Ys Origin (PC) - Guest Post

Hi, I'm Ray Hardgrit and the following words are not written by me. They were put there by some guy called Jihaus who wants to show off the first hour or so of a game called Ys Origin and infect my site with his opinions.

I've never seen the point in asking guest posters to stick with my rating system though, as everyone's got very different taste and it seems like it'd be misleading somehow. You can only really trust a rating when you know the critic and can compare it against their other reviews. Basically what I'm saying is don't flip out if this doesn't get a 'gold star' badge at the end, as Jihaus doesn't hand the things out.

Developer:

Nihon Falcom

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Release Date:

2012 (WW)

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Systems:

Windows

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Today I'm finally playing Ys Origin on PC, an action RPG with platforming elements and fast-paced combat. I've played my share of Ys games so I'm no stranger to their brand of anime-style characters combined with rockin' music combined with crushing difficulty, and this one in particular uses the same engine as its last two predecessors so it should be relatively familiar territory. I always did find it extremely amusing that the correct pronunciation of "Ys" sounds a lot like "ease", because that is entirely the opposite of what these games tend to be.

Unlike the other games in this series which deal with the adventures of the red-haired swordsman, Adol, this game instead goes in a different direction - specifically, 700 years before the first Ys game in the chronology. Despite the the huge departure, it treads a lot of familiar territory, and fans of the first and second Ys games will see familiar people, places, and terminology. In particular, most of not all of the game takes place in the enormous demon tower of the first game, which has changed little on the outside but got a serious renovation on the inside. That's about the extent of what I know going in anyway, so I can't wait to see what we'll find.

I've heard horrifying things about the difficulty in this particular installment but I will proceed to flagrantly disregard such warnings and play on its hardest difficulty, nightmare. Without further ado, time to die!

(Click images to view them at their original weird-ass 1024 x 578 resolution)

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We get a choice between two characters, a sorcerer named Hugo and an axe-wielding girl named Yunica who looks like she doesn't belong in a dungeon let alone a hero role. I was drawn to Yunica's whole shtick of carving up monster faces with an axe while looking like a random vendor in an item store, so I went with her and proceeded.

I got treated to not one but two semi animated intros, largely consisting of nice looking images with text superimposed on them. The first one was the backstory - that there was a prosperous land called Ys that had crazy goddess-gifted magic, but it got nearly overrun by demons so they decided to lift up the whole land to escape. The demons wouldn't have that, so they built a gigantic tower to reach up to them, while the goddesses decided to pick these worst of times to go and disappear. The good guys now form a search party to look for them and our not-quite-hero is one of them.

The second intro is more animated and shows a sequence of shots depicting the events that lead to the start of this game, all to the sound of awesome music. The main take away was that on the way down, some jerk shot our group with some kind of laser and scattered all of the search party members everywhere.

Our heroine wakes up on the ground entirely intact, close to a talking tree ancient who provides additional exposition. Yunica is introduced as someone incapable of using magic but wants to make up for it with strength. She seems to be a bit optimistic given the situation, and the tree more or less says that everyone's scattered. However, he did see the goddesses heading towards...

...THAT tower. With our objective clear and axe in hand, we go forth to go wreck some faces.

Inside we find some beleaguered search party members who need saving and it looks like we'll get some actual fighting for a change. By this point I'm itching to just hit something because I'm suffering a bit of intro fatigue. I think that's more my impatience though, because I know what kind of game this is and I was itching to start immediately. Relative to other RPGs, the size of the intro was actually not that bad.

Yunica the NPC-heroine runs in and tries to take some heat off of them by beating up the closest monsters, clearly already having a bad day and unwilling to take any of their crap.

We get a quick tutorial showing some moves which are pretty straightforward and simple...

...and then I FINALLY get to hit things. The combat as expected feels very responsive and meaty. Regular attacks can chain and hit as many enemies as there are in front of you and briefly stun enemies that get hit. The monsters telegraph their attacks very clearly so they're easy to avoid if you're not able to maul them fast enough. In no time at all, the enemy group is wiped out, and I'm still hungering for more.

Afterwards, I end up saddled with a lot of dialogue setting things up and explaining the useful items I start with, which puts an ugly stop to my current bloodlust.

The items are a sort of long distance communicator I assume can be used to get clues, and a crystal that can turn specific statues into the glowing save point statues pictured above and allow fast travel between them. Yunica the misplaced baker decides to go do some advance scouting and training by killing monsters, fully aware that she's a bit of a noob at this point.

Into the first floor we go, fighting some of the same enemies and some new ones. These enemies are pretty easy even with larger numbers as seen here, but then again this is just the first room.

The UI is pretty straightforward here, with the horizontal blue bar being my health and the curved one under the portrait being the "boost" bar which can be activated to do useful things like reduce the cost of skills, which we don't have right now.

Thankfully the game quickly fixed that problem in the next area where I get my first skill, which is a whirlwind attack that I can use to float as well. There is a jump button in this game which I expect will be used quite often for terrain navigation.

The skills run off of a now-active secondary bar under the health bar which regenerates constantly. I soon found out that charging enemies head on and whirlwinding them in the face was extremely fun and very sustainable, vastly changing my playstyle. In general you can put out a lot of hits and can stunlock an enemy relatively easily, so the challenge for regular enemies probably lies in not getting overwhelmed.

The game has a significant platforming element and that's already evident in this first floor. The three-dimensional design is great and some enemies aren't bothered by elevation at all, chasing after you if necessary.

Of course, the biggest thing I noticed up to this point is that the game is very stingy with healing, with no ability to buy items at all. I did catch some healing items occasionally, but even those didn't heal much. Because of how valuable HP is here, I was already feeling the "nightmare" aspect of this difficulty level as I found myself going back to the original save point or even getting game overs because I was careless.

Thankfully some "outdoor" areas like these exist which not only show you the dismal state of the surface world but allow you to heal your HP to full as long as you're standing still. Despite that, due to the lack of ability to save anywhere, you still have to be real careful.


EVENTUALLY...

A suspiciously placed save point next to a one-way drop leads to a large room where I run into these two jerks. Despite the fact that Yunica the not-so-harmless NPC-heroine has proven to be adept at carving up creatures, this (Mean) Spirited Girl doesn't buy it at all and lets her know it. I mean, I understand that villains have to talk down to people, but that is just rude!

Seeing themselves too cool to hang with us, they instead drop this demon on us and run off, leaving us to our first boss fight! Yay!

This boss follows expected Ys boss formula of having specific moves or patterns that need to be memorized or accounted for, and this one is pretty straightforward. In demon form it just stands there then uses one of two attacks after a few seconds, which can be avoided easily if you get out of the way.

The annoying part is when it breaks up into the little bats you see here which chase you and are invulnerable. Eventually they fly off somewhere and reform as the demon, where you can hit it again. Once below 50% HP, the bats instead split into 2 groups permanently and transform into 2 separate demons. The timing for when both groups transform is not always parallel, creating difficult situations where bats are chewing you up while you're trying to damage the other demon.

Thankfully dying repeatedly is made bearable thanks to the convenient retry option on the game over screen, which puts you right back to the start of the battle, letting you get right back into it. I lost count of how many tries it took, but thanks to that eventually I brought it down.

Past the boss I acquire an item which I was able to use to get past a sealed area from earlier. More search party members show up some time after, conveniently not having to deal with the boss I just killed. To be an even bigger dick, one of them proceeds to tell Yunica the demon-slaying baker that she is immature and should quit getting into trouble. She responds to this in a rather... expected manner, but considering what I just went through I'm tempted to just axe the guy in the face. Unfortunately we are good guys here and this is not that kind of RPG.

Yunica is told to go back to the others but she decides to completely disregard their orders and keep looking around.

As if on cue, a giant monstrosity falls out of the ceiling in the next area and seems to laugh at our folly with one of its two heads, or maybe it's just a cheery monster. Yet while this thing looks like the last boss of some other game, Yunica, in a fit of madness or extreme badassitude, decides to neither run away or find another way. Instead she says the hell with that and decides to go wreck both of that monster's faces.

Before I can shake the bewildered expression from my own face, the battle is on.

This is on an entirely different scale as the previous boss. The boss shoots lasers and does sweeping area of effect attacks which are far more dangerous and harder to avoid than anything I've fought so far.

Attacking the lower face enough times causes the whole thing to fall down for a few seconds. You then have to jump up on top of it and attack what looks like its brain. Doing this is what actually causes its HP bar to go down, not attacking the lower face.

The problem here is how it spits out those crawling maggot things, which don't directly attack you but drop that green crap everywhere they walk which makes the floor slippery. Next thing you know, you're careening across the platform barely dodging giant arm swings and acid bubbles like a drunk figure skater while trying to hit these tiny maggots with everything you have.

To make things worse, the boss does a move where it attempts to inhale everything including you, and any maggot that you didn't kill heals its HP. Ugh.

I ended up seeing a lot of this and I wasn't really making any progress. Eventually I had a lapse of manliness and lowered the difficulty, since I didn't want to spend the rest of the day on this boss. My glorious nightmare run came to an end as I wallowed in crushing shame. Honestly though, if a Ys game causes you to lower the difficulty, it'd be entirely expected.

It wouldn't let me continue the fight on the lower difficulty though, so I started a new game and got up to the same boss. This time I wasn't taking as much damage and the enemies as a whole weakened. Hard mode enemies felt comically easier on the way to the boss, and the boss itself was a bit nerfed so I was able to beat it. Still took a few tries, but hey.

Moving on, we arrive in the next area called the "Flooded Prison" which has the look of a water level. It seems like this tower is going to be one huge continuous vertical dungeon theme park, so this should be interesting. Right away, enemies are kicking my face in again and I'm accidentally getting game overs from being stupid, so difficulty is back on track.

Eventually, I ran into the same girl who dropped the demon on us earlier, who now decided to actually fight us herself. Unfortunately, she got so thoroughly wrecked that I didn't even get any proper shots of the fight. Of course she tries to play it all cool per standard villain procedure, but deep down knows that she just got defeated by a hick with an axe.

I end up getting called back to the group to go meet up with more newly recovered members of the search party...

...who, like everyone else, have zero respect for Yunica the Death Baker.

Seriously, they don't seem to realize that they won't have to dodge acid bubbles and get mauled by giant arms thanks to our efforts, but I guess since the bosses' corpses evaporated into energy, they can just talk all the smack they want. Considering I don't run into any of them in my search, they must all use secret elevators or staircases that they refuse to tell us about because we're apparent amateurs not entitled to shortcuts.

Yeah well...we'll show them.

The trek continues and suddenly we're completely underwater, with swimming and all. I was expecting platforming but I wasn't expecting full blown underwater navigation, so this was a nice patch of variety. Unfortunately, I was unable to find out where I had to go next, resulting in Yunica getting overleveled.


A LONG TIME LATER...

We entered through a suspiciously fancy door via a key to this room with a not-statue that has 'boss' written all over it. There's always a damned centipede boss, but this looks...different.

And holy crap is it ever. I was expecting the standard "hit it in the tail/weak spot while it runs around like an ass" mechanics but instead we got something cooler. This centipede writhes around this round area crawling here and there and up the wall and down the wall, shooting lightning here and there and dropping exploding poison pods. While that's happening, we have to wreck each of its segments. Unfortunately, dead segments spew out more poison pods, so things get hairy real fast.

What makes it cool is that you can actually get on top of it and attack the segments directly. Of course it doesn't like our cowboy antics and will sometimes double back on itself and shoot lightning from its head directly at us. It'll also get sick of your crap sometimes and will get back to crawling on the wall in an attempt to shake you.

But this is my centipede rodeo, dammit!

Compared to the previous boss, this was much easier. I managed to wipe out half its HP on my first try and...

WHAT THE HELL! You can't do that!

Oh right. Ys. Boss at half HP. Extra attacks. Yeeeah.

This guy now proceeds to roll around at high speed around this minuscule circle, while poison bulbs are blowing up and leaving persistent green bubbles all over the place, so you can't just run everywhere. Suddenly there's nowhere to go and there's a giant flaming centipede wheel heading your way, at which point you start lamenting your lack of care in keeping up your HP in the first half of the battle...

Eventually, after some game overs, I defeated it. It still wasn't as hard as the giant red jerk with the big arms, but it was considerably more fun. I think I had a silly grin on my face the whole time, even though I was dying. That was one of the coolest boss fights I've seen in a while, so it was quite satisfying.

With that out of the way, the door to the next area opens up, allowing Yunica the Baker of Destruction (and Centipede Wrangler) to proceed to the next floor, where she will no doubt obliterate legions of monsters and giant monstrosities and still get absolutely no respect from her peers in spite of it.


CONCLUSION

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It goes without saying that I'm definitely not done with this game.

Ys Origin is a straightforward action RPG with simple controls and a simple story, and it's not a very high-end looking game as far as graphics are concerned, but they do amazing things with what they have and the boss battles are gloriously huge in scale.

Its true strength lies in its tight gameplay, where there is more value in skill and technique over levels and gear. At harder difficulty levels it provides a level of challenge that demands your absolute best and this is certainly one of the harder Ys games I've played. This here is the FUN kind of difficulty - the kind where your failure is entirely due to your lack of skill, not due to some arbitrary random chances or bad rolls. Every retry makes you stronger and takes you farther along until you realize you've become a complete badass yourself. If you love that exhilarating feeling of grasping victory over an insurmountable challenge after fighting at your absolute hardest, and if dying only makes you try harder, then put yourselves in the hands of this game and let it strangle the life out of you.

Also, the soundtrack is amazing. Seriously.

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Just a quick reminder, if you've got anything you want to say about Ys Origin or Super Adventures you can enter your comment into that box below. The one that says "enter your comment" in it.

That clue on the left isn't cunning misdirection by the way. I decided to go easy on you this time.