Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: Feiyun

Would you choose to try the Switch version again?

In mid-2022, Falcom announced that its famous "ISU" series will launch a new "ISU 10". At the end of 2022, Falcom announced that the HD remake of Ys: The Oath in Felghana (hereinafter referred to as "ISU F") will also be available on Switch in the spring of 2023.

This is the third version released by Falcom for "ISU F". The earliest version of "ISU F" was the PC version launched in Japan in 2005, and the "Evolutionary version" of "ISU F" PSP was released on PSP in 2010. If you look back, "ISU F" is actually a very special game-it is actually a remake of "ISU 3: adventurers from ISU", which has made various improvements and evolution on the basis of the original game. it has changed the mixed praise of the original work, won a lot of praise, and sold well.

For domestic "ISU" players, "Yisu F" is also a very meaningful name. In 2006, the game launched the authentic version of the Bank of China on PC, which played a very important role for domestic players to further understand and familiarize themselves with the "Yisu" series. Many players have deep feelings for this.

Perhaps it is precisely because "Yisu F" performed so well that Falcom chose to add new elements and new content to the latest HD reproduction, rather than simply transplanting the old version into "fried rice", showing a certain degree of sincerity.

After many years, the original version of "ISU 3" and "YSU F" was released in 1989. The original PC-8801 platform (a home computer issued by NEC in Japan in 1981) was soon expanded to many mainstream PC and mainframe platforms such as MSX, SFC, MD, PCE and so on.

"ISU 3" is not as well received as the first two works of the "ISU" series, and people have different opinions about it. This is mainly due to a lot of twists and turns in the development of "ISU 3". The first generation of "ISU" was not taken seriously in the Falcom club, but later became popular with the second generation and became a popular game of that era. Having tasted the benefits, Falcom wanted the development team to transform a new game under development into "ISU 3" and position it as a rumor of the "ISU" series, which caused resentment among the development team at the time-the original idea of Yosu Miyazaki and Changya Hashimoto should end after two works, and it was difficult for them to accept Falcom's interference in the creation. The two dropped out in the middle of research and development, set up Quintet, and later developed a number of games for SFC.

PC-8801 version of "ISU 3" after the two main creators, developers have left Falcom to join Quintet. Falcom was originally a small company, in order to cope with the exodus of a large number of talents, it had to urgently recruit a group of newly graduated college students to develop "ISU 3", which was much worse than the previous series.

In addition to the twists and turns in development, the dissatisfaction of the veteran players of the series at that time focused on the change of the game mode: the first production and the second generation adopted the attack mode of overlooking angle and automatic impact, which was simple and straightforward in operation and quite difficult. It gives players the desire to challenge repeatedly, which is the key to the initial success of the series. But "ISU 3" has become a 2D horizontal version of ARPG, with the design of attack keys and jump keys, which is no longer in automatic impact mode, which makes it difficult for players who are used to the first two games to adapt.

At the same time, the plot of "ISU 3" is mediocre, the world outlook is different from that of the first two works, and the overall charm is insufficient. At the same time, the plot of "ISU 3", which was released in 1991, is also mediocre, with a different world outlook from the first two works.

Of course, the game also has many advantages, such as music and picture performance. In terms of music, it has maintained the consistent high standard of the series; in terms of picture, the first version of the PC-8801 platform achieved the amazing triple scroll effect of that year, which was not achieved in other transplant versions later.

But on the whole, the reform of "ISU 3" failed. Since then, Falcom has given up its own research and development for four generations, but made the original case and handed it over to several partner companies to make different mainframe versions. This is the end of the story.

Many years later, TAITO launched a copy of ISU 3 on PS2, and the great evolution of ISU F, which still uses the horizontal model, is of great significance in the whole ISU series. On the one hand, as a reproduction of "ISU 3", it has achieved a bumper harvest of word-of-mouth and sales, and even attracted some new players to go back to play "ISU 3". On the other hand, after "ISU 6: Nabistin's Ark" saved series sales and Falcom turnover in 2003, "ISU F" successfully "took over", allowing players to regain their love for the "ESU" series.

However, in history, these questions are not without reason. The quality of "ISU" series often jumps between peaks and troughs. In 2009, ISU 7 on the PSP handset fell into the same trough as "ISU 5: the lost Sand Capital Kefen" (of course, the situation is not as serious as five generations), fortunately, "ISU 8: Dana's tears Day" came out. Bring the series back to the top again.

For Falcom, "ISU F" is significant enough. The success of "ISU F" is due to its four major evolution based on its original work.

The first evolution is in game mode. The original "ISU 3" is the only one in the series that uses horizontal operation, but the players do not recognize it. The solution of "ISU F" is that the game as a whole is 3D and retains some horizontal levels in the original version, such as mines and snow-capped mountains, on the basis of the full 3D space operation mode. This makes the original version of some well-designed horizontal level can also experience, horizontal and full 3D space switching can also bring a certain degree of freshness and interest. At the same time, for those players who like horizontal version, this design also takes care of their hobbies.

It can still be used as a horizontal level in scenes such as mines. The second evolution is a change in the way you play. "ISU F" is the first work in the series to add a second jump, and this design is an evolution compared to "ISU 6", which is often easy to misoperate and criticized by players. The second jump is much easier and more convenient.

In terms of combat system, the biggest change of "ISU F" is the removal of the "Ring Energy Magic" system of the original "YSU 3" and replaced with fire, wind, dark three-attribute bracelet magic and explosive ability.

The so-called "Ring Energy Magic" system means that Yatru, the protagonist of "ISU 3", can get all kinds of rings. after being equipped with different ring starting capabilities, the energy value will continue to decrease with the passage of time. Once you return to zero, you need to spend money to restore energy in the town store.

This combat system was not bad at that time, ensuring the consistent simplicity and pleasure of the "ISU" series, but also a certain degree of innovation. But in the age of reproduction, it looks a little out of date.

Three generations of "Ring Energy Magic" system "ISU F" added the design of the three-attribute bracelet magic to greatly increase the sense of pleasure: the Flame Spirit bracelet can fire a fireball of long-range attack; the Wind Spirit bracelet can release a whirlwind chopp. it can also cooperate with a two-stage jump to fly for a long time in the air to reach a distant platform; the Dark Spirit bracelet can send out shock waves, remove some obstacles, and have a wonderful effect when destroying a group of enemies.

Yatru can also use the accumulated anger trough to operate explosive anger, and the protagonist in the explosive state will enter a short state of invincibility, and the attack speed will become very fast, and the use of explosive gas attack in times of crisis can cause great damage and then turn around.

As the game progresses, players can enhance the magic attack ability of the bracelet with gems and get the key prop of "Engraving of Spirit", which greatly increases the blast time.

The second stage jump plus whirlwind chopping brings a refreshing experience in addition, "ISU F" also continues the series of early difficult designs, adds a number of new Boss, and strengthens the design of traps and organs, making the overall difficulty higher than that of "Yisu 3" and is more challenging. How to use bracelet magic and explosive ability to get through customs is a very difficult but fun thing.

Concise, straightforward, difficult, coupled with the substantial evolution of the system, "Yisu F" has been recognized by players, many people also go through customs many times, repeated aftertaste.

The third evolution of the Boss ice dragon in ISU F comes from music. Due to the departure of the composer ancient Suke3, who played well in the early and second generations of the series, all the soundtracks of "Yisu 3" were composed by Ishikawa Mikeiko alone. In the two generations, the two cooperated quite well, but the ancient Yousan joined the Falcom for many years and was still an intern, so he chose to leave, and the composition of "ISU 3" naturally fell to Ishikawa Saneko. Later, the ancient Yousan composed music for games such as "Iron fist of Wrath", "inheritor of Light", "Super tolerance" and "Bay Coast Racing", which continued his early glory.

"ISU 3" almost every piece is very good to listen to, and is not inferior to the first two works. The initial adventure song "Yingwu Junior", the background song of Barestan City, the background song of the snow-capped mountains, and the ending music "Wanderers from Ys" are all famous songs, which are very popular with players.

Many years after the original cover of "ISU 3" X68000 edition, the soundtrack of "ISU F" brought in the musician Shen Teng Dongda, who was responsible for rearranging all the tracks of "ISU 3". Shendo himself is a music school teacher with a deep background in classical and rock music, as well as a deep study in electronic synthetic music technology. through electronic synthesizer, he has created a sense of grandeur no less than real orchestral music, of which "Wanderers from Ys" is the most typical. The electronic rock version of the protagonist Yatru adventure is also set off to the extreme.

Shinto has worked with Falcom for many years, but he is rarely in charge of all the arrangements, and it is also one of the pinnacle of his personal music career. Music contributes to the success of "ISU F". Whenever I review these famous songs, I can recall the scenes of fighting in the game.

The fourth evolution of Shenteng by Dongda is the strengthening of characterization. In the original "ISU 3", the characterization is actually flattened and faceted, there are not many characters, and the plot is relatively simple. "ISU F" joined a lot of dialogue, so that the town's original tool people-like NPC become flesh and blood, with their own characters and stories, new nuns and other characters to enrich the overall plot.

In addition, McGaia, the owner of the game Boss Barestan, is no longer the purely evil villain in ISU 3, and his stories with his wife and children make players realize the tender side of the character.

McGaia's children also have stories the influence of the national version of PC in March 2007, Beijing Entertainment Co., Ltd. issued a genuine version of "ISU F" PC. Previously, Entertainment has introduced "empty track FC" and "ISU 6", these masterpieces together with "ISU F", so that domestic players begin to understand the "track" and "ISU" these two series.

Interestingly, apart from Falcom, there were not many Japanese game companies willing to launch games on PC, and overseas manufacturers generally did not attach much importance to the Chinese market. Falcom appears to be a "maverick" because of its own special situation. It has focused on the PC platform for many years, but is indifferent from the mainframe.

In the 1980s and 1990s, personal computers in Japan adopted a completely different architecture from the familiar PC, with the emergence of unique models such as PC-88, X68000, FM Towns, MSX and so on. Falcom's early successful works were mainly published on these platforms. For example, the masterpiece Dragon Sword 2: Renonidu Chronicle, launched in 1985, shipped more than 500000 sets on these platforms, which was a staggering figure at that time.

DOS version of "Dragon Sword 2: Renonidu Chronicle" of course, other companies will also launch games on these platforms, such as KONAMI has released works such as "Alloy equipment" and "Contra" on MSX. However, with the strong rise of the mainframe, more and more mainstream Japanese companies focus on the development of mainframe games and are reluctant to make games for the PC platform. In the two or three decades since the 1990s, many host masterpieces have not had corresponding PC versions. This situation did not change until Steam became popular all over the world.

Falcom is special, because it has been limited by the size of the company for a long time (until now, Falcom has only more than 60 people), even during the strong rise of the mainframe, there is not much energy to develop games on the mainframe, so I chose the exclusive farming PC platform, and its new mainframe version is outsourced to other companies-HUDSON is one of the partners of Falcom. He is responsible for transplanting the early works of "ISU" series, such as PCE version, "Hero Legend 3: White-haired Witch" and so on.

The SS version of "Hero Legend 3: White-haired Witch" appeared on the main interface of HUDSON's copyright logo Falcom also tried to set foot in the mainframe market, but the company spent a lot of painstaking efforts to produce the exclusive "ISU 5" sales fiasco, can only go back to stay on PC.

After all, the scale of Japan's PC game market is limited. Japanese players have a large number of games to choose from on PS2 and other consoles. No matter how hard Falcom works on PC, its competitiveness is far less than those console manufacturers. Under the circumstances, Falcom thought of expanding overseas markets. And because of the lack of understanding of the European and American markets at that time, the company's preferred target is a large number of Chinese players-at the beginning of this century, most PC games produced by Falcom will be released in both simplified and complex Chinese versions, as well as in Chinese mainland and Hong Kong and Taiwan. For a small company, tens of thousands of additional sales are enough to drive it to produce a Chinese version.

The characters were speaking Chinese "ISU F" when the national version was launched in 2007, when the development of domestic online games was in full swing. At that time, there were not many new works that could be played on the domestic stand-alone platform, and the games launched by Falcom just met the needs of these stand-alone game enthusiasts. It was at that time that I bought almost all the PC national games owned by Falcom, and naturally became a fan of Falcom.

On the other hand, although there were many Japanese game masterpieces on PS2 at that time, due to rampant piracy, lack of spending power and other factors, domestic players were not able to enter the vision of mainframe manufacturers. At that time, mainframe masterpieces generally did not have a Chinese version, and the Bank of China was out of the question. In contrast, "Yisu F" not only has a Chinese national version, the price of a box of dozens of yuan is also much cheaper than the genuine console games at that time, coupled with the high quality of the game, repeated customs clearance will not feel bored, really attracted a lot of powder.

In contrast, the original "Heart of the Kingdom" is still not supported in Chinese. What is even more interesting is that later, because the PC version of "Tale of double Stars 2" did not sell well in Japan, while works such as "Hero Legend: the trajectory of the void" and "Yisu F" transplanted to PSP were popular, Falcom abandoned the PC platform strategy that had been adhered to for many years, and instead developed games for consoles and handsets. This makes players who are accustomed to Falcom out of PC feel frustrated.

Later, the domestic distributor Happy Best bought the copyright of "Hero Legend: the track of Zero", "Hero Legend: the track of Bi" and "ISU: the Tree Sea of Celceta", which were exclusively owned by the PS department at that time, and transplanted them to PC and introduced them to China. Most of these games are "violent transplants", and menus and UI are not adapted to computers. Today, we can still find traces of these games on the official website of Happy hundred, and of course the activation code cannot be purchased a long time ago.

Although "ISU F" has been posted on Steam a few years ago, there is also a fundamental problem with the Steam version and the previous PC version-- it is too difficult. Due to the limitation of the player's means to increase blood, the later Boss battle, especially the final Boss, is easy to make the player lose confidence in the battle. When I played for the first time, I had to use a modifier to play it, and then I passed the customs by myself. In addition, there is no voice in the PC version, which is also a pity.

In contrast, the PSP version of "Yisu F" launched a few years later is much more mature, not only adding the design of the second stage of explosive gas, but also can restore blood, reducing a lot of difficulty. Full voice is a highlight of the PSP version. However, the handheld platform has its own limitations, and the resolution of the PSP version is only 480 × 272, which is obviously far from meeting the needs of today's players.

The 2010 PSP version has many improvements compared to the 2005 PC version. The Switch HD remake, which will be released on April 27, is an "ultimate enhanced version" based on the PSP version, with a resolution raised to the HD level, and a new character upright painting. Players are free to switch between the old and the new. In addition, the Switch version also adds new voice and high-speed modes, as well as various support features for beginners in action games, such as "Not Fall" that can fall from a height without damage and recover immediately.

Therefore, from the perspective of game balance, dubbing, picture performance and other aspects, Switch remaking is quite ideal and has a certain replay value.

Old version of vertical painting

Of course, for Falcom, the choice to remake "Yisu F" should also have practical considerations. With dozens of members, Falcom has been busy producing two new series of "track" and "ISU". According to the president, Jiyang Kondo, the company is also developing a new series of games. In this case, it is much easier to renovate the classic.

So, if you bought the national version of "ISU F" that year, would you still choose to experience the Switch version again?

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.