Virtual 100 – Game 14

Ys. It’s pronounced ees. I remember seeing one of these games on a Blockbuster shelf back in the day and asking, “What’s why’s?”

That question went unanswered for me for another twenty-five years or so. It was one of those series that would pop up from time to time, but I never really paid attention to. Back in the PS1 and PS2 days, I was a bit of a Squaresoft whore. It was the golden age of Square, after all. Final Fantasy VII blew our freakin’ minds, and then there were games like Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Brave Fencer Musashi… I mean holy shit. That’s just a short list of the kind of magic Square was cranking out in that generation, and that’s not even counting the stuff they gained when they merged with Enix.

What I’m getting at is that any JRPG that I saw around, if it didn’t have the Squaresoft logo on it, was second rate.

Not that it was a good way to think of it. There were some absolutely fantastic JRPG’s that were being put out by other studios. But when you consider that we didn’t have digital services (or the internet) for most of that time, there was a very real possibility that a game could come and go and you’d never know it. Unless it was a big ticket item, with a decent marketing push behind it to get ads in the gaming magazines, most of the time I would see a game on a shelf and if it came down to giving my $4.50 an hour to one game or the other, I was going with the sure-fire hit.

That’s all a very long-winded way to say that some series, like the Ys games, I had never even given a second glance at. It wasn’t until the magic of modern day digital stores that I could go back and give some of these games a chance.

Every so often, GOG throws some discounts my way, and over the past year or so I’ve been able to acquire almost the entire Ys catalog at a pretty good price. The only one I’m missing is Ys IX: Monstrum Nox, which is the most recent game to hit the U.S. I’ll get to it eventually, but first I have nine others to dig into.

I’ve tried Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana on Playstation Plus, and what I played of it was pretty fun. But the series has seen a number of evolutions over the years, and starting out with the very first was quite the adjustment.

Ys I & II has seen multiple remakes, remasters, and re-releases, and easily has one of the most convoluted histories in all of gaming. So much so that I am not even going to try to straighten it out here. Just a looking at the wiki for it makes my head hurt. The copy that I own is the most readily available version, Ys I & II Chronicles+. Is it the best version of the game? I have no idea. But it’s the one I have.

I considered playing both and writing about them together, since it’s technically one title in my backlog, but Ys I and II are self-contained games that have their own stories and gameplay mechanics. So I may as well count them individually. So, let’s start at the beginning, with Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished. Let’s take a look at the breakdown of this early ARPG from Japan.

Classes: Seeing as how this is a JRPG, the character class is pretty locked up. Adol is an adventurer, using a sword and shield to bump n grind his way to victory.

Companions/Party/Solo: Adol, for this adventure, is running solo.

Customizeable Appearance: Adol is Adol, and his look is consistent throughout the series. As such he doesn’t have any customization options. Also, he’s a 2D sprite. Every so often the look of his shield or armor will change depending on what he has equipped, but other than that, it’s pretty much set.

Adjustable Camera Angle: This is an old-school 2D RPG, so no camera exists.

Map Type: The map type is technically “open world.” It’s not a large map, but what is there is freely traversable. It’s even possible to get Adol into areas that he really shouldn’t be just yet.

Player Progression: Progression is XP-based. Adol levels up automatically, and his stats get a pre-determined bump. He maxes out at level 10 though, which is weird, because anyone who gets lost in the game and wanders aimlessly, like I did, will hit the level cap long before the end of the game.

Inventory: Adol’s inventory is a set grid, with each item filling in a specific slot. There is no loot in the game, with items being either required to access certain areas or as quest items to turn in. Stronger weapons and armor are acquired through a shop or found in the world.

Endgame: There is no endgame. Once the story is completed, it’s time to move on.

Ys is a weird game. Instead of actively attacking an enemy, the game uses a “bump” mechanic, where you’ll do damage by literally ramming Adol face-first into a monster. The catch is that if you hit an enemy dead-center, meaning the monster and Adol are lined up perfectly, Adol will take damage as well as the monster. In order to get a clean “hit,” Adol needs to be slightly off-center. Whether that’s facing north-south or east-west, he will need to be offset accordingly.

It’s easier said than done, especially in the version that I played, which was accelerated significantly. Adol can walk, but his default is a full-on sprint, and considering the amount of aimless wandering you will do in this game, anything slower would be agonizing.

Ys is also a product of its time. It is a remake of a very early game, and while some of the game mechanics have been tweaked, a lot of them remain the same. For example, there’s no quest objective or quest log. You need to talk to people in towns in order to get an idea of what might be a side quest. And they won’t all be obvious, either. One girl might say, “My harmonica was stolen and I’m just going to stand here and look lost until I get it back” and you’ll realize right off the bat that there’s a harmonica out there somewhere waiting to be found.

Other times, you might talk to one person that says they saw the shopkeeper pick a ring off the ground and put it on his shelf. And another person will say that “Joe” is afraid to go home because he lost his wife’s ring. So you put two and two together in your head and go to the shop and see a ring for sale with a vague description and a steep price tag. If you buy the ring and take it to the guy, you’ll get a reward. As you would, in an RPG. But the game doesn’t track this, it doesn’t tell you it’s a quest, it really doesn’t give you a hint whatsoever.

And that goes for pretty much everything in the game. Not only does this game not hold your hand, it won’t even give you a smile and a wink. Most of the time, talking to the right person will advance the story or give you a sense of purpose, but who that person is and where they are is completely left up to the player to discover.

As I said, it’s a product of its time. This was back in the day when we bought one game a year and we were enthralled by it. Discovery was the magic sauce, and we couldn’t wait to get to school the next day and tell them what we found. Finding those answers for yourself was most of the fun.

And to be fair, I still enjoy games like that from time to time. Elden Ring was one such game. But I’m old now, and I don’t have the time or energy or attention span that I used to. And what I do have, I certainly don’t want to spend on old games that won’t even nudge you in the right direction. Luckily we have the internet now, and man did I use it for this game. Sometimes I would have a span of a few days go by between play sessions, and with no quest log or map to speak of, I would be at a complete loss when trying to figure out where I was and what I was doing.

Oh, and like I mentioned above, there is no map. And some of the caves— and especially that damn tower— are mazes in themselves. As I said, back in the day, we would have been more than happy to grab a stack of printer paper and a pencil and start drawing out our own maps. But I don’t have that amount of dedication nowadays. Maybe part of me is just spoiled. But part of me is also old and tired.

Another odd decision is the inability to use or change equipment during a boss fight. That includes health potions. Which makes absolutely no sense. Outside of boss fights, Adol can heal in a few ways. First, if he’s not in a dungeon, merely standing still will heal him over time. Second, if he’s equipped with the Heal Ring, he will heal over time by standing still, even if he is in a dungeon. The third option is to consume a health potion. It’s all fine and dandy, but because of the other two methods, Adol has virtually no reason to use a health potion in order to heal. Any monster can be run away from, and allow some healing to occur, even if it’s just for a few seconds. A health potion just isn’t necessary.

You know when a healing potion IS necessary? When a swarm of bats has just hit you six times within two seconds, stealing about 80% of your health, when you have only a few more hits to get in to kill a rather irritating bat boss. And that’s the exact time you can’t. It’s a mind boggling decision that defeats one of the oldest RPG staples around. Health potions are for boss battles.

Speaking of boss battles, it’s time for me to admit something. As of this writing, I have not yet beaten the game. I am stuck on the final boss. This guy is all kinds of bullshit. He’s hard as hell, and not in a good way. I literally burst out laughing when I first encountered him.

I finally get to the top of that fuckin’ tower, and I approach this Dark Elf lookin’ dude sitting on a throne. He’s looking all bad guy-ish. He speaks to me and gives me his typical bad guy spiel.

Then the fight starts and he begins hauling ass around the room like he’s cracked out on sugar and cocaine, and there are fireballs shooting at me, he’s flinging projectiles that explode into other projectiles, the platform I’m on is disappearing, and all while I’m supposed to literally bump into him in order to do damage. My first encounter with him lasted about four seconds before I was looking at a dead Adol.

It was all so ridiculous. As I said, I burst out laughing. It was… shocking. Dude skipped the first two phases of the fight and skipped straight to the final form.

The first five times I died, I did minimal damage, if any at all. I figured there had to be something I was doing wrong.

And of course, I was. See, during the ascent in the tower, there’s a point where Adol is hit by a trap and captured. He loses all of this silver items. Silver sword, silver armor, and silver shield. All gone. It’s up to you as the player to find them in chests and re-acquire them. Which I did.

But along the way, I also found other, better weapons and armor. And of course I equipped them. Eventually, I reached a point in the tower where I couldn’t progress any further, due to whatever reason— I forget. So I backtracked. I wandered around looking for a solution. During this process, I forgot to equip the thing that allows me to get past the trap that captured me in the first place. It got me, and teleported me to the dungeon cell. No big deal, the hole in the wall was already there, I just waltzed on out and went about my business.

Well, I played the game, and figured out who I needed to talk to or what I needed to do to get closer to the top, and before I knew it, I was standing in front of the Dark Elf lookin’ dude, about to get my ass kicked.

And got my ass kicked, I did. After a few tries, I consulted the internet, and read about the silver equipment, and I was like, “Oh, I need to use the silver. Makes sense, I guess.”

Only… I didn’t have the silver equipment. I looked in my inventory, and all three were grayed out. Apparently, when I got captured the second time, I lost my silver equipment a second time. But the game didn’t tell me anything, and I didn’t notice because I was using the better equipment I had found. I needed to go and find them again.

By this time, I had been running around in this tower for a while. A long while. Days’ worth of off-and-on play sessions. And I was so done with it.

So I put it down. And I decided to do the write-up. I still have nine other Ys games to get to, after all. Ten, if you consider the fact that Ys III has two versions: the original SNES version, Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, and the 3D remake, The Oath in Felghana.

I looked up the ending to both Ys I & II Chronicles+ and the original Ys I. The ending to Ys I in the Chronicles version (the one I own) and the original are different. The ending to the Chronicles version is essentially a block of text that doesn’t say much at all. The ending to the original had a whole cutscene.

Then out of curiosity I booted up Ys II and watched the intro. It’s literally the ending of the first game.

So technically, I’m not missing anything by not beating the first game, aside from the sense of satisfaction from kicking the shit out of that meth’ed out motherfucker.

I do believe I’m going to set this one aside for now. I’ll make a note of it, and maybe once I’ve moved on and put some distance between this game and some of the others, I’ll come back to it and slog through that damn tower again to find the silver equipment, and try to beat that piece of purple shit.

Until then, though, I’m considering this one done. Because I do believe I’ll come back to it one day, but for now, I have tower fatigue.

That’s all I have for this one, for now. There will be an asterisk next to it, a constant reminder, that there’s one thing left to do here. But I’m moving on to Ys II, and I’m praying to the two goddesses that one is a little bit more gamer-friendly.

I’m not getting my hopes up.