Review: Ys Strategy (NDS)

In its long and productive life, the GBA hosted some of the finest strategy games around with titles such as Advance Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Fire Emblem. Despite the obvious advantage that the DS’s stylus control offers for games of this nature, Nintendo have been slow to establish the format as the strategy gamers handheld of choice. The recent release of the Gamestyle approved Age of Empires and now Ys Strategy go some way to addressing this anomaly. But is Ys Strategy worthy of a place alongside the greats of the genre?

Disappointingly, the answer is no. Perhaps it’s the break with tradition; Ys titles have appeared as action RPG’s since the days of the Master System, but the move to real time strategy is one that developer Falcom have clearly struggled to make. Certainly, the decision to allow the action take place in real time rather than in turns (as is the norm for handheld of this ilk) is a bold move. However the game mechanics of Ys Strategy are so fundamentally flawed you’ll wish Falcom hadn’t bothered.

Proceedings start well enough, there’s a decent intro movie, but once the action begins, you’ll be left wondering if you’re playing the same title, as this is one ugly game. Units look like stickmen and the animation is horrendously bad, Gamestyle can recall seeing better on the NES. Combat also looks ridiculous, with units waving their little stick swords or spears in the general direction of the opposition. And then somehow, seeming to cause damage regardless of whether contact is made or not. Maps and backgrounds are also lacking in detail and too brightly coloured, which at times make it difficult to spot your little army of stickmen. Even the map doesn’t scroll properly, as it judders along at a tediously slow pace.

The game play is the sort of bog standard RTS fare that PC gamers have had experienced for years. Starting with a town hall and a handful of worker units, the player has to collect timber, food and gold in order to create more units and buildings. There are two possible ways to win each scenario, either by defensive victory (building then protecting a particular building for 10 minutes) or offensive victory (killing everyone on the other side). The hideously slow build times, plodding movement speed of units and terrible AI (of which more later) make the offensive victory by far the most attractive option, particularly when your forces include a ridiculously overpowered hero character, given to you gratis at the start of many battles. The player can assume direct control of the hero and move them with the d-pad. Doing this allows them to move at twice the speed of normal, a massive advantage in its own right. They can then be marched straight over to the enemy’s base where standing near enemies and hammering the a button allows your hero to beat the living daylights out of them, stopping the battle before it even gets started. Often your enemy will start with a hero as well but this does little to even the odds up. As the simple solution is to simply move your hero away, order him to take a nap until his health is replenished. Then march straight back into battle to finish off the opposing hero. That’s right, Falcom have given every unit in the game a self-heal ability, which the enemy will never take advantage off. Extreme defensive measures are needed to take down heroes and their presence unbalances the game.

As mentioned previously, the AI in Ys Strategy is truly terrible. Enemy units will happily march past your workers instead of attacking them. Units on either side will simply ignore an ally under attack, never mind do anything if a building is under attack. The opposition hero can be easily drawn away from their base - failing to return - even if you mount an attack, if they are more than a certain distance away. Rather than sending a worker unit looking for cover, attacking them sends them fleeing to the edges of the map, where they can easily be picked off.

Other problems plague Ys Strategy. The touch screen control is incredibly badly implemented. It’s imprecise and fails to work at all, half the time. There’s no proper help system and the tutorial is not terribly informative, which means a continuous cycle of reference back to the manual to decipher the little icons that make up the menus. Even the save system hasn’t been thought through. There’s no quick save option and saves can only be made at the end of each battle meaning that if you make a mistake its right back to the start of the battle. This would be easier to swallow were it not for the horrendous amounts of text that bookend each battle. The box for Ys Strategy boasts that the game features “almost a novel’s worth of narrative”. Gamestyle would prefer the description inescapable, badly translated, uninteresting narrative. It’s possible to spend as long as 20 minutes ‘enjoying’ the story both before and after battle, bearing in mind before a save can be made. Restart a battle and you have to sit through it all again.

A wireless multiplayer option is included, but this suffers the same problems as the single player game and in any event there’s very little likelihood of actually finding anyone else stupid enough to have purchased Ys Strategy to play against. There’s also a quick battle option for the single player, which thankfully dispenses with the copious amounts of text, but is still the same unbalanced mess of a game.

Ys Strategy is perhaps one of the worst games on the DS and is certainly not worthy of a place amongst the heavyweights of the genre. A series with such a long and distinguished heritage as Ys really deserves better treatment than this. Truly terrible.

Rating: 2 / 10

Words by Andy Lucas