It's new to me: Ys Origin
A prequel that breathed life into the series early lore, while also foreshadowing directions future Ys titles would take.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Prequels can be tough to pull off sometimes. Sometimes they’re designed so that only people already in the tank for a franchise are going to enjoy them, and other times, there just isn’t enough there outside of fans clamoring for more to justify the decision to make one. Ys Origin, though, avoided both of these issues, and did so deftly despite the absence of the only thing that truly unified every Ys game to that point: protagonist Adol Christin.
That’s right, Adol isn’t a playable character in Ys Origin, as the game takes place 700 years before Adol’s own first quest that would take him to the titular land of Ys. Instead of Adol, there are myriad connections to the lands of Ys and Esteria, in the form of characters, talking trees, and, of course, the Darm Tower, which is where the entirety of Ys Origin takes place. It wasn’t known as Darm’s Tower at this point, because Darm wasn’t known, but still. Those familiar with Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished (and Ys IV: Dawn of Ys) will recognize the Devil’s Tower for what it is, especially once that theme hits. And those for whom Ys Origin is their first actual interaction with the land of Ys and its backstory will find plenty of explanation and much to love, even if some of the overt references will go over their head.
For instance, you would have to have played the original Ys game to realize that the first playable character, Yunica Tovah, is the ancestor of the fortune teller, Sara Tovah, who sets Adol off on his quest before she’s murdered by forces who do not want to suffer the kind of interference Adol could provide. But that’s more just a neat little nod to people who are aware than it is something you need to know to glean enjoyment from Origin — hell, if you don’t remember Sara’s last name, or that one of the books of Ys is the Book of Tovah, even having played Adol’s first adventures might not get you there. It’s both self-contained and a celebration of existing Ys knowledge, and effectively walks that tightrope from start to finish.
Ys Origin uses the same style of play as Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, and the remake of Ys III, The Oath in Felghana. It’s the most fully realized version of this battle system, too: whereas something was still missing from Ys VI, and was absolutely found in time for Oath in Felghana, Origin further refines the battle system, and applies it to three characters who all play quite differently. You have your basic attacks for each character, and you will collect additional (and upgradeable) elemental attacks to be deployed that will deplete your magic meter. These elemental attacks also serve as skills that let you progress through certain obstacles, such as floating for longer jumps, blowing up weakened walls to find the secrets behind them, or lighting braziers. Lastly, you have a boost meter that fills as you take and deliver damage, and when utilized, gives you a damage boost as well as heightened defenses.
Enemies will drop items that can temporarily boost your attack and defense, so long as you keep finding new items to replenish that meter, and constant attacks will also bring additional experience points to you, as well. You can push from the standard 1.00x experience points to 1.99x, but you have to keep moving, and keep finding enemies to attack, before the timer runs out. This is a good way to level up in a hurry, especially in new areas with tougher foes, which helps keep the whole game moving along, and ensures you’re engaged even if you’re fighting the same kind of enemy yet again while backtracking.
Unlike in Ys games to come, though, which all featured multiple playable characters. you don’t form a party here, so you’ll be keeping all of those meters up by your lonesome: Ys Origin is three separate but linked stories, and all three must be played in order to fully reveal every piece of each tale, one protagonist at a time.
Only one of the stories is actually considered canon —that of Toal Fact, who you can’t even use until after you play through the other two paths — but like with Fire Emblem: Three Houses, you still need to actually take each non-canon path in order to fully learn what’s going on both within the tower, within Ys, and with each of these three characters. Yunica Tovah’s tale is one of a young woman who has not yet proven herself as a warrior, and needs to show herself, and others, that she can still be a vital warrior and knight despite her lack of magical acumen. Her father was a legend, and he died under the onslaught of demons that invaded the land and kicked off this adventure, so her own insecurity and need to prove herself are also due to what she believes is expected of her as the inheritor of that name. There’s quite a bit of that going on in this game, from all three characters.
Yunica is your traditional Adol-like character in terms of gameplay, except that she wields an axe before she picks up a sword — the weapon of choice of her father. But she’s all about timing your melee attacks just right to pull off damage-increasing combos, before moving out of the way of counterattacks. Hugo Fact, your second protagonist, is as arrogant about his abilities as Yunica is unsure of her own, and it’s nearly to his own detriment given how relationships with others suffer, and how his lust for power — even with that power being used for arguably good purposes — ends up haunting him and bringing him close to the very demonic forces he’s attempting to stop. Hugo is a ranged character, and if you recognize his last name, it’s no accident: Hugo is an ancestor of Dark Fact, the antagonist of Ys I, whose defeat ends up transporting Adol from Esteria on the ground to Ys in the air for Ys II.
He is also a sorcerer who attacks from range — making his playthrough the easiest one even on tougher difficulties, which plays into the idea that he is as powerful as he claims to be — and the brother of Toal Fact, the final playable character. Toal is presented as an obvious bad guy at first given he’s one of the “Darklings,” former humans with demonic powers after their acceptance of them, but as you play through the paths before his, you’ll come to realize isn’t as his brother Hugo viewed him. Whereas Yunica’s quest is about proving to herself and others that she can be a knight without the aid of magic, and Hugo’s is about learning about what the incessant lust for power can turn you into if you’re not careful, Toal’s story is about sacrificing oneself if it’s what needs to be done. Toal became a knight of Ys, charged with defending the goddesses, and it was at first believed that he had turned on them by accepting demonic powers to augment his own. Much more was going on there, though, that serve to show he never betrayed his ideals as a knight or his defense of the goddesses and homeland he swore to protect — but that won’t be entirely clear until you’ve played through his own version of the tale. Toal, by the way, is basically the challenge mode of the game: he attacks close, but fast, and everything is basically about speed for him and how the levels react to his presence.
While you can’t form them into a party here, the three characters still serve as what would end up being the archetypes for the Ys titles to come, where parties made up of characters with different strengths and styles is central to their gameplay. Yunica is the Adol with slicing abilities, Hugo the ranged fighter who can pierce from a distance, Toal more the hard-hitting brawler who can break through tough defenses with sheer power. These styles are at the core of future Ys party members, and while they don’t always have magic or claws or axes, the basic principles behind the way these warriors fight still applies.
The bosses here are excellent. Huge bosses with patterns and weaknesses to suss out, some of them based on enemies you’ll be familiar with if you’ve played Ys I and II, but in a far different form now that you’re not using bump combat and instead are in what’s now a more traditional action RPG setup. And musically, well, this is a Ys game, so you know what you’re in for: it’s a great soundtrack, with some quality arrangements, even if I do miss the extra energy that exists within the Ys I & II Chronicles version of Over Drive. Don’t fret, though, there’s plenty of thrashing and riffing throughout Origin even if they toned that particular song down.
The reasons Ys Origin isn’t a better game than Oath in Felghana despite the refinements to the battle system and the varied playstyles have to do with two things: level design, and ease of play. The level designs in The Oath in Felghana are excellent, and there’s nothing wrong with Origin’s, which are smartly done and manage to fit in quite a few environments despite everything being contained within this one tower. There isn’t much in the way of hidden rooms or goodies, though, with you mostly following the main path to pick up everything, and every side path has a meaningful purpose, too. Oath in Felghana gives you a bit more room to explore and play, which is to its credit. And as for “ease of play,” I don’t mean the difficulty, so much as that Oath in Felghana is a nifty and tidy story featuring Adol Christin, and just Adol. There’s nothing wrong with Ys Origin’s tri-protagonist approach, but to experience all that’s on offer here without even getting into the multiple difficulty levels, you have to spend around 24 hours with it all, and play through three times. Oath in Felghana is a far breezier experience, coming in around 10. Your mileage may vary there, but there’s something to the shorter Ys titles — I might think Ys VIII is a killer action RPG, but that doesn’t mean I want every Ys title to be as lengthy as that one.
Luckily, each protagonists’ path is about eight hours long, so you do still get that breezier experience when taken individually instead of as a whole. And you don’t solve puzzles the exact same way, either — Yunica, for instance, gets to play the famed harmonica theme in order to neutralize the literally killer sounds in the Devil’s Corridor, while Hugo has to take a hammer and a page out of Adol’s book to destroy a column that’s piping in that devilish music. Toal doesn’t solve the puzzle so much as fight through it as fast as possible to avoid dying — his really is the challenge version of the game.
The three protagonists will all bump into each other throughout their own quests, which also sheds light on what each has been up to when they aren’t on screen, while also furthering the idea that, while Yunica and Hugo might not have done everything exactly as is done in their own playthroughs, they were still around and performing the vital task of progressing through the Devil’s Tower while learning its secrets and defeating its foes.
It’s impressive, how Falcom managed to breathe life into the lore from the original Ys games that take place in Esteria and Ys, without either doing something that didn’t matter at all to the mythology of the series or saddling said mythology with unnecessary baggage for the sake of cashing in on the Ys name. Your recognizable enemies behave in ways you’d expect them to, while the newer ones fit comfortably within both the game and the larger universe, as if they’ve always been there, too. The paths of Yunica and Hugo might not be canon, but if they were, they’d still make plenty of sense within the lore of Ys that exists, and Toal’s does enough to justify its existence as the One True Path given the way it wraps up compared to the other two.
Spoilers, obviously: Toal ends up fighting his own father and the leader of the six priests of Ys, Cain Fact, after defeating Dalles, who is the final boss for the other two paths, as well as the (revived) lieutenant of Ys II’s antagonist, Darm. Darm, by the way, is Cain Fact — Hugo and Toal might have avoided becoming the true demons they feared being, but their father had already made his decision, as did their descendant, who would eventually be known as Dark Fact and whose presence would get Adol started on his first real adventure.
Even without knowing how Toal’s story wraps and the extra context given within, you get quite a bit of additional narrative for how the goddesses, Feena and Reah, got to where they were in Ys I and II. You see the decisions that brought them to the surface, the danger the Black Pearl caused even before Darm got his hands on it, and how they would lose their wings and become seemingly regularly young women who could help and be helped by Adol. Basically, if you’re into Ys’ whole deal already from a narrative and storytelling perspective, Ys Origin is mostly here to fill in some blanks, and to do so without it being either too fanservice-y or simply to add some more text to a Fandom wiki page. All of it makes sense, and is stuffed into a vital game that works whether it’s your introduction to the franchise or a game you went to after playing everything that came before it.
It’s a lovely action RPG, one you can find on basically any platform, which isn’t always the case for Ys. Ys Origin, though, is available on Windows, where it received its original release back in 2006 before a worldwide release in 2012, as well as on the Playstations 4, 5, and Vita, Xboxes One and Series S|X, and the Nintendo Switch. And even though it features 24 hours of play just to get through the three paths, never mind before you challenge yourself with the tougher difficulties, it can be purchased for all of $19.99 regardless of platform. Never played a Ys before, but like action RPGs? Buy Ys Origin, play it, and then start going for the rest of the bunch. And if you want to experience the first adventures of Adol beforehand, well, Ys I & II Chronicles is right there on Windows, too.
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