Fun fact: I gave Gideon Zhi the translated script for this game a full five years before the patch was finally released. He had to do a TON of extensive assembly hacking to get the game to work, as string lengths were hardcoded (attempting to display more than 24 characters on a screen would cause a crash). He also did some nice work on the menus. We took the English font from Ys III for SNES. Gideon didn't actually WORK on the game all that time... he had prior commitments. I think the actual work took something like ten months. It's nice to see these games get some love, even given how weird this one was. What was odd in particular was that this game was coded like a CD-based title. When you walk into a town, for instance, it loaded in ALL of the text that would ever show up in that location, regardless of if you'd tripped all the event triggers that would cause it to display. I think this weird approach to it is one of the reasons that the game is a little buggy. Falcom wasn't used to coding for consoles, and it showed.
So it loaded everything in one chunk upon entering areas? I wonder if that's why the loading transitions felt so long in a lot of cases. Because they were often shorter during cutscene triggers where they likely didn't need to load an entire area's dialogue. That's really interesting to say the least.
I couldn't say for certain, as the ins and outs of coding are a bit beyond me. But I recall that when bugtesting the patch with save states, I'd have to leave and re-enter an area after loading, or else the prior revision of text would still be in memory. Exiting and returning would cause the game to reload from ROM, in exactly the same fashion as a CD-based title.
Hmm, that is odd that it loads everything like a CD game. I wonder if there's any possibility that this game started life on the PC Engine CD, but then switched development to the SFC at some point. Falcom did program Legend of Xanadu 1 & 2 for PC Engine CD around the same time, so they weren't completely unfamiliar with programming for the platform. However, while the PC Engine was indeed fairly popular in Japan, and as far as consoles go, I think the Ys series, was possibly more well known as a PC Engine series, the SFC obviously sold more, so likely they decided for Ys to go with the system with the higher user base. Years ago when I was more involved in the jomebrew scene, I did meditate on some ideas for remaking it on the TurboGrafx-CD. Including the ability to switch back and forth between a bump system and an updated hack and slash system closer to Ark of Napishtim. I also worked on ideas on how to redo the music to give it more of that Ys guitar power ballad sound. But like so many other ideas and games that we never finished, I never got around to actually working on this beyond some planning. I don't think I ever had a programmer that was on board with the project either. And I do feel that it would have been a challenge to return to the bump system while having elevated platforms, but I wanted to find a decent way to do that.
is YS the saga the pioneer of remaking games? i mean they were remaking titles since the nineties and now we are at the doors of 2020s and they keep remaking old games haha
I would love for a remake of 5, and you can definitely tell that Ys 5 is on Falcom's minds with them referencing it a lot a bunch in Ys 8 (a bunch is definitely a hyperbolic term).
@Jordan Priley to be fair, Ys 8 is set directly after Ys 5 so they have to mention Xandria. He even used his best weapon in Ys 5 (Isios blade), fighting the oceanus before the Lombardia sunk thus the endless cycle of Adol being stripped off his best gear
Huh, good to see I'm not the only person who liked Ys V more than Mask of the Sun. ...actually, good to see I'm not the only person who played Kefin via the Aeon Genesis translation. The best possible thing they could do with the Kefin remake would be to reincorporate Dogi, who was originally planned to appear in the SNES version, but was apparently left out due to time restrictions. Apparently, Effy (from Felte) was intended to be his girlfriend. As long as they add Dogi and don't remove the Stoker subplot (like the Taito remake apparently did), Falcom should have a decent framework to build a proper remake.
Yeah, I was kind of wondering about the Taito remake because Dogi is in the intro cutscene for it, but it's a bit weird Stoker is gone since a lot of what makes all the stuff near the ending interesting is all related to him.
In general, Falcom didn't get to develop most of their story concepts for Ys V into the game itself, judging by how much better and fleshed-out the novelization is. Stoker's one of the few story additions found just in the game, feeling rather shoehorned (especially once the time-travel BS kicks in). I think Falcom has enough vision to reconcile the pre-production materials (which became the novelization), SFC release, and new ideas for Kefin/Xandria into an excellent remake. And hopefully the remake hews closer to Oath in Felghana's approach (largely the old game but with important, interesting changes to the premise) than to Celceta's (half Felghana-like remake, half utterly new premise with classic Ys IV-isms shoved in).
8:41 you can actually change adols hair color too. There is an npc hidden behind a building in the town of felte that will unlock the option in your menu. It was kinda glitch though
9:12 That's because the text box and background use the same layer. The SNES has 4 background layers which makes this decision baffling to say the least.
I like the idea of enemies dropping materials instead of money if those materials have another use. If they're only sold for money, there's literally no point in having them.
Yesterday I finished this game and I totaly agree with everything you say. Game have potential so I hope Falcom will make it shine in remake. Last boss kinda looks like Black Pearl, so I think they can use that and talk about how Eldeen create this staff. Also, tombstone says Ys 1-5, but 5 does not have a bump combat and 3 too.
2:20 Same here. When I played the fan translation for myself, all I could think was that it felt like it was just ripping off what Square and Enix were doing at the time. Even the music loses Falcom's trademark rock sound in favor of a more western-classical vibe. If someone just saw it in action, out of context, they'd probably think it was some Mana spinoff they'd never heard of.
I dissent on music mainly because, despite the slow pace of some tracks and some lacking instrumentation, the compositions have memorable but also more interesting melodies/chord progressions than previously heard in Ys games at the time. Satoshi Arai, a Sound Team jdk newcomer, and veteran musician Naoki Kaneda did most of the music, and the BGM retains the high adventure feel of Ys without resorting to rock tracks. For the remake, I hope either Yukihiro Jindo or Sound Team jdk take the lead in rearranging these tracks with more of a rock focus, just without downplaying or eliminating the more exotic parts of the music.
This 'Gems' concept is basically the same thing that JRPGs have been doing more recently (since the mid-2000s), where you need to sell scrap/treasure etc. I guess Ys V was ahead of its time!! I don't like it either tho. I would prefer to just be given currency.
@@mickeymickey9914 Ah, it just uses the PS2 tracks by a bunch of random slapped together composers at the time. So not actually a consistent sound by someone as talented as Ryo Yonemitsu. That's not really in the same ballpark.
About the Remake. They will make it fit due to Alchemy and stuff in Ys IX. Original Dev Docs had a lot of lore that wasn't included in the game. I think they waited for IX because of what the plot of IX entails for what concerns Kefin
It's interesting to see that for Ys 5 they tried to give the combat more depth and it just ruins the pacing. It's also interesting that this game seems very buggy whilst all 4 PC Engine entries are smooth in pacing and performance. That being said, most super famicom ports of Falcom fames lose a bit of their lustre and it seems obvious Falcom took a liking to the PC Engine as a platform.
Here's an interesting tidbit: Ys V was originally slated as a PCE title, but Falcom's PCE team was fully committed to the development of The Legend of Xanadu II and didn't want to free up their resources for other projects, so the SNES team was singled out to handle Ys V.
I just beat this game. It was a very middle-of-the-road experience, but it wasn't awful. I might not have put up with it if there was, oh I 'unno, some grand re-imaging of it in the vein of Celceta... Ah well, maybe one day. I really thought for sure there was going to be some other use for the gems that enemies drop. There had to have been?? Right?? Or else why would enemies drop them rather than just gold??? But nope. I was also almost as baffled with the magic system. None of the spells I got, other than the very first one you get, was useful. And when I started using that one spell, within moments I got it to like level 4 or 5 and it was more powerful than my sword attacks. Magic attacks other than that ONE either had too much time to cast for me to properly aim, or I just had no idea what the magic was even doing. BAFFLING. I don't regret playing it, but I do feel there's a lot more room for fleshing out the mechanics and, like you mentioned, story in a modern remake.
A friend of mine messed around with that stat system and apparently it just gives you full stats upon leveling up both paths. So Adol has two pools of stat growths are the separated from each other, but also just end up stacking at the same time. It makes it very easy to inflate your health pool since leveling up physical and magical both gives you more HP. Which is really messed up and probably not intended to work that way.
The Kingdom for Kefin photoshop got a good laugh out of me. Well done. That said, I kind of hope they do some kind of remake of this, but I fully understand why they wouldn't.
We're more likely getting a remake than not. Falcom's president has gone out of his way to mention Ys V in passing during recent Ys VIII interviews, not to forget an earlier fan interview with Eurogamer. It seems like President Kondo really wants to make Ys V's magic system good for once, too.
Honestly, its probably gonna get a remake, but they'll probably do to the story what they did when Ys 4 got replaced with Memories of Celceta. Falcom seems to have a good track record of making sure the current Ys canon is fun and mostly consistent by remaking any games that were either bad or just underwhelming.
Here's an interesting tidbit: Ys V was originally slated as a PCE title, but Falcom's PCE team was fully committed to the development of The Legend of Xanadu II and didn't want to free up their resources for other projects, so the SNES team was singled out to handle Ys V.
The remake of this game will probably add Dogi, because on Ys 8 Dogi is with Adol on Lombardia just after leaving Afroca and he gives adol he Aegios Blade (I think that's the name xD). But I guess they decided to make Ys nine first. After all, sometimes the story isn't as good as they want and maybe they're re-writing Ys five to work better with the new system (Since Ys Memories of Celceta aren't the best of the remakes so far).
Well we have Ys IX coming out now. I'm wondering if we'll even get a modern remake of V at this point. VIII is such a massive leap forward for the entire series that I don't see how they can go back and remake V unless they really go ambitious with it. And this is coming from someone that played Memories of Celceta first. The entire Ys series is fantastic, but I feel Falcom cannot go back after VIII's massive ambition and quality. I really hope that is continued and bested in IX!
The game is definitely highly flawed in several areas, no doubt, but it didn't stop me from loving it. Yes, it was incredibly easy and quite short too, and the soundtrack wasn't the most memorable one, but this was something very special to me at the same time. I'm not a retro gamer, far from it, but this game was fun to play for me. I'm hoping for a remake that does justice for the original game, no modern party system. (As much as I loved it in Memories of Celceta and other games) I feel like this review was still quite harsh for what the game was back in the day. But I definitely understand why that is too. The potential is there, but I see why it never made it outside of Japan. However, I'm extremely happy I experienced this game and that it actually has the English translation available. It's definitely worth giving a shot at least.
I really want to play this, wish this gets a remake someday! Storywise, am I missing out on a whole lot??? I'm playing chronological order but plan on saving Origin for last.... currently playing Memories of Celceta...
Depends on what you want. If you purely go in for the gameplay, I'd suggest Oath of Felghana is a good place to get a feel for what the series is like. Ys 8 is pretty great for newcomers too. If you really want to get in for the story, I'd suggest starting with Chronicles 1 and 2, and then play Origin before moving on to Felghana. Also wait for a sale, the games go on sale frequently, and you can usually pick up most of the Xseed releases on PC for dirty cheap when it happens.
Aboveup Thank you so much for responding! I am a story guy so this really cleared things up for me. I really enjoyed the review btw! You have a unique voice both literally and litararily (probably not a word but whatever)
Ys V is the only entry that I have never played, but, looking from this video, it seems like Falcom tried to copy all the idea of the popular titles at that time. The UI feels like a mixture between Secret of Mana + FF VI (the colour scheme and menu layouts seriously scream FF VI to me). The combat and some enemy designs are blatant copies of Link to The Past (those armour knights seriously look like the one in Zelda games). This title just came out after the great exodus; when most of the talented developers from the old titles left the company. I'm not surprise why the quality dropped that drastically.
I'm watching this today, in 2021. And after having Lacrimosa of Dana teasing Lost Kefin AND Monstrum Nox ALSO teasing Kefin (Aparently when you learn about what the monstrums are you also are teased about Kefin), I'm sure Falcom will make the Remake of Kefin. Maybe they want to make the story better, since those games from the SNES era are kinda "small" compared to the ones we have now, but I really hope we can play a moden version of Kefin. Especially because the concept of the city seems amazing AND I have to say now, It's quite interesting to know that FMA wasn't the only piece of media who used the concept of the Philosopher stone using a certain thing as fuel to exist. Quite interesting indeed.
funny fact: even the ys V remake for ps2 is super slow. but i remember playing the ps2 version entirely in japanese, until the end and liking the game, nowadays i can't play it anymore i used google translate
No. PSP got the Ark engine games, so the prequel, 3's remake, and 6, and the first party based game in 7. Falcom hasn't revisited 5, but there is a Taito PS2 remake. People gloss over the Taito games because they're not good.
I was very fond of this game after going through the two previous entries. It looked great and the gameplay was... okay. That's far more than I can say for Ys 3 or Mask of the Sun.
Late to the party here, but I just recently finished this game and there are a couple of things you missed, that I think make the game a bit more interesting, though still VERY flawed: Enemies dropping gems: easy to miss, but different vendors value the gems differently. I didn't pay attention at all until I came upon a vendor that offered a lot for pearls, and I was able to farm up a ton of cash very quickly. Magic system: magic might seem weak at first, but that's because it levels up separately from physical attack. Take the time to level it, and it does a ton of damage. This allows you to easily one-shot the enemies on the river platforming section from afar, for instance. Still, the cast times are horrendous, and you can't even use magic on most bosses, so it's a poorly-implemented system for sure. Overall, as a game, it's rough, but as an experience for a Ys fan, I actually enjoyed the story and characters more here than in Felghana, so I think there's really great potential for a remake.
Actually the magic system is more interesting than you think. For the wrong reasons. Magic has its own leveling system, as in, it increases your entire character's stats separately from attack. Both leveling schemes also increase the rest of your stats, except that offensive one. So if you level up both magic and attack you get ridiculous amounts of health as you're basically increasing the stats of 2 different character classes on one playable character. Very likely a huge oversight.
@@Aboveup I noticed that as well, though the game is clunky enough that I didn't mind having a massive health pool to tank through most of it. In the end, I'm actually glad it's an easy game, because tuning it for more challenge without addressing the flaws in the underlying systems (and THOSE HITBOXES) would have just made it immensely frustrating.
@@wiremesh2 Yeah, the game is a clunky mess in a lot of ways. The pinned comment by Jeff Nussbaum who worked on the fantranslation is especially enlightening.
This one was one of the best ys in my opinion right next to ark of napistim and memories of celceta. Though I know they got a remake of this one coming soon with how much of an importance 5 had for the story in ys 9
Yeah, the Ark engine. Named after the first game using the new engine that redefined the series 8 years after this one nearly killed the IP. This game absolutely started using that.
![KRK - ชนิสรา Ft.WanMai , N/A [Official MV] Prod. By Sakarin](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/C-WMwwYobcU/mqdefault.jpg)
Fun fact: I gave Gideon Zhi the translated script for this game a full five years before the patch was finally released. He had to do a TON of extensive assembly hacking to get the game to work, as string lengths were hardcoded (attempting to display more than 24 characters on a screen would cause a crash). He also did some nice work on the menus. We took the English font from Ys III for SNES. Gideon didn't actually WORK on the game all that time... he had prior commitments. I think the actual work took something like ten months.
It's nice to see these games get some love, even given how weird this one was. What was odd in particular was that this game was coded like a CD-based title. When you walk into a town, for instance, it loaded in ALL of the text that would ever show up in that location, regardless of if you'd tripped all the event triggers that would cause it to display. I think this weird approach to it is one of the reasons that the game is a little buggy. Falcom wasn't used to coding for consoles, and it showed.
So it loaded everything in one chunk upon entering areas? I wonder if that's why the loading transitions felt so long in a lot of cases. Because they were often shorter during cutscene triggers where they likely didn't need to load an entire area's dialogue. That's really interesting to say the least.
I couldn't say for certain, as the ins and outs of coding are a bit beyond me. But I recall that when bugtesting the patch with save states, I'd have to leave and re-enter an area after loading, or else the prior revision of text would still be in memory. Exiting and returning would cause the game to reload from ROM, in exactly the same fashion as a CD-based title.
Hmm, that is odd that it loads everything like a CD game. I wonder if there's any possibility that this game started life on the PC Engine CD, but then switched development to the SFC at some point. Falcom did program Legend of Xanadu 1 & 2 for PC Engine CD around the same time, so they weren't completely unfamiliar with programming for the platform.
However, while the PC Engine was indeed fairly popular in Japan, and as far as consoles go, I think the Ys series, was possibly more well known as a PC Engine series, the SFC obviously sold more, so likely they decided for Ys to go with the system with the higher user base.
Years ago when I was more involved in the jomebrew scene, I did meditate on some ideas for remaking it on the TurboGrafx-CD. Including the ability to switch back and forth between a bump system and an updated hack and slash system closer to Ark of Napishtim. I also worked on ideas on how to redo the music to give it more of that Ys guitar power ballad sound. But like so many other ideas and games that we never finished, I never got around to actually working on this beyond some planning. I don't think I ever had a programmer that was on board with the project either.
And I do feel that it would have been a challenge to return to the bump system while having elevated platforms, but I wanted to find a decent way to do that.
The gems to get money makes more sense than monsters having money
FFXII did it as well and I always kinda liked the system.
is YS the saga the pioneer of remaking games? i mean they were remaking titles since the nineties and now we are at the doors of 2020s and they keep remaking old games haha
I would love for a remake of 5, and you can definitely tell that Ys 5 is on Falcom's minds with them referencing it a lot a bunch in Ys 8 (a bunch is definitely a hyperbolic term).
@Jordan Priley to be fair, Ys 8 is set directly after Ys 5 so they have to mention Xandria. He even used his best weapon in Ys 5 (Isios blade), fighting the oceanus before the Lombardia sunk thus the endless cycle of Adol being stripped off his best gear
Ys 9 references Adol's adventures in Xandria quite a bit as well; especially the bits about Alchemy.
Still waiting...
Huh, good to see I'm not the only person who liked Ys V more than Mask of the Sun.
...actually, good to see I'm not the only person who played Kefin via the Aeon Genesis translation.
The best possible thing they could do with the Kefin remake would be to reincorporate Dogi, who was originally planned to appear in the SNES version, but was apparently left out due to time restrictions. Apparently, Effy (from Felte) was intended to be his girlfriend. As long as they add Dogi and don't remove the Stoker subplot (like the Taito remake apparently did), Falcom should have a decent framework to build a proper remake.
Yeah, I was kind of wondering about the Taito remake because Dogi is in the intro cutscene for it, but it's a bit weird Stoker is gone since a lot of what makes all the stuff near the ending interesting is all related to him.
In general, Falcom didn't get to develop most of their story concepts for Ys V into the game itself, judging by how much better and fleshed-out the novelization is. Stoker's one of the few story additions found just in the game, feeling rather shoehorned (especially once the time-travel BS kicks in). I think Falcom has enough vision to reconcile the pre-production materials (which became the novelization), SFC release, and new ideas for Kefin/Xandria into an excellent remake. And hopefully the remake hews closer to Oath in Felghana's approach (largely the old game but with important, interesting changes to the premise) than to Celceta's (half Felghana-like remake, half utterly new premise with classic Ys IV-isms shoved in).
8:41 you can actually change adols hair color too. There is an npc hidden behind a building in the town of felte that will unlock the option in your menu. It was kinda glitch though
Huh, I guess I missed that. It being glitchy fits well with how the rest of the game works at least. Maybe that's why they made it unlockable.
9:12 That's because the text box and background use the same layer. The SNES has 4 background layers which makes this decision baffling to say the least.
I like the idea of enemies dropping materials instead of money if those materials have another use. If they're only sold for money, there's literally no point in having them.
Yesterday I finished this game and I totaly agree with everything you say. Game have potential so I hope Falcom will make it shine in remake. Last boss kinda looks like Black Pearl, so I think they can use that and talk about how Eldeen create this staff.
Also, tombstone says Ys 1-5, but 5 does not have a bump combat and 3 too.
2:20 Same here. When I played the fan translation for myself, all I could think was that it felt like it was just ripping off what Square and Enix were doing at the time. Even the music loses Falcom's trademark rock sound in favor of a more western-classical vibe. If someone just saw it in action, out of context, they'd probably think it was some Mana spinoff they'd never heard of.
I dissent on music mainly because, despite the slow pace of some tracks and some lacking instrumentation, the compositions have memorable but also more interesting melodies/chord progressions than previously heard in Ys games at the time. Satoshi Arai, a Sound Team jdk newcomer, and veteran musician Naoki Kaneda did most of the music, and the BGM retains the high adventure feel of Ys without resorting to rock tracks.
For the remake, I hope either Yukihiro Jindo or Sound Team jdk take the lead in rearranging these tracks with more of a rock focus, just without downplaying or eliminating the more exotic parts of the music.
They probably thought it is more realistic for enmies to drop some cristals than money...who knows
they practically did
the same for tokyo xanadu and I think it was for reasons of consistency in the story.
This 'Gems' concept is basically the same thing that JRPGs have been doing more recently (since the mid-2000s), where you need to sell scrap/treasure etc. I guess Ys V was ahead of its time!!
I don't like it either tho. I would prefer to just be given currency.
I wonder how this game would have been if had the treatment as the first 4 cd games
Same. At least someone made a Redbook audio style remix of the first area song, so that's probably the closest we'll ever get.
@@Aboveup there's an msu1 hack for it
@@mickeymickey9914 Ah, it just uses the PS2 tracks by a bunch of random slapped together composers at the time. So not actually a consistent sound by someone as talented as Ryo Yonemitsu. That's not really in the same ballpark.
This was the first Ys video of yours I watched so I have no context for anything but its pretty good, I'll watch the others.
What's the music that starts at 11:11? It sounds familiar
About the Remake. They will make it fit due to Alchemy and stuff in Ys IX. Original Dev Docs had a lot of lore that wasn't included in the game. I think they waited for IX because of what the plot of IX entails for what concerns Kefin
It's interesting to see that for Ys 5 they tried to give the combat more depth and it just ruins the pacing. It's also interesting that this game seems very buggy whilst all 4 PC Engine entries are smooth in pacing and performance. That being said, most super famicom ports of Falcom fames lose a bit of their lustre and it seems obvious Falcom took a liking to the PC Engine as a platform.
Here's an interesting tidbit: Ys V was originally slated as a PCE title, but Falcom's PCE team was fully committed to the development of The Legend of Xanadu II and didn't want to free up their resources for other projects, so the SNES team was singled out to handle Ys V.
I just beat this game. It was a very middle-of-the-road experience, but it wasn't awful. I might not have put up with it if there was, oh I 'unno, some grand re-imaging of it in the vein of Celceta... Ah well, maybe one day.
I really thought for sure there was going to be some other use for the gems that enemies drop. There had to have been?? Right?? Or else why would enemies drop them rather than just gold??? But nope. I was also almost as baffled with the magic system. None of the spells I got, other than the very first one you get, was useful. And when I started using that one spell, within moments I got it to like level 4 or 5 and it was more powerful than my sword attacks. Magic attacks other than that ONE either had too much time to cast for me to properly aim, or I just had no idea what the magic was even doing. BAFFLING.
I don't regret playing it, but I do feel there's a lot more room for fleshing out the mechanics and, like you mentioned, story in a modern remake.
A friend of mine messed around with that stat system and apparently it just gives you full stats upon leveling up both paths. So Adol has two pools of stat growths are the separated from each other, but also just end up stacking at the same time. It makes it very easy to inflate your health pool since leveling up physical and magical both gives you more HP. Which is really messed up and probably not intended to work that way.
The Kingdom for Kefin photoshop got a good laugh out of me. Well done.
That said, I kind of hope they do some kind of remake of this, but I fully understand why they wouldn't.
We're more likely getting a remake than not. Falcom's president has gone out of his way to mention Ys V in passing during recent Ys VIII interviews, not to forget an earlier fan interview with Eurogamer. It seems like President Kondo really wants to make Ys V's magic system good for once, too.
Honestly, its probably gonna get a remake, but they'll probably do to the story what they did when Ys 4 got replaced with Memories of Celceta.
Falcom seems to have a good track record of making sure the current Ys canon is fun and mostly consistent by remaking any games that were either bad or just underwhelming.
Here's an interesting tidbit: Ys V was originally slated as a PCE title, but Falcom's PCE team was fully committed to the development of The Legend of Xanadu II and didn't want to free up their resources for other projects, so the SNES team was singled out to handle Ys V.
The remake of this game will probably add Dogi, because on Ys 8 Dogi is with Adol on Lombardia just after leaving Afroca and he gives adol he Aegios Blade (I think that's the name xD). But I guess they decided to make Ys nine first. After all, sometimes the story isn't as good as they want and maybe they're re-writing Ys five to work better with the new system (Since Ys Memories of Celceta aren't the best of the remakes so far).
Idk man, Memories of Celceta was pretty damn awesome. That game has a pretty crap ending but it's hella fun all the way through.
Well we have Ys IX coming out now. I'm wondering if we'll even get a modern remake of V at this point. VIII is such a massive leap forward for the entire series that I don't see how they can go back and remake V unless they really go ambitious with it. And this is coming from someone that played Memories of Celceta first. The entire Ys series is fantastic, but I feel Falcom cannot go back after VIII's massive ambition and quality. I really hope that is continued and bested in IX!
Where you got the translated game from?
Ys V for ps2 is a remake right?
The game is definitely highly flawed in several areas, no doubt, but it didn't stop me from loving it. Yes, it was incredibly easy and quite short too, and the soundtrack wasn't the most memorable one, but this was something very special to me at the same time.
I'm not a retro gamer, far from it, but this game was fun to play for me. I'm hoping for a remake that does justice for the original game, no modern party system. (As much as I loved it in Memories of Celceta and other games)
I feel like this review was still quite harsh for what the game was back in the day. But I definitely understand why that is too. The potential is there, but I see why it never made it outside of Japan. However, I'm extremely happy I experienced this game and that it actually has the English translation available.
It's definitely worth giving a shot at least.
I really want to play this, wish this gets a remake someday! Storywise, am I missing out on a whole lot??? I'm playing chronological order but plan on saving Origin for last.... currently playing Memories of Celceta...
Which Y's game should a newcomer start with?
Depends on what you want. If you purely go in for the gameplay, I'd suggest Oath of Felghana is a good place to get a feel for what the series is like. Ys 8 is pretty great for newcomers too.
If you really want to get in for the story, I'd suggest starting with Chronicles 1 and 2, and then play Origin before moving on to Felghana. Also wait for a sale, the games go on sale frequently, and you can usually pick up most of the Xseed releases on PC for dirty cheap when it happens.
Aboveup
Thank you so much for responding! I am a story guy so this really cleared things up for me. I really enjoyed the review btw! You have a unique voice both literally and litararily (probably not a word but whatever)
Idk what they were thinking with this.
I really had a great time with the game. It made me play Book 1 and 2 on PcEngine right afterwards.
Ys V is the only entry that I have never played, but, looking from this video, it seems like Falcom tried to copy all the idea of the popular titles at that time. The UI feels like a mixture between Secret of Mana + FF VI (the colour scheme and menu layouts seriously scream FF VI to me). The combat and some enemy designs are blatant copies of Link to The Past (those armour knights seriously look like the one in Zelda games). This title just came out after the great exodus; when most of the talented developers from the old titles left the company. I'm not surprise why the quality dropped that drastically.
Ah yes, Ys V: Adol‘s Adventure in generic SNES RPG.
I'm still waiting for Ys V remake....
I think that Ys V has pretty great music, even though it's not like in other parts of the series.
I'm watching this today, in 2021. And after having Lacrimosa of Dana teasing Lost Kefin AND Monstrum Nox ALSO teasing Kefin (Aparently when you learn about what the monstrums are you also are teased about Kefin), I'm sure Falcom will make the Remake of Kefin. Maybe they want to make the story better, since those games from the SNES era are kinda "small" compared to the ones we have now, but I really hope we can play a moden version of Kefin.
Especially because the concept of the city seems amazing AND I have to say now, It's quite interesting to know that FMA wasn't the only piece of media who used the concept of the Philosopher stone using a certain thing as fuel to exist. Quite interesting indeed.
Super Nintendo just kills it when it comes to role playing games, especially those by Squaresoft, Enix, Namco and Quintet among others.
funny fact: even the ys V remake for ps2 is super slow. but i remember playing the ps2 version entirely in japanese, until the end and liking the game, nowadays i can't play it anymore i used google translate
Quality videos
Graphic wise, the jump between either version of 4 and 5 is like jumping between Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy 6.
Didnt the psp get 5 as well?
No. PSP got the Ark engine games, so the prequel, 3's remake, and 6, and the first party based game in 7. Falcom hasn't revisited 5, but there is a Taito PS2 remake. People gloss over the Taito games because they're not good.
I have it on PS2 from Japan
I was very fond of this game after going through the two previous entries. It looked great and the gameplay was... okay. That's far more than I can say for Ys 3 or Mask of the Sun.
I like it... modern gaming feel... it was ahead of the time.. modern games lack the same things
Get to know who boy is?
Late to the party here, but I just recently finished this game and there are a couple of things you missed, that I think make the game a bit more interesting, though still VERY flawed:
Enemies dropping gems: easy to miss, but different vendors value the gems differently. I didn't pay attention at all until I came upon a vendor that offered a lot for pearls, and I was able to farm up a ton of cash very quickly.
Magic system: magic might seem weak at first, but that's because it levels up separately from physical attack. Take the time to level it, and it does a ton of damage. This allows you to easily one-shot the enemies on the river platforming section from afar, for instance. Still, the cast times are horrendous, and you can't even use magic on most bosses, so it's a poorly-implemented system for sure.
Overall, as a game, it's rough, but as an experience for a Ys fan, I actually enjoyed the story and characters more here than in Felghana, so I think there's really great potential for a remake.
Actually the magic system is more interesting than you think. For the wrong reasons. Magic has its own leveling system, as in, it increases your entire character's stats separately from attack. Both leveling schemes also increase the rest of your stats, except that offensive one. So if you level up both magic and attack you get ridiculous amounts of health as you're basically increasing the stats of 2 different character classes on one playable character. Very likely a huge oversight.
@@Aboveup I noticed that as well, though the game is clunky enough that I didn't mind having a massive health pool to tank through most of it.
In the end, I'm actually glad it's an easy game, because tuning it for more challenge without addressing the flaws in the underlying systems (and THOSE HITBOXES) would have just made it immensely frustrating.
@@wiremesh2 Yeah, the game is a clunky mess in a lot of ways. The pinned comment by Jeff Nussbaum who worked on the fantranslation is especially enlightening.
This one was one of the best ys in my opinion right next to ark of napistim and memories of celceta.
Though I know they got a remake of this one coming soon with how much of an importance 5 had for the story in ys 9
You forgot the fact that Ys V introduced the new combat system that redefined the series.
Yeah, the Ark engine. Named after the first game using the new engine that redefined the series 8 years after this one nearly killed the IP. This game absolutely started using that.
combat better then Ys 1 lol
say what they say, but this game, as bad as it can be, interests me a lot more than every other title just for not having the bump combat...