Backlog Bingo 2025: Ys: Oath in Felghana

The year's first DNF. Last year had none, but, hey, the rules of Backlog Bingo, insofar as there are any, are that you're trying to remove games from your backlog, not explicitly roll credits on them, and "I'm not going to consider this on my To Play list anymore" for any reason accomplishes that.

I hated this game, and it's wild that I'm writing this when it shares a list with Might and Magic IX, a notably and publicly reviled game. Oath's Metacritic score at time of writing is 25 points higher than M&M9's, but I...couldn't. I don't get what people like about this.

Oath in Felghana is a remake of the third game in the Ys series, appropriately called, uh, Ys III. It came out in Japan in 2005, but got localized in the US by Xseed in 2012. (It existed in fan translations before this.) It also got a voice-acted and slightly expanded PSP port in 2010, which was also localized. It then got a second expanded remaster in 2023, which was localized here in...January 2025. Very recent! I have owned the game for a while, and am playing the Steam version: this is "the PC version from 2005, but with the 2010 PSP voice-acting patched in later."

The point of the previous paragraph is just to say: this game is the first remaster of a remake of a game that was ported to multiple consoles in its heyday, which now has a second remaster and an 80 Metacritic. Oath in Felghana has a higher Metacritic rating than 1000xResist. It is stunning to be that I disliked this as much as I did, but I've spent long enough rambling about that.

Basically nothing about this game feels mechanically deliberate? It's certainly meant to be extremely fast, but there's no stick to enemies, so very very often you'll just yeet yourself past whatever you're trying to kill. Hitting things charges a gauge that you can expend to make your basic combo have much faster animations and 10 hits instead of 5, but...this also just ends up with you yeeting yourself past enemies faster. (Also some bosses just directly nope out of this mechanic, which is always fun.)

Three bosses in, I told my partner "if one more boss sucks this much there's no way I'm finishing this", and then I got to a dragon that wanted me to do...something? The game talked about using my recently acquired wind magic to put out the fire dragon's fire, and multiple FAQs mention the same, but as far as I could tell, the wind magic doesn't actually do anything, because no youtube video actually uses that magic for anything but damage, and "how long does the dragon spend not in lava" is the only thing that actually matters for when you can attack it. "A boss chooses when you get to hit it based on RNG" isn't that weird (gestures back at the Terranigma writeup) but I was just...done by this point. I was not enjoying any of this: the anime-ass writing that can't stop being sexist randomly, the combat, the platforming, the level design (reading "oh yeah the solution to this boss was to have taken a thing from an invisible treasure chest three rooms ago" was not my favorite either), the fact that the input buffering was so aggressive that I'd sometimes get attacks multiple seconds after pressing their button and being knocked down before the attack came out, just...nothing about this game was working for me, so I DNFed in dungeon four. Sorry, Sabera, I know you love this one. <3

Okay, well, the music does absolutely slap though.