Review: Ys I + II Chronicles
Ys I
I don't really know why I started played Ys I; I gave it a shot a few years ago and it absolutely was not my thing. The bump combat is janky at best, and like many games from the 80's, "directing the player as to what they actually need to do" is more of a suggestion than something the game actively does. Still, I downloaded it again on a whim and took to it much better this time, so let's dive into things.
First, it should be said that the bump combat is bad. The instruction given is "hit them from the side/behind or off-center" which is at least partially true - if you can approach an enemy from the side or behind, it's very easy to push them into a wall and defeat them with no real resistance. The "off-center" bit is...a little less reliable. Now, a large part of this could easily be that the 360 degree control granted by a control stick makes staying off-center harder, but enemies can still move a bit on their own and it's very easy for them to drift over just enough that you get bounced away and trade hits. Beyond that, the power scaling is absolutely fucked. You'll probably hit max level (10) around halfway through the game, and three of the five equipment levels are available in the very first shop. Upgrades are massive improvements, and getting a new sword or an extra level is often the difference between a boss requiring 20 hits or 60 - and this is doubly important given that you have no ranged combat options at all. You are going to run into that boss who appears for five microseconds in between attacks that take 30 seconds to execute, and you are going to LIKE IT.
And while we're here, major shoutouts to the final boss who is unplayable on modern hardware without capping the framerate. The fight itself is fairly straightforward, but he rains down meteors that explode into fragments, and on anything higher than 60 FPS, they come down so fast that you can't finish him off before you get chipped to death. This would be entirely avoidable if you could heal in battle, but for some god-forsaken reason, you can't use a healing potion during boss fights. So uh, thanks for that Falcom. Great stuff.
Putting the combat aside, Ys I is a tiny game. It has all of three towns (one of which wasn't even in the original and was added in one of the remakes) and three dungeons, although they do their best to get some mileage out of those dungeons. In the midgame, the required plot progression is as follows: After clearing the shrine, you come back to Minea and find out that the woman who sent you to the mountains has been murdered, but she left you a message saying to head to the abandoned mine next. You enter said mine (the second dungeon) and go through 2/3 of it to find the Roda Seed and the Harmonica (you MUST have both). You then turn around and leave, go back to Minea, give the harmonica back to the lady who was looking for it, and she'll play you a song. Next you head to the Roda Tree in the western part of the plains and eat the Roda Fruit, which allows you to talk to the tree. It tells you to go to the other Roda tree (in the SE corner of the plains), at which point you get the Silver Sword and can now defeat the boss at the bottom of the mines in a sane manner. The only hint you have to ANY of this sequence is that A) the lady told you her harmonica was stolen earlier in the game and B) there's a dude at the bar who asks about a Roda fruit because it supposedly has a great taste. That's it! That's all you get. And frankly, I was pleasantly surprised that you get that degree of hinting at all.
Aesthetically, Ys I looks exactly like you'd expect a 2009 PSP port to look, with acceptable spritework and an appropriately kickass soundtrack. Again, there's not a ton of music to go around, but what's there is excellent and it's nice to see that Falcom's musical prowess extends this far back into their catalog.
And that's about it for Ys I. It's a very simple and short game (5-6 hours), and I liked it more than I didn't, but it's also really clear why they moved away from these systems pretty much immediately. Surely Ys II will be better, right?
Ys II
Ys II picks up about five seconds after Ys I ends - after defeating Dark Fact, Adol collects all six books of Ys, a bright light envelops him, and he gets transported from Esteria to the land of Ys itself, having been uprooted from the ground and turned into a floating island. After being found by a young girl named Lilia, Adol discovers that there's demons afoot here as well, and it's up to him to travel to Solomon Shrine and put a stop to things.
Mechanically, Ys II is much cleaner than the first game - while attacking an enemy off-center is still kind of a crapshoot, the game is much more reliable about picking up on diagonal attacks, and you even get a ranged attack in the form of a chargeable fireball. Its power curve is also substantially slower than Ys I - you level up much more frequently (Max 55? It's at least 50), and get smaller stat boosts as a result. The end result is that you usually end up being a lot more fragile than you would in the equivalent situation in Ys I, so expect to spend more time healing up with the Spirit Cape (which both heals slower and takes longer to kick in than in the first game) or plan on packing a few herbs. Being able to heal in battle is also a nice...I want to say "quality of life" feature, but there's zero reason that you shouldn't have been able to do it in the first place. Maybe more like "righting a wrong"? Let's go with that.
As for the overworld, Ys II is a little bit larger than the first game, though not by much. There's four major dungeons this time (up from three), and they're immediately more complex than Ys I's. Whether or not that's a good thing is up to the reader, as the mine is full of identical small corridors instead of 2-3 larger maps, the ice area has a bunch of one-way slides but is otherwise fairly non-descript, and I somehow missed an entire village (and its related plot quest) in the lava area. I want to give a special shoutout to the first dungeon, whose primary puzzle is that you have to return the six books of Ys to their respective tombs. You know how many of the tombs are in the mine? Just five, not that there's ANY indication of this. For all the flack that I gave the midgame sequence in the first game, I had to pull up GameFAQs significantly more often in Ys II, and more often than not, I was a lot more annoyed by what I found when I did.
Like, did anybody want this? I'm not saying that Ys I's dungeons were top tier material, but Ys II's biggest sin is far and away the fact that it overcomplicates the shit out of everything. The final area is a clusterfuck of samey shrine areas and sewers that could have easily been broken into two (or even three!) different dungeons that all would have been perfectly acceptable, but instead it's a criss-crossing navigational nightmare. Of my 7 hour playtime, almost half of it was spent either in the Shrine of Solomon itself or on a plot beat connected to it, and it is fucking exhausting.
Bosses, too, are significantly worse than the first game. They're more complex, yes - which is something that they desperately needed, given that half of Ys I's bosses are DVD screensavers - but the complexity comes in the worst way. For one, with the sole exception of the final two bosses, you can't hurt any of them with the bump combat anymore; you can ONLY hurt them with Adol's fireball. Occasionally there's a rando add that can be killed like normal, but you're gonna be getting some heavy use out of that trigger finger. Furthermore, each boss has its own gimmick. Some can only be hurt if you attack them from the front, some only when they enter a vulnerability phase, some require you to kill their add-ons before you can damage them directly, and the "best" ones combine multiple of the above. The boss at the end of the fire dungeon is a giant zombie head that releases a big worm from its mouth that chases you around the arena. You can't damage the head OR the worm, and coming into contact with either of them just hurts Adol. So, how do you defeat this fearsome foe? Well, after a little while of chasing you, the worm goes back into the head's mouth. In this window (and ONLY this window), you can throw fireballs into its mouth to do damage - which means that the worm must be far enough away from the head so that you have time to get there before it (because it blocks your shots) AND it has to be high enough in the arena that you CAN get below it to aim in its mouth. Neither is guaranteed, in large part because you only somewhat have control over how they move.
On a final note, it's very clear that Ys I and II are supposed to be one game. I'm sure they've confirmed that in a billion interviews somewhere, but the general difficulty curve and story make that obvious just from playing the games. I don't know how much it would have helped the experience if that were actually the case - Solomon Shrine would still be a brutal endgame gauntlet - but at least the story flow would be a bit better. It definitely would have helped the music, because Ys II by itself has a pretty mediocre soundtrack. And for what it's worth, I appreciate that Adol gets a love interest in Ys II for literally no reason other than so she can get shot down because the man's already taken by a literal goddess, a tradition the rest of the series proudly carries on.
So, what's the verdict? It's...fine. I don't think anyone is looking for HARD HITTING JUDGMENT over a pair of 35 year old games at this point, as even the steam ports are over a decade old themselves. I imagine that anyone interested in playing them is already aware of whether or not they'd enjoy them, but if not, I genuinely do suggest giving them a try. They regularly go on sale for a couple bucks, and at worst you can see a piece of gaming history.