As part of knocking stuff off my list, I started in on Ys I & II for the Turbo Duo, and I polished off the first game, or first half of the larger game, a few days ago. A little Ys goes a long way, so I decided to take care of another title before going back for seconds on Ys. I doubt my opinion on Ys is going to change with Book II, though, so let's start now.
The Angelique Luminarise website is publishing a series of what it calls "short stories" to introduce the characters and reintroduce the series setting. (They're shorter than short stories, but whatever.) Below is a translation of the first, featuring Guardian of Light Yue, Guardian of Darkness Noah, and Guardian of Wind Vergil.
Notes with asterisks are explanations from the document; notes with daggers are, naturally, my own commentary.
Taking a look through the other side of the looking glass. Same #NotAllMen, #NotAllWomen disclaimers from the previous post apply.
I've talked a bit about how the various incarnations of the Silver Star chapter of Lunar are about children inheriting and taking over their world from adults. There's a secondary theme, though, that's frequently overlooked, even by me: the idea of what it means to "become a man." (Looking through some screenshots I took of the Sega CD TSS, I was struck by the sheer amount of dialogue dedicated to this idea, as you see in the samples above.) That oversight is perhaps understandable: Lunar was in general never known for revolutionary gender politics, of which this is part and parcel (albeit more nobly-minded), and there's no reason its metrics for growing up need be exclusive to men, after all. The theme itself isn't anything revolutionary, but it's interesting to look at the decisions that were made with certain elements of the story in view of it.
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