Baud Attitude

At some point in the last few years, I decided that I was going to set up a box full of emulators and older games and put it under the living room TV and have access to decades worth of interactive entertainment whenever I felt like it.

That was before I realized that just playing the games I had actually, you know, BOUGHT would probably last me until the end of days and I didn’t need access to thousands more.  So that project got shelved, and then I took the shelf I’d shelved it on and fed it through a wood chipper, and then I burned the chips.

Really I just wanted to see how far I could take that metaphor.

Still, I had a retro style gamepad lying around as a result, and it became unearthed during a recent cleaning spree, so I figured I would see how the Surface 3 could handle emulation tasks.  I also have a handful of GBA, WonderSwan and SegaCD games in the backlog still, so I carefully went out and found ROM images for JUST those games, set up RetroArch, and gave it a go.

Initial results are… well, they’re passable.  From the point of view of “I have a portable SNES in my backpack and can pop out its little kickstand and play a game wherever I want”, it’s pretty good! It’s totally like that Switch reveal video, where Karen invades your cool rooftop party so she can play video games in the middle of it.  I HAVE BECOME KAREN, DESTROYER OF FUN.

Performance, on the other hand, well, the Surface 3 does not have a beefy processor and it seems to be stretching things a bit to get much oomph out of it.  I started with Klonoa: Empire of Dreams, and it plays really well when you’re in the game levels… but when you’re on the world map, or in one boss fight so far, there’s a ton of audio slowdown and it’s really kind of painful on the ears.  And that’s just a GBA game, which should not be a real burden to emulate.  I’m definitely not going to try emulating any 3D systems on this little guy.

Also as a side note, it’s very weird loading some of these ROM images and seeing little intro bits by whatever group ripped the images, with Amiga-demoscene-style bouncing text and greetings to their buddies, before you can actually get to the intro screen of the game.  It’s a mix of nostalgia and annoyance.

In the last post, I not-so-humbly bragged about beating every Ys Origin boss on the first try.  That did not hold up – even excluding the boss you’re SUPPOSED to lose to, I took a few dirt naps before the end credits rolled.  Most of them were resolved by following the time-honored method of backing off and grinding up a couple of levels, fortunately, so I never had to git gud.

I really can’t recommend this game enough if you’re a fan of action RPGs.  It pretty much requires you to have played the first Ys game, of course, just so you get all of the cool things that they slip in, so that’s not a small time commitment.  Figure probably 25 hours?  What were you going to do with those heartbeats, anyway, watch TV?

…

Anyway, after finishing Ys Origin, my plan was to work on the bits of my backlog that require me to hold on to very specific bits of hardware.  For example, I have, like, one Dreamcast game, and a couple of GBA games, and a Wonderswan game, and I’m holding on to all of the necessary consoles and accessories for these when I could really use the closet space back.  Instead, I played through a quite good bullet-hell shooter called Crimzon Clover: WORLD IGNITION, tried a couple of indie Japanese shooters from the eXceed series that didn’t manage to grab me, and then was reading older blog posts (and finding an embarrassing number of typos) when I hit this one and realized that I had been all happy about being able to BUY the Batman: Arkham Origins DLC but had not actually, you know, played it yet.

I was not, for the record, looking for games with “Origin” in the name.

So, with Arkham Origins being all about Bruce starting out in the Bat-Business and meeting many of his Bat-Villains for the first Bat-Time, first Bat-Channel, it’s probably no shock to anyone that an expansion called Cold, Cold Heart is all about Mr. Freeze, the most sympathetic member of the Bat-Rogue’s-Gallery.

I say that based almost entirely upon the character’s portrayal in the 90s animated series, but since the 90s animated series was the best version of Batman ever created I’ve never felt the need to explore if there is an alternate version of the Bat-Mythos in which Mr. Freeze is a total jerk.

I guess there could be.

Anyway, I played through Arkham Origins last February and was quite giddy about “getting” the signature Arkham combat at the time.

Going back to it, eleven months later, all of that muscle memory was gone and the giddiness faded rather quickly.  The DLC assumes that you are playing it immediately after finishing the main game and that you have all of your gadgets, upgrades, etc, so it’s not shy about throwing some very nasty fights at you pretty much from the get-go.  I was very grateful that I could use the practice arena in the Batcave to remember a little bit about how the combat system works, which sorts of enemies could just be punched into submission and which needed to be countered or stunned first, etc.  This makes it very hard to recommend in a vacuum, so the question becomes “have you played Arkham Origins and want more of it, do you not mind another retelling of how Victor Fries became a super villain, and do you have a few bucks?”

So, as I mentioned earlier, I’m following up Ys: The Oath in Felghana with Ys: Origin, a game set 700 years before the first Ys game.

I’ve only played about three hours, which has been enough to get past the fourth boss.  Plenty to go.  It doesn’t seem quite as obtuse as the older games, which is probably a mark of change in game design in the mid 2000s.  It also gets serious marks for giving you a choice between two characters at the start – one melee, one magical – and having the axe-wielding spinning-death-ball-of-doom being a cute girl with braids.

One guess which I started with.

Anyway, it doesn’t diverge too much from the Ys pattern in some ways.  Charge through a dungeon maniacally destroying weak monsters, find a save point directly in front of an ominous door, save, walk through the door, meet a boss…

…LOSE to the boss, back off a bit and grind some, come back and beat it down.

The bosses in Ys: Origin are really involved affairs, with lots of stages and special attacks thrown at you, and I suspect the designers had a lot of fun with them.  I’ve certainly had fun figuring them out, aided somewhat by the general principle of “there’s a glowing spot.  I should probably try to hit it” even though the glowing spot is sometimes out of reach and involves, say, knocking the boss to its knees and platforming up its body to reach said glowing bit and poke it a few times.  Thankfully they are fairly slow paced, giving you lots of time to think, and I am happy to report that I have not yet lost a boss fight.

That isn’t to say I haven’t had at least one close call:

The “1/106” in the bottom left represents my current hit points.  The glowing explosion thing represents the other guy dying instead of me.

Life is good.

So, my third Ys game down in the last few days, leaving only the prequel “Ys: Origin” sitting in my Steam library.  I’m honestly not sure where that one is intended to be played, but I’ll be playing that one next regardless – while “The Oath in Felghana” is a modernized version of Ys III and is a natural follow-up to Ys Chronicles, the series gets weird after its third entry. There were “Ys IV” games for both the Super Famicom and the PC Engine, but neither is considered the “real” Ys IV.  As best I can tell, the first canonical “Ys IV” wasn’t released until 2012 and is thus far a Vita-only game.  Lacking the ability to make sense of this, going back to the past sounds just fine. 

Anyway, setting timeline confusion aside, The Oath in Felghana is a pretty neat game and a bit less doom and gloom than the first two. There’s still a Big Bad, of course, but the story is much more personal and revolves around friendships and family. It’s definitely best played with a FAQ handy, particularly if you care about achievements at all, because it revels in giving you new abilities and making you backtrack to early dungeons where those abilities are needed to find secrets, but once you accept that – and it is a bitter pill to swallow, I will concede – you are looking at a good dozen hours of action-RPG goodness taken straight from the glory days of the genre.  The “bump combat” from Ys I and II, nostalgic as it may have been, gets completely tossed out for a control scheme with melee, spell, and jump buttons, and Adol’s move repertoire gets expanded to include jumps, double jumps, double jumps combined with using wind magic for just a little extra lift, tricky platforming bits, slippery annoying sliding bits… it’s a much more active game.

Also it naturally has amazing music because every Ys game has had amazing music.

Apart from regularly needing to run back to a FAQ to find hidden areas, I have only one tiny quibble with the game.  You’re given the ability to fast travel about halfway through the game, and that’s great because it makes the backtracking much less vexing.  HOWEVER, and this is a big however, you are not given the ability until after a particular boss fight that takes place in an area which you are trapped in until you defeat the boss.

Also the monsters in this area are pretty low level, and if you are having trouble beating the boss and want to grind up a couple of levels to make it easier, it takes a LOT of grinding.  I got stuck here for about an hour beating up stuff that presented precisely zero challenge, and it made it so that getting past the boss didn’t give that, well, you probably know the feeling of FINALLY getting some bastich dead, right?  Super satisfying?  This didn’t have that.

So: If you are a fan of old-school console-style RPGs, consider this one wholeheartedly recommended.  Just, when you get to the lava level?  Don’t let it get to you.  🙂