier series due to its thematic and mechanical similarities.

And speaking of Atelier, here’s a track from one of the more recent ones. It very much sounds like the distinctive sound Gust has put together for the Atelier series over the last few installments, featuring prominent use of traditional “folk-style” instruments such as harmonica and penny whistle.

I’m also a big fan of this track’s title.

Staying with Atelier and moving forwards in time, this is from Escha and Logy, a game I don’t know a lot about but know is reasonably well regarded in the Atelier canon. There’s a pretty cool guitar solo in the middle of this track, too.

And we’re up to the most recent Atelier game, Atelier Sophie, and a track with a pretty magnificent rhythm guitar part. There’s also a hint of Nights of Azure in there with the prominent use of harpsichord/clavichord. In fact, this whole track wouldn’t be out of place in Nights of Azure.

YouTube agrees. Nights of Azure was a really great game that I enjoyed a lot, and a big part of that was due to its wonderful soundtrack, also the product of Gust’s sound team, but clearly heavily inspired by Michiru Yamane’s work on the older Castlevania games. This sort of Gothic rock is perfectly fitting with the game’s fast action and overall tone, and contrasts nicely with the more gentle music used in its story sequences.

Let’s do two more, or we’ll be here all night. This one’s from Megadimension Neptunia V-II, a game which I’m sure you already know I liked a whole lot. This particular track was one of my favourites due to its heavy use of some distinctly retro-sounding synthesisers, which brought to mind a few things: the synthesised music of Sega Mega Drive/Genesis games, and the once-fashionable .MOD format of digital music, which effectively used short, digitised samples as “notes” on a virtual synthesiser-sequencer and allowed those who knew what they were doing to put together multi-track compositions.

Last one!

Eternal Sonata was an extremely peculiar concept for a game in that it’s an RPG based around the noted Romantic composer Frederic Chopin. In keeping with that, the soundtrack has a distinctly Romantic feel to it, with authentic orchestral instruments used to give the music a very different feel to more obviously “gamey” pieces. The game also used some of Chopin’s work directly in its soundtrack.

2313: Reimagining

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I’m going to resist ranting on about how good Ys II was, even though I finished it this evening, and instead talk a little more generally about something that divides opinions somewhat among gamers: the idea of remakes.

The reason I bring this up now is that the first two Ys games have the dubious honour of being some of the most frequently remade and rereleased games of all time. Beginning life on the PC-88, they subsequently found themselves ported, remade and rejigged on platforms ranging from the Sega Master System to modern Windows PCs. And, from what I know of these different versions, they provide markedly different experiences, at least in terms of their aesthetic, but also to a lesser extent in terms of gameplay and narrative content, too.

The situation with Ys reminds me somewhat of the ’80s and early ’90s in gaming, when multiplatform releases were noticeably different from one another due to the wildly different capabilities different hardware had. The ZX Spectrum version of a game, for example, tended to be the “worst” in most cases thanks to that system’s slow processor, lack of RAM and poor graphics and sound capabilities, while the Commodore Amiga version tended to be the most impressive version thanks to being a 16-bit rather than 8-bit computer, plus all the dedicated graphics and sound hardware in that system that made it one of the most impressive computers on the market during that period.

Ultimately, the Windows PC came along and made all this sort of thing mostly irrelevant, which was probably for the best — at least from a development perspective, as developers no longer had to create ten or more completely different versions of their game — but I sort of miss the differences between platforms, since there’s really very little to choose between Xbox One and PS4 versions of games these days, while the PC version is usually the “best” if your hardware is up to the job and the port has been handled with actual PC gamers in mind. The margin of “best” is much smaller than it was back in that period, though; in most cases, it’s only the very worst type of insufferable frame-rate buff that will be able to highlight (and probably talk about at great length) the differences between PC and console versions.

But back to Ys and the concept of remakes in general. The version of Ys and Ys II that I played was the Chronicles+ version, which is — for now, anyway — the absolute latest version. This features lovely PS1-style pixel art, a glorious live-recorded soundtrack (plus the option for two of the older incarnations of the music, too), some really rather fabulous 2D lighting effects and an excellent, excellent localisation by Xseed Games. In comparison to the earlier versions, the script also fleshes out some of the character and world backstory, too, making for a much more “complete”-feeling experience. It is, in short, probably closest to what the fine folks at Falcom wanted to create when Ys was first put together.

Ys is an example of a remake done extremely well. It’s true to the original game, but acknowledges modern tastes. For example, it incorporates analogue control, which simply didn’t exist in the console space when Ys first came out. It also features modern trappings like cloud saving and achievements — the latter aspect of which was added by Xseed and adds an enjoyable “metagame” to the experience, encouraging you to seek out some secrets you might not have found otherwise.

Other solid remakes I’ve come across include Atelier Rorona Plus on PS3. This was a curious situation in that the original Atelier Rorona was a PS3 title too, and only a couple of years earlier than its Plus incarnation. Plus turned out to be the definitive way to enjoy Rorona’s adventure, though, thanks to improved character models, a better interface and an overall better game experience all round. It was a less radical reinvention than the various Ys remakes, but it was still significant and ultimately to the game’s benefit.

Where I find myself raising my eyebrows a bit are when it comes to “remakes” that are little more than ports. Sure, it’s nice to be able to play, say, a PS2 classic in 1080p at 60 frames per second, but sometimes I wonder what a true remake of these older games might be like with modern technology. That’s a lot more work than a port, of course, but I can dream — and it is possible to do something along these lines. Ultimately this type of remake is mostly valuable for those who perhaps missed out on a game on its original platform, so might as well play a technically superior version for (theoretically) the “best” experience with it; contrast with, say, the Ys remakes, though, which provide value even for those who are already veterans of the source material.

Anyway. Remakes can be good; really good, in fact. And I’m more than happy to support them when they’re of as high a quality as the two Ys games I’ve just played through. It’s got me thinking about remakes I’d really like to see, too — though perhaps that’s a subject for a separate post on another day.

2312: After 1.5 Games, I Already Like Ys More Than Any Zelda I’ve Played

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A controversial statement, perhaps — and I make no apologies for a third post about Ys in a row — but one that I feel confident in making, even having only finished the first game and made it about halfway (I estimate?) through the second. (Aside: given how much I’ve enjoyed the first two games so far, you can count on a month of Ys over on MoeGamer at some point in the near future.)

Ys speaks to me in a way that Zelda never has. This isn’t to say that I don’t like Zelda, mind you — I count A Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask among some of my favourite games of all time — but there’s something just… kind of magical about Ys that I’ve been delighted to discover over the past few days, and a little disappointed in myself that I never took the plunge and explored this series earlier.

Let me try to explain what I mean.

I think the thing that sticks out to me most of all is how Ys provides a much more coherent and continuous feeling in its narrative than Zelda does. The fact that Zelda games up until Link’s Awakening still referred to the various dungeons as “levels” made it pretty clear that despite the sprawling overworld in each instance, these were basically games designed on the same linear principles as more traditional action/arcade adventures. This very much gives Zelda games a feeling that persists today: a sharp demarcation between the overworld and the dungeons. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it particularly unusual; many RPGs make this distinction, and massively multiplayer games in particular have an even more stark divide between the two types of content, with dungeons tending to be cooperative multiplayer affairs, while overworld action tends to be (for the most part) solo or social in nature.

But with Ys, there’s no such demarcation. The world is continuous and coherent, and consequently far more believable. You’re not pausing your exploration to get through the mysteriously puzzle-filled castle that happens to stand between you and your objective; you’re continuing your journey, exploring the world, fulfilling the promises you made to the people who believe in you. It’s a continuous, flowing process and narrative, rather than one that is heavily punctuated. Exploration flows into conversation flows into combat flows into more exploration; the only real punctuation comes in the form of the boss fights, which don’t necessarily come at as predictable points as in Zelda games.

This coherent feeling is particularly apparent in Ys II, which expands on the excellent worldbuilding of its predecessor. Characters move around as the story progresses, and they make reference to the places you find yourself travelling to. Sometimes you run across them on your travels as they get up to things independently of you; sometimes you’ll return from an adventure to find them acknowledging your deeds when you speak to them. Contrast with Zelda’s worlds, which tend to be rather static in nature; populated with weird and quirky characters in many cases, sure, but there’s not a lot of feeling of things going on while you’re not there, with the exception of Majora’s Mask, of course, where this sort of thing was the whole game’s central design tenet.

My friend Chris also points out that Ys makes him feel powerful, and he’s absolutely right. This is a big contrast between Ys and Zelda, and it’s partly due to the nature of the protagonist character. While both games sport a visually distinctive but mute self-insert character for the player to inhabit and play as they see fit, Zelda’s hero is a child, while Ys’ hero is a young adult. There’s always been an element of childish clumsiness to Zelda’s combat; even once the series moved into 3D with Ocarina of Time and started having more complex combat mechanics than a single attack button that always did the same thing, Link always felt… not incapable or incompetent as such, but like he perhaps wasn’t quite as comfortable holding a sword and shield as he perhaps should be. Which is understandable in several of the games, where he has the whole “Hero” thing kind of thrust upon him suddenly.

In the case of Ys, meanwhile, there’s a strong feeling that, when played well, you are overwhelming your enemy with superior skill and power. This is depicted differently in both Ys I and Ys II, despite both being based on the same fundamental “bump” system, which allows for button-free attacking and a style of gameplay where you never really have to stop moving.

In Ys I, the feeling of overwhelming power is brought about by the rather brief levelling curve: with a level cap of just 10, each one of those 10 levels is a significant jump in power for protagonist Adol. If you keep pace with where you’re “supposed” to be as you proceed through the story, you’ll take down most enemies in a single hit. It’s not until the very latter stages of the game, when you’ve been level 10 for a while, that you’ll come across enemies that need multiple hits to fell, and even then, no more than one or two extra hits.

In Ys II, meanwhile, the combat is rejigged so that individual hits do less damage, but you can inflict them incredibly quickly, particularly while attacking diagonally. You also push enemies backwards while attacking them, giving the combat a feel somewhat akin to the sport of fencing, where dominating your opponent and forcing them to move how you want them to move is key. In Ys II, careful, tactical movement of enemies — not shoving them into a large group of their friends, for example, nor pushing them into a corner behind a rock that makes it difficult for you to keep up the assault — is absolutely key, and getting it right is an immensely satisfying feeling completely unlike any other action RPG I’ve played.

Then you have things like the items. In Zelda, the items you unlock as you proceed through the game are predictable and are used based on clear, recognisable visual cues that stay the same throughout the game. In Ys, meanwhile, you might use each item only once or twice throughout the game in circumstances where it makes narrative sense to do so, not because it would make a good puzzle or dexterity challenge. This gives the game much more of a traditional “adventure game” feel to it, and I like that very much about it. In Ys II, there are also a number of items you can use in unconventional ways, too, and the game rewards experimentation with, for example, giving healing items as gifts to NPCs, or using the “Alter” magic to turn yourself into a Roo and talk to monsters. While very few of these things are necessary to complete the game, they, like so much else in these games, provide a lovely sense of a world that has been well thought out and beautifully crafted, particularly in these revamped Chronicles+ versions that I’m playing on PC.

This is all my opinion, of course, and doubtless there are some die-hard Zelda fans out there who would feel the complete opposite to me — and doubtless some other people out there who would gleefully point out that Ys and Zelda aren’t really directly comparable at all — but so far, I don’t feel it’s premature to say that I’m already in love with this series, and intend to devour as much of it as I can in short order. Count on further enthusing as and when that happens.

2311: I Finished My First Ys

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It’s something of a novelty these games to start and beat a game over the course of a couple of days — particularly an RPG — but with Dungeon Travelers 2 being considerable in both length and difficulty, I felt that a palate cleanser of some sort was in order before I tackled the remaining 15+ floors of that game’s final dungeon. I considered picking up the new Doom, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to spend that much on it, so instead, as I noted yesterday, I turned to the Ys series.

This evening, I beat Ys I. Here are some things I thought about it.

Things I liked

That music! The PC version I was playing has three mixes of the soundtrack available: the original FM version, a remastered MIDI version from a later incarnation and a full-on rock the fuck out version from Falcom’s in-house band. I must confess I didn’t try the two earlier versions, as Falcom’s band is pretty damn amazing. Wailing guitars and pounding drumbeats complemented the action perfectly, and brought a pleasantly nostalgic feeling over me, making me think of both Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which had plenty of widdly-diddly guitars) and my brother (who was always very good at widdly-diddly guitars when I was growing up).
Levelling up is meaningful. There are ten experience levels in Ys I. Each one is a significant jump in power. From level 1 to level 2 is the difference between taking 4 or 5 hits to kill an enemy and being able to splatter it in a single hit. Your power continues to increase hugely as the game progresses.
You have an HP bar that gets bigger. I don’t know why I like this, I just do. I liked it in Metal Gear Solid, I liked it in Kingdom Hearts and I like it here. It’s a satisfying visual representation of your growth in power.
Your HP bar shows how much damage the last hit you took chipped off. This is really nice. Similar to how fighting game health gauges work, your HP bar in Ys highlights the amount of damage the last hit gave you in a brighter shade of red so you can estimate roughly how many more individual hits you can take before needing to worry about healing.
Tactical health regeneration. Healing items are few and far between in Ys I, so it’s fortunate that you regenerate health by standing still… though only when you’re in a place where you can see the sky. Later in the game, you acquire a healing ring that allows you to regenerate in dungeons, too, but for the majority of the time, finding an open-air “clearing” in a dungeon makes a nice checkpoint.
Cute girls. My goodness. I want to cuddle Feena forever.
The sense of place and character. I mentioned this yesterday, but Ys I’s world feels remarkably coherent, even with its relatively tiny size compared to some other RPGs. By the end of the game, you recognise every character, and the character notebook feature in the game suggests that the writers thought long and hard about each and every NPC in the game, regardless of their importance (or lack thereof) to the plot.
The interesting structure. Ys I is broadly split into two parts: the first half sees you charging around the overworld completing various quests, and this will probably bring you up to the level cap of 10. Once you’ve done everything out in the world, you then enter the 25-floor final dungeon Darm Tower, where you’ll need to use everything you’ve learned (and a few other things besides) to make it to the top and kick the last boss’ face in.
The last boss is the hardest thing in the game. I’ve lost count of the number of RPGs I’ve played where the final boss is an underwhelming battle thanks to the ability to overlevel yourself for it by doing all manner of side activities beforehand. In narrative terms, the final boss should really be your most significant challenge, so it’s always a little disappointing when you can mash it in a couple of turns. Not so in Ys I; this asshole puts up a fight.

Things I liked a little less

The bosses are a bit primitive. This is perhaps understandable, given the game’s heritage — despite this being a modern remake, the original Ys I came out in 1987 and the bosses in particular make this abundantly clear, with very simple attack patterns that have no “intelligence” whatsoever — simply either randomised or predictable path-based movement.
The last boss is the hardest thing in the game… but for all the wrong reasons. The final boss is all kinds of bullshit. He bounces around the screen, frequently going out of reach. When you hit him, the floor falls away underneath where he was, and this can either kill you instantly or trap you in a corner if you’re not careful. He shoots fireballs that split into so many bullets it’s literally impossible to dodge them all. Fighting him is more a matter of being able to inflict enough damage on him before he kills you than any real skill at recognising and dealing with his patterns.
Inconsistent item behaviour is a little unfair. You can’t use items or change your equipment in boss battles. This means you can’t use that healing potion you’ve been saving, or the magic mirror to freeze your opponent in place. Worse, the various rings you acquire throughout the game — which vary in effect from doubling your damage dealt to halving your damage taken via allowing you to slowly regenerate when standing still — have no effect whatsoever in boss battles, either.
There are a number of instances where the game kind of forgets to tell you what to do next. This happens for the first time right at the very beginning of the game, where no-one tells you that in order to trigger an important event you first have to speak to each and every NPC in the starting town. There are a number of other such incidents later in the game, too, but again, this is perhaps a remnant of the game’s 1987 heritage, when games were a lot less hand-holdy.

Ultimately, none of the things I liked a bit less about Ys I distracted me from playing it through from start to finish and really enjoying the experience. I’m not sure whether I’ll go back and play it on the notorious Nightmare difficulty — I’m not sure I can face some of those bosses again! — but it’s a definite possibility. For the immediate “now”, though, I think I’m going to move straight on to Ys II to see how Adol’s adventure continues.

Yep. I’m 100% on board with this series, and I look forward to exploring the rest of it.

2310: My First Ys

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I’ve been meaning to check out the Ys series for quite some time — my Steam library informs me that I have owned a number of the PC versions for several years, and I also have a number of the PSP versions loaded on my Vita, too. For some reason, though, I’ve never got around to it.

I decided that it was time to change all that, so I booted up Ys I to start at the beginning. And, well, I kind of wish I’d done this sooner.

Ys is a series I’ve been dimly aware of for many years. I remember some seriously random things from my childhood, and one of the things that is still stored in my memory for some inexplicable reason was seeing a review of Ys III: Wanderers from Ys in the SNES magazine my brother’s girlfriend at the time was working on, Control. Something struck me as very interesting about this side-scrolling hack and slash adventure, and I often found myself wondering what it would be like to play. For one reason or another, though, I never did check it out, but the Ys series had always been at the back of my mind ever since.

Ys I is a rather different affair from Ys III, which took a distinctly Zelda II-esque approach of attempting to reinvent the series as a side-scrolling platform action RPG rather than the more traditional top-down perspective of other installments. But Ys I isn’t like any other RPG I’ve played, either. It’s not like Zelda because of its use of the rather peculiar (but fun and satisfying) “bump” combat, wherein you attack enemies just by walking into them, and whether or not they do damage to you depends on the angle you hit them at. It’s not like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest because it’s not a turn-based RPG, nor is it a globetrotting adventure. Instead, it’s something that very much has its own identity.

Ys I — and, indeed, most of the subsequent Ys games — casts you in the role of one Adol Christin, a redheaded adventurer lad who washes up on the shores of the land of Esteria against all odds after surviving a strange phenomenon surrounding the island called the Stormwall. After a brief convalescence — and specifically against the recommendations of his doctor and nurse — he heads out into the world to explore and figure out what is going on, and before long, oh, wouldn’t you know it, he’s some sort of Chosen One at the centre of all sorts of mystical happenings that appear to converge on Darm Tower, a hulking, sinister structure on Esteria that seems to be the source of everyone’s troubles and woes.

Where Ys shines is in its small scale. In this sense, it’s rather similar to the only other Falcom game I’ve played to date, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. Trails in the Sky featured a fairly hefty journey for its main cast, but its real appeal was in how much character and personality it gave each and every party member, shopkeeper, NPC on the streets and distinct region of the world. Ys I is the same, only in more concentrated form; the island is a very small place that you quickly learn to find your way around, even with the game’s total lack of any sort of map function, and it’s not long before you feel like you’ve got to know pretty much all of the 88 characters who are scattered around the game world, some of whom have something interesting to say, others of whom are simply background colour.

What’s fascinating about Ys is that even the incidental, “useless” NPCs are full of personality and have clearly been written with a greater context in mind. They each have their own little stories to tell, and over the course of Adol’s adventure, the things they say change subtly, giving you a good feeling of the sort of person they are and what they think about everything that’s been going on. And the game sometimes surprises you by making what appeared to be an incidental character rather more important than they first appeared.

Couple all this with some really lovely pixel art in the field, some gorgeous visual novel-style illustrations when speaking with the more important characters, and an absolutely rockin’ soundtrack, and, well, you have a game that is really rather good: unconventional, memorable, interesting and, most of all, fun.

If Ys I, the oldest and most primitive title in the series, is this appealing to me, I can only imagine how enjoyable the most well-regarded entries like Oath in Felghana and its ilk are. I’m looking forward to investigating the rest of the series in detail, and anticipate that I may well become a bit of a Falcom fanboy by the time I’m done with them.