Thanks to refint/games for the review code
Title: Ys VS Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $34.99
Release Date: 10/10/2025
Story
In this crossover between the Ys and Trails in the Sky series, you take control of one of several characters from either franchise as you go across the land of Xanadu and defeat an evil dragon god.
Don’t worry about this being yet another branch added to the gargantuan tree of Trails related stuff you have to catch up on for newer entries; the story in Alternative Saga is utterly forgettable and insignificant as a whole, and only really goes to have some nice fanservice for the first three trails games. This is one of the most cookie cutter plots imaginable, and outside of some neat nods to the PC88 Xanadu, there’s nothing memorable about it.
The Ys side is barely representative of that franchise, since the original Ys Vs Trails hit with the release of Ys SEVEN around 2010, and thus most of the roster from Ys comes from that game, so you have a bunch of nobodies from Seven, Adol, Dogi, and Chester from Felghana. Lloyd from Trails to Zero is also here as a walking advertisement, since this originally came out right before Zero hit the PSP in Japan.
Translation wise, the english translation used here is based off a Geofront fan translation for the PSP version, and it’s OK. For such a weak plot, you can only do so much to punch it up, which makes the newly added English dub the best part of the localization process overall, since a ton of the original english voice actors returned to reprise their roles, and do a darn good job at doing so. In a bizarre change from the Geofront translation (which used the English terminology), certain song names are renamed to their Japanese terminology, meaning songs like Silver Will are renamed to Gin no Ishi. Very weird.
Presentation
Being a PSP game from 2010, it should be expected that a modern HD port would require a lot of work to make it scale well on bigger displays, and Refint did an OK attempt at doing such on Switch. Since the original game used a version of the Ys Seven engine, the 3D models looked rather blocky, and thus scale up pretty well in both docked and handheld modes.
What didn’t upscale so well, were the stage elements. Some levels look pretty decent upscaled into HD, but a lot of them have bizarre artifacts or odd changes compared to how they looked in the original PSP game, with this sign in the Crossbell stage having a ridiculous looking font added to it.
By far the worst upscaling job comes from the story mode backgrounds. They were very pixelated in the PSP original and without the original source backgrounds, I can see how these would be pretty tricky to upscale, but the way refint did it was just bad. Smeary filters applied to every last story mode background make all of them look bad, and there’s no way to go back to the original pixel resolution for these backgrounds, and I can’t even tell what kind of smoothing filter was used for these backgrounds, since some look like a hot mess, moreso than a typical smoothing filter would produce. I really hope this is remedied soon, as by far this is the worst part of the HD port’s upscaling efforts and one that soured this port for me quite a bit.
Thankfully, there were still some aspects that translated beautifully into HD. The Falcom key art that populates the gallery are all in the highest resolution possible and look stellar, and the key art for the playable characters look pretty great too. The music is also typical Falcom quality from the time, consisting of outstanding songs from across their history up to 2010, along with some excellent remixes of certain songs such as Stopper from Legend of Heroes II, and brand new compositions that fit perfectly as battle themes.
This game also marks the last time Ys V’s music has ever appeared in a Ys-related game, although they’re mostly the original SFC tracks unlockable via the shop system. I just found that pretty neat as I long for a remake of that one.
Gameplay
You have a few different modes in Ys Vs Trails, but the two big single player ones are the Story Mode and Arcade mode. Story Mode is where the bulk of your time will be, as you pick from one of several characters as they go on a quest across Xanadu to beat up their former friends, free them from the Dragon’s control, and eventually unite in order to defeat the big bad at the top of the mountain.
This also acts a little bit as a tutorial, too, which helps to get you to grips with the combat since the game has a leveling system. You could try to do Arcade mode first in theory, but those CPU opponents are much higher in level even on the easiest difficulty, meaning despite knowing how to play the game you’ll likely be ramming your head into a wall at spongy opponents trying to overcome them. Thus, the Story mode is the best place to get to grips with things.
When it comes to how the actual matches are played, the action is a simplified version of Ys SEVEN’s combat system, which was already pretty simple especially considering what that party system would later evolve into with Ys Celceta, VIII and IX. This means you have a jump, dodge, and attack to make use of, along with equipable skills that can be used by holding down the skill button in combination with one of the face buttons, and being able to pull off an EXTRA skill in a pinch.
To sum this game’s combat up, just imagine a Ys Seven with spongier enemies to deal with and moments with even spongier bosses without any of the cleverness that the Ys Seven bosses had, and you have the entirety of Ys Vs Trails in the Sky’s combat. Does this sound like it’d be funny at first only to quickly get tiresome? Yes, yes it does. Does that also mean without the improvements later party games would add, that the combat is paper thin and will ultimately lead to button mashing? It sure does! Even on higher difficulties, you’ll mostly be relying on that good old dodge and jump to deal with those added challenges, since your combat techniques are still incredibly basic.
This also has the side effect of making the story mode absolutely dull to go through unless you’re a fan of the english voice acting and just like hearing how the characters would talk to one another between fights. Solid voice acting and the outstanding soundtrack were pretty much the only things that kept me wanting to play a story mode campaign to the end, since by the fourth tier I was getting incredibly tired of Estelle wanting to look for another battle and saying the same battle over and over again. Did the story mode get me giddy when I heard a remix of Stopper? Yes it did, but that quickly faded once the stage was over and it was back to more tedium until the story mode was finally over.
As you play matches in Ys Vs Trails, you’ll eventually gain points and currency to use at Mona’s Shop, which is where you can upgrade your character’s weapon, buy new skills, upgrade new skills, or burn the money on misc stuff like Falcom songs or the stages from the story mode. Spending more money upgrades the shop and thus adds new things like accessories and music, which means if you wanna get everything, there’s an obscene amount of grinding to be done, and I mean a huge amount.
You might be able to level up Estelle and have a good time playing as her for a few hours, but if you wanna shift to say, Kloe or Dogi, you’ll have to upgrade their equipment and buy skills for them starting from level 1 as well. And if they don’t have a Story Mode campaign, well I hope you don’t mind throwing them at Arcade mode until they get past it or just goofing around in the local multiplayer against CPU/real friends, since that’s the other way to gain EXP and money.
A lot of PSP fighting games liked to give you reasons to play the arcade or story modes as every single character, and Ys Vs Trails is no exception, but Ys Vs Trails ain’t Blazblue Continuum Shift II, and doesn’t have a fighting system or plot worth all that tedium and grinding. It may be amusing to get to play as Joshua or Kloe in the Ys Seven combat system, but it also can lead to you wanting to flush your Switch down the toilet having Olivier sing at you to death as you struggle to get past him in Arcade mode with a weaker level character.
I’m not kidding when I say the excellent Falcom music does a lot of the heavy lifting for me with this game, since losing a battle with Silver Will or Stopper playing in the background is more motivating than if something from say, Cold Steel III were to be playing in the background instead. Thankfully, Refint did add some stuff to try and give this game a bit of extra legs. You no longer need local wireless to do the multiplayer in this game, since now you can just do couch VS mode on a single system with ease, which is also the best way to level up the other characters, so if you happen to have a Falcom loving friend around, you’ll be able to reduce the overall tedium by quite a bit.
There’s also online multiplayer available with full crossplay which is really rad, but that also requires you to want to play this game over the internet. There’s no ranked battles or anything, so it’s all just for dumb fun like most of the game is.
Upon clearing one character’s story mode, you can replay it again with the opponents at higher levels if you so wish so you won’t end up OHKOing all the computer opponents. Still, after getting a good chunk of the gallery and clearing one of the story modes, I had my fill of this one. The badly upscaled story mode backgrounds didn’t make me want to play that mode more than I had to.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Ys Vs Trails was a pretty rocky game even back in the day, just being a title shoved out on the Ys Seven engine with barebones gameplay padded out by a lot of grinding. Refint tried their best to make the best modern port they could, and while some of the new features like local and online multiplayer are great additions, they still don’t fix the big flaws Ys Vs Trails has that make it a dull fighting game.
Add in some truly ugly upscaled backgrounds, an absolutely forgettable story, and pretty grindy gameplay loops to get anywhere with unlockables, and while you have a decent port job here, this is still one of Falcom’s weakest games at the end of the day, and something I can only feasibly recommend for Trails megafans that just like seeing their characters fight to epic music, since Ys fans won’t find much here unless they really like Seven.
Even then, Ys Vs Trails is more of a means to have dumb fun, rather than something meant to hook you with gameplay depth or anything resembling a plot. You do get a lot of content for the price, but that’ll also require you beat up the same characters over and over again to fully complete that gallery and all the single player content, so whether you find that a worthy endeavor depends on how much you like the characters from the source materials.
I give Ys VS Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga a 5 out of 10.