If it's not clear by now, I adore the Ys series. I love how purely fun these games are, I love the simple sense of adventure, and the sense of genuine mystique from uncovering the lore of ancient places of legend. I love the way Falcom humanizes their characters and really makes them feel 'real' in a way other studios' JRPGs struggle to match. And whatever I may have said about Celceta it still is a game that has a lot of that.
Time for a quick history lesson! Ys IV's history is a strange one indeed. Back around its initial release there were actually two games that were Ys IV, there was "Ys IV: Dawn of Ys" by Hudson Soft on the PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16) CD-ROM, and then there was "Ys IV: Mask of the Sun" by Tonkin House on the SNES. How did that happen? Well Falcom were in a bit of a situation at
Heading into the final era of Ys games and in the series' timeline the chronologically last of the localized games so far we have Ys Seven. Released for the PSP in late 2009 and ported to the PC years later, this game marks a heavy departure from earlier titles in the series in terms of graphics, gameplay and storytelling alike. The shift was met with mixed reception, but given all that came out of it, I couldn't be
Now for perhaps one of the best-known games in the series, Ys Origin has gained quite a bit of notoriety especially on Steam, probably mainly because its Steam trailer is super hype. Does it deserve it? Well, to put it very simply... hell yeah it does.
As mentioned already, in Ys Origin you do not play as Adol. That's because this game is a prequel to the Ys I & II duology,
The third Ys game was known in the SNES era as "Wanderers of Ys", and was the game to introduce a lot of the western world to the series. Its reputation overall has been mixed, being a sort of "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link" of the Ys series, ditching the overhead view for a sidescrolling adventure and as already implied not really being about the land of Ys at all anymore,