The Ancient Land of Ys: Won! (and Final Rating)

There's no "congratulations" screen, so this will have to do.

Wow, right? I didn't expect it to be over that fast, either. But it actually took longer than you might think, as I essentially played it for 16 hours straight yesterday.

As you can see from the screenshot, my name isn't "Adol" after all, it's "Arick." I didn't find this out until late in the game, when someone addressed me. But it seems like all of the proper names changed between the original versions and the DOS version. The villain in at least one console version, for instance, is Dekt, not Malificus. I suppose that's to be expected when (as we covered yesterday) the very title of the game changed for the DOS port.

Anyway, what I took to be the "opening area" of the game--the city, a nearby village, a cave, and a palace--was in fact the "only area" of the game, and the side quests I got at the beginning, which I took to be representative of a slew of side quests that would be forthcoming, were the only side quests. The game was still bigger than it seemed--much more vertical than horizontal. The cave, the palace, and the ending tower all had multiple levels and multiple bosses.

I suspect this would actually suck in battle.

I didn't take great notes or capture copious screenshots, I'm afraid. I was just trying to plow through it. Getting to the end was a process of finding a slew of items in various treasure chests, including a sword, armor, and shield of silver; keys; special items like a rod and a hammer; necklaces and rings that would allow passage into otherwise-forbidden areas; and so on. There was a lot of backtracking involved including a particularly annoying bit where I got all the way to the top of the tower and the endgame, only to find that I needed to turn around and go back down most of the tower to get an amulet from a guy in a dungeon. That backtracking took almost 90 minutes by itself.

I thought this might be heading for the first example of a CRPG romance (the one on the left, wankers), but this game wasn't quite that sophisticated.

At one point, I rescued a damsel from the palace named Fiina. She had lost her memory but turned out to be one of the ancient goddesses of Ys. The game could have done something with this, but it doesn't--Malificus just drops this information on you at the end. I should point out, because I don't think I did before, that there are lots of NPCs in the game, but there are no dialog options; you just read what they say.

Combat never got easy, but increasingly powerful weapons and armor helped, as did a magic ring that gradually restored my health even indoors. Aside from the backtracking, five things annoyed me about the game:

• Most of the "side quests" turned out to be interlocking bits of the main quest. For instance, the recovery of the Rodane seed was necessary to talk to a Rodane tree and recover a silver shield needed for the final battle. So that still leaves Might & Magic with the only true "side quests" so far.

• Upon entry to the final tower, there was one of those tiresome "taken prisoner" scenes in which I lost all my silver items. I had to slowly recover them from chests in the tower later.

Here's an original plot device. I wonder if there's a way out of this cell?

• The game allows you to collect healing potions, but it doesn't allow you to use them (or access your inventory at all) when in combat with bosses, when you most need them.

• I maxed out my experience points way before the end of the game. That is very annoying--there should always be reasons to kill more enemies. I maxed out the gold, too, and instead of freezing it at the max, the game flipped it over to 0! Fortunately, by that time there was nothing to buy (another thing I don't like).

Oddly enough, the max number of experience points is the same as the max number of rows in Excel 2003, and the max hit points is the same as the max number of columns!*

• In a lot of the dungeons, you have to take doorways in the southern end of rooms, but very often you can't see, or can only barely see, the doorway at the edge of the screen. This was responsible for a lot of my backtracking, as I thought I'd thoroughly explored certain levels when in fact I had missed huge sections.

Can you see that doorway just south of me?

Balancing all of this: the game was fairly short. And the boss combats (one to retrieve each book) were quite challenging, each requiring some new tactic to avoid attacks and land my own attacks.

This double-headed thing could only be damaged when its two heads came together. In the meantime, I had to avoid its spinning fireballs.

I had to replay the endgame seven or eight times before I finally defeated Malificus, who had transported me to a platform flying through the firmament and was flying around, shooting fireballs at me. Every time I hit him, another piece disappeared from the platform, so I had to avoid both his fireballs and falling down the holes. I kept trying to record it, but since I kept dying, I eventually gave up. Here's a recording of that scene that ends with me falling off the platform:

And here's a recording that picks up after I finally kill Malificus and see the end game:

By the way, I figured out later that a lot of the boss combats would have been simpler if I'd cranked the CPU speed in DOSBox down to an era-accurate level.

As is my wont, since the gameplay for Ys only took two sessions, I'll do a quick GIMLET right here in this posting.

The game's backstory is somewhat nonsensical (really, what does this metal have to do with anything?) and its trappings are undistinguished fantasy fare. The explorable world is very limited--more a "small hamlet of Ys" than an ancient land. On the plus side, your actions do affect permanent changes in the game world, and the NPCs acknowledge it (4).

There is no character creation: everyone starts playing Arick with the same statistics and equipment. Leveling is swift and satisfying in the first half of the game and then suddenly (and maddeningly) freezes to a halt at about the halfway mark. This is one of the few games of the era to give you experience point rewards for quests (3). NPC Interaction is important--you learn valuable things from them, and some of them are interesting--but it is all one-way (5).

NPC "interaction."

Regular foes vary only by icon and toughness, and I didn't know what most of their names were, but the boss foes are quite original, and figuring out the best tactics to defeat them was slightly fun. This is another game where the enemies constantly respawn, but to no real benefit since the experience and gold stops doing you any good (4). There is no magic in the game (aside from a couple items), and combat involves charging into creatures, with the added tactical complexity of trying to achieve the right angle--interesting, but not enough to redeem the combat system (2).

Boss fights were challenging and interesting; the rest of the combat was not.

You have a basic variety of equipment, but it is all found at fixed locations, and none of it is dropped by foes (3). The economy is maddening: although you need money at the beginning of the game, after you've purchased a few fundamental items, there is no reason to keep collecting all of the gold that the enemies offer you (3). The game has a main quest and fooled me into thinking it also had side quests. There is only one ending to the main quest and no way to role-play it (2).

Graphics are decent enough, if a bit small. Sound is the bloopish variety of the time. The controls are extremely basic, as you would expect from a console port, but intuitive enough (4). Gameplay is mostly linear, given the limited game world, and there would be no reason to replay it. The boss fights do add a satisfying level of challenge, and the game doesn't overstay its welcome (5).

The final score of 35 seems about right. I wouldn't have wanted to play it for much longer, and the score would have been much lower without the challenge and tactics of the seven or eight boss fights, but it was an acceptable way to pass a couple of CRPG sessions.

Next stop: The Bard's Ta...no, wait. Arcanum had to go and do some research. We have to do Zeliard first.


*That was a joke. I know why this is.