To those who know me, I'm quite a bit of a Falcom fan, or at the very least, a Ys fan, but it was not always the case. I played and beaten SNES version when I was a teen. It was ok, but nothing special, and thought the rest of the games were like that. Years later, I played the 6th game, Ark of Napishtim, on a whim, and enjoyed that quite a bit. At that time, I heard word about how this game, Oath in Felghana, uses the same engine and is even better. I eventually played the import and thought it was fantastic. It turns out that it's a remake of the third game, and is interesting how the circle from sort-of-hater to fanboy would be complete. Heck, I love that game so much that I imported a copy with a sweet, compilation soundtrack when it was on sale, then the localized PSP version... and later the Steam version as well.
At some point or another, I did feel like messing with one of the old versions for the fun of it to see how it is. In particular, I wanted to play the Turbo CD version, which I assume is the best of the bunch. I did want it to come on the Wii's virtual console like with Ys I & II (which was pretty damn fun), but sadly, that never happened. I eventually played the game by some "other means" and recently finished it.
Now the thing you probably wonder is why the hell would I even want to play this version of III when I have three copies of the completely superior remake? Well, it's partially out of curiosity and wonder what I think of this version of the game after all these years. The primary reason is actually because of the music. The Turbo CD version is fantastic, and heavily indicates how innovative Falcom were with the audio back in the day. Sure, I can listen to the music of Turbo CD Ys III somewhere, but I wanted to experience the game along with it too.
The game is still pretty underwhelming as I remembered it to me, but still kind of fun in its own way. The dungeons are completely straightforward, especially after going through the mazelike dungeons of I, II, and recently, IV. II is especially noteworthy where I got lost in the final dungeons for hours each time I've played it. Granted, Felghana's dungeons are linear too, but they're designed better and at least have more substance. It's also kind of jarring how different the translations were from what I was used to, even in the SNES version. In the Turbo CD version, Felghana is Kanai, Redmont is Sarina, the final boss, Galbalan is called Demonicus and a few other extreme differences. There are a few other little issues and nitpicks, but they're not really worth noting upon.
Though the game is faulty, I still did enjoy the most recent romp through it and kind of has its own charm. The pacing is good, and was fun blazing through all the dungeons, killing the enemies in one strike. The Turbo CD version also has some terrible voice acting, but of the totally hilarious kind that could only be done from the 90s. To me, when voice acting in modern games is bad, it feels bad because the actors certainly tried and took it serious, but botched it. 90s voice acting: A lot goofier and seem to be having fun with it at least. Chester's voice is especially bad since it just does not fit his character at all, but is part of the fun. At the end of the game, one of the weaker Ys games, but still pretty good, at least for its fantastic soundtrack.
No comments:
Post a Comment