prfsnl_gmr wrote:Exhuminator wrote:Now please excuse me while I go install Xanadu Next.
Are you kidding me?! You haven't even beaten Romancia yet!
No one actually beats Romancia. It's entirely ridiculous that it was meant for children. The original Dragon Slayer is exceedingly more playable. I played Romancia for about an hour before getting kind of tired of it, and deciding to check a long play to see how far I had gotten--. There is no way any human being could naturally figure out all of the ludicrous flags to trigger to beat it (spoiler: it requires dying several times in a very specific way). I don't think I even bothered to watch the LPer actually get to the final boss. Play a more reasonable Dragon Slayer instead, like literally any other one.
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1. Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys (PCE-CD)
Oh god, the second half of this game SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS--. Here the are the positive things I can say about it: The animated cutscenes are excruciatingly beautiful; the first half of the game coincides with a short enough period of time that the combat doesn't make me want to beat my head against a wall (about seven hours), and the game is almost fun over that interval; the music is pretty good, but Ys III's OST is so god-tier that IV's is almost boring by comparison. That's all I've got. It was twice as long as it needed to be, the story is just uninteresting, and it gets caught up in too many tangential threads/details that are either poorly resolved, or largely inconsequential. In general it's kind of an incohesive mess. The graphics are all right, but scrolling is a tad choppy, and there is some massive slowdown in a number of places. Bah.
Since I don't really have much else to say about the game itself, here's my diatribe on the Ys series, and its creators: As I was playing this game, I noticed a few things that seemed a little awkward to me, about the setting, and the main objective of the game, which led me to some information on the Super Famicom Ys IV, and what was really up with these entries. I knew going in to Ys IV that I had already played all of the Ys games that were made by the original creators, but was under the impression that the SFC and PCE versions of IV were completely separate. In doing some research, I found that the producer for Ys I-III, Katou Masayuki, gave Hudson and Tonkin House the same base scenario to work off of, which they both adapted into their respective versions of Ys IV. So, they share most of the same main characters, many of the same plot elements, and sequences of events. Even the music is the same. They aren't really the same game, but I hadn't realized that they shared so much in common. In some ways it's almost like the differences between Rondo of Blood and Castlevania X.
Anyway, part of what made me so upset about playing Dawn of Ys is that it's set in between the events of Ys II, and Ys III--except it kind of messes up the timeline a bit, and
So, here's the thing: Wanderers from Ys is a pretty good game--I already mentioned the soundtrack. After Ys II, Hashimoto Masaya, the series creator and main programmer, wanted to make something drastically different for the next entry, and god bless him, because he was right to want to. Bump combat sucks, and nowhere does it suck more than in Dawn of Ys--apparently I was coddled by the Saturn ports of the first two games. The story goes that Wanders from Ys met with pretty lukewarm reception from fans, and has always been pretty divisive when it hasn't been shrouded in moderate obscurity. Who cares about the fans, though, they were dumb. Where are bump mechanics now? Ultimately it didn't affect Hashimoto Masaya much; He just opened up Quintet with Ys series scenario writer Miyazaki Tomoyoshi, and they made Actraiser, and two of the best ARPGs/games on the SNES in Soul Blazer and Terranigma.
So, overall, I'm kind of split on Hashimoto Masaya as a game dev. Wanderers from Ys, Soul Blazer, and Terranigma are excellent; Asteka II, Ys I/II, and Illusion of Gaia, not so much. Actraiser I've never been able to stick with long enough to actually beat.
Am I glad that I beat Dawn of Ys? Meh. It was kind of a waste of time, but I guess I'm happy to gain a slightly broader perspective on the Ys series as a whole. Also, Ys V is the only Ys game left that I own and haven't beaten. Maybe I'll just get rid of it before I can talk myself into playing it, and just be done with everything Ys that isn't Wanderers.
I'll just leave this here, since it's been providing some pretty decent reading material on the Ys series: http://www2.jan.ne.jp/~psyzans/Kura/Kuramenu.html.
