Chris’s Year of the Sicko 2024

The Ys Series

Of course I have played an Ys game before this year. I’m not a monster. But this year, on one fateful Megadrive Monday, I played Ys III The Wanderers from Ys for the first time in my life somehow, and that game rules for two very interesting reasons. First is that it’s just totally different from the previous games in the series. No longer top down, no longer bump combat, but it still feels like Ys. Everything is super fast. The soundtrack, the first in the series without Yuzo Koshiro on it, still kicks ass, so much more so coming through that sweet Megadrive sound. It moves super fast.

So funny thing about that is that I didn’t beat the Megadrive version first. In 2024, the Year of Our Lord Sicko, I couldn’t just do something as borderline non-sicko as that. No, the version of the game I beat first was …the PC-88.

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Ys III Wanderers from Ys

Like every EGGConsole release, this is untranslated. Unlike Hydlide 3 The Space Memories, there is no charmingly clunky attempt at localization by the original developers. And no, it isn’t mostly in English like Xanadu. So I spent a weekend on my couch aiming a phone with Google Translate at the screen to tell me what every word on screen said, but thankfully, there actually wasn’t a ton of text in game. The soundtrack still sounded good though.

It’s ridiculous to think this game came out in 1989 on a PC. It’s beautiful and vibrant. The parallax scrolling is gorgeous. The waves lapping onto Adol’s boat as he approaches the final island are wonderful. The effect as he walks up the tower, the whole thing rotating as he walks, is perfect.

I get why Falcom basically retconned this game out of the series with The Oath in Felgana. It makes a pretty decent amount of sense, given how later games in the series would never return to the side-scrolling fun of Ys III Wanderers from Ys, but it is still kind of funny how much this game did show up in those later games. Think of playing a later game in the series without Adol being able to swing a sword or jump. There’s always going to be part of me that wishes they would go back to it, but I know that’s unlikely.

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Ys IX Monstrum Nox

Everyone always has said that, barring the first two games and Ys Origins, each Ys game stands on its own. Despite following the adventures of a single guy over the course of less than a decade of his life, they all function mostly independently. Usually there is some reason why Adol doesn’t keep things between games, but that’s basically just a convenient reset button, and goes all the way back to Ys II, which took place like minutes after the end of Ys I, but reset Adol back to level one due to some convenient amnesia. That’s fine with me; as someone who has had to answer many times which Yakuza game people should start with¹, I can appreciate a series that basically says “eh, start wherever”. This is mostly true of Ys IX Monstrum Nox, but also kinda not.

Ys IX Monstrum Nox Is SUPER INTO the History of Ys

Early in the game, when Adol is getting interrogated after being arrested, and the interrogator cracks some jokes about how many gods he has met, how many shipwrecks he has been in, and so on, I thought it was a cute acknowledgement of how silly this all is. What I wasn’t ready for is how the rest of the game, bosses from old games return (even a few from Ys I and II, fully 3D-ified), and characters make reference to previous adventures in conversations. This is never done in a way that made me feel lost, but in a way that made me want to see those adventures, so good job Falcom making a game that successfully advertises for like 9+ other games.

What’s cool is, without getting too into it, Adol’s status as “dude who has done way too much to only be like 24” is even a driving force for the game. The main villain, when you eventually get to him, is obsessed with Adol because of that, and willing to do some pretty interesting things because of who Adol is. It’s nothing earth-shattering or literary, but it was a bit more thought than I thought Falcom would put in for the Mallgoth Knocks.

The Ys Games Have a Really Weird Relationship with the Real World

Ys IX Monstrum Nox takes place in Gllia (not a typo, pronounced Glee-a) is really obviously not-France (Gaul), but all jumbled up. The Hundred Years War happened 500 years before Ys IX Monstrum Nox (which would mean, if the series was at all following real world chronology, this game takes place in…1953…which it very much does not) and even had its own Joan of Arc, Rosavita. Instead of fighting Britain, the Gllian people fought Britai. And this is all pretty relevant to the actual story of what happens in Ys IX Monstrum Nox.

Also relevant to it though is religion, but man, this gets confusing. Gllia is run by the Hieroglyphic Church, which is clearly a stand in for Catholicism, but rarely gets much of its theology discussed. There was, prior to the arrival of the Hieroglyphic Church, a strong following for the Nors religion (obvious parallels to Norse, but also Ys-ified, so there are two rival gods, Grimnir (totally not-Odin) and Luki (totally not-Loki)). Again, this is also actually plot relevant, and kinda makes me hype to play Ys X Nordics for obvious reasons.

Oh also somehow modern Gllia has been taken over by the Romun (not a typo) people from Romn (still not a typo), who are clearly the Romans, and have an empire expanding into Gllia-Gaul, but 500 years after the Hundred Years War. It’s all kinda confusing when you try to line it up to the real world, so maybe just don’t. Maybe someone at Falcom just had a Wikipedia account and went buck wild on that chronology whammy bar. It sorta doesn’t matter too much.

Also, in terms of the full seires, the Hundred Years War took place 200 years after Ys Origin, and like 490 or so years before the beginning of Ys I.

As Much as that Matters, None of That Matters

Falcom does a pretty decent job of making all of that part of the plot, and also making it not really what makes the game fun or interesting. I can totally admit I was originally drawn to this one as “Adol gets a makeover somewhere between mallgoth and visual kei, and fucks up a prison city”, and it didn’t disappoint on that at all. What I didn’t quite anticipate is how much fun the game would make getting around that city.

Way back in the early 2010s, there was a game called Prototype. Prototype was all grimdark and tribal tattoo in its art design and plot, but was also from the studio that made Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, so it knew how to make getting around a city fun. Probably not fun enough for most people to get past the aesthetics of the whole thing, understandably. I didn’t even bother finishing it at the time, but I do remember how good moving felt.

Thankfully, I think somebody at Falcom played that, or at least watched a Youtube video on it. I think they also played Crackdown, a game that also tried to make open world movement fun, but more importantly realized that getting on the roof of buildings was maybe the most important think you could do with movement in an open world game. So much of Ys IX Monstrum Nox is just running around on top of buildings. Sure there are streets, but damn, standing on the roof is so much cooler. And nobody in the city questions you for that, because snitches get what they get.

Despite being like 30 hours long, the whole think feels like it moves at the signature Ys pace. I just motor through things, leveling whole populations of monsters and bosses on my way to the end. There are small segments with a non-goth-ified Adol who is stuck in prison, and those are just long enough to make me appreciate getting back to the mallgoth meat.

Game rules.

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Ys Origin

Ys Origin almost feels like someone made an arcade game out of Ys. Short, fast, lots of focus on combos and powering through waves of enemies to a wailing guitar soundtrack. It is shorter than modern Ys games but longer than the original duology. It only takes place in one tower, ostensibly the big dungeon from the end of Ys I, but very much not that. You are meant to play through it multiple times with different characters, but none of those characters (not counting his availability in a bonus time attack mode) is Adol.

The original duology is cool for lots of reasons, but one that always stuck with me is how Adol joins things in media res, really. The land of Ys has a long history behind it and you can tell this when you play, but Adol isn’t privy to the whole thing, so neither are you. Adol is just stumbling his way through a land with hundreds of years of history and trying not to fuck it up too much, but you never quite get the full story of what is going on. It reeks of videogame dream logic, and that is not a complaint.

Ys Origin tries to fill in a bit of that, and (if the Internet can be believed), the third time through, it does a lot of that. I haven’t gotten there yet, but even one time through the game felt really good. The feeling of constant forward momentum, occasionally hindered by a boss who is just hard enough to make me need to try a few times to win, got me through a playthrough in a couple days. It really balances the feeling of new Ys (more complicated combat, jumping) with original Ys (fast as fuck RPGing).

As much as Ys IX Monstrum Nox is obsessed with the history of the Ys games themselves, Ys Origin is obsessed with the hidden history of the land of Ys itself, which is an new kind of navel gazing for a series that often doesn’t seem to even notice it has a navel. Everything in the game ties into the original two games, and that is pretty cool. At some point, I am sure I will get to the third character and get the full story, but in a year that was seemingly so much about personal histories, Ys Origin being about a universe’s personal history was fitting

It’s also super cheap and runs on a potato (being a PC game from 2006), so you should play it.

1. Sickos: PS2 Yakuza with the English dub; Normal humans: Yakuza Zero ↩︎

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