What is console gaming in 2021? Last weekend I played through Ys Origin on my Xbox Series X. This is a 2018 Xbox One port of a Japanese 2006 PC game that received an English translation in 2012 and became backwards compatible with the Series X along with the rest of the Xbox One library. This history help explains the game’s unusual look, which resembles a high definition version of those PlayStation 1 and Saturn games that mixed sprites and 3D backgrounds, like Grandia, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Klonoa. It’s running on the same engine and is the same style of game as Ys: Oath in Felghana, which was also a PC game and came out a year earlier. It’s a look that gives the game an uncanny feeling, with the tiny characters not quite blending in with the massive environments of the tower, and works well in the context with the setting and story of the game.
Ys Origin does not, in fact, tell the story of the origin of Ys, a magical land that’s been the setting for a games series that has been ongoing since the 1980s. Instead it tells a tale set during the fall of Ys, after demonic forces have sprung up in the land and the people of Ys have retreated to a floating shrine, which the demons are trying to reach by constructing a giant tower. Ys Origin tells the story of either Yunica or Hugo (the two selectable characters) as they participate in the search of that tower, looking for the missing goddesses of Ys and a powerful artifact called the Black Pearl. There’s a third, unlockable, character with the game’s “true” ending, but I’ll be focused on Yunica during this discussion.
There’s a surprising amount of story in Ys Origin, which falls into a subgenre of the action RPG genre where a character spends the entire time exploring a single dungeon, with no overworld, towns, side quests, or optional areas (though you don’t technically have to visit every room.) Because Hugo and Yunica come to the tower as part of a search party they run into various characters, both friendly and not, over the course of their adventure, and they can always return to home base to talk to the few NPCs there about what’s going on. Over the course of the 10 hour running time they’ll encounter about 2 dozen unique characters, most of whom will pop up multiple times to flesh out the story or provide some character development. Yunica’s story is fairly complete and satisfying, giving her a character arc that’s not quite what you’d see in a full on RPG but is way more than most games of this type have. However, I found it a little too wordy and generally wanted to get back to the action rather than listen to the characters talk, especially since some of the story segments are pretty long and they often occur back to back, involving a ton of text to wade through.
You may get more out of the game if you play Ys Books I and II, which it’s a prequel to, first. I played them after Origin, and lots of the items and locations in Origin are callbacks to the earlier games. Darm Tower, where Origin takes place, is also the setting for the back half of Ys Book I, and many of the characters, items, and concepts in Origin serve to flesh out Ys Books I and II. It’s interesting to see how the designers fleshed out and re-imagined the tower almost 20 years after the first game’s release, but Origin also works fine as a stand alone release. It contains enough explanation to make its story coherent, even if that story is a little bit rote and told in a longwinded fashion.
Fortunately, the game’s action is much more compelling. This is definitely an action RPG, featuring leveling, equipment, weapons and armor that can be improved over the course of the game, and abilities that can be upgraded over the course of the game. Despite the RPG trappings, though, the game leans more into the action than most games in the genre, and especially most Ys games, with precise controls and some fairly intricate platforming sequences. Your character doesn’t have any consumable items like potions and instead can find healing items and boosts to damage or magic in items that enemies dropped, and they are used on pickup. The RPG elements, by comparison, are simplified. There are no decisions to be made when leveling, and equipment and artifacts are found in treasure chests rather than purchased. There is a shop of sorts, where you can upgrade certain abilities like your magic recharge rate or your resistance to status effects, but the shop is just a text list that can be accessed at any save point. You need to find items to progress through certain areas of the game or upgrade your abilities, but none of the items in the game are hard to find, and I managed to locate every optional item and upgrade in the game on my first run through without using a guide. The wide open and uncluttered environments make searching for items easy, and even though there’s a special item that is equipped to search for secrets, there are only two such secrets in the entire game, and neither is optional. The game is generally lacking in puzzles, with only a few simple ones that involve hitting switches or lighting torches. There’s even an in-game hint system where you can talk to someone at your home base to get a hint on what to do next, should you need one, which is a direct call back to Ys Book II. The entire game takes place in one massive tower, and though there are significant changes in environments through the various parts of it (including water and lava levels, which really must make climate control on other floors an HVAC nightmare) it's always clear where you have to go. Up.
So the game really lives and dies on the quality of the combat, and it’s good stuff. Like most Ys games attacks are fast paced and furious, and your character is quick and responsive, allowing you to dodge in, smash enemies with your axe (or blast them with your magic), and get to safety. Your characters each get three magic skills, wind, thunder, and fire, and can swap between them on the fly, and those become chargeable after you find upgrade items for them. Your character can also “boost”, which gives them added damage and damage resistance that they can activate through a meter, and eventually gets the ability to “burst” which lets them expend their meter to do a powerful AOE attack. All this means that you have a fairly robust arsenal of tools to deal with each encounter, but nowhere near the variety you get in most full action RPGs. You’re never swapping weapons or armor to deal with resistances or elemental weaknesses (though you may switch the type of skill you are using for enemies who are vulnerable to that) and you don’t need to go find special items to deal with certain enemies. Combat against normal enemies is very hack and slash, without a dedicated dodge button, and can feel a little sloppy and imprecise, but is fast paced and visceral enough to still be fun, and there are strategic choices to be made as to when to use boost and magic. The bosses in the game are a highlight; most of them are polygonal (and the only polygonal enemies in the game) and they look great and are lots of fun to battle. The first few bosses crushed me easily, but rather than going back out and grinding levels I focused on learning to read their attacks and was able to get past them by improving my skills. I almost bailed to grind on the second boss, who is extremely complex, but I figured it out, and the rest of the bosses were all a matter of improving my pattern recognition and practicing my skills a bit. The high quality of the action, and especially the bosses, are the highlight of Ys Origin and were enough to push me through the game despite the archaic, though pleasant, graphics and overly wordy story.
Because this is an Ys game it is worth taking a moment to talk about the music. It’s great, of course, but not quite at the standards of the previous games I’ve played in the series. The best tunes are drawn from prior games, including the spectacular main series themes, but the original material is pleasant enough. I mostly played the game without listening to podcasts or Youtube videos, which is a good sign that I was enjoying the music in a game without speech. I’d also like to note that there are a few anime cut scenes in the game, and they are uniformly excellent. They are very fluid and pretty for video game anime, and though there aren’t many of them I was always happy when they appeared. Of course if you don’t have nostalgia for 90s style anime you might not get as much out of them, but I thought they were a highlight.
Ys Origin is a weird game, and an especially weird game for Xbox. To my knowledge this is the only Ys game that has appeared on an Xbox system, and the very Japanese and somewhat archaic nature of it meant that it doesn’t appear to have resonated with Xbox players. The completion achievements are shockingly rare for a game that’s only 10 hours long and is not particularly difficult (on normal I was cruising by the end of the game, beating most of the last bosses in a couple tries and not even threatened by normal enemies.) It definitely doesn’t require knowledge of the Ys series to enjoy, since it doesn’t even feature the series protagonist, Adol, but there are lots of tie-ins to the series for long time fans. It just doesn’t seem like the kind of game that Xbox players gravitate to (Playstation gamers have much higher completion rates), which is kind of a shame because I thoroughly enjoyed it. The 10 hour length is fine considering the $20 price tag (I got it on sale for $10) and as a sort of isometric action game I thought it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the graphics style and music, and even the story had its moments. The game adds longevity with multiple difficulties, extra modes like time attack and boss rush, and, of course, multiple characters who play differently from one another and have distinct stories. The first thing I did after beating the last boss was jump back in with the other selectable character to see how he played. I got about an hour in before I started losing interest, but for me to even want to do that shows that the game hooked me on some level, because I usually drop games immediately after rolling the credits. I don’t know if I will ever go back and complete a second playthrough, let alone a third one to get the true ending, but even if I don’t I had a satisfying experience ascending the tower and stopping the demons’ evil plans.
I don’t know that I would recommend Ys Origin to everyone. It’s an old Japanese computer game and it has those quirks. You have to appreciate the graphics and be willing to tolerate the wordy story and not always great translation. You have to be willing to put up with things like an evil ring that you’re supposed to charge with demonic energy that instantly kills you if you’re wearing it when it gets charged. But if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind those quirks, and especially if you’re into the Ys series, it’s a very solid game that’s worth checking out. There aren’t many games that play like a super polished high definition PS1 action RPG, and after playing Ys Origin I kind of wish there were more.
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