Ys III: Wanderers From Ys
Revision as of 15:19, 26 November 2018 by TheAlmightyGuru (talk | contribs)
Ys III: Wanderers From Ys is an action adventure fantasy game developed and published by Nihon Falcom for the PC-9801 and PC-8801 on 1989-07-28. It was later ported to several other platforms. It is the third game in the Ys series.
I didn't know about the Ys series when it was most popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I had seen the titles in lists of games, but because they were mostly Japanese releases, I didn't bother trying to play them. At the end of 2018, I finally decided to try a Ys game because I saw that Ys III had several elements of my favorite game genre, Metroidvania.
Contents
Status
I do not own this game. I am playing the SNES port.
Review
- Overall: ?/10
- Best Version: Genesis
Good
- The graphics and music are both pretty decent in the 8-bit ports. However, the graphics look a bit dated on the SNES and TurboGrafx-CD.
- The game lets you save and load pretty much everywhere which is nice considering how easy it is to take damage.
Bad
- The beginning story is odd. Dogi takes Adol to his home town, but when it is discovered that the town's leader has been lost in a quarry full of monsters, Dogi just lazes in the inn so that Adol has to rescue the leader by himself.
- You have to spend a lot of time grinding.
- Several monsters move so fast it's very hard to avoid taking a hit.
- Hit detection is pretty bad. Enemies can hit the player even when they aren't visually touching, but your sword also has a huge hit box, so it equals out.
- A lot of the bosses have attacks that are extremely difficult to dodge, so you basically just mash the attack button and hope you have enough hit points.
- Ground-based enemies just move back and forth in a fixed area without even a primitive AI.
- Enemies do not have wall collision and instead walk right through them. They're usually placed in areas where they won't walk though walls, but sometimes they do.
- The animation on the weaker ports (PC-88 and MSX) are terrible.
- Items have liner upgrades, but they are not automatically equipped. If the next sword is objectively superior than the last, it should automatically become active.
- The dialogue is often confusing because it's hard to tell who is speaking.
- The console ports use start for pause and select for the menu. This should have been reversed.
Ugly
- Across the various ports, the player control is pretty bad. Movement is a bit difficult to control, jumping is a bit jagged, attacking doesn't feel fluid at all, and the down-strike on a jump attack is odd. The SNES port has bugs on stairs.
- Neither the player nor the monsters recoil from getting hit. This is a terrible way to handle combat because, with such a short invincibility timeout after getting hit, monsters can walk through the player and cause damage over and over again.
Media
Box Art
Documentation
Titles
Language | Native | Transliteration | Translation |
---|---|---|---|
English | Ys III: Wanderers From Ys | ||
Japanese | イースIII – ワンダラーズフロムイース | Isu Suri – Wandarazu Furomu Isu | Ys III: Wanderers From Ys |
Links
- mobygames.com/game/ys-iii-wanderers-from-ys - MobyGames.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ys_III:_Wanderers_from_Ys - Wikipedia.