Review: Ys Memoir: The Oath in Felghana (Nintendo Switch)
As someone who came late to the Ys franchise, Ys Memoir: The Oath in Felghana provided me a clear indication of how logically this series has progressed. Originally released as Ys III: Wanderers from Ys in 1990, this remaster of that game’s 2005 remake be a comfortable fit for anyone who started with the more modern 3D adventures.
It starts, as Ys games tend to do, with Adol and Dogi sailing into town—this time Dogi’s home village of Felghana.
The two adventurers quickly find that things aren’t going well for the villagers; monsters have been attacking uncharacteristically and Dogi’s best friend from childhood has been missing for months. Who’s better to solve these problems than Adol Christin?
Gameplay starts quickly and moves along briskly, especially when compared to the more recent Ys games that tend to have a bit too much exposition. The action is also paired down and more accessible, which is logical considering the game’s age. Standard attacks are altered by their timing, not by button complex combos, making the system easier to master early on.
Of course, you do get more powerful magic attacks as the game progresses. Three bracelets to uncover yield the powers of earth, wind, and fire.
Learning how and when to use these abilities (and their charged attacks) quickly becomes a necessity, especially when you’re facing the game’s brutal bosses.
The progression for all of this is typical Ys fare. The story will unlock new areas of the world map as you push through, and those areas have “dungeons” to explore. Certain areas are off limits at the start, but it’s up to you to find a way through to the objective, which always culminates in a boss fight. There are plenty of treasures to locate and uncover as you go, along with numerous respawning enemies to defeat. If you defeat a group, leave that area, and come back, that group will be there waiting for you. This is great for ensuring you stay leveled up, but annoying when you’re just trying to find your way through. There are plenty of dead ends and causes to re-explore multiple areas, not to mention the occasional lack of direction, so Ys Memoir becomes highly repetitive.
It helps that combat is spritely and involving. You can’t just hammer (or hack and slash) your way through, you’ll need to learn to jump and run out of the way and attack when the enemies can’t immediately retaliate. Even against the most basic enemies, I felt I had to stay engaged in order to survive.
The boss battles are something else entirely. They can take a long time to defeat even when you’re perfectly optimized to defeat them. Memorizing their attack patterns is one thing, but executing the defensive maneuvers to avoid them is another. To make matters worse, the environment is often working against you, too. Even with the multiple difficulty settings available, you’ll either need to grind for experience or become highly adept at the combat controls in order to push through. That’s expected with an Ys game, though, right? The challenge is built into the series.
You don’t want Ys Memoir: The Oath in Felghana to be too easy, anyway, as it’s actually quite short; you can beat it in around 15 hours. This helps to prevent repetition from becoming a sticking point, but it also means that taking on the bosses multiple times before winning becomes an important way to prolong the experience.
That experience is aided somewhat by this remaster. The environments are brought together by colorful and detailed graphics, although textures become muddy with certain areas and objects. Character designs have been updated to match those of similar games of the modern era, but you have the ability to swap in the original illustrations if you want to experience the game closer to its origins.
The same goes for the music, which allows you to alternate between the original, PC-8801, and X68000 versions, all of which have been remastered.
And hey, Adol is voiced in this version! That should maybe be a bigger deal considering it’s the first time we’ve heard his voice, but it ends up not contributing much. Longtime fans may feel a bit more passionate about this.
That’s about it for the benefits of the remaster: enhanced graphics, new difficulty levels, soundtrack options, and turbo mode. Did I mention turbo mode? There’s a turbo mode. Ys Memoir: The Oath in Felghana therefore has to be carried by the strengths of the original game, and it’s up to the task. It’s a tight, focused adventure that moves quickly and engages the player throughout, save for some exploration and combat repetition. Ys fans will be glad to get their hands on this game, as should anyone who enjoys the PSP era of action RPGs. The more I’m exposed to games like this, the more I realize I’m part of that group myself.
