Ys II Special
A shot from the introduction to the game when it started working.
I had never heard about this one until I started this project and discovered that a fan had uncovered an “Oath in Felghana” scale makeover that had happened once before in 1994 with Ys II. If it was that good, I had to find out more.
According to the page created by a poster on Ancient Land of Ys who calls himself Seldane, the remake project had started in 1992. According to Seldane's information, a South Korean company named MANTRA licensed the game from Nihom Falcom and took it upon themselves to remake and release this new Ys II and had worked to expand many of its features making it a much larger, and longer, game. They had even contracted their own band, soundTEmP, to fill in for Falcom's Sound Team JDK.
A bunny girl in a Japanese game ported by South Korea? Is anyone really surprised?
It was also apparently very buggy with patches that introduced only more bugs into the mix.
My first experimentation with it wasn't too impressive. After finding a copy, I tried it out in DOSBox. Initially, the intro – hinting at what could have been great – ran at a snail's pace. Figuring out how to get the music to even start was something of a small challenge once I ran the install configuration.
The controls are a little finicky and through trial and error, I found out that the ALT key acts as the confirmation button, and CTRL backs through conversations or out of menus. The F1 – F4 keys bring up the menus for the game such as the loading screen for saves, Adol's status (which is actually in English along with most of the basic interface), inventory, and equipment. Hitting TAB brings up a smaller menu displaying the others as a list.
It looks like this monster moves with its own vomit. Maybe it's on Spring Break.
Arrow keys move Adol around when he's not in a menu or talking to anyone and the ALT key swings his sword. You can still bump into enemies, but swinging Adol's blade seems to work much better. Other alterations to the original Ys II game include a somewhat different leveling scheme. Though Adol's maximum HP has traditionally been 255, reaching level 8 brought his HP to 500. Stronger creatures do damage consummate with the changes, however, so it's not as dramatic a change as it might seem at first.
Unlike Falcom's own titles, it's also not very subtle as to where the player should and shouldn't go. Monsters that can't even be scratched by my weapon were obviously there to tell me “Don't go here” in as much as the hangul text boxes that came up when I wandered too far off the beaten path. Dying from a single touch or from poison (or was it a bug?) that drained my hundreds of HP was also as fun.
Adol runs along a dirt road while a slime chortles menacingly behind him. Well, not really, but slimes can really mess you up early on in this game.
Under DOSBox 0.72 (and a reboot), the game suddenly ran pretty smoothly. The music stuttered on occasion and performance seemed to drop slightly when there was more activity onscreen, but otherwise, it wasn't too bad. It even had an animated intro and the scene where Lillia turns to face the screen is still a beautiful piece of work and seems directly copied from the anime frame by frame.
One glitch I noticed included a visit to the Inn where Adol's gold and HP displayed on the bottom of the screen “glitch” to lower levels until you leave and everything is normal again. SoundTEmP's soundtrack comes off as a very good rendition of what Sound Team JDK is known for with a little personal embellishment.
No, it's not David Bowie from Labyrinth.
Character portraits had also undergone a bit of change and look different from the ones that Falcom had done for its own Ys II revival. As in, incredibly different.
However, Seldane's article also points to its inherent quality and the passion that made it an extremely unique Ys title and remake within the series' history. Back then, the Internet wasn't as popular as it is today so losing out on this piece of franchise history might have been as permanent as seeing those Spring Break pictures that you never wanted on the web come up years later. Thanks to the same passion for the series that the developers had in making it, however, it has managed to live on...if not run well.
Additional links:
Sadly, the company that made the game is long gone.
