Designing Ys II, Vol. 1: Velagunder

Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished—The Final Chapter was a much younger game when Ys I & II first debuted. A common misconception even among Japanese players was that Ys II wasn't planned in advance, but was made as a separate project in response to the first game's financial success. Iwasaki himself debunked this in his Untold interview:

"In the history of Ys, it is said Hashimoto and Miyazaki made Ys I and Ys II as two parts, two separate projects. This is not true. The original plan for Ys included the contents of both Ys I and II. However, that would be too much content for the floppy disk capacity of the era, so they decided just to make the first half. Then, after Ys was a hit, the sequel was greenlit. [...] I know that when Hashimoto and Miyazaki made Ys I, they didn't know if they could make the second part of the story. If Ys I had not sold enough, then perhaps they could not have made Ys II. But Ys I had big sales, and they were able to finish it. This is true, but lots of people still believe Hashimoto and Miyazaki planned them as separate games. 

I heard the truth from [Yamane Tomo/Amagi Hideyuki] and also I know because of the comments in the source code for the games. For example in Ys I, the final boss is Dark Fact, and his messages were cut. They were removed or "commented out". Originally in Dark Fact's messages, he says Feena is [REDACTED] and after defeating the player he will hire her as a maid. But this is commented out. Because if Miyazaki and Hashimoto had used that, then Ys I would not be seen as finished. Because no player would understand that - "Why?! Why is Feena [REDACTED]? And why does Dark Fact say that?" So Miyazaki and Hashimoto cut that message, and Dark Fact only says something like, 'Welcome, but you die here.'"

—Iwasaki Hiromasa, Ys I & II director & main programmer, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2, p. 99

(Yamane and Amagi are the same person under a pseudonym; Yamane on the original Ys and Amagi on Hudson's remake. Incidentally, Dark Fact's messages were restored for the Famicom version.)

As I noted at the beginning of this series, the focus of Ys II is on magical combat rather than physical. It's easy enough to see how the first Ys games fit together as two halves of a mechanical whole, but in this case the team's original vision may have been a little bigger than they could reasonably realize. There are six spells in Ys II, which gradually replace the Books in the player's inventory as the game progresses. Despite this variety, one spell dominates gameplay to such an extent that I would call it the defining mechanic of II: Fire.

In most RPGs magic represents an exponential escape from the linearity of melee combat, capable of targeting different elemental weaknesses, providing buffs and debuffs, healing party members, affecting speed, and even expelling enemies from battle entirely. In Ys II magic serves to simply grind the flow of the bump combat system to a halt. This is exemplified by the first boss, Velagunder, who is designed to teach the use of the Fire spell.

The player that reaches the first boss without having learned magic is in for a rude awakening.

Velagunder is completely immune to physical weapons, so the Fire spell is the only means the player has to damage him. His pattern is the simplest of any boss in the first two games; Velagunder aligns himself with the player's position, pauses, and fires out a row of five shots with gaps between them. The player is to quickly step into one of the gaps, then step back out and shoot Velagunder straight in the chest with the Fire spell. Velagunder is only vulnerable immediately after firing, and done too early or too late the spell will simply bounce off him. So the player's strategy is to sidestep Velagunder's shots then stand there, mashing the magic button until one of their spells bounces off, and realign themselves with the gaps.

In direct contrast to the tense high-speed weaving-and-charging gameplay of the Dark Fact battle, the Velagunder fight is one where Adol is constantly starting and stopping. It's nowhere near "seamless," the seams are everywhere, and this transfers to the battles against random mobs where the player finds themselves coming to standstill in the middle of dungeons to mash magic into crowds of monsters.

The fact that Adol cannot move and use magic at the same time creates perpetual interruptions in the flow of play. Regular Fire spells have no functional cost when compared with Adol's bottomless supply of Magic Points, and the ability to hold enemies at bay while bowling them over with the knockback from the spell makes it disproportionately powerful compared to tackling them head-on. Weapons still matter, as the damage a spell deals is derived directly from Adol's Attack stat, but those weapons will rarely if ever meet flesh. The Fire spell can be further enhanced with the Eagle and Hawk Idol items found on in the game's dungeons, which add homing properties it, and the spell eventually grows even stronger as Adol levels up and becomes capable of plowing through multiple targets at once. Even if the player wanted to not to use this incredibly powerful mechanic, the bosses are explicitly designed to be invulnerable to everything but it.

Instead of creating a dynamic supplementary system, magic turned Ys II into a bad shoot-'em-up.

Most of the game's other spells aren't especially useful, either. The other five spells consist of Light, Return, Transform, Time, and Shield. Light magic reveals hidden doors in the bottom parts of the map by filling them with light, which is useful in the mines when you're still unaware of the mechanic—then it becomes trivial to spot them on your own. Return has a much longer shelf life, as it allows the player to warp to the entrances of specific safe zones like the villages of Ys, and so the player comes to depend on it well into the endgame.

Transform is probably the second most useful spell, as it turns the player into a monster, allowing them to both bypass enemies without fighting them, and talk to them for clues. This does carry the risk of the player not being strong enough to overcome the subtractive damage formula, as they need to gain experience points to finish the game, but it also acts as a built-in dungeon shortcut that lets the player simply turn on Transform when they need to get back to where they were after warping out mid-dungeon.

Time and Shield arrive so late in the game that there's almost no opportunity to use them, with the former being prohibitively expensive to cast and only working to stop basic enemies in their tracks, and the latter only being available during the final boss battle. We'll get to it eventually.

While Velagunder contrasts strongly with Dark Fact immediately before it, it also contrasts with Jenocres, the boss that began this whole series. There's much more going on with the Jenocres fight, and the elements of it are easier to intuit; while Velagunder's immunity to physical attacks is foreshadowed by one of the sage statues the player finds, Jenocres used mechanics that were already established from the moment the player first set foot in Esteria, and the torches' layout in that battle gave them an opportunity to step back and learn the pattern without putting themselves at an immediate risk. Whether you look at Velagunder as an eighth boss or a first, it's not a pretty picture.

The next boss, while visually impressive and less mechanically offensive, continues to develop Ys' slow burn on magic in a direction that doesn't see real fruition until many hours later.