If you’re finding your wallet is a bit empty, it might be because you took advantage of the Steam Summer Sale. Last year I skipped it, but this year I didn’t come out empty handed. I now have Ys: The Oath in Felghana and Ys Origin. As a huge Ys fan, I think I’m a bit late to the game on those. If you are too, both of those are still on sale, as well as Ys I & II Chronicles +.
Now, if you’ve never played Ys: The Oath in Felghana, you might not know that it’s a remake/reimagining of Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, which was the black sheep of the series. It was a departure from the rest of the series, pulling a Zelda II. It became a side scroller instead of a top-down ARPG, and the combat seemed clunky at best. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t have the charm the rest of the series had.
Oath in Felghana takes the same storyline framework and locations and plops them down into the game engine used in Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim. It’s good stuff. Falcom took everything I liked about Ys III and Ys VI and put them into a blender. All the music is there with some wonderful remixes. There’s a magic system and even a weapon upgrade system that expands on what we saw in Ys VI.
Fact: Any game with a “down thrust” is automatically awesome.
You could say it’s Ys III finally done right, unlike Taito’s trainwreck of a remake on the PlayStation 2. I don’t know how you could make Ys III worse, but… wow. It was a sidescroller that didn’t scroll!
After numerous fan requests and years of anticipation, Earthbound is finally released on Nintendo’s Virtual Console. The catch is, it’s only on the Wii U. So, for those of you that have one, it’s $9.99 and you probably want to check it out to see what all of the fuss is about. The only way I can really describe the game is “bizarre”. If you like RPGs and weird 1950’s settings with lots of strangeness piled on, you will probably enjoy it very much. I’ve never gotten a chance to get too in-depth with it, and I’m hoping I’ll get some time to sit down with it and explore more than the first couple hours.
Pfft… I don’t need to listen to what NPCs tell me.
While we’re on the subject of SNES RPGs and backlog, there’s a game I recently pulled out which I intended to do for my “Blowing Dust” column but have subsequently bailed on. That would be Lufia & The Fortress of Doom. I don’t really like doing RPGs for Blowing Dust. I like RPGs. A lot. I feel like it’s a genre that would naturally dominate my discussions if I were to let it. Not to mention, even if it’s a game I’m familiar with, I like to give a game a play through or two before writing an article about it. RPGs make that difficult, especially because I’m probably going to be playing other stuff as well. Playing through a 30-40 hour game in a week is rough.
Lufia’s been a game that I’ve gotten many requests to write about. Specifically Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals. I thought I’d want to play through the first one before tackling the second because I thought they took place one right after the other. I was wrong. They don’t. Rather, Lufia 2 takes place about 100 years before the first. I could have played Lufia 2 from the start, not missed a beat and not have had the ending spoiled by the first game. Yeah, that’s a thing that happens.
Oh God, it’s like Golden Sun all over again!
I didn’t really like Lufia, which wasn’t something I expected. Lufia 2 seemed pretty solid from what I played and I expected the first one to be similar. They’re actually quite different. Lufia wasn’t bad, per se, but it felt very archaic for a game from 1993. The story seemed reasonably intriguing, the music was INCREDIBLE, but the battle system killed it for me. I can deal with insanely high encounter rates. I beat Phantasy Star II for Christ’s sake. One of my biggest pet peeves is when you have a character that kills an enemy while another character also targeted it. Instead of moving to a different target, the second character attacks the empty spot like a dumbass. Since Final Fantasy III I’ve come to expect my characters to switch a target when their original one is defeated. This is the 90’s. Get with the program, Taito. Then again, what did I expect from the guys who screwed up Ys III so hard on the PlayStation 2!
And there we go! Full circle! Rad out!
