Are you a Falcom fan? Then welcome aboard the Ys Vs. Trails Train. Everyone else can take the bus. Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga is more or less the last missing piece of Falcom’s legacy here in the West. I’m not counting Akatsuki no Kiseki because that’s not canon. And sure, I know this isn’t either, but this got a retail release. Wait, why am I arguing with myself about this in the review? That’s what the comments are for! Anyway, let me tell you who I think this game is for, and who I think this game is NOT.
Quick History
Ys vs. Trails in the Sky originally came out for the PSP back in 2010. Yes, if this game was a person, it would be in high school now. Entering its rebellious phase. Poorly applying too much makeup and vaping in its boyfriend’s car. The fact that we’re only now getting this game is actually a little odd. It would have made some sense to bring this game out in the West, if only because there’s not nearly as much text to translate as most of Falcom’s projects. This was back when publisher XSEED was still scoffing at the idea of even bringing Trails in the Sky to the West because of how much text it had. So maybe they thought it wouldn’t be worth it, since half the cast of the game would be unknown to us. But that’s all changed now. Trails and Ys are probably at the height of their popularity, and if there’s ever been a strike-when-the-iron’s-hot moment for Falcom, it’s now.
I bring up the history to remind you of what you’re getting into with this game. On a high level, this is a fifteen-year-old PlayStation Portable arena fighter. If you’re big into the arena fighting scene, you might be wondering if this game holds up against the giants of the genre. If you’re a hardcore JRPG player, and by that I mean you cringe at the idea of playing any genre besides JRPGs, you might be wondering if this is for you at all. But if you’re an open-minded Falcom fan, I think there’s enough here to show you a good time, regardless of where you fall on the JRPG to Arena Fighter spectrum.
What Is This Game?
I’ve been throwing around the term “arena fighter” like I actually know what it means. By definition, it’s a 3D fighting game where your character has free range of motion, and typically the camera is positioned above and/or behind the character. Some examples that even I’ve heard of would be the Dissidia Final Fantasy games and the Power Stone series for the Sega Dreamcast. Also apparently a ton of shonen anime properties like Dragon Ball Z. Despite being a newcomer to this genre, it honestly feels like something I’d be pretty into. Maybe not to the level of more straightforward JRPGs, but something that I’d play in between epic 90-hour games. Still, from what I’ve been able to gather, people seem to think most arena fighters are fairly mediocre. It’s most likely the curse of the quick-and-easy anime license cash-in. Quick-and-easy games come out in the genre, do poorly, and thereby damage the reputation of the genre.
So how does Ys Vs. Trails in the Sky hold up as an arena fighter? I mean, like I said, I can’t really say. I haven’t played any others. But I can tell you how it felt to play it. Let’s start with the basics. It’s made up of several modes, including multiplayer, single player, and story modes. It has a relatively robust leveling system for all its characters, where you can gain experience, level up, and outfit everyone with better weapons and accessories to give you advantages in battle. The story mode lets you choose from a few characters and play through its very simple, fanfiction-esque plot about the magical land of Xanadu and the evil Dragon King that’s taken over. Since I’m a story guy, let’s start there.
Story
The basic premise is that this land of Xanadu has been under attack by the Dragon King many times over the millennia, and now he’s back. A bunch of warriors from two different worlds have been summoned – or isekai’d, where my otakus at? – but yeah, they’ve been pulled into Xanadu in order to help defeat the Dragon King and seal him away again. Your character of choice is teamed up with a little pom named Lappy, who seems to know quite a bit about what’s going on. One thing I love about the story of this game is that it fully leans into the absurdity of its premise. It does this not by ironically winking at the audience, which I think would be the instinct of a lot of writers nowadays, but instead by just playing it extremely straight. The characters need absolutely NO convincing. They are fully on board with the mission they’ve been given, and they don’t even bother asking the obvious questions, like “How did I get here?” or “Was a twelve-year-old girl really the best choice of a warrior?” I started with Estelle, because she’s the best, but after finishing the story I started right up again, this time with Kloe as my protagonist. The overall plot is the same regardless of which character you choose, but the characters you’ll meet will appear in a different sequence, which does change the way conversations play out. It actually does feel worthwhile to play through the game with each character, if only because you’ll get to enjoy more character interactions. The between-fight scenes are brief, but there’s a ton of character and humor in there.
This is helped immensely by the fact that the localizers made sure to fully localize the game by giving us all dialog in English. If you prefer not understanding what people say in video games, you can play with Japanese dialog as well, but having the English made this SO much more enjoyable for me. Not to mention that the original cast is back, and it’s fantastic to get to hear more from them so soon after Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter released. I also love that, despite Adol not being the protagonist – or at least not the protagonist in other scenarios beside his own – he’s still silent and communicates the same way he does in the Ys games. It’s pretty funny. I feel like most other series would have just bitten the bullet and had him talk. Persona has done that with crossover games, after all. But no, they doubled down, and it’s hilarious. I normally hate silent protags, but since the story is such a small thing overall in this game, it worked for me.
The actual story campaign for a single character won’t take you too long. If you play reasonably well and don’t lose too many fights, you could be done in as little as four hours or so. I finished Estelle’s story in a single sitting and still had time to play the first two-fifths of Kloe’s before calling it a night in my first session. If you’re wanting a super robust story like something you’d find in the Trails games or more modern Ys, this isn’t going to give you that. But I think most of you know what you’re signing up for in something like this. It’s a fun, non-canon side story that celebrates Falcom’s heritage. And I love that the celebration extends even beyond just Ys and Trails, despite them being the marquee players. The land of Xanadu and the dragon king Galsis are straight out of Falcom’s Xanadu series, and there’s even a cool cameo appearance from an important character in the Gagharv trilogy. If Trails and Ys are Falcom putting in the work, Ys vs. Trails in the Sky is Falcom cutting loose and having a party.
Now, if you’re a fighting fan, you might be wondering why I’ve written something like thirteen hundred words and still haven’t talked about the fighting yet. Fair point. So let’s get into it.
The Battles
This game is built on the back of the Ys 7 engine, so if you’re familiar with that game, it won’t take much to get comfortable here. But even if you’re not into Ys 7, the combat is refreshingly straightforward without being simplistic. Attack, dodge, block, jump. Because this is all action-based, you can feel that Ys had a much stronger influence on the proceedings than Trails did – though I’d be interested to see if and how a modern Ys vs Trails game would play out now that Trails has started dipping its toes in the action combat pool – but the combat is extremely fast. It’s not a button-masher, though. If you mash, you’re trash. Just sayin’. No, but seriously, there’s a surprisingly large amount of finesse required to actually git gud at this combat system. Finding combos that work for you, understanding how and when to use a jumping attack, which is an attack in midair up to but not exceeding the apex of your jump, or a diving attack, which is an attack in midair as you begin your descent. You can charge your basic attack, too, which doesn’t do much more in the way of damage but does allow you to strike from a much greater distance. Much like the anime arena fighters, characters will be flying around the screen with flashy attacks going off all over the place.
You can equip skills that you purchase using the in-game currency from Mona, who also upgrades your weapons and armor and sells you accessories. You activate skills by holding a shoulder button and pressing the assigned face button, which will be a familiar control setup for Falcom action RPG fans. One quick note on Falcom games, something that has befuddled me for ages. I hate their default control scheme. On almost every game they’ve made, I always have to go in and change the controls around. Is it just me? I feel like every control scheme they put out just feels ridiculously unintuitive. And I mean, good on them for making it so easy to customize buttons, but like, so many games I feel just work right out of the box without any tweaking. Why is it that Falcom likes to hurt me this way?
Anyway, bashing your opponents around the arenas is really fun. Some of that is down to the arenas themselves. A few are just basic, but many of them are incredibly big and full of platforms and houses and other things to fight on and around. Like, almost the entire village of Ravvenue from Trails in the Sky is one of the arenas. That’s crazy. You start out down by the water, but you can make your way all the way up to the graveyard, the inn, like I said, almost the whole town is available. It’s really cool. Around the arenas are various breakable objects that typically contain items that will help you in battle, by raising your SP, which you need to use your skills, or healing items, that sort of thing. And since this is a fighting game based on JRPGs, you better believe status ailments are part of this. You can put on different accessories to help prevent certain ailments like paralyze or poison, and other accessories can make it easier for you to inflict those things on your opponent. The arenas, the character progression and customization, it really makes this feel like your competence with the fighting is only one piece of the puzzle – the rest is made up of knowing how to build and load out your character. And since each character has their own stats and equipment, you can make multiple builds depending on how you’re feeling. Each character already fights quite differently than the others, and having this additional layer of customization on top of all that makes it feel really robust.
I’ll admit, I fully expected to find the combat a chore that I would have to sit through to get to the next story bit. I’m happy to say that’s absolutely not the case. I want to keep playing the game just for the sake of playing the GAME. It’s fast and fluid and challenging in a fun way, and it makes me hope that Falcom will dust off the genre for another outing, especially now that the Trails series roster has expanded so freaking much.
The Presentation
Like I said at the beginning, this is a 15-year-old PSP game, so you shouldn’t expect anything cutting edge from the presentation. But everything does look very crisp and sharp, which is nice. The character portraits are bright and colorful, but I have a couple of issues with them. For one, they don’t have all that many facial expressions. I feel like Estelle is smirking through way too much of the proceedings for it to make sense. The other issue I have is down to the eyes, and I wonder if I’m the only one who feels this way. The way the eyes are drawn on most of the characters… The pupils in particular. It sort of looks like their eyes are looking different directions. Just slightly. Just enough to look unhinged. That, combined with Estelle’s often uncalled-for smirk, makes her look insane. Anybody else bothered by this? And if you didn’t notice it until I said something and now you can’t un-notice it… I apologize.
The music is classic Falcom Sound Team jdk, with some rearrangements of classic songs from the games and some originals. Falcom’s music is so interesting to me. I find it so catchy and appropriate for the action on screen, and it all sounds as though it comes from the mind of one composer, but that’s never been the case really. There are multiple composers involved, but they have such a strict adherence to the “house style,” so to speak, that it’s like they’ve formed some kind of mind meld with each other. I’m sure if I spent a lot of time focusing on tracks that I know were composed by one individual or another I could start to pick out some subtle signs to indicate individual styles, but the Falcom sound is very real and very iconic.
Conclusions
One thing conspicuously absent from this review is anything to do with multiplayer. It’s true, I haven’t played online with any friends yet. I did manage to play online with a stranger, we went a couple rounds with us and two computer-controlled characters. It was fun! But the issue is that I spent a long time waiting for someone – anyone – to pop up in a lobby and it was just a ghost town. I might say that doesn’t bode well for the success of the game, but I don’t know how these things usually go. It IS a very niche title, targeted to an audience that might not be the biggest fighting game fans in general, but I’ll say this. If you’re a Falcom fan, you should pick this one up. I’d love to see those lobbies full of people enjoying this game. It’s fun, it’s easy to get into with enough depth that I think you could occupy yourself with it for a decent amount of time if you wanted to master it. If you think the $35 asking price is too high, then grab it on sale. Personally, I’ll be grabbing the physical if and when that gets announced, but I’m a Falcom sicko, so naturally I want to be able to hold the thing in my hand. Your mileage may vary, but this is a fun diversion for Falcom superfans, and it’s worth giving it a go just to see if it’s up your alley.