I had initially planned on two posts, one covering disc 1 and the other disc 2. However, I think the story is too long for me to cover it in detail, and I’m not sure there’s much purpose to a short description of each chapter. Instead I will just talk generally about the story in this post.

As I said before, the game takes place among these high schoolers (this is Maria, their English teacher and homeroom teacher — her full name is Maria Alucard. Aren’t people wise to this trick by now?). All five of the core characters discover that they can call on a certain “power”, and they sometimes have memories of past lives (or maybe their ancestors) in the Edo and early Meiji periods.

The other characters that join also have the same power, which manifested at the same time in a previous year.

The story as a whole is episodic in nature. The episodes often play off of common superstition or urban legends, such as groups of crows attacking people, or water demons. The enemies even include Lovecraft’s Cthulhu demons (explicitly so, not just ones that resemble them) and Neo-nazis. There’s also a lot of mythology and historical occultism, as well as feng shui and other Chinese mystic practices. It seems sort of like they just threw everything into the pot.

On the first disc, it becomes clear that all of the incidents are centering around a group called the Kidoshu, headed by a mysterious figure that is also a high school student gifted with the “power”. Many of the enemies in this section are normal people who have been gifted with (or forced to take) a demonic power that even turns them into Japanese-style ogres.

The final episode of the first disc involves the fight against Kozunu, who is the leader of the Kidoshu.

However, it’s probably not a huge surprise that this is not the real final enemy (since you have another disc to go). Kozunu was being manipulated by someone else.

Disc 2 begins with some interval stories — a class trip where we fight against yakuza trying to shut down a traditional village, and then a shrine festival where we fight the lingering spirit of the disc 1 boss.

The final wrapup of the storyline involves the attempt to release a sealed dragon (sealed by the ancestor of the main character, and protected by other ancestors or past lives of the other characters).

The final fight is pretty tough — you have to defeat these balls, but the dragon (who can’t be attacked) can hit you with a huge area attack.

In addition to this broad storyline, there is a lot of high-school stuff and little side stories to amplify the bare outline. One thing I did not manage to get was the date “Christmas event” in chapter 20; it involves a lot of flags and specific things that I didn’t know about. However, it sounds like on the extra disc (which I’ll get to in 1999) you can see the events even if you didn’t fulfill the conditions.

I’m actually not quite done with the game because once you finish, there are several Gaiden chapters that fill in some gaps of what went on in the game.

Overall I am going to give this an A because it did hold my interest to the end. The battle system has some flaws but is overall interesting. I think my biggest complain with the battle system is that you often don’t get much time or leeway to fight; instead you end up having to finish the battles in 2-3 rounds because the enemies can do so much damage that you can’t afford to let them survive for very long.

I would recommend this game if you like visual novels. I think that if you are not so much a VN fan, the battles alone may not keep your interest.

As I said above, there’s an extra fan disc in 1999, and the series continues in 2002 with a second game set in the Meiji period with the ancestors (or former lives) of the main characters. There was supposed to be a third game that would have taken place in between the two, but for whatever reason development was cancelled.

Next I am going to play Ys VI — I was looking back over some old posts and I mentioned in my Ys V review that I bought the game for PS2 about 20 years ago but never played it. Now seems like a good time. I will then try the next Famicom game (Mirai Senshi Jarvas, which is supposedly a kusoge so I probably won’t play it for too long). The next SRPG is Langrisser V.