Tom

So a new Switch port for Ys: The Oath in Felghana came out a couple months ago in Japan. I haven't seen a whole lot of chatter about it online in any language and I'd brushed it off thinking it was another DotEmu joint like the Origins port, but after a friend informed me that not only did DotEmu seemingly have nothing to do with this release, it runs more or less rock solid and boasts some modest, if nice extras, after getting back from Tokyo, I bought a copy using some spare store points I had lying around and... yeah, it's probably the best and easiest way to play this game portably now and it still kicks ass! Near 100% smooth FPS barring some brief drops during effects-heavy boss fights, voice acting that I assume is carried over from the PSP release, and optional updated character portraits that, in my opinion at least, are more tastefully done than what was seen in, say, the Vita ports of the Trails in the Sky games, even if there's maybe still a bit of an aesthetic clash with what's still very much so a mid-2000s Windows game at heart.

But my favorite extra, one that I'd completely overlooked until said friend informed me, was that it also lets you play the entire game with either the PC-8801 or X68000 soundtracks for Ys III (which Felghana is a remake of, for those unaware), which is a great touch! I've procrastinated on playing the pre-6 Ys games over the years because I just used to not be too keen on how the bump combat works. I still want to give them another proper attempt in the near future, but for now, this is a fun compromise as someone who's only familiar with the really famous tracks from those old games when Yuzo Koshiro was on music duty. I've been playing through the game with X68k soundtrack this time around and it's a good time; this footage below of a PC version mod that achieves the same thing demonstrates exactly how the game looks and sounds in practice. (Edit: Apparently the VO and bonus soundtracks are all things that got implemented in the Steam release a few years back, so I guess this one of those Falcom re-releases where they've gone back to maintain parity with Xseed's improvements. Thanks, @Ligana5!)

Less important, but equally novel to me is the fact that they've now added combat barks to Adol so he yells every time he attacks and while on the face of it, I could take it or leave it, it turns out he's voiced by the same guy who plays Bren in EX Troopers and has those exact same yells and inflections. So now every time Adol opens his mouth, I think of my dumbass anime son who likes eating hamburgers like some kind of Space Jughead and, y'know, there's worse things to be reminded of.

Anyway, Oath in Felghana, as great as it's ever been and now you can play it portably at the proper framerate without having to deal with Steam Deck compatibility issues. There's no English option in this release and no announcement for a localization yet as far as I'm aware, so maybe stick to one of the other versions if you haven't played it before. But if you know the game or it being in Japanese is no problem for you, then rest assured, they did right by this game, and I hope Falcom gets around to at least doing Ys 6 in this same manner if circumstances prevent them from redoing Origin again.

Like Jinrui no Minasama he, a game published by NIS (that's the Japanese parent company, not the US branch) here that at its most charitable one might describe as a Switch/PS4 yuri urban scavenging and survival game that takes place in a ruined Akihabara, but I'm personally more inclined to describe as an engine test map masquerading as a retail game where the only gameplay is to stand on differently shaped markers on the map and press A to turn on the next universal background flag and advance the game. And a really ugly, foggy mess of an Engine Test Map: The Game at that, especially on the Switch, which is how I played it. (I guess if we're being technical, it's an alarmingly liberal depth of field effect being used to I guess obscure LODs, but you get what I mean.) I honestly would've preferred to play around in grey block version of this stuff than the mess we got instead.

I paid like 2200 yen for this last year and went in at the time fully expecting it to not be a good time, but I wasn't expecting just how Nothing the entire thing is. No real gameplay loop, no story (I mean, there are tons of cutscenes and characters talking to each other, but so little ever happens, I actually fell asleep multiple times playing this game the deeper I got), and no actual yuri to speak of, just bait-y teases from a game without the spine to commit to anything more than "A nerdy setting without any of the guy nerds mucking the place up."

Such a uniquely miserable experience, even more so than Natsuiro High School, for you really long-timers who remember people like me streaming that "open world" """dating sim""" """""classic""""" when that launched back in 2015. And yet somehow the parties involved bafflingly found it within themselves to make a visual novel-only sequel that cut out the survival bits entirely.

You think you understand the markers for success in this part of the industry and then sometimes the industry goes ahead and makes another one of these against all odds.

Anyway, there's no moral to this story. I just have like 300 of these shots still sitting on my hard drive and just needed people to know this is the burden I carry.

Dumping a bunch of my screenshots and capture footage onto my networked storage so I have easier access to all of that stuff in the future across any and all of my devices and it's been a pointed reminded of just, what a tremendously framed game Fuuraiki 4 remains. Yes, you have the free camera that you can manipulate and it's a genuinely fantastic addition, but none of that would mean anyhing if the scenery chosen to admire wasn't pitch perfect, as well as the juxtopositions of the heroines into the photography.

What a god damn game, and that's without getting into the sublime writing. It'd be such a challenge to localize well for a number of reasons, but it kills me it's stuck in Japanese. The GOTY conversations abroad felt genuinely incomplete to me in 2021 without this game able to be in proper contention and was a stark reminder that no amount of internationalizing judges' panels on stuff like The Game Awards can compensate for the barriers such games face in getting proper recognition without carving out specific spaces for them (which is to say, yes, I think at the barest of bare minimums, The Game Awards really ought to have a best foreign game category specifically for unlocalized stuff, or, hell, multiple such categories by region).

Anyway, please play this game if you have the Japanese chops for it, and especially play it if you haven't played any of the previous Fuuraiki games. It's got storytelling like nothing else in the entire Japanese industry and has a lot of touching ruminations on subjects you'll be hard-pressed to find anywhere else within it.

I think it's fair to say that even in a post-Breath of the Wild world, for almost all intents and purposes, most people, developers and players alike, probably consider open world games to be mostly the dominion of western developers. Although the very earliest roots of Japanese experimentation in the genre actually date back to a similar time frame as western efforts by way of games such as Doukyuusei for the PC-98, it wasn't without a kernel of truth, at least depending on whether and how you qualify a game's environments as open world.. If we're talking about vast sandbox-style games in the mold of Grand Theft Auto III and onwards specifically, then, yeah, budgetary realities previously meant few Japanese developers had the financial means and team sizes to seriously attempt them, let alone compete at an international level. It's not say that there weren't games that tried, especially around a decade, decade and a half ago, but it's fair to surmise that few left any lasting impression and some games outright crashed and burned for getting too close to the sun.

The problem with this mindset is that it presupposes that open world games are, by their nature, a format of action games first and foremost, if not exclusively. Games like GTA, Just Cause, and Saints Row where you have an antagonistic relationship with the environment and the fun and pleasure come from subjugating that environment and its denizens as you increasingly navigate and engage with it on your terms and only your terms. It's true that a lot of the most globally successful examples build upon such templates, and for perfectly understandable reasons. In a world of suffocating socioeconomic realities weighing the majority, for those in the poor and working class, there's a real catharsis to be felt in attaining a digital safe space to cast aside their inhibitions and be on top of the world for a change, and an often violent change at that. I felt as much in the summers I spent in New Mexico taking turns with my cousins seeing how long we could all survive in Vice City and it's a premise that's only gone on to resonate to exponentially higher degrees over time.

But it's not the only way to make open world games and the real reason most Japanese open world games don't look as though they can compete to that standard is because they aren't. The open world ideal as expressed through Japanese games tends not to be an action game, but an adventure one.