Ys III: Wanderers From Ys (TurboGrafx CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
231A playthrough of NEC's 1991 action role-playing game for the TurboGrafx CD, Ys III: Wanderers From Ys.
Wanderers from Ys for the Turbo was the first time the 1989 Nihon Falcom game had been localized for English speaking audiences. It is the direct sequel to Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished - The Final Chapter, which had only been released in the west as part of the Ys I & II remake compilation (a TurboGrafx CD exclusive) in 1990. It has also been remade as Ys: The Oath in Felghana, though the remake changes the core game play significantly.
Despite being part of the same series, Wanderers from Ys bears little resemblence to the first two games. Whereas I and II were played from an overhead perspective (with a strange "run into stuff from behind to kill it" battle system), Ys III is a side-scrolling platformer with RPG trappings somewhat similar to Zelda 2 or Faxanadu.
You still play as Adol Christin, the famous sword-toting adventurer with fire-engine red hair, and this time Adol has travelled with his friend Dogi to the town of Redmont. As soon as they get to town, Adol hears rumblings about bad stuff going down nearby, and decides to put his sword to use once again.
The general flow of the game is quite similar to the older ones: typically you'll get a quest, go and beat some stuff up to gain experience and gold, kill a boss, return to inform the person that tasked you that you were successful, upgrade your equipment, get asked to do something else, and repeat the cycle.
The voice acting and the melodrama really help to keep the game moving forward, and Ys III is really quite short, so it never bores you by dragging anything out for too long. Of course, like in any game of this age, grinding is a necessity, but it isn't too bad here. You'll probably notice that there are a couple of points in the video where my experience level jumps. Those are the seams of a couple of edits that I made to cut out the grinding portions of the video. Between them there's about 25 minutes cut. I didn't think that they made for terribly compelling viewing, so I axed them. While I'm talking about edits, I also scaled the game screen a bit - the game's window is surrounded by fairly thick black bars, so I cropped them out.
The graphics look pretty nice. They're typical of a 16-bit game from the early 90s (even if that attempt at parallax scrolling was... ill-advised) and they do their job just fine. The real star for the graphics here is the cinematic scenes. There are only two and they're both relatively short, but for a console game in 1991, they looked fantastic!
The soundtrack, on the other hand, is among the best I've ever heard in a video game. Regardless of the era, few soundtracks ever hit the sheer heights of awesomeness that Ryo Yonemitsu's arrangements of the PC88 version's soundtrack hit on the Turbo port. The Redbook soundtrack is absolutely loaded with wailing guitars, 80s synths, and more power drum kits than you could ever hope to shake a stick at. The tunes are all incredibly memorable, and you'll be spoiled for music in videogames forever after hearing them. There aren't enough synonyms for "good" in the English language to really get across how I feel about the music in this one. If I had to give a point of comparison, I'd say the only soundtrack (especially in this style) that's even near comparable would that the one from the Turbo version of Lords of Thunder. There was something truly magical about NEC/Hudson's console relationship with metal music.
It, along with the voice work and cinematics, hoists the Turbo experience well above that of the other ports. The Genesis version made an extremely respectable showing, granted, and the X68000 version was thoroughly excellent, but neither hold the production values of Hudson's upgrade. The SNES version (https://youtu.be/I8Tcdm2foE0 ) is the throwaway port of the 16-bit version generation - and yeah, I know people will get bent out of shape with me for that one, but the music is completely awful (WTF did they do to the instrumentation?) and the graphics are dark and muddy.
While Ys III: Wanderers From Ys hasn't ever really been much more than an average RPG-lite side-scrolling platformer/ action game, the general execution of the entire package on the TurboGrafx really elevates it to something far more than the sum of its parts.
And just for the record, though I really enjoyed Oath in Felghana, I'd take this one over the remake any day.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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