Ys 3: Wanderers From Ys

Well guess what? It’s time for Ys 3: Wanderers from Ys! I had to keep going, I’m just not being attracted to any other games at the moment and I really want to see this series through. Once again I’m opting to play the Turbografx version which, now that I’ve spent some time with, feels like maybe not the wisest choice. This game is ported to everything of the era - SNES, Genesis, Famicom - along with NEC’s intrepid console. Of the home console versions in the west, I believe this version is the only one with voice acting… they really lean into the voice acting - more on that later. For now, let the adventure begin!

The big change here is … well, everything, I guess! It’s a side scrolling game, now, with an attack button and jump button. According to the manual you have a few options of attack style. Press the button and Adol swipes his sword out in an arc starting at his face and ending parallel with the ground at waist height. You can jump-slash, you can also crouch-slash which lets you duck and attack enemies that are close to the ground. Lastly there is a downward slash that is supposed to let you get the the drop on an enemy from above. All these moves sort of work in taking down enemies but sometimes it’s hard to know if you’ve hit or been hit because the feedback you get is roughly the same for each. There are a lot of enemies that are low to the ground, requiring you to crouch to attack, there are also enemies that have a projectile or long reaching weapon like a whip that is just too low to be able to crouch under. Everything all together makes the combat feel clunky and perfunctory.

In Ys Books 1 & 2 there was a change at the halfway point of how the magic items would work. In Ys 1 you have a selection of rings on your equipment screen and they each do something to augment Adol’s power - strength, armor, health regeneration, etc. In the second game, rings became an equipable item and your magic was controlled by a variety of staves along with a pool of magic points. Some of those magics would be used slowly and by your hand (like blasting fireballs) but others - like transform and even worse, shield tick away at your magic at a breakneck pace. This is how Ys 3 has chosen to adopt the magic system this go around, rings that perform augmentations on your stats but eat at your magic points - and by Feena do they eat. With a ring equipped you see the magic melt away, with 255 MP, I estimate it would run out in around 180 seconds. This system of consumption is my least favorite - it leaks out no matter what you are doing! One addition to this system is the ability to craft a potion that lets you perform 3 small refills of your MP. Killing enemies does add a few MP back into the till but in my experience its not enough to keep things recharged for good. So far the rings I’ve acquired are shield, power and time. I got the time ring right before a strange boss that had two energy balls quickly rotating around it, one teleported you away, the other was where you were teleported to. This felt like the perfect opportunity (and reason!) to use the time ring, but alas, it had no effect on a boss. Whomp whomp.

Speaking of bosses, the last big change that I’m seeing in the way the game works is you can no longer save in the chamber directly before a boss! It just gives you a no sound when you try to access that menu. However you are now allowed to use healing herbs in the middle of a boss fight as well as reshuffle your equipment. This is a welcomed change! I never understood why you weren’t able to do that in the first two games. So far the bosses have been fairly varied, but in the end they all seem to have a very similar weekness, get right up on them and hit slash as fast possible. There have been teleporting bosses and flying bosses and giant woman that throw knives, but mostly all you need to do is get really close to them and hit them with Adol’s sword as quick as possible. If you start to run low on health hit the run button, heal, and keep going. These fights are mostly about staying alive just a little bit more than your opponent because the end of each fight, Adol gets a fresh stack of XP and health refilled!

Since I’ve already played Oath in Felghana, which is a remake of this game, I’m able to kind of predict the story as it unfolds! Its sort of like watching the high school stage adaptation. The voice acting is terribly over dramataic much more so than the first outing on Turbografx. Not only that, it’s not mixed down very well making lots of very important plot points difficult to hear and understand. I don’t quite get how there is such a huge disparity between the quality of voice acting between these two releases. According to the MobyGames entry there doesn’t seem to be a voice director credited on Ys 3, unlike Ys Book 1 & 2. Perhaps it was a case of “who’s around the office today, we’ve got 40 lines of dialogue we need recorded!” kind of thing. It really is that bad, too! Chester comes out, clears his throat and with his whole ass proclaims “YOU ARE the boy I SAW earlier. What are YOU doing HERE?”

I’ve been working through this game for 2 nights and I’m now in Valestine castle. I’ve still got one armor set to acquire and one more statue to find, but it certainly feels like I’m on the end run. If this game follows a path similar to Felghana, I’ll need to fight something in the castle, yell at King McGuire and then find out we need to head to an island to kill the big bad! I’ll update this more when I find out! Until then here’s some screenshots that make this game look like a buddy comedy between Dogi & Adol.