Ys II Special

Originally posted on Facebook on 2 April 2023

Ys II Special for MS-DOS

Okay, this might be one of the most obscure Ys games out there. But I was sooo curious about it, I felt compelled to play through it!

"Ys II Special" is an MS-DOS game released in 1994. Of course I played it on my computer with DOSBox, after having downloaded it from an abandonware site.

This Ys game has an interesting distinction - it was never released in Japan! Rather, this game was exclusively released for the South Korean market.

While I do have some intermediate Japanese language knowledge, I have absolutely zero Korean language knowledge, so I was completely illiterate throughout my Ys II Special playthrough. I couldn't find a walkthrough for this game online, however, THANKFULLY someone had submitted the game's maps to vgmaps.com, and they even included useful information about where to find and use items. Additionally, I found an Ys fansite forum thread from 2007 where people were figuring out how to progress. This is about as close to a walkthrough as there is, and it was helpful enough to allow me to finish the game.

Ys II Special is loosely based off Ys II, except it has been greatly modified and expanded. The same characters, locations, and very broad story structure are present, but everything has been changed so heavily that it barely resembles Ys II at all. 

For example: in regular Ys II, Adol starts with the six Books of Ys, which he must return to the six priest statues found in the first dungeon area.

However, in Ys II Special, Adol must travel the lands, seeking out six towers - each one dedicated to one of the priests. Each tower is a dungeon with many floors and a boss fight at the end. Adol will then return one of books to the priest statue at the top of the tower.

This aspect of the story that was just an earlygame quest in Ys II has become the entire premise of the adventure in Ys II Special.

Ys II Special overall is actually quite a bit bigger in scope than most of the classic Ys games. I would say that it took around three or four times longer to finish Ys II Special compared to Ys II normal. The numbers also get much bigger - At max level, you have 9999 HP! Compared to regular Ys II where you max out at 255 HP.

The gameplay is pretty smooth. Adol has eight-way movement, and he will automatically navigate his way around bumps in the terrain, which is really nice. He walks pretty fast, and the game even has a "fast mode" that makes the game REALLY fast! It's easy to toggle fast mode on and off whenever you like with the PgUp and PgDn keys, so backtracking and exploring large areas is really fast-paced, which I enjoyed a lot.

You have the classic bump combat system, but additionally, you can also swing the sword independently of the bump combat. What this means is that you can steamroll your way through weak enemies just by walking, but when up against a stronger enemy or a boss, you also have a more controlled way of fighting. I actually like this system quite a lot!

The dungeon design in this game is okay - the earlygame dungeons are fun to explore, however the lategame dungeons tend to drag on a bit too much, with some of them being based around a not-so-fun gimmick. Most gimmicky is Fact Tower, which is sixty floors of "pick a door", and if you pick the wrong door, it sends you back a few floors. ... very annoying.

However, the dungeon that really got to me the most was Solomon Shrine, the final dungeon of the game. 

In regular Ys II, Solomon Shrine was a large, mazelike area that was pretty fun to figure out. Once you got the basic gist of the layout in your head, navigation became pretty simple. 

However, with Ys II Special, they went way, way, WAY overboard when designing the expanded layout of Solomon Shrine. It is an enormous, confusing, maddening labyrinth, and I just couldn't get my head around it. Most of the other locations in the game were fun to figure out mostly by myself, but when I got to Solomon Shrine, I was nose-deep in those vgmaps.com maps the whole time. It would have taken more patience than I had to figure it all out for myself - especially while illiterate. So yeah. Fun dungeons for the most part, but that final one is a bit too much for me!

The overall game balance feels a bit out-of-whack in this game. When exploring a dungeon, it is very easy to get yourself in a state where you "feel" overleveled, as the enemies can barely touch you... however, when you reach the boss at the end, you find that you can't deal any damage to it, which means you still gotta grind. It feels like the power levels for the bosses don't match the enemies. Grinding is pretty fast in this game, though, as you can just turn it to Fast Mode and zoom up and down a corridor, gaining tons of EXP very quickly... so you won't be stuck on a boss for very long.

I would say that the enemies in this game are pretty negligible for the most part - most of the dungeon challenge comes from the navigation.

This game has a lot of cool hidden secrets to find in it. Mostly small sub-areas with unique items in them, which is always fun to find. Some of them are hidden pretty well too...

So overall the game is great, right? A big unique adventure, fun dungeons, fun exploration, tolerable enemies.... well, not exactly. There's one huge, huge HUGE problem that almost ruins everything.

...

And that problem is that the game has a tendency to crash. And it's not just the occasional random crashing - it's some significant consistent crashing.

In fact, the crashes are so bad that it makes the game literally impossible to beat, unless you know about a very very specific way to bypass the crash.

Let me go into detail:

The game seems to crash at specific moments. I noticed that there are some secret sub-areas in the main overworld with a treasure chest inside. However, every time I went inside and grabbed the chest, the game would crash upon trying to leave. Every single time.

So eventually I just learned to avoid entering these areas.

However, the big problem came when this consistent crash started happening in a quest-mandatory location.

In the Ice Ridge area, there is a section where you need to find an NPC in the Ice Ridge field, and then go back to the nearby town afterwards. However, every single time I talked to this NPC, the game would crash before I had a chance to go back to town. I tried six or seven times, and it was the same crash every time. I was well and truly stuck. And it wasn't just me - the people in the 2007 forum thread were reporting the same issue. So it's not my specific DOSBox setup - it's the game itself that has the problem.

In this game, you can only save at Inns in town. You can't save anywhere, which is a real problem when the game crashes, as you may lose a lot of progress.

However... HOWEVER. In the first village in the game, Lance Village, there is a very very VERY hidden cave. You have to walk into what looks like a solid wall. It is very unlikely that a player will find this cave accidentally. ...And once you're inside this cave, it's swarming with high-level monsters that will instant-kill all but an end-game level Adol. HOWEVER - inside this cave is a treasure chest containing the "Diary" item. And with this item in your inventory, you are granted the ability to SAVE ANYWHERE. 

This item can be obtained immediately upon starting the game, however since it is so well hidden, you most likely won't chance upon it. I only learned about it thanks to the 2007 forum thread and the vgmaps.com maps. And even if you do find the cave by pure chance, you might assume that this is a high-level area you should return to later, and may not decide to explore it fully. Actually reaching the Diary chest requires some nimble avoiding all of the enemies, which isn't so easy.

I speculate that the crashes occur due to the game not clearing its memory properly after certain scenes. But if you make a save with the Diary before a crash is about to occur, you can save, close the software, relaunch it, and... all of a sudden, you can progress past the crash point just fine! 

There's one problem though.... once you enter the Ice Ridge, you temporarily lose access to Lance Village. You have to complete the entire Ice Ridge area before you're allowed back out. ...this means that, if you entered the Ice Ridge without the super-duper-secret Diary item in your inventory, then congratulations - you have rendered your game completely unwinnable. No matter how hard you try, you cannot progress without the game crashing. And you cannot leave and go grab the Diary either. Welcome to your new icy purgatory.

So...yeah. Is this a huge problem, or what?

Thankfully the Diary item even exists in the first place - otherwise the game would be literally unwinnable. 

There are lots of other bugs too:

Some of the doorways in Solomon Shrine will trap you in the walls when you enter them, forcing you to reload. ...it makes an already confusing maze even worse.

A couple of times, the game set my respawn location to be precisely on top of an enemy, which caused an infinite loop of dying and respawning and dying over and over until I reloaded. ...that was fun.

There are actually many other signs that indicate that the game might have had a rushed development. For example, one of the towns has a large building with a playing card icon on the door, however the door doesn't go anywhere. It seems like there were plans for some kind of casino minigame here, but there's just nothing there. I wonder if they had run out of time, and had to scrap the nonessential minigames in order to finish the important parts of the game on time.

And some of the item placement feels like they didn't fully finalise everything too - very often you will open a chest and find a new weapon that is significantly weaker than the weapons you've already had for a long time. And one of the items, the Flame Shield, is found in two different locations - once in Burnedbless, and once in the Solomon Shrine Waterways. If you grab the second one, it doesn't get added to the inventory, it just vanishes lol. Additionally, I found a few keys that didn't seem to have corresponding doors. And there appear to be lots of items in general that just flat-out don't do anything. The inventory gets pretty messy in this game, with no way to sort items.

I wonder if the game was rushed to release. If they just had a bit more time to develop the game, they could have sorted out the bugs at the very least.

It's such a shame.

Ys II Special is a great game to play if you're following guides like I did.

But these technical problems are too significant to overlook. You have to be savvy about mitigating the crashes in order to enjoy this game.

Overall, though, I had a great time with this game. It's fun, but definitely not a must-play in the Ys series. I'm glad I satisfied my curiosity about this game for sure. It was well worth a playthrough for me, despite the technical difficulties. 🙂