It's new to me: Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga

Ys vs. Sora no Kiseki, really, because this fighting game crossover between two Falcom JRPG franchises hasn't been officially released outside of Japan.

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.

Ys is a hell of an action RPG series from Nihon Falcom, one that launched in 1987 and has produced nine mainline entries plus a number of remakes and ports of those games along the way. Falcom’s Trails series doesn’t have quite as much history in terms of age, but it’s actually a subseries of The Legend of Heroes, which dates back to 1989, when Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes released for the PC-8801 in Japan. And Trails in the Sky, the first Trails title, came out in 2004, seven years before it made its way to North America on the Playstation Portable, and a full decade before its worldwide Windows release. So, it might feel recent out west, but Trails in the Sky is nearly 20 years old as of this writing, too.

In the summer of 2010, Falcom released a crossover fighting game featuring its two JRPG titans. They didn’t stop there, however, as the game also features characters and locations from other Falcom games, and even starts out in Xanadu, the most famous and enduring of their Dragon Slayer locations, which ended up spinning off into its own series just like Trails eventually would. It’s a real love letter to Falcom, by Falcom, and you probably need to be steeped in all of that to a degree to get the most out of it. If you’re into Trails and Ys, though, and don’t conceptually mind the idea of a fighting game that’s also somehow and noticeably utilizing a Ys game engine, then Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga can be an enjoyable time even if you never get the chance to try out its multiplayer aspects.

There is a story mode, a traditional arcade mode, a multiplayer mode featuring custom matches, and a free mode that lets you pick whatever character and stage and just have at it for fun without committing to a full playthrough of anything. For story mode, you pick a starting character from a limited list of five choices, featuring the likes of Ys protagonist Adol Christin and Estelle Bright, co-protagonist of Trails in the Sky. I say “limited” because the roster for Ys vs. Trails in the Sky is much larger than these starting characters, but these are the ones for which story modes were written: you’ll fight battles, gain experience and levels, equip new gear, and work your way through both the game’s narrative and the roster of playable characters.

You don’t just use that gear and experience in the story mode, either: as befits a game based on a pair of JRPGs, it permeates everything in the experience. You’ll want to give everyone a shot or two or six, because the levels and stats for characters who go through story mode are going to shoot through the roof. At one point I checked in on the arcade mode after playing a couple of hours of story, and my Adol was level 20 with 2,746 hit points and 103 strength. His companion, Dogi, who was fought and rescued in the story mode but had otherwise not been interacted with by me yet, was still at level 1, with 480 HP and 13 strength. Just a slight difference: Dogi would be able to handle other level 1 characters in arcade mode, but if you were to hypothetically use the game’s network mode to fight against some other folks, you’d get washed unless they were also using a low-level fighter.

You can level your characters up to 99, so the expectation is that you’re going to go well beyond what you can earn out of story mode, anyway: that just gives you a head start with the eligible fighters, but even they’ll have to gain their levels and pick up new gear and such like the rest of the rabble. While five characters are playable in story mode from the moment you open Ys vs. Trails in the Sky, there are 17 total: all but one Ys character, Chester, is from Ys Seven, while the Trails’ cast is entirely from Trails in the Sky save Lloyd Bannings, who is from the Crossbell duology of Trails games that began with Trails from Zero. Ys Seven released in 2009, two years before this crossover game, and a modified version of its PSP engine powers this game, while Lloyd Bannings’ first adventure would release a few months after Ys vs. Trails in the Sky, making him something of a special promotional case for the upcoming continuation of the franchise. Don’t worry, Chester’s inclusion is also special, but for very different reasons you’re aware of if you’ve played Ys III or its remake, Oath in Felghana.

That’s just the main playable characters, though! There are also support characters who you can sometimes assign to help you out in battle, and a few of those are from other Falcom games. Some of those are from other Falcom games that received PSP releases, like Parin from Gurumin and Dela from Brandish, so even for people who mostly knew Falcom from this particular era, there were plenty of fan service-y inclusions outside of the main attractions.

The story mode has your chosen character coming to in the unknown land of Xanadu, and learning that you’ve been summoned to aid in the defeat of the demon lord Galsis, who can only be taken down by the wielder of the legendary Dragon Slayer blade — hey, that’s the name of those games. The problem is that many heroes from other lands were magically summoned here, and Galsis sunk his metaphorical claws into every last one but you. So, you’ll have to knock some sense into every other hero you encounter to subdue them long enough for your little talking teddy bear looking pal from this world to work their magic and bring them back to the side of light and right, which builds up your roster of support characters and unlocks additional fighters for the game’s other modes. It’s got a real Smash Bros. single-player vibe in that respect, and you’ll certainly see that name tossed around in explanations of what this game is like, but that’s not the most accurate comparison. For that, you’ll need to namedrop Power Stone.

Capcom’s beloved Dreamcast 3D fighter takes place from an angled topdown perspective, and has you running around an arena performing standard attacks and special attacks that can only be utilized after you’ve properly powered up. The ways you do so in Power Stone and Ys vs. Trails in the Sky aren’t exactly the same, but it’s a much closer comparison than Smash Bros. — if Smash Bros. is on one end of the spectrum and Ys vs. Trails is on the other, Power Stone is somewhere in between them. It’s got a lot in common with Ys vs. Trails, but it also includes aspects similar to Smash’s item and weapon pick ups, as well as a Final Smash-esque power-up that existed before Smash’s own feature did.

In Ys vs. Trails, you’ll also run around an angled topdown arena where the camera sometimes zooms in to change the perspective a bit, charge up your special skill attacks through the use of your standard one, and eventually be able to unload massively powerful attacks that can win a battle or save you in a moment where you might have been about to lose it. While there aren’t weapons to pick up and deploy, there are items to collect, which can heal you or give you a boost of skill points. It all feels very Ys in how it plays: equipping skills to your face buttons, gear that can boost your stats or allow you to have a chance to inflict status effects like poison on foes, and a meter that fills and fills until you can finally perform your special attack.

Image credit: Geofront

In story mode, you can sometimes assign a support character, which will be another one that you’ve already fought and rescued (so long as they’ve agreed to join up with you — some do not for story purposes). This helps quite a bit since in the larger boss fights, you’re often taking on more than one opponent at a time, and you don’t want all of their energies focused on you. Even if your support character works mostly as a damage sponge for a bit until you can solve one of the two problems on screen yourself, that can be valuable, especially since, just like in Ys and in Trails, if you aren’t at the proper level for a particular fight, you’ll notice in a hurry. Luckily, you can level up your character in story mode by replaying past fights, and still reap rewards you can use to improve your equipment, too.

There are ways to play the game’s network mode all this time later and despite there never being a release of Ys vs. Trails in the Sky outside of Japan, and you can thank Geofront for that. The unofficial translation team released their localized version of Ys vs. Trails in the Sky back in 2021, and along with it came tools and instructions for how to play it online through a PC emulator, as well as HD texture packs for use with the same. Unlike most Falcom games, this one never did end up on Windows, so actual PSP hardware or an emulator are your only options here. Considering the PSP’s internet functions are basically nonexistent at this point due to changes in wifi connections and security over the years, emulation is the way to go if you want to play with others.

Even if you don’t want to play with others, though, and you just want to clear the story mode a few times and setup arcade battles on your own, there’s plenty of game here. It’ll get a bit repetitive, sure, but if you’re into Ys and Trails enough that you’d even track down the game in the first place, you’re probably already in deep enough to play and enjoy yourself here, too. Throw in that the game is loaded with arrangements of excellent Falcom Sound Team classics, arenas within Xanadu that often correspond with the Trails and Ys opponents you’re facing, as well as character and landscape art featuring your favorites from these franchises, and yeah, if you’re already a Falcom fan and sold on the game conceptually, you’ll probably have a good time here, multiplayer or no.

Given the PSP is a dead system that is nearly impossible to shop for these days, whether you’re talking about the price of things or Sony’s insistence that it be difficult to give them money for PSP titles, this is one that fell by the wayside and stayed there. There were other priorities for localization in North America — again, Trails in the Sky didn’t release in North America for the first time until 2011, a year after a crossover game featuring it released in Japan — so it’s no wonder that this spin-off, crossover oddity ended up requiring Geofront’s intervention so anyone outside of Japan could understand what it was they were playing. It’s still a shame, though, as this is the kind of spin-off that easily could have become a worldwide series, given the continued growth of both Ys and Trails, as well as the popularity of the latter both in and outside of Japan. Next time, maybe.

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