The Ys games have been around for ages, but they’ve hardly been mainstream. It arguably wasn’t until the release of the PSP where we began to see the series take shape with more careful attention with translations from XSEED (and eventually NIS America) with its recent releases.
I’ve personally only played the 3D games, starting with Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, so when I saw that they were bringing Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana to the west, I was definitely looking forward to it being my first 2D Ys game, but I sure got humbled by it.
The game was originally released in the west as Ys: The Oath in Felghana on the PSP in 2010 before it saw its souped up PC port a couple years later. Now labeled Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana, Falcom and XSEED have provided more avenues to play the game with its recent release on the Switch and PS4/5. This port of the PSP game is largely unchanged, with the main new features being updated hand-drawn character art to closer resemble Falcom’s modern anime style we see across their other games, in addition to the Turbo Mode that we’ve also seen in other recent Falcom games to hasten gameplay.
If you’ve never played an Ys game before, this is a fine place to start. Unlike Falcom’s Trails series, no prior knowledge of any other Ys game is required to enjoy any of the games. In Ys lore, the main character Adol Christin is known throughout as a humble adventurer with countless tales in countless territories left behind for people to talk about. This has allowed Falcom to jump back and forth with Adol’s age with every Ys title. There definitely is some continuity as it’s the same Adol with every game, but references to instances in other titles are minimal.
One of the featured improvements to this port of The Oath of Felghana is in the character art to make them more in line with the rest of Falcom’s more recent releases. If you’d rather keep the classic art, you can change your preferences in the settings.
For those interested in where the game falls in the Ys timeline, Oath in Felghana takes place after the events of Memories of Celceta but before Lacrimosa of Dana (Ys V would be between those games, but we haven’t seen an official western localization yet), technically making it the sixth game in what’s now a 10-game series. Once again, the game follows the red-haired Adol Christin as he arrives in the island nation of Felghana, the place where his companion, the blue-haired thief Dogi, grew up. While Dogi quickly becomes nostalgic walking around his home, he notices quite a few peculiar details. Monsters now plague places that were otherwise safe, affecting resources and Felghana’s ability to trade, and he finds out one of his childhood friends left town six months ago–at around the same time Felghana started to see this strange activity. So as we’d expect, it’s up to Adol and Dogi to find out what’s causing this mess in Felghana.
To the uninitiated, Ys features a snappy and intuitive action-based battle system that feels a tad more like Zelda than it does a Mana game. In addition to standard slashes with your sword, you also will eventually come across the ability to use projectiles, a spin attack, and a charge; all of which are mapped to the left face button, and can be cycled through using the right shoulder button–which I actually found pretty cumbersome when playing on handheld mode with the Switch. That aside, each of these abilities are made more powerful by jewels you’ll find in the game, and they also double as abilities you can use outside of battle for light puzzle solving.
The controls are simple enough, and you’ll eventually find your own comfort level with each ability as you play. There are some in-game pop-ups that tell you about them, but for the most part, I found them useless and would’ve preferred to have an interactive tutorial to better get up to speed.
Back to why this game felt humbling–Oath in Felghana is widely regarded by Ys enthusiasts to be one of the hardest games in the series, if not the most difficult. Every boss in the game will likely require more than one try, and there are uncalled for difficulty spikes throughout that are sure to frustrate people. If you’re playing Oath in Felghana looking for a chill experience, you might want to drop it to its easiest setting, and even then it’s hard to say you won’t die.
Traps and occasionally clunky platforming add to the game’s overall difficulty.
As difficult and frustrating as some of the levels and boss fights can be, the game at least respects your time. If you die at any dungeon, you’ll respawn back at the beginning of the screen you were on with the health you had, so you it shouldn’t take much time to get back to where you were when Adol fell. That said, if you had a low amount of HP when you got to that screen, it could be a struggle. You don’t have the luxury of using items in your inventory to heal up either, as you can only heal by finding a save point, leveling up, or being lucky enough to have monsters you kill drop an item that would immediate heal you. I had a rough time during one of the game’s final dungeons, as I was in an unfortunate position where I had only 5 HP and instead of just taking enemies on, I tried avoiding them as I jumped around each level.
Speaking of jumping around each level, the dungeon and level design is a mixed bag. All the dungeons are fairly lengthy for a game of this age, and on top of that, each one feels like two dungeons in one. Approachability aside, one thing I really appreciated was how the dungeons felt like they were inspired by Zelda or Metroid, where you get to unlock the aforementioned abilities of using fireballs, a spin attack, and the charge. These moves acted as each dungeon’s main gimmick or at least made it easier to traverse. You’ll even be inclined to backtrack to old dungeons to see if you can unlock new areas with your newfound abilities. It’s something you’ll actually want to do as most of the time you’ll uncover resources that’ll allow you to upgrade your gear, which is essential to staying alive. The problem with exploration is the only map in the game is a world map, so if everything looks the same to you, going through dungeons without having good visual memory could prove to be an issue.
To get back to the subject of bosses, they’re great, but again, they’re hard to take down. If you die enough, the Game Over screen will give you a “Weaken enemies and retry” option and if you keep dying, it’ll keep offering to lower the difficulty until you finally figure it out. Every single boss I fought in the game killed me enough times for me to bring the difficulty down all the way until I could finally beat it. This humbled me, but I was glad to be able to eventually figure out how to take all the bosses down without using a guide. My favorite of which was this dragon that you had to knock down by charging into his feet, followed by constantly slashing its face. It eventually got to a point where it grabs you and drops you down a chasm where you hit rock after rock and lose health, so when I finally killed the beast, it felt amazing… especially when one of the reasons why I kept dying was accidentally tapping on the R button, using the wrong attack.
If you’re looking for an RPG that plays more like Zelda, the classic Ys games are an easy recommendation.
One of the nicest things about The Oath in Felghana is that despite its difficulty, it’s not a long game if you keep at it. I was able to roll credits after playing no longer than 12 hours, which is really short even for classic RPGs. That said, there are times where the story does feel a little choppy. I personally felt like the game got to its main twists a little abruptly but again, this game came out more than a decade ago. Still, now that the series has gotten a little more attention, I would’ve liked to see Dogi be playable. Since the game takes place in his homeland, you’d think he’d be a much more central figure, but it was hardly about him and as someone who’s played through a bunch of these games and wanted to know more about the thief, I found that a disappointing.
All in all though, especially starting at $30, Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana is a terrific value to both newcomers to Ys and those looking to experience the story again with the updates it got. I would’ve preferred more substantial improvements, but the 12 hours spent in Felghana were definitely more than enjoyable and definitely represents a great start to the big huge 2025 that Falcom is poised to have–which should be music any JRPG fan’s ears.
The Ys games have been around for ages, but they’ve hardly been mainstream. It arguably wasn’t until the release of the PSP where we began to see the series take shape with more careful attention with translations from XSEED (and…
The Ys games have been around for ages, but they’ve hardly been mainstream. It arguably wasn’t until the release of the PSP where we began to see the series take shape with more careful attention with translations from XSEED (and eventually NIS America) with its recent releases.
I’ve personally only played the 3D games, starting with Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, so when I saw that they were bringing Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana to the west, I was definitely looking forward to it being my first 2D Ys game, but I sure got humbled by it.
The game was originally released in the west as Ys: The Oath in Felghana on the PSP in 2010 before it saw its souped up PC port a couple years later. Now labeled Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana, Falcom and XSEED have provided more avenues to play the game with its recent release on the Switch and PS4/5. This port of the PSP game is largely unchanged, with the main new features being updated hand-drawn character art to closer resemble Falcom’s modern anime style we see across their other games, in addition to the Turbo Mode that we’ve also seen in other recent Falcom games to hasten gameplay.
If you’ve never played an Ys game before, this is a fine place to start. Unlike Falcom’s Trails series, no prior knowledge of any other Ys game is required to enjoy any of the games. In Ys lore, the main character Adol Christin is known throughout as a humble adventurer with countless tales in countless territories left behind for people to talk about. This has allowed Falcom to jump back and forth with Adol’s age with every Ys title. There definitely is some continuity as it’s the same Adol with every game, but references to instances in other titles are minimal.
One of the featured improvements to this port of The Oath of Felghana is in the character art to make them more in line with the rest of Falcom’s more recent releases. If you’d rather keep the classic art, you can change your preferences in the settings.
For those interested in where the game falls in the Ys timeline, Oath in Felghana takes place after the events of Memories of Celceta but before Lacrimosa of Dana (Ys V would be between those games, but we haven’t seen an official western localization yet), technically making it the sixth game in what’s now a 10-game series. Once again, the game follows the red-haired Adol Christin as he arrives in the island nation of Felghana, the place where his companion, the blue-haired thief Dogi, grew up. While Dogi quickly becomes nostalgic walking around his home, he notices quite a few peculiar details. Monsters now plague places that were otherwise safe, affecting resources and Felghana’s ability to trade, and he finds out one of his childhood friends left town six months ago–at around the same time Felghana started to see this strange activity. So as we’d expect, it’s up to Adol and Dogi to find out what’s causing this mess in Felghana.
To the uninitiated, Ys features a snappy and intuitive action-based battle system that feels a tad more like Zelda than it does a Mana game. In addition to standard slashes with your sword, you also will eventually come across the ability to use projectiles, a spin attack, and a charge; all of which are mapped to the left face button, and can be cycled through using the right shoulder button–which I actually found pretty cumbersome when playing on handheld mode with the Switch. That aside, each of these abilities are made more powerful by jewels you’ll find in the game, and they also double as abilities you can use outside of battle for light puzzle solving.
The controls are simple enough, and you’ll eventually find your own comfort level with each ability as you play. There are some in-game pop-ups that tell you about them, but for the most part, I found them useless and would’ve preferred to have an interactive tutorial to better get up to speed.
Back to why this game felt humbling–Oath in Felghana is widely regarded by Ys enthusiasts to be one of the hardest games in the series, if not the most difficult. Every boss in the game will likely require more than one try, and there are uncalled for difficulty spikes throughout that are sure to frustrate people. If you’re playing Oath in Felghana looking for a chill experience, you might want to drop it to its easiest setting, and even then it’s hard to say you won’t die.
Traps and occasionally clunky platforming add to the game’s overall difficulty.
As difficult and frustrating as some of the levels and boss fights can be, the game at least respects your time. If you die at any dungeon, you’ll respawn back at the beginning of the screen you were on with the health you had, so you it shouldn’t take much time to get back to where you were when Adol fell. That said, if you had a low amount of HP when you got to that screen, it could be a struggle. You don’t have the luxury of using items in your inventory to heal up either, as you can only heal by finding a save point, leveling up, or being lucky enough to have monsters you kill drop an item that would immediate heal you. I had a rough time during one of the game’s final dungeons, as I was in an unfortunate position where I had only 5 HP and instead of just taking enemies on, I tried avoiding them as I jumped around each level.
Speaking of jumping around each level, the dungeon and level design is a mixed bag. All the dungeons are fairly lengthy for a game of this age, and on top of that, each one feels like two dungeons in one. Approachability aside, one thing I really appreciated was how the dungeons felt like they were inspired by Zelda or Metroid, where you get to unlock the aforementioned abilities of using fireballs, a spin attack, and the charge. These moves acted as each dungeon’s main gimmick or at least made it easier to traverse. You’ll even be inclined to backtrack to old dungeons to see if you can unlock new areas with your newfound abilities. It’s something you’ll actually want to do as most of the time you’ll uncover resources that’ll allow you to upgrade your gear, which is essential to staying alive. The problem with exploration is the only map in the game is a world map, so if everything looks the same to you, going through dungeons without having good visual memory could prove to be an issue.
To get back to the subject of bosses, they’re great, but again, they’re hard to take down. If you die enough, the Game Over screen will give you a “Weaken enemies and retry” option and if you keep dying, it’ll keep offering to lower the difficulty until you finally figure it out. Every single boss I fought in the game killed me enough times for me to bring the difficulty down all the way until I could finally beat it. This humbled me, but I was glad to be able to eventually figure out how to take all the bosses down without using a guide. My favorite of which was this dragon that you had to knock down by charging into his feet, followed by constantly slashing its face. It eventually got to a point where it grabs you and drops you down a chasm where you hit rock after rock and lose health, so when I finally killed the beast, it felt amazing… especially when one of the reasons why I kept dying was accidentally tapping on the R button, using the wrong attack.
If you’re looking for an RPG that plays more like Zelda, the classic Ys games are an easy recommendation.
One of the nicest things about The Oath in Felghana is that despite its difficulty, it’s not a long game if you keep at it. I was able to roll credits after playing no longer than 12 hours, which is really short even for classic RPGs. That said, there are times where the story does feel a little choppy. I personally felt like the game got to its main twists a little abruptly but again, this game came out more than a decade ago. Still, now that the series has gotten a little more attention, I would’ve liked to see Dogi be playable. Since the game takes place in his homeland, you’d think he’d be a much more central figure, but it was hardly about him and as someone who’s played through a bunch of these games and wanted to know more about the thief, I found that a disappointing.
All in all though, especially starting at $30, Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana is a terrific value to both newcomers to Ys and those looking to experience the story again with the updates it got. I would’ve preferred more substantial improvements, but the 12 hours spent in Felghana were definitely more than enjoyable and definitely represents a great start to the big huge 2025 that Falcom is poised to have–which should be music any JRPG fan’s ears.
by Danreb Victorio
