Steam Community Items
A Magical Hour With Ys: The Oath In FelghanaRepublished from Rock, Paper Shotgun


Currently doing rather well for itself on the Steam bestsellers chart, XSEED's milk-eyed JRPG Ys: The Oath In Felghana has been recommended to me by various corners of the internet. If you can stand to hear me harp on for a moment, I can tell you a little about it. A little? Well, I only played about 60 minutes of it, but have one hour on me.


For the first fifteen minutes, I screamed. It's all cutscene all the way, as boring cutsey pixel-people say boring things about something I couldn't give the faintest hoot about. I clicked and I hammered and I slammed and the talking just would not stop. With the game lacking an imaginative setting or an obvious hook, I was mere moments away from writing a post which may well have quite literally read SCREW YOU YS YOU'RE EVERYTHING THAT'S WRONG WITH GAMING. Then, finally, it relented. I was in.


It turned out to be a surprisingly wild time, and at odds with the increasingly negative preconceptions I'd developed during the waffly crap in the intro. An action-RPG requiring high-velocity death-dealing with a combination of sword and spell, it was exciting, it had a wonderfully silly soundtrack (Andrew WK let loose with a MIDI system, essentially) and a whole lot of things died at my hands incredibly quickly. I felt like a tiny god with a ridiculous haircut, and lo it was good.


Well, until I hit an irksome boss that required precisely-timed jumps and mastery of a finicking spell-aiming system to defeat (checking the setting that interprets analogue commands as digital is a must if you're using a gamepad, which is also a must). I was fourth time lucky in defeating it, but I knew didn't have the will to press on with something that would so casually interrupt joyful, high-speed monster-bashing. But the monster bashing that led up to that is indeed joyful and high-speed, a sort of lunatic take on Zelda or stuff like Chantelise and Fortune Summoners. I can totally see why it's garnering so much attention and it had a playfulness that's lacking in most Western action-RPGs.


It's fairly pretty too, a fusion of 3D environments and sprites and a large-ish hub city to wander around picking up new gear and, when scripting permits, quests, but while I dig the frenzy of it the tedious conversations and flow-wrecking boss fights mean it isn't ultimately something I want to persevere with. Which isn't a dismissal of the genre, just an honest admission that I get my happyfuntimes elsewhere. This certainly seems to sidestep many of JRPGs' tropes in favour of something more agreeably frenzied, so I can see the appeal and if I didn't have enough games to break a battleship's back stretching ahead of me, I suspect I'd give it more time.


Here's a trailer for you.



Alec Meer is a writer for Rock Paper Shotgun, one of the world's best sites for PC gaming news. Follow him on Twitter.

Republished with permission.


...

Search news
Archive
2024
Oct   Sep   Aug   Jul   Jun   May  
Apr   Mar   Feb   Jan  
Archives By Year
2024   2023   2022   2021   2020  
2019   2018   2017   2016   2015  
2014   2013   2012   2011   2010  
2009   2008   2007   2006   2005  
2004   2003   2002