Originally posted on Facebook on 18 February 2023
It's time for Ys IV!
Ys IV was released in 1993 on two different platforms - the TG-16 CD, and the SNES. ...Well - I should actually be saying "PC-Engine CD" and "Super Famicom" specifically, because unlike with Ys I&II and Ys III, neither version of Ys IV was ever released in English, and they have since remained Japan-only games. Oh dear, that seems to happen quite often with these long-running classic RPG series, doesn't it?
Thankfully, both of these versions have received fan translations, so modern-day players can enjoy them in English. Thanks fans! I decided to play Ys IV on emulator with the translation patch applied.
So, what's up with Ys IV? The TG-16 version is titled "Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys", while the SNES version is titled "Ys IV: Mask of the Sun". Are they the same? Are they different? Why do they have different names?
Well it seems the history of Ys IV is a little unusual and I'm not 100% sure about the details, but this is how I understand it:
Nihon Falcom wrote up a game proposal and design document for Ys IV, but they did not develop the game themselves. Instead, they outsourced development of Ys IV to two different developers for the two different platforms. Hudson Soft developed the TG-16 version, while Tonkin House developed the SNES version. And it seems like the two developers must have been left to get on with it without much guidance from Nihon Falcom, as they both interpreted the provided documents very differently. As a result, the two versions of Ys IV ended up as two COMPLETELY different games!
So which version did I play? ...Well, I played both, of course. 😃
Since I had just finished playing Ys I&II and Ys III, both on TG-16, I was rather keen on playing Dawn of Ys next. Dawn of Ys is the final Ys game for the TG-16, so it just felt appropriate to play it next, to round off my Ys adventures on this system.
So let's talk about Dawn of Ys!
Thankfully they ditched the ill-conceived sidescrolling gameplay from Ys III, and we're back to the same great top-down action from Ys I&II. The "bump combat" returns, where you attack enemies just by running into them, and it's just as fast and breezy as ever. Dawn of Ys also sees the return of all the other stuff that was missing from Ys III - we've got lots of dungeon mazes to explore, hidden treasures to find, NPCs to talk with - all that good RPG stuff. This time the adventure is bigger and grander than that of Ys I&II. The progression is more guided, with a lot more cutscenes along the way. It really feels like a nice, well-realised world.
I should mention that the TurboGrafx-16 Ys games don't have any way of displaying subtitles during voiced cutscenes - which meant that the fan translation team actually went to the trouble of providing their own English dubbed voiceovers for this game, which is quite remarkable. That being said, it definitely sounds like an amateur fan effort, as it is nowhere near the quality of a professional video game voice over. The important thing, however, is being able to follow the story, and with the fans' efforts, I am able to do just that. So regardless of how "bad" this dub is, I appreciate their work nonetheless. Thank you, Ys fanbase! Your work is much appreciated.
In this game, Adol finally has the ability to move diagonally! (Maybe his brief holiday in the world of sidescrolling got him thinking about the different kinds of movement directions that are possible...?) The movement in Dawn of Ys feels much smoother now that we are no longer confined to four directions, and to complement this new control scheme, the environmental design has also been made a lot more naturalistic, and a lot less blocky. It's a nice upgrade that makes adventuring feel a lot comfier.
Many elements from Ys I&II return - most notably the magical rings from Ys I (including the all-important Healing Ring), and the magic wands from Ys II. It feels nice to have so many different options for equipment in this game, and finding one of these important treasures hidden away in a corner of a dungeon always feels rewarding.
The game world feels like it has a lot of care and attention put into it. The NPCs in the villages will update with new dialogue after story events, which I always like to see, as shows that the development team cares a lot about the world they are creating. There's also a hint system in the form of a homing pigeon that will bring you a letter with a clue to the next objective. I like that there's such a natural and cute way of helping players who may not know where to go next. However there is no way to re-read these letters, so you better remember what they say! Otherwise you're just stuck again.
New to this game is an alchemist who will brew you some potions with special effects if you combine two materials. It's really cool that there is some semblance of a crafting system in such an early RPG, however I thought that this system wasn't all that well-implemented in my opinion. You can only hold one of each material and one of each type of potion at a time, which means that if you actually want to use them regularly, there's way too much back-and-forth with gathering the materials over and over and talking to the alchemist again and again. And also, the alchemist is only found in the final town, which means that for the majority of the game you'll just be carrying these seemingly useless ingredients around. It's a very cool idea, but it doesn't really end up working out, and I didn't really use the potions at all.
The boss fights in Dawn of Ys are the best bosses I've seen in Ys so far. They are really fun, varied and challenging. The bosses each have quite an array of different attacks, and the majority of them will change up their patterns halfway through the fight, to keep things interesting. After the relatively simplistic boss design of Ys I&II, I'm actually rather impressed with how cool the bosses in Dawn of Ys are.
You still can't use the inventory during boss fights, but now they allow you to activate whichever your currently-selected inventory item is mid-fight, so you finally have the option to heal during bosses! You're only allowed one heal since you can't open the inventory to change to a different item, but it is indeed an improvement over I&II for sure! The game is also very generous in placing a chest with a healing herb in almost every dungeon, which is nice if you forgot to bring one, or want to replenish it after using it during the boss.
A few times during the course of the game, I encountered bosses whom I could not damage - I would inflict 0hp with every attack. This problem could be solved by grinding a bit and levelling up a few times, which effectively means that there are "minimum required levels" for the bosses in this game. I would have really preferred if the minimum possible damage was 1hp instead of 0hp, which would allow for the possibility of a skilled player to triumph while underlevelled through skilled play, rather than all players being completely stonewalled until they grind to the prerequesite level. Oh well.
I was very impressed with Dawn of Ys. The story is expanded and more interesting, the characters are fun and distinct, the world is really well put together, the progression feels satisfying, the dungeons are fun to solve, and the bosses are challenging and interesting - basically, this game expands and improves on everything that I&II did well. It feels like the perfect culmination of the Ys series so far, and a great send-off to the TG-16 series of games. I had a really great time with this one!
...But we're not done yet here, are we. We still have another entire Ys IV game to go through.
So..... Ys IV: Mask of the Sun for SNES. Let's talk about it shall we.
it's...
...
um.....so this game kind of upset me. 🙁
...I guess I'll just start describing it.
So Adol is back to 4-way movement without diagonals. The "bump combat" is still here, but the way it's been implemented feels noticeably more fiddly and annoying than it did in the TG-16 games. Enemies in this game are very fast-moving, and they will always reposition themselves to block your attacks, even after you initially positioned yourself well. In the TG-16 games, dealing with enemies felt quick and satisfying, while here in Mask of the Sun, it just feels like you're constantly being bombarded by swarms of annoying little pests.
The world design in Mask of the Sun is very simplified and straightforward, and to me it feels rather incongruous. The world is designed like a mostly-linear string of locations, that all lead directly into one another. ...So in order to travel from the treetop town to the mountain town, you exit town, travel through a maze of ladders, and then the only path forward is through a cave, and the only way through the cave is to travel through the series of quicksand holes. And then at the back of the cave, right after the boss fight, there's an exit that leads DIRECTLY into the next town.
The only way this makes sense is from the perspective of an RPG progression. The game needs to have a cave and a boss between these two towns, right? But it absolutely does not make any sense from a world design perspective at all. Is this supposed to be a path that the villagers use to travel between towns? Do the villagers love solving a ladder maze and drowning in quicksand on their daily commute? I mean, okay, Dawn of Ys also had some mazes on the paths between towns, sure - but they were like forests and rivers and over environments that could believably be traversed by the world's inhabitants. ...At least, more believably than in Mask of the Sun, that's for sure.
And it's not just the world layout that feels weird, but other aspects of the world too - the mountain townsfolk strongly dislike violence and they especially hate swordfighters, yet... they still have the standard weapon and armor shop in town??? What gives? All of that care an attention-to-detail from the other version of Ys IV is just... not here.
And there are so many weird and arbitrary "rules" or "traditions" that the game characters need to follow that don't make ANY story sense at all, they only make sense in the context of the RPG progression. For example, there is a wise sage that we need to talk to, but the elder of the town refuses to let anyone speak to the sage unless they have all three sacred gemstones: the Eye of the Sun, the Eye of the Earth, and Eye of the Moon... except apparently the Eye of the Moon has been lost to time and nobody knows where it has been for hundreds of years. ....
... uhh.. so if this is well-known in this world, then why is the rule still in place? Do you just intend to never let anyone speak to the sage for as long as he lives? You do know that the world is in peril, yes old man? Why can't you just take me to the sage who literally lives behind your house, just because I don't have all three stones, which you yourself know is something that is "impossible" to have anywayyy????? ...Of course you do get all three stones later on, but it just feels so arbitrary and unrealistic and just plain lazy RPG progression design. Yes, in RPGs you're always collecting sacred gemstones, that's nothing new, but it really needs to have some kind of story relevance other than "do it because we said so".
The dungeon design is rather bland in this game. It's trying to go for the same kind of maze-like design of the previous Ys games, but it doesn't really succeed at this. The dungeon paths are very simple, so it's more like a series of linear paths that you're just kinda walking through. The treasure chests with new armour and weapons aren't even hidden - they're all placed in plain sight along the critical path, which means that finding all the items isn't really a fun reward for having good navigation skills in this game. It's just something that happens to all players, and it feels rather unusual and anticlimactic to find such powerful artifacts with no effort. The only dungeon that felt somewhat on par with the previous Ys series was the final dungeon, as it was an actual maze.
The game is also poorly balanced in terms of grinding - especially in regards to the items purchasable in the shops. It's all extremely overpriced, in such a way that it's basically impossible to naturally accrue enough gold to get the latest gear. Enemies drop around 30 to 50-ish gold each in this game. There's lots of them and they're quick to kill, so maybe between towns you'll have accumulated maybe... 1000-ish gold? ...so you enter a new town and check out the shop, and you see that it's 1500 for a new sword, 1500 for new armour, and 1500 for a new shield. You basically have no choice but to grind if you want to buy it. ...But if you grind for money, you also become overlevelled - so having the latest gear isn't going to be of much use anyway... ESPECIALLY since the next dungeon is just going to have BETTER armour found in the chests in plain sight, anyway...
The usable items are even worse. It costs 8000 gold to get a single-use "kill all enemies on screen" item. That is ludicrously unhelpful. Just the act of grinding enough money to buy a single one of these will get you levelled up enough so that the enemies aren't a threat any more. And besides, enemies in Ys are always spawning in from offscreen - so killing all of the ones on-screen doesn't even help much.
The bosses in Mask of the Sun are definitely not as good as in Dawn of Ys, but I wasn't holding out much hope for that anyway. For the first time, they let you have full use of your inventory during bosses now - so if you really want to use all of your extremely overpriced combat items, you can go nuts. I didn't find the boss design to be all that interesting, and a few of them definitely have some cheap shots. Overall they're okay but nothing special.
But... I haven't actually talked about the most upsetting thing yet. And that is just how uncanny this game feels for someone who has just finished playing the other game, Dawn of Ys.
Because the two games were developed with the same design specs, they actually share a lot of elements.
The cast of characters, the basic general progression, the lore - a lot of aspects are shared between the two games, yet they are handled completely differently.
So the story goes: after beating the big evil guy at the end of Ys II, Adol went sailing off into the horizon for more adventure. Ys IV takes place two years later, after Adol returns to Esteria (which was where Ys I takes place).
The way the game handles its plot elements is completely different between the two games. In Dawn, Adol speaks to the fortune-teller in Esteria, who informs him of impending trouble in the nearby land of Celceta. In Mask, however, Adol instead finds a letter in a bottle that informs him of the impending trouble in Celceta.
It's like, the games have the same broad structure, but all the inbetweeny bits are filled in differently.
Early on in the game, Adol gets captured and locked in a jail cell by the corrupt soldiers. In Dawn, Adol is rescued by Karna, a fighter girl he met earlier in the story. She storms in, beats up the guards, and opens the cell in a fun cutscene. In Mask, however, when Adol is thrown into jail, he escapes because he finds a "secret door button" in his cell, and he just presses the button and escapes easily. ...What the heck? ...Mask of the Sun just loves to have unexplained contrivances like this. In Mask, Karna isn't even introduced at this point of the story - she is later introduced fighting a group of monsters, in a much less impactful manner compared to Dawn.
It's not just the incidental stuff that's so different between the two games - it's also the very important lore things as well.
The "Tomb of Lefance" is an important location where the spirit of the ancient hero Lefance will imbue his power to Adol. In Dawn, the tomb is sealed away, in a hidden sacred temple located in the lost city of gold, deep underground. Whereas in Mask, the Tomb of Lefance is just in a small little shack behind the elder's house... and the only reason we can't visit it sooner is because the elder arbitrarily blocks us.
This ancient city of gold, by the way, is handled completely differently in both games too. In Dawn, Adol travels the world, seeking magical power from the spirits of the five disciples of Lefance (who, naturally, are found at the end of five different dungeons across the world, in true Zelda-like fashion). At the end of the game, the villains steal the magic powers and summon enough evil power to resurrect the ancient city from underground, in an attempt to reawaken the evil sealed within.
In Mask, however, Adol is the one who has to resurrect the ancient city from underground, in order to prevent some evil rite from taking place. The five disciples are all met at the same time in a single cutscene once you enter the city, and they don't really have much overall relevance. It just feels like...on the whole, the characters and elements from Nihon Falcom's design documents were integrated very naturally into the adventure by Hudson Soft, but were all kind of shoehorned into the game by Tonkin House.
It's so uncanny... I got so used to the Dawn of Ys version of everything since I played it first, so everything in Mask of the Sun to me just feels so weird and "off-brand". ...but... but what if I had decided to play Mask of the Sun first??? Would I then be thinking Dawn of Ys was the "wrong" one??? It makes me feel existentially uneasy.. It's upsetting because Dawn of Ys felt like such a perfect, satisfying continuation and send-off to the series up until that point. It was such a natural conclusion. The world design felt good, the characters felt like they fit in their roles, all the elements from previous Ys games were expanded upon and called back to in ways that fit in with the new plot so nicely, and everything was generally very fun and interesting. It felt right.
...But then here comes this weirdo version of Ys IV on SNES that undermines everything I just played, by insisting that the series of events in this story was actually completely different and much less interesting???
...I looked things up, and it seems like Nihon Falcom had officially declared that Mask of the Sun was the "true" canon version of Ys IV.
Dawn of Ys was deemed as completely non-canon. Hudson Soft took too many liberties with Nihon Falcom's design plans, and as a result it doesn't follow the "true vision" for Ys IV's story as closely as Tonkin House's lazy effort does. So the vastly superior Dawn of Ys is considered tantamount to fanfiction.
...What utter rubbish.
That's what made me so upset when I played Mask of the Sun.
...
But hey, good news - it seems like this situation has been addressed since then. 20 years later, in 2012, Nihon Falcom released a new game called "Ys: Memories of Celceta". This game was created to once-and-for-all sort out this mess of a situation. Memories of Celceta is now the definitive, true version of the Ys IV story. No ifs or buts, no more fanbase bickering - we finally have the canon Ys IV.
It was developed by Nihon Falcom - no more outsourcing this time - and so it follows their Ys IV vision properly.
I have not played Memories of Celceta yet, but I am definitely VERY interested in seeing what they did with this game. Hopefully they didn't fully abandon all the cool things I liked from Dawn of Ys, but if Memories of Celceta is actually a good game, I won't really mind if it more closely follows the Mask of the Sun version of events - if it actually makes everything make sense this time.
So... Memories of Celceta is DEFINITELY on my "to play soon" list now! I am very curious about how it handles the story. But for the moment, I want to stick with the SNES, so I am going to play Ys V next.
Wow, I might actually play through the ENTIRE Ys series this year. I've not gotten tired of it yet! It's actually becoming more and more interesting the more of them I play. 😃
No comments:
Post a Comment