Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga

Date Started

Jun 21, 2026

Progress

in progress

Console

switch

Genre

Fighting

Whenever I’m about to get really busy, I decide to take a sunday and cram it full of as many video games as possible, even though I know I’m not going to be able to finish them all in a timely manner. I’m still playing Resident Evil Remake as well as Xenoblade Chronicles but a recent mail-call has brought to me a game that I’ve wanted to play for a while, even before it was announced for localization in english… Ys vs. Sora no Kiseki or in English, Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga!

title

Hey this game is very fun. It’s fairly simple but I think it offers much to do. It’s a Power Stone clone but with the characters of Ys & Trails games. The story is pretty straightforward, some kind of dragon guy in some alternate world summons heroes from other worlds to do something and they band together to stop the dragon or whatever. See? Pretty simple. Whatever the story is the gameplay loop works like this: Choose a fight from the map, watch some character dialogue, fight a match in a 3D arena, win, watch some more dialogue and collect your rewards. Rewards range from XP to equipable items with a smattering of currency thrown in for good measure. Some missions will require you to choose allies, which are made up of previous opponents. It looks like during the main game you can upgrade and equip only your main character, but within the arcade mode you can level up and equip things for any unlocked character. This feels like the perfect “mess around on the couch” game, it’s low lift story-wise and looks like it has a lot of content. I’m going to kick the tires on it for the foreseeable future!

Jun 22, 2026 / 9:19 pm

I chipped away at this game a bit today. Well, more accurately, I played this off an on in between phone calls, paperwork and emails today. It’s actually a great “5-minute” game. “Hey I’ve got 5-minutes, I’m going to take on the next stage.” For the most part, the battles are pretty quick - as in 5-ish minutes. Maybe a bit more, perhaps a bit less, but right in that sweet zone where you can grab a quick bout in between other things.

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I was actually able to get through Adol’s complete journey today, as well. There are maybe 20 stages throughout the main story of the game. And this isn’t a bad thing, I don’t need - actually I don’t want 75 story-based stages to this game. I’m a fan of Falcom, I love the Ys series, I’m ready to admit defeat and become Trails-pilled, but I don’t know who most of these characters are. The ones I DO know I’m not begging to hear lots of dialogue from.

YSvTrails_003

Chester from Ys … 3? 4? was a good get but outside of “Hey that’s Chester!” that’s really all I need or want. No the cool part of this game is that you collect your characters like Pokémon, use them in partner battles, and can select and level them up in arcade mode. So outside of Adol’s story I actually spent a fair amount of time in arcade mode leveling up Dogi and Estelle.

PSP XMB Title Card
PSP XMB Title Card
AND the other thing I did was… dig out my PSP, download the english rom-hack of Ys vs. Sora no Kiseki so I could compare the two versions of the game. I wanted to do this because I wanted to know what was changed, what was left the same, etc… I don’t need to explain to you what a comparison is.

I was curious! It turns out it’s exactly the same fucking game straight up and down lmao. So much so that I was actually super impressed. The experience, the intent, everything, feels so authentic to the original in a way that only Falcom can deliver. The one thing that stuck out to me was on the Switch version, they may have used AI to upscale the backgrounds, which shame on them if true.

These are the talking portrait backgrounds and are probably AI upscaled, the stages are fully rendered.
These are the talking portrait backgrounds and are probably AI upscaled, the stages are fully rendered.

If they didn’t, they just did kind of a bad job. Everything else seems like they were able to upscale from the original models because they all look excellent. I’ll drop a few comparisons below.

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As for the combat, it feels so very similar that I was surprised. They were able to get the original game to run at a pretty high frame rate so much so that I barely needed to struggle to adapt to the original. I believe I lost my first match, but it was close and this game is pretty hard at the beginning! And when I went through Estelle’s storyline (something I’ve yet to do in the Switch version) I was able to blow through the first few stages no problem.

I don’t know if I’ll stick with the PSP version, but on the Switch port I’m going to at least play through and level up Estelle. There are some things I haven’t quite figured out how to unlock yet, like the support character summons. There is a fairly large menu option for these support summons but so far I only have one for every character. There must be a way to unlock more of that.

YSvTrails_004