Ys: The Oath in Felghana

I'll be straight with you: Felghana is not the game for people who come to RPGs for branching narratives, morality systems, or the joy of theory-crafting a build into hour 40. Adol Christin, Falcom's perpetually red-haired wandering hero, does not make choices. He nods. He helps. The narrator tells you he did both. And yet somehow, across a compact 10-15 hour runtime, this game earns a place in the conversation about how action RPGs should feel to play, because almost everything else it does is close to immaculate. The setup drops Adol and his companion Dogi into Felghana, Dogi's tyrannized homeland, where Count McGuire is squeezing a mining town dry and something ancient is waking up in the hills. The story is not going to trouble anyone with its depth. The townspeople of Redmont get just enough page time to feel like a community rather than XP dispensers, and the villain is comfortably operatic without being interesting. What the writing does manage is a brisk, well-translated momentum that keeps you moving from dungeon to dungeon without filler quests clogging the path. That alone is a small mercy. The real argument for this game is its combat and boss design. Forget deep skill trees. Adol has a sword, a jump slash, a downward stab, and a set of magic bracelets you acquire across the dungeons, each one both a traversal tool and a combat option. The bracelet system lightly echoes Zelda's item gating. You backtrack to previously unreachable platforms with the ring of wind or burn through barriers with the ring of fire. The dungeons layer in platforming sections that feel closer to an action game than a traditional RPG, and the pace is relentlessly fast. Here is the thing critics of this game miss: the simplicity of the toolkit is not laziness. It forces precision. Enemies hit hard, move fast, and certain types are outright immune to your sword, forcing you to swap magic mid-fight. The experience multiplier system rewards aggressive play by letting your XP bonus climb to 1.99x when you keep up a hit streak, which means staying in the pocket is both risky and mechanically incentivized. That tension is genuinely well-designed. Boss encounters are where the game justifies its reputation. These fights are pattern-recognition puzzles at speed, and the gap between dying confused and dying because you misread a telegraph is razor-thin. The difficulty dial at the start spans very easy to nightmare, and a per-boss difficulty drop option exists if you get completely stuck, though using it carries its own quiet sting of pride. Inferno difficulty unlocks post-game and is for people who have decided suffering is their hobby. New Game Plus carry-over gives veterans a reason to loop back. The bigger honest criticism is that some upgrade materials and critical rubies for magic upgrades are hidden in ways that cross the line from discovery into guesswork, and absent objective markers or a quest log, first-time players will occasionally hit a wall that sends them to a guide rather than a eureka moment. That is a design habit of the era and it has not aged gracefully. The soundtrack, arranged from Ys III's original compositions, remains genuinely great. A free 2020 update added English voice acting and the option to swap between the modern arrangement, the PC-88, and the X68000 versions of the music, which means there is more to fiddle with than the original 2012 PC release offered. Performance on PC is stable. If you are an action RPG fan who can accept a story that does not reward close reading, a combat sandbox that cannot build beyond its handful of tools, and a dungeon design philosophy that occasionally hides a critical item in an invisible box, Felghana is a compact, confident, and frequently thrilling game that asks very little of your calendar and delivers a focused experience that bigger RPGs forget to be.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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