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.

Jul 9, 2025 / 8:41 pm

Okay I’m straight up not having a great time with this game tonight. Since I last played I had used all of my herbs and crystals, so I’m out of stuff and my health was pretty low. It was low enough that the boss I was standing in front of was too strong, and I keep dying on my out of the castle to try to get to town and refill. I had one option, grind a lot to get up a level while also refilling my magic. Remember earlier I said that killing enemies will also slightly refill your magic? It’s exactly 1 to 1. One bad guy slain and you get 1MP added to your ring. 1MP will heal you for 1HP if you have the heal ring on. Yay. How wonderful. So instead of restarting the game I found a door that had an enemy spawn in front of it and I went in, killed it, healed for 1HP, left. Went in, killed it, healed for 1HP, left. For like 30 minutes.

This got me to 40 or 50HP and allowed me to move back to the boss room, where I did the same thing on a flight of stairs.

Somewhere along the way… I also leveled up and found that I hit the level cap! Already! Apparently level 16 is the limit and I’m there, baby. This all worked out, I defeated the knight-boss that swings two morning-stars at you.

After that, I found the Battle Armor and am now being trounced by ANOTHER boss - this time it’s the wolf guy from Oath in Felghana that I absolutely crushed in one go. Looks like its payback time.

Jul 12, 2025 / 12:13 pm

I got frustrated with that fire boss and took a few days off, I had a pretty big job that took up most of my week. But now that I have a Saturday and some achine muscles I’m going to put this game to bed. I had not attempted to leave the castle since hitting the level cap so I bid the wolf farewell and got back to town to restock. With a full inventory, I made it back to the wolf outsted him in one shot - the magic of the shield ring made it trivial. The rest of the castle didn’t pose too much of a threat, I made my way through it including Merland/Garland.

The final march from Valestine Castle to Sarina had a good pace but it was ruined by the lack of enemies. I thought they’d start to introduce a barrage of smaller enemies that would provide a challenge but each of the new areas felt anemic. I liked the way they handled the dark maze - with your magic light equipped you are met with a sweeping light that scans back and forth through the cave. It illuminates where you are going but still keeps things tense and mysterious. The vision of Adol on his small boat braving the storm was maybe the highlight of the game for me, it was just a cool moment! There are small cutscenes spread out across this game and when they aren’t relying on the terrible V.O. I thought they were well done.

And … that’s credits! The final boss was tough - it was a giant floating thing that shot energy balls in a pattern as it moved back and forth across the screen. I found the Protect ring ate my magic too fast to be useful, so I ended up equipping the Power ring with full magic and keeping the herb in the accessory slot. It took a few tries - lost count after 15 but it wasn’t much more than that. Once you recognize the pattern things become much easier to dodge.

Final Thoughts

Apparently, it’s the Summer of Ys! A title I wish I had come up with sooner! I understand why this is a game that carries with it a dark cloud. It’s short, the magic system is weak and the voice acting is less than good. I still enjoyed my time with it, it continues the lineage of the series and builds up what the first two games started. I enjoyed the addition of Dogi as a companion, Adol deserves a buddy. I would not have believe myself if I read this before playing, but I missed the bump combat! It seems as though Hudson-Soft wanted to add in platforming elements and decided to keep with the times, they needed to shift perspective to side-scroll. And then they mostly forgot about the platforming until the very end of the game. The clocktower (which is represented in Oath very well) brings platforming to the forefront of the gameplay as you need to jump and puzzle your way around some giant gears. It’s mostly successful, though there are jumps that if missed force you to wait around until a moving platform moves back into position. The boss design relied on racing to the bottom of the health pool - I undertand most bosses in video games need you to not die before them - in many of them you could lock into a position and blast them until dead, refilling your health as you go.

I’m excited to see what else this series has in store. I would like to play both iterations of Ys 4 - neither of which officially came west but luckily there are some fan translations available.

Additional Images