Yeah the button prompt shows up right before killing big bosses no matter what, but the perfect guard can get one to show up for the red attacks mid fight.
Any time you guard, provided your partner is alive, you are guarding as a duo. It’s weird and not perfectly explained.
also been putting some time into Oath in Felghana and it’s pretty great. i think i had the PSP version of this, but i didn’t enjoy playing it on that, so i didn’t get very far. i enjoy when the game has visual nods to the idea of being a sidescroller, like the original
i was looking forward to Nordics, but as soon as it released here, they announced an Atlus-style “new and improved” version so uh, guess i’ll just wait for that one
Yeah, having played the original pretty recently, it’s really cute how many screens are just recreations of Ys III areas, like the big mine shaft, some of the mountaintops, etc.
I hadn’t realized that about Nordics until after I bought it, but that will just be the PC version I pick up cheap later on.
Something I meant to complain about in Nordics: Weapons
Or, more specifically, when you get new weapons (aside from the final weapons) it doesn’t change what your character is actually holding. It did change in IX, which was pretty fun. The final versions there were hideous black with neon green and pink details and they ruled. But not in X, which sucks.
Oath in Felghana has a Diablo II like gear tiering system, so each tier changes the look of Adol, even if an individual piece on its own won’t. It’s pretty cool.
Oh.
…Well that sucks for me, my bad for buying a game while new to support a dev I like.
Today I remembered that I had a map of Ys from buying Ys for PSP looooong ago, and so I got it and some pushpins and some yarn and charted out Adol’s whole journey so far:
The lighting in my basement sucks, so I will try to get a better shot when there is some daylight, but yeah.
I finished Oath in Felghana today, and it was apretty good time throughout. I think I like the original Ys III a bit more, but really that is probably due to some bias towards seeing old games figure out some really impressive technical things. When I played the PC-88 version on my Switch, the graphics for going up the tower and going to the final island were both just so cool and memorable (and at least in the case of climbing the tower, had big “how the fuck did they do this”) vibes, and I didn’t get that in Oath as much.
Which isn’t to say Oath was bad at all. It actually ruled a lot. Like Isfet said above, there are all sorts of neat moments of tribute to the sidescrolling nature of the original, and at least the version I played had the PC88 and X68K soundtracks as an in game option, which both rule, though man, that Megadrive version is so good that I missed it a lot.
The game definitely ties into the theory of the whole theme of the series being historical influence, in how the past events in Felghana have a lasting consequence on the people of the region, and Adol is there to try to help deal with it. The colonizing aspect is there as well, as the king of Felghana is put there by the Romuns, and the church itself gets tied into what ends up happening.
Looking at that in my last post, it is kinda hilarious how the series seems to be circling around Romn, but never going into it. It’s in so many of the games though, so it feels like eventually they might have to deal with Romn.
After finishing out Felghana, I booted up Memories of Celceta (Which technically takes place between X Nordics and Felghana, whoops). It’s different so far. No Dogi! No Jumping! Lots of material gathering and map making. Also I am kinda…working for the Romuns? Huh.
Suikoden and the Ogre series also have this in common. They have each game take place in a new region, and have this strong colonizing foreign power influencing the geopolitics of every game in the shadows, and we never get to see their place (aside from a few cutscenes)
I think the creators are either waiting for a Final Game that will never materialize, or they’re more interested in the smaller regions than the global superpower
Yeah, I do wonder if it connects to post WW2 Japan’s occupation by the US, but I don’t know enough of the perspective on that from the Japanese side to say if it is saying anything about that. And it’s not like that has wrapped up either, so if it is connected, it makes sense as an open question hanging out there.
I remember having a really tough time with the first few bosses until the battle system clicked with me (sometime after the sandworm set-piece battle, which I found completely perplexing). Now the game feels a little easy, but the combat is maybe my favourite in the series.
So I finished Memories of Celceta over the weekend. For those not keeping up with things (why would you?), Celceta is the game meant to replace the two different versions of Ys IV, The PCEngine CD’s Ys IV: Dawn of Ys and the SNES’s Ys IV: Mask of the Sun. Notably, neither of those was actually made by Falcom (Dawn was made by Hudson, Mask was by Tonkin House), so I guess that might have been part of the motivation here. I have only played a little bit of those at this point, so I don’t really have any opinions on how much this game relates to those. At the same time, this is also clearly just the second version of the Ys Seven engine, a game I have played a little of and yup, that sure is what this is.
The PS4 port is kinda a silly mess, because it is another clearly Vita game, but they didn’t even dress it up much, so the HUD is still basically built for touch controls, meaning the corner of the screen has some things that are clearly meant to be buttons. It’s fine, just funny.
So this might be the first Ys game that made me want to tap out for being too long. It’s only about 25 hours or so, but I think that could probably be at least 5 hours shorter without missing much in terms of story or whatever. It did really feel padded in a way the other games haven’t. Even IX and X, which were even longer, didn’t feel like that. I think part of that is variety; in the later games, there are different ways you have to play the game. IX, for example, had dungeons and town shit and exploring the surrounding areas and the whole Monstrum Nox game, not to mention the small stealth Adol sections. You had the same actions and controls in each of these, but it felt like a shift in context, and it happened all the time so I never felt lagged down. Celceta doesn’t do any of that. There is overworld exploration and dungeon exploration, and that’s about it. It’s not bad for like 15 hours, but for 25, it was way too much.
That aside, man this game had a lot to do for the Ys Plot. Gonna get spoilery here, so I will hide it. I am not spoilering the pictures though because why not?
So the big boss of Ys III/Felghana is this creature named Galbalan. In Oath, it is talked about how Galbalan invaded Felghana and fucked shit up, but it’s never really talked about where Galbalan came from. So it’s not entirely clear where Galbalan came from yet, except that one character in Celceta rides a different Galbalan, and it is talked about how more Galabalans were made in the past to fight the dark version of the angel that became God in Celceta.
So the plot of Celceta starts of as Adol working for the Romuns to explore the forest. Well, that is what he starts doing when he wakes up in a town and has no memory of anything (not even our mad lad Dogi) and no idea what to do. He meets up with a guy who remembers him from before he lost his memory, and they take off exploring. Turns out lots of people remember Adol from his first time through the forest, though they blame him for all sorts of shit he did not do, but whatever. He even finds his own grave at some point, which was put there by one city after he disappeared and was presumed dead.
Except he wasn’t dead. What had actually happened is that he met a god named Eldeel, who really is a four-winged angel living at the top of a tower who has all the knowledge of the whole world for all time, and dishes it out to the people around the tower as needed. He’s been doing this for…ever?..and the people basically worship him as a god. The people he originally did this for were the legendary kingdom of Celceta, which eventually fall when Eldeel turned into Dark Eldeel and tried to fuck shit up. Current Eldeel was all set to give Adol some big information (how to fly, possibly? but also give him the Mask of the Sun) but for some reason (Dark Eldeel) decided against that, and tried to kill Adol by shoving him off of a waterfall, which caused him to lose his memories.
The Mask of the Sun itself is kinda cool, because what it actually does is let someone read the Akashic Records (which are an outside-of-Ys myth of basically a record of the past/present/future everything) and make edits to them, basically changing all of history and the entire universe if someone wants to. Of course, someone wants to, and Dark Eldeel is working with him to do that. In addition to making the Mask of the Sun, Eldeel also made the Mask of the Moon, which can basically just get Dark Eldeel to chill the fuck out.
So tl;dr version: Galbalan from Ys III is either from Celceta or from wherever the angel Eldeel is from, which is probably where the Goddesses of Ys are from and yes I know, this is all talked about in Ys VI Ark of Naphistim, which I will play next.
I say next, but I need a bit of an Ys break right now. I am taking that and doing something stupid by trying out Trails of Cold Steel (which it only recently occurred to me means Trains) right now. Sure, just be a sicko, Chris.
Funny note about the end is that Eldeel officially awards Adol with the title of…
lol
PS: So far, this is maybe my favorite subtitle of an Ys boss, holy shit:
Love the thread.
I’ve played only a few ys games and it’s interesting how different they all are from eachother.
Ys 1 feels nothing like Celceta. The newer ones that vi haven’t played have an over the camera shoulder.
Early on @boojiboy7 mentioned how one of the games was similar to Xanadu. Then later clearly they take from Trails. It’s really cool to see the Falcom of it all.
I also really enjoyed Celceta for being what I thought Zelda should have been when I was a kid.
I look forward to playing more Ys someday.
Yeah, the leveling in V uses the separate leveling for physical and magic based on use/kills, which is straight out of Xanadu. The only problem with it in V is that you barely need to touch magic at all, so it feels kinda pointless. Good game though.
That’s one of the things I find really cool about this series—it’s kind of the missing Link. As a US Nintendo console kid, I only really knew Ys by way of 3 on the SNES, then all the hype for the Turbo CD version of 1 and 2. But I played a mess of stuff influenced by it, and those were all some of my favorite games.
Falcom was this sort of undefined presence through most of my life because I saw some weird thematic ties (ie the fixation on pick axes) between Legacy of the Wizard and Faxanadu but it wasn’t til I was like in my 30s and my friend who wrote for HG101 sat me down and had me try Game Boy Dragon Slayer that I understood.
Yeah it’s kinda funny, because I’ve never been super into Zelda, but the two series that have had maybe the biggest influence on it (Dragon Slayer/Ys and Hydlide) are extremely my shit.
Is your Ys journey a recent thing or has this been a thing for you for a while? My antenna weren’t up for this back in the PSP days when I suspect most folks caught on.
I beat Ys I a long time ago, and I bought Ys Seven for the PSP when it was new, but never got far in it (that’s where the map upthread came from).
Really the current thing is an outgrowth of me getting so into Xanadu last year, and then also Rudie making me play Ys III on a Megadrive Monday.
