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Ys Origin
Developer: Falcom
Release date: 2006 (JP) 2012 (Steam NA/EU)
Platform: PC
Genre: Action RPG.
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Ys Origin serves as a prequel to Ys 1 & 2, the first game in Falcom's long running action RPG series. It is the third game to use the Napishtim engine, the game engine developed by Falcom to bring its games into the 3D realm (the other two games to use it are Ys: The Ark of Napshtim and Ys: The Oath in Felghana). While many of the games in the series have gone unlocalized for a very long while, XSeed games managed to secure localization rights from Falcom and have been steadily localizing the series' most recent offerings for the PC and PSP. Ys Origin itself was released at the end of May of last year, two months after they released Ys: Oath in Felghana for the same. As a prequel to the first game in the series, it had a whole lot of questions to answer, and a great deal to live up to.
So, the game takes place about 700 years before Ys 1. The country of Ys is in peril- a horde of monsters has burst forth from the earth itself, bringing with them untold disasters, such as spontaneous volcanoes and other eruptions of lava. To protect the people of Ys, the six priests gathered its people into the lands surrounding their most sacred place, Solomon Shrine, and raised that part of the land into the sky. While this was accomplished, it was a great cost, as the lives of two of Ys's bravest captains of knights, Saul Tovah and Toal Fact, were lost in the battle to protect the people as they fled to the shrine. However, that was not the end of the problems of Ys, as the monsters built a huge tower from which to try to launch further attacks on Ys, and what's worse is that the twin goddesses that watch over the land of Ys, suddenly vanished. Knowing that they only place they could have gone is to the tower, the six priests assemble a team of knights and wizards to go down there and recover the wayward deities. Joining them are Yunica Tovah, daughter of Saul and close friend to the twin goddesses, and Hugo Fact, a rather sour wizard looking for the power to escape the shadow of his heroic brother. While the tower is filled with monsters, there is another threat- there is another powerful group looking for the goddesses as well, and they are no friends of the land of Ys.
The gameplay is based on the refined version of the Napishtim Engine that was used in Oath in Felghana. However, this game does have three different playable characters, with Yunica and Hugo playable at the start and a third character unlocked once one of those two has been completed. There are some similarities across characters, such as how each has a boost meter and three separate special skills based around a recharging MP meter, but that's where things change. the actual effects of the special skill vary wildly by character, and even the basic forms of attack can differ. Yunica is a bashy melee type, whereas Hugo fires a series of magic bolts. The effects of activating boost also depend on character- while Yunica gets an attack speed boost, Hugo's spread of magic bolts gets wider, meaning he can catch more enemies. Each chracter also has their own weaknesses. Hugo has a ranged normal attack, but his attacks don't interrupt any enemies, unlike Yunica, who can interrupt many enemies with her melee strikes. The third character has to go without any ranged attacks at all for 90% of the game, and the one he gets can only be used fairly rarely. Armor and upgrades are all acquired as there are no normal shops in the game, as the entire game takes place inside the Tower- you gain spirit points from destroying monsters, and you exchange them at save points to upgrade your character's capabilities, such as MP regen, enhancing armor, or increasing drop rates. Like in Oath in Felghana there are no standby healing items, but standing on the balconies of the tower does allow the character to regen HP, just like Adol could in Ys I.
It's rather difficult to talk about the dungeon design as opposed to the rest of the game, because the whole game technically takes place entirely inside a dungeon, The Tower. However, there are six distinct areas inside the tower itself, each having their own character and unique puzzles. In fact, the solutions each character have for some of the puzzles differ, sometimes wildly- they even get different items towards solving some of the obstacles preventing further ascent up the Tower itself. There is however, usually very little reason to backtrack to earlier areas of the game, except to upgrade your character's weapon once you have acquired the materials to do so. Also, a couple of the puzzles are easily solved if you've played through Ys I, as there are some things about the Tower that didn't change much in 700 years.
The difficulty is different, but equal to other Napishtim Engine games. This game actually has some of the more difficult normal enemies to be found in the series, especially as there are a couple later on that can stack multiple temporary status ailments. While the bosses in previous NE games tended to rely on flattening Adol with single, powerful attacks, the ones in Origin tend to deluge the player with hordes of attacks to grind the character down, so while a single mistake may not cost you the fight, they can, and will add up. The boss fights are also generally more involved, with even the early bosses on each route able to pull some pretty nasty surprises. Also, each character has at least one boss fight entirely exclusive to their route. The game also features very many, for lack of a better word, modern "remixes" of bosses from Ys I & II, and there are only three bosses from those games that don't put in an appearance in Ys Origin.
Ys Origin has it's own approach to story progression. While all of the characters will pass through the same areas and fight mostly the same bosses, and the basic plot is the same, the character you choose does have a fairly strong effect on the themes of the story of Ys Origin, and it also affect which characters live and which die over the course of the game. Even though there's only one character which has the true story of what happened 700 years prior to Ys I, it is still worth it to play through all three of them, and it's not a huge burden to do so- each individual playthrough is not especially long, usually at around 7-10 hours per character. The game also has boss rush and survival modes, the latter of which is used to unlock alternate versions of the three characters for use in the main game, as well as a certain quiet redhead for survival and Boss Rush.
The game has the same graphics philosophy as Oath in Felghana, and they are handled with the same degree of quality as this game's Napishtim Engine predecessor. The redo of the Ys I & II bosses are almost universally good translations into the 3D environments the game uses. Of special note is the game's soundtrack, as it is excellent from top to bottom- the only game in the Ys series that might have a better soundtrack are the latest iterations of Ys I & II, such as Complete and Chronicles. It contains a couple of especially good remixes of tracks from Ys I & II, but there are actually very few remixes of tracks from previous Ys games.
I would rate Ys Origin something worth giving a shot generally, but I would actually call this game essential for fans of the series, especially after one has completed Ys I & II.
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Intro.
Screenies:
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