Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana Revisited

 Going back-to-back after Memories of Celceta, my detour before reaching my final destination of the Ys Marathon, is Ys Oath in Felghana, repackaged as Ys Memoire on Nintendo Switch. Back then, I had some hesitation about revisiting it, considering I had already done a full rewrite of the article not too long ago and, story-wise, Felghana was relatively lightweight.

However, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to fully revisit Adol’s adventure in Felghana. Ys Memoire is essentially a straight port of the PSP version of Oath in Felghana, with some surface-level improvements, primarily new character illustrations for the cast. These additions don’t necessarily make this version superior to the PSP release, which still offers an intense and tightly designed adventure built around the Napishtim-era engine.

Overall, the game delivered pretty much what I expected from my playthrough 15 years ago: intense, high-paced combat with a minimal narrative layer. The boss fights remain as brutal as ever, and I still consider them the hardest among all the Ys iterations on Normal difficulty. I had to retry several bosses multiple times, particularly the Lava Statue and Clockwork Cannon. Surprisingly, though, my fight against the final boss, Galbalan, went relatively smoothly and only took one retry.

While I wouldn’t say I gained much from revisiting Felghana purely for my blog articles considering the main Felghana article is pretty much done. I still gathered enough material that should prove useful for future JRPGtalk articles related to Felghana, such as pieces on the Ys heroines and Galbalan.

With the playthrough clocking in at around eight hours, I consider my revisit with Oath in Felghana still turn out to be worthwhile. It may not have added much to my existing Felghana coverage, but it was a short, intense trip down memory lane and provided enough new material to make the detour worth taking.