Designing Ys, Vol. 7: Dark Fact

The final battle of Ys is perhaps its most iconic moment, and the culmination of everything the bump combat system represents. The player enters the 25th floor of Darm Tower armed with six of the seven Books of Ys, having only just learned the name of the black-cloaked man they've been chasing across Esteria, and just as soon as the player gets to meet Dark Fact they find themselves facing him in battle. The meeting with Fact is by no means short—dying and challenging him again may account for as much as an hour of the game's six-hour playtime. But unlike the encounters with Vagullion or Yogleks and Omulgun, the battle against Dark Fact never feels "cheap" or "unfair" to the player; they always know exactly why they died, how they could have avoided it, and what they need to do better to prevent that from happening again.

Let's break the elements of this battle down:

• Dark Fact is a moving target, but his movement is not unpredictable like Vagullion. He follows a set path, tracing out what may be the worst figure-eight in the world across the arena. As they continue to rematch Fact, the player becomes better attuned to this pattern and intuits the best ways to connect with him.
• Every time the player successfully damages Fact, the tile they hit him on is destroyed. If the player is standing on that tile they die instantly, though it's easy to avoid. The resulting pits are impassable, so the more damage the player does to Fact the more ruined the arena becomes and the harder it gets to maneuver. Effectively planning around hitting Fact on the corners and edges early on will lead to the player's movement being less restricted as the fight progresses.
• Fact periodically sends out one to two fireballs that explode in eight directions. Like Nygtilger, this is an unequal fight; Fact can shoot in twice the number of directions the player can move, which is where much of the challenge comes from.
• Although Fact does not speed up, as the fight goes on he sends fireballs out with greater frequency, and the erosion of the arena creates a gradual loss of options for the player. In contrast to what came immediately before him, the final boss of Ys builds intensity as the clash continues. Urgency is placed on the player to escalate with the boss, doing what they've already learned to do but faster and more precisely. The convergence of multiple eight-directional shots from different parts of the screen and overlapping holes in the floor pressures the player into the tight gaps between "death zones," providing a small taste of the kind of gameplay that would later define the bullet hell genre in the late 90s and early 2000s. (Later remakes extend the comparison even further.)

Essentially, the player is to avoid all of the fireballs (of which there can be as many as 16 on-screen at one time) and maneuver around the collapsing arena while making contact with Fact himself. In addition to all these action elements, there's a puzzle to Fact—the player has to equip the entire set of Silver equipment rather than the stronger Flame Sword and Battle equipment. This is toned down in the PC Engine release, as Fact spells out when the fight begins that they can't win without it:

"The name Dark Fact will be the scourge of all men to come! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh you are brave, but you are also a fool! You have no chance without the protection of the Silver equipment!"

This was an addition made as a result of many players of the PC releases not picking up on the supporting cast's hints that the Silver Sword, Shield, and Armor, all had to be worn together to damage him. The PC-88, X-1, and other Ys releases lacked such an overt explanation. Iwasaki originally wanted to have a second audio track prepared, where Dark Fact panics upon seeing Adol in the full Silver set, but memory restrictions made this impossible.

The battle with Fact having eroding terrain is its most important feature, as this is how Falcom incorporated into the final battle the field elements of continually adjusting Adol's position while running through new territory. By integrating this with the principles of making safe attacks, always having a line of retreat open, striking at offsets, and evading projectiles, the Dark Fact battle brings together the disparate elements of Ys into a concentrated high-speed finale. In the age of romhacks and superbosses that kind of design might be hard to appreciate, but in the context of this being just three years after players were first cutting down Ganon and slaying Dracula, it's an impressive body of innovations. If there is fault in it, it's that the boss as-is often doesn't last long enough for its battle theme to be fully played out.

The Action RPG as a genre hasn't really changed that much even between 2009 and 2019—the big names in town are Nier Automata, Monster Hunter World, Breath of the Wild, and Kingdom Hearts III, but the mechanics they're drawing on came about with the turn of the millennium. Their moment-to-moment play isn't so radically different from the lineage that informed them: Dark Cloud, Kingdom Hearts, and Phantasy Star Online, all codified the control schemes and standards that today's ARPGs depend on. Meanwhile the battle with Dark Fact in 1987 and '89 is night and day not just to Xanadu, but to the final bosses of games released in the very same years as Ys. We would be hard-pressed to find anything in the 80s that surpasses it from any genre, making Ys a fitting conclusion to the decade and the capstone of Falcom's work in this period.

...Or it would be, but there's a whole extra game on the disc.