Ys-y Duz It

King of Posters
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As mentioned in my Hinge Problems 2024 year in review, I have been playing a lot of Ys games, so I am making this thread to JUST POST about them. So yeah, get a load of these Ys.

Ys V - Kefin, The Lost City of Sand-thumb
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Tonight I played a couple hours of Ys V The Lost City of Sand for the SNES. If you saw me talking about the Ys series chronology, you might remember that this is is the one THAT ISN’T ON IT, because it has never gotten an official release outside of Japan, but we live in a magical time where lots of people have translated games, and so I downloaded that and off we went.

Man, this game is pretty cool. I mean, it’svery different from other Ys games, but that is OK. It is Super Nintendo as fuck, right down to having weird menus that aren’t as bad as Legend of Mana, but are clearly from the same school of barely usable menu design. The music is very SNES, and that’s not always a good thing, as Flacom knew what to do with a Megadrive a lot more than with a SNES. It’s not terrible, but it also does not rock, as Bob Pollard says at the beginning of Propellor.

What this game does have, seemingly unqieu compared to like…every other Ys game, is a magic system and a weird leveling system. The magic system involved combining different crystals to make new spells and then attaching them to your sword in a way that feels…really Sorcerian*, which I did not expect that. I have two spells now, one of which is a fireball; the other is called Ravine and does something to the whole screen and I don’t even know what.

The leveling system is…Xanadu??? Like really, you level melee and magic separately and it just feels very much like Xanadu in terms of wanting to balance your effort, because your stats level based on which one you use. You don’t get magic for the first good chunk of the game though, which led to Adol getting this stat sheet, which I fell is pretty perfect for the Adventurer Himbo King himself:

Ys V - Kefin, The Lost City of Sand-image
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You don’t even need to know what those numbers mean (I sure don’t) to see that 5 in INT and know that everything is alright alright alright for our boy.

The game just feels odd as a whole, but it does have that early Ys feeling of EVERYTHING MOVES REAL QUICK, so I will probably play some more of it. Like I think I put two hours in and I am already on my way to the second of six crystals needed to do the…uh…something…with the thing. There is a girl frozen in a crystal and a 500 year old wizard who keeps just appearing out of the aether to tell Adol to keep going, so yeah. There’s also a prophecy about how a redhead will bring doom to the world. It’s good.

On the other side, I think I am nearing the end of Ys X Nordics, which remains funny for focusing on the Normans, and not the Nords, but still has some hints that it might connect into that stuff from Ys IX: Mallgoth Knocks. But it’s pretty good! Some fun boat explorations and just taking shit over, getting into cannonball fights with demons, etc.

I really do miss the mobility from Ys IX, though. IX lets you do all sorts of fun movement shit to just run all over its whole city, right up walls and such. Ys X has…none of that, and sometimes you can’t even hop over a tiny fence, which feels jarring after IX. By the end of IX, it did some pretty cool things with dungeons that actually made you use a lot of that mobility to get around, such as one that was like a big open underground cavern, and you had to so all sorts of wall running to get around. It was neat-o.

X has none of that, really; it does have a hoverboard that you can grind on rails with and float across water on. That is pretty cool.

I’ll probably have more to say about X when I finish it, but IX was just so damn cool that it’s hard to live up to.

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I think I’ve played 6 or 7 of the Ys games now (depends on if you consider Ys I and II via Chronicles + to be one game or two), 5 isn’t one of them though for the obvious reasons. My take on IX was that I liked the new movement option but the first chunk of the game is legit bordering on bad (all the combat for the first several hours being via colored orbs you walk into to warp enemies into the city was an all-time bad idea) so I’m hopeful X can recapture some of the magic VIII had.

For the sake of discussion I’d rate the Y games I’ve played as such, from best to least best.

  • Ys: The Oath in Felghana
  • Ys Origin
  • Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana
  • Ys I
  • Ys IX: Monstrum Nox
  • Ys II
  • Ys VI: Ark of Napishtim

I’d recommend most of them except Napishtim FWIW, that game unfortunately has some serious leveling/balance issues that are too severe to really overcome.

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I kinda forgot about the walking on orbs in the city because it just becomes totally unnecessary for a lot of the game. Doing side quests gets you so much better results, but yeah, it’s silly that they made you do it to start. Thankfully the dungeons are none of that.

I never really gelled with 8. Part of that so that I was playing the switch version, I think, which has some frame rate issues and such, so I will probably give it another go on PC or PS5 at some point soon.

I just picked up the rerelease of Oath, which I think lets you use some of the original III soundtrack, which I’m hopeful for because the original version of III rules and has some great songs. Probably gonna be my next one after X wraps up.

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The Ys series’ greatest master stroke is how they got the music in that dragon boss fight in Ys 7 to line up perfectly with the moment the player will actually start gameplay, even though technically the player has to press a button to dismiss each of the dialogue boxes during the leadup. They just understood player psychology that well.

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Ys games were so quick and efficient before 8 I feel like I don’t know the series that well despite having already played nearly all of them

IMO
2d-3d Ys > Bumpslash Ys > 100 hours long Trailsified Ys > 16bit Ys >> PSP slightly Trailsified Ys
Love Adol but Origin is the best one

These 100 hours long Trailsified new Yses are an obviously successful new direction, it’s impressive how they have managed to pull off that scale at that budget but as usual, couldn’t we have 10x less cutscenes. I remember 0 new Ys characters from 8 or 9! These games have hours of cutscenes!!

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Honestly, not sure where you are getting 100 hours from? Like IX was under 30 hours when I finished it, and X is probably going to be under 40 based on where I am now, which honestly, pretty alright length for a modern RPG.

I am almost done with Ys X Nordics, but in the mean time, I finished up Ys V. It was pretty fun. I mean, it’s got some problems, but I enjoyed it overall. The attract mode has some nice art of Adol:

Ys V - Kefin, The Lost City of Sand-250114-214153
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The combat is a bit slower and weirder than other games in the series. Each sword you get has its own swing arc and some of them suck, including the most powerful one in the game, whoops. There is also a dedicated shield button. Not a guard button, but Adol raises his shield. It’s weird!

The magic system is basically useless. You have to charge spells so much to use them, and a lot of the enemies don’t even take magic damage. As if to make it more usless, you can’t use it to fight bosses?!? I don’t know what they were thinking here. You just don’t really need it ever. And its so over complicated. There are a whole ton of spells I never unlocked because the just aren’t necessary. Real odd choices there.

It’s notable that after the weird twin versions of Ys IV (not made by Falcom), this one was made directly by them. The story is a mess, in that you can tell there is a whole lot of stuff they just had to chop out (Dogi) or just very poorly explain. That is OK, really, as it is enjoyable enough, but apparently the never-translated PS2 remake has some more of that story in it, but also takes some stuff out from this one? I’ll probably never get to play it, and that is OK.

What is left of the plot involves a giant floating city in the sky that is powered by killing people to keep its engines running. They brainwash the people to get them to jump into the death machine. Also there is some half assed time travel involved.

The fan translation of the SNES game is pretty good, though I found one thing that was a problem. So for the whole game, you can just change the color of Adol’s armor and ummmm underarmor. But there is a way to unlock the ability to change his hair color as well. Unlocking that cause a menu in the game to…well, not look good. I wonder if the fanslation team just didn’t know about that, as it is slightly secret.

The music is…well, kinda a mixed bag. I admit some of that is personal bias in favor of the Megadrive sound chip, but man, SNES music is not Falcom’s strong suit. I really do think the lack of bass hurts them a lot. Like the version of the Theme of Adol in this game is just…like, it’s a cool song, but man it made me want to listen to other versions. This is also why the Megadrive version of III is so much better, good lord.

I will say this weird bell jam was genuinely creepy when it showed up:

So yeah, knocked that game out.

Ys V - Kefin, The Lost City of Sand-250119-002727
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So a bit more about Ys V:

I realized I never posted any actual screens of the game itself, so here it is:

Ys V - Kefin, The Lost City of Sand-250119-205556
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I love that just looking at that, it is SNES as fuck. I kinda miss that, how certain hardware just had an aesthetic to itself. Currently, PC/Xbox/PS5 just kinda look the same unless you know the developer is only working on one of them, but man, this game just looks like an SNES game.

I think I might have mentioned the menus before, but they are HOT GARBAGE. Like not quite Secret of Mana, but still pretty fucking bad.

Ys V - Kefin, The Lost City of Sand-250119-205457

Like…look at that shit. And I played this game for six hours and I almost always picked the WRONG direction to hit when i wanted to swap between the menus. It also didn’t help that, depending on where you were standing, the whole layout could change:

Ys V - Kefin, The Lost City of Sand-250119-205515

There were a couple places where it just became a vertical or horizontal line. You just never know when you hit that X button what you are going to get!

It’s such a deeply weird game.

So in other Ys news, I finished Ys X Nordics today, and while it didn't mechanically rise to the elvels of Ys IX for me, it still was a really good time. It never did explicitly tie into the Nords from IX, but there are some pretty clear connections you could draw. It's odd that they don't spell them out, but what does that matter.

After playing IX, which was so obsessed with the history of the whole series, it was fun to play this one that takes place right after Ys II and doesn’t really care to tie into much other than itself. The plot highlighted how one of the things I have enjoyed in Ys is how each of the games takes place in a land with its own history (well, sorta; it seems usually based on a real world event kinda, like IX and the Hundred Years War), and Adol is usually there to try to help the land deal with its shit.

In Ys X Nordics, this turns out to be...(there be spoilers here if you care)

Rollo, a Norman leader who was a murderbeast of a dude until something stopped him and he founded a peaceful land but eventually dissappeared when the land was wiped out in a flood. Turns out that what made hims top being a murder machine was meeting a literal mermaid who guards the throne of a god that Rollo sought to get his wish of domination granted. That mermaid had a kid with him after they founded the country, and turns out that Karja, your sworn Shield Sister in the game, is a descendent of him.

Also turns out that what made Rollo into KillEmAll.guy was that his mom, who hadn’t been able to get pregnant, prayed to Loto (clearly this game’s Loki), who gave her pregnancy, but also made sure the kid was basically possessed by three demons. When Rollo went good, those three demons (called the Trident, collectively) got out, and caused all the other demons to show up. And fuck shit up more.

MurderManiaRollo’s reputation stuck around, so modern people are just terrified of him. Which means that when people figure out that the Three Demons are trying to summon him back, it’s gonna be bad. It also means that Karja’s dad, who knew she is a descendent of Rollo through her mom, realizes that the Trident wants to use Karja to resurrect MurderRollo somehow. Eventually, we find out that the Trident are parts of Rollo’s ragey self, and if KarjAdol can kill them, they can possess Karja and reawaken Rollo. Karja’s dad knows this, and so eventually decides he ahs to kill her if this happens.

So eventually, we end up with Karja, having to contain the generational rage trauma in herself until she can eventually find a way handle it, which comes through finding the actualy Rollo, who is 143 years old, but absorbs the spirits into himself so that KarjAdol can wail on them and kill them all off.

I feel like a lot could be written about what this might be saying about people dealing with the the burdens of history, but this is an Ys game, so you know they aren’t doing that, nor should they. I kinda think at the end of playing all these games, I might have some sort of Big Theory to write about these, like how Kingdom Hearts is actually all about how dudes are really bad at being friends no matter how hard they try, but we will see.

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Is there a recommendation for Ys V or just “if you’ve already played all the other Ys’s…”

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VIII is honestly enormous. I probably spent around 100 hours on it. Or at least it felt like it.
IX was a bit shorter but much in the same mold, it doesn’t have the brevity and quick pacing of the earlier games. Ys pre VII was always ~ 10 hours or less

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I think it’s worth checking out. It’s nowhere near as necessary to play as Ys III, but it is cool just to see what they did. You can get a feel in like half an hour of you want to keep playing it.

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Oath in Felghana putting in the work to let us know exactly what the relationship is between Adol and Dogi:

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which version did you play ?

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I have my first afternoon where I have zero responsibilities in like a year.

Do I start Ys XI (my big Christmas present) or the Ys VI reissue (my big birthday present)?

Or do I keep pressing forward in the ice area of Elden Ring?

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I vote for Ys IX, personally.

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My Christmas present from last year that I never got to play