Some of my favorite childhood memories are of going to Toys R Us and getting SNES games. I devoured pretty much everything on the SNES (aka the best gaming system ever, I’ll fight you!) that had anything to do with RPGs, and yet somehow I missed Ys III: Wanderers from Ys. In fact, the series was so foreign to me that I assumed it was Y’s and I wondered why the letter Y was so special that it got its own game series. I also assumed this was a remake of the original Ys game, when in fact it’s a prequel!
After choosing one of two heroes, you’re presented with the game’s premise: in the midst of a terrible war the twin Goddesses who protected the land of Ys vanished in the night. It’s discovered that they returned to the surface and ventured into the Devil’s Tower, and it’s up to you to help find them and make sure they’re safe or the land of Ys may be lost forever.
I tried Ys Origins out first with Yunica, a warrior with a battleaxe, and chose the normal difficulty mode. After getting stuck on the third boss, I ended up switching to easy with Hugo, a magician with projectile attacks. The gameplay is consistently fun as either of them, and the varied abilities and battle styles of both keep their runs fresh. This is even more true as not only is the story different between the two of them, some of the boss battles are even completely different. It was refreshing playing a game where different playable characters actually change the story somewhat instead of having a flat, uninteresting character that doesn’t really matter and can be swapped out without altering anything.
The gameplay is solid with a button for standard attack (either swinging your weapon with Yunica or firing the Eyes of Fact as Hugo) and a button for your magical attack. These magical attacks mix things up quite a bit for both characters, and there are three elements to unlock and upgrade. You can easily swap between these three on the fly; some enemies are weak or strong against various types of attacks, so swapping magical attacks up is vital. Your MP recharges rather quickly over time and there aren’t even healing items to worry about, so you can focus entirely on kicking butt, exploring and leveling up!
Speaking of leveling up, the RPG elements in the game are minimal but just enough to scratch that RPG itch. You get experience when you kill enemies and level up with enough experience as you may expect, but that’s about it. There are no skill trees and no choices with level up stats, the game does it on its own. Instead there are items hidden around levels to upgrade your main weapon and magical attacks, but it’s that simple – get the item and become stronger (although technically ore to power up your weapon needs to be brought to the base floor and used). You find new equipment but you just equip the new stuff since it’s better and leave the old stuff behind. The only real variance is with the accessories – one allows you to see secret platforms and doorways, for example, and another allows your attacks to permanently kill the few enemies that normally otherwise just get temporarily knocked down. Only one of these can be equipped at a time, so you’ll need to equip the right one when you need it. There are also divine blessings (pictured below) that allow you to customize things more personally, although I was never able to be patient enough to save up for the ridiculously expensive “increase movement speed”. SP is collected as drops from enemies and can be used to purchase all sorts of things!
While the gameplay was rather fun for a while, the difficulty balancing needed a lot of work. When I played on normal mode the game was very challenging but enjoyable aside from the boss battles, one of which was so brutal I died over a dozen times and gave up. Easy mode, sadly, is far too easy. The balancing with attack and defense in the game are wonky as well, even in easy mode: I would go from killing enemies in a few, quick, long-range shots to doing 1-7 damage per shot and taking several minutes of careful dodging, jumping and fighting to take out what should be ordinary enemies. Going back and finding some ore to power up the weapon and/or leveling up a few times magically fixes this problem, but it’s crazy just how necessary the hidden items are. I assumed those were special bonuses due to how hidden some of them are and without a hint as to how many are hidden per area.
The story was the same way for me. Maybe it was just because I thought Hugo was a bit of a douche, I’m not sure, but eventually I got to the point where I was hitting the skip button on all the dialogue. I’m interested in the story, and reading more about the Ys series has been very entertaining, but the dialogue droned on and on at times. And, yeah, Hugo is quite the jerk for at least the first half of the game, but Yunica is a genuinely awesome girl from what I played of her story.
Between both characters I got a good 25 hours of gameplay, although a fair amount of that was grinding for XP and looking for keys, equipment or things to make me powerful enough to continue on. I actually quit my easy playthrough because I absolutely couldn’t find the key to the next boss fight anywhere. I did enjoy most of my time with the game, and for those who are incredibly thorough explorers (I thought I was until Ys Origin!), they’ll likely have a fantastic time with this game. Plus, hey, the game is only $20 when it’s not on sale; that’s really easy to recommend!
Ys Origin is available for Xbox One (reviewed), PS4, PS Vita and Steam (Windows)
I received a free copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.