Old school style J-Action-RPG. Fast, furious, and generally hits the difficulty sweet spot on the right side of hard.
The Ys series (pronounced 'eese') is a long running action-RPG from obscure Japanese developer Nihon Falcom. Nihon Falcom is a name that might be familiar to a few of you as the developer behind the well-received 'Trails in the Sky FC' for the PSP. Although the developer has held a strong long-standing presence in Japan as a mark of 'hardcore' game development, their forays into English speaking territory have been few and far between. Publisher and localisation outfit Xseed has seen fit to bring over Ys Oath in Felghana over to Steam users for 9.99GBP. With so few offerings from Japanese developers on the PC and a low price, Ys appears to be a no-brainer for JRPG fans, however prospective buyers should be aware that this game has some issues with difficulty consistency that prevent it from reaching the heights it could have.
The Ys games are largely disconnected from each other in terms of story. In any case they are largely the same; you play Adol Christin, a red-haired adventurer who almost always seems to run into trouble. In tow is your partner and muscle, Dogi. Some stuff goes down which sets the backdrop for 15-20 hours of hacky-slashy, boss-smashy fun. In the case of Oath of Felghana the game opens with the two arriving at Dogi's home-nation Felghana. It quickly becomes apparent that something has gone very amiss; monsters run rampant, a power-hungry noble in his quest for power is impinging on the livelihoods of the locals, and one of Dogi's childhood friends has been missing for six months. The story may set itself up for being the stuff of a massive role-playing epic, but that really isn't what it is about. The game world is set on a peninsula of a single island, there is only one hub-town, and only around 30 or so NPCs. The limited number of other characters in the game has been exploited to an extent in that every character fits into a family within the town; all have their own names and their own artwork. There is no 'generic old man x' or 'generic little girl y' here. Sadly the potentially intimate character relationships that could have been forged through this narrative device never really pan out. Instead the characters (the story as a whole in fact) simply colour the experience of playing Ys and inject a little character into proceedings rather than defining them. For the most part the story takes a backseat to what Ys is really about; high-speed hacking and slashing accompanied by the blaring of background guitar music that makes this reviewer want to use words like **** and 'radical'.
The gameplay of Ys focuses around guiding Adol through dungeons and fighting through rooms of monsters. The tools at your disposal are a combination of running, jumping and running/jumping slashes peppered with the odd use of magic. The enemies are largely fodder for your sword that die after being pressured by a few hits. What makes things interesting is the combination of the generally high difficulty of the game (enemies can deal out a deceptively large amounts of damage) and managing crowd-control; fighting airborne enemies requires you to run around and bat at the air with your sword a lot, but trying to do this whilst simultaneously handling several grounded enemies that use projectiles or melee attacks can get messy. There really isn't any strategy to it; the enemies even broadcast their attacks with a tell-tale white flash. What Ys offers is white-knuckle action at a frenetic pace. You simply 'get' the enemy attack patterns which leaves you free to spend the rest of your time running around their attacks and trying to frantically score hits like a headless-chicken (or perhaps more fittingly, like a chibi-version of death incarnate). Enemies explode en masse into showers of gems, coins and blood. It's fast, responsive, messy and above all, satisfying. Some would describe the Ys games as dungeon crawlers but for all the gusto and sheer momentum with which Adol decimates each successive wave of enemies, the term 'Dungeon raider' might be somewhat more accurate.
Fast wouldn't just describe the pace of the combat in Ys. The game itself has you levelling up frequently, getting new equipment (which in turn can be levelled up quite frequently) and running into one of the games' many boss encounters frequently. You are never more than 20 minutes away from the 'next thing,' which pushes you on that little much further.
Speaking of the bosses, they are without a doubt the most memorable moments in Ys. These bosses show some of the very old-school design mentality that went into this game. They are hard; require twitch reflexes to get through and above all an enduring observance to their attack patterns. The bosses even change up their attack patterns as they go, stacking together multiple attacks and getting progressively faster. At their best these are hair-on-end, edge-of-your seat intense encounters. At their worst though, they show up the biggest design flaw in this game: the pliability of the balance of difficulty. In this game it goes without saying that every time you see a save-point (which indicates something terrible is just around the corner) you should max out all of your equipment upgrade options and (if it is viable), level up to the next level. Small stat increases in this game can make for massive differences. This is problematic in that pretty much any boss in this game is borderline impossible without doing the aforementioned preparation to an extent, but it is also problematic in that levelling up smartly can make some encounters go from very challenging to laughably easy. One boss fight pits the player against three bird-like bosses at the same time, something that this reviewer was unable to clear for almost over an hour of tirelessly dodging and weaving. A quick run through the dungeon prior netted enough cash and EXP to get strong enough to not only get through the encounter but to leisurely romp through it. So big was the difference of just spending that extra 20 minutes grinding for cash and EXP (as with the combat and general pace of the game, even grinding is fast) that no attempt had to be made avoid many of the attacks simply because the increase in defense had rendered the bosses virtually impotent. It's a shame because Ys is really at its finest when it is presenting you with a challenge that it practically dares you to stand up to.
The higher difficulty levels in the game get around this to an extent by assuming you are going to do more preparation than it assumes on lower difficulty levels, but these higher difficulty levels are perhaps too high for a new player…and in any case aren't available until you've already ran through the game once.
Oath in Felghana comes down to around 15-20 hours of gameplay time on the clock, though in reality you will spend many hours retrying some of the harder, and better, encounters and sections in the game. This reviewers' clock-in time in real world hours was 25 hours. For the 9.99 it asks it isn't a bad proposition. The game is not at all frustrating for the most part (something well done given how hard some parts can be at times) and at times so cathartically brilliant in its mishy-mashy violence that it feels like playing a speed-run of another game. It comes with this reviewers recommendation, albeit with the warning that this game can at times have the challenge peeled back to the point where it becomes trivial, and so watered-down in its appeal.