Found this on NeoGAF, so I thought I’d share:
Thanks to Aveyn Knight for the heads-up. It seems that there was an offer to get it for free yesterday that is still going today even though I guess it wasn’t supposed to be. This game is one of my favorites, so I hope a bunch of people get to take advantage of this.
Someone in the other thread confirmed that it’s still working, at least for now.
Originally Posted by Aveyn Knight:
I’m kind of hesistant to post this, but I don’t believe I’m breaking any rules. The only issue is that I’m not completely certain if this still works.
It seems Groupon had a special promotion on April 28th only where new users can download what seems to be the full download version of Ys Origin for free. Unfortunately, I only saw the offer right as the 28th was ending in Japan, so I didn’t bother downloading straightaway.
However, somebody on a forum that I maintain reported that that the game seems to still install fine after the 28th. A few hours ago, I managed to download and install the game fine. I already beat the first boss and I can’t see any signs of the game being a trial version. I think the installer checks online before it installs the game, so presumably they made a mistake and forgot to prevent the installation from working.
Instructions:
- You’ll need Japanese regional support enabled (the ability to display Japanese characters). Not just for the installation, but the game crashes very early on if Japanese characters don’t display! You can use Applocale with Japanese as the selected language if you prefer.
Download
- Press the button to the top right of this page. It’s the one embedded in the banner. [Image]
- Select any location, enter your e-mail address in the appropriate field and hit the red button a bit below. You may want to use an alterative e-mail address to your usual one, as Groupon may send you promotional e-mails.
- Log-in to your e-mail and search for a new e-mail from Groupon. Note that it may be in your spam e-mail folder. Follow the first URL to return to Groupon’s site.
- Click the subtly-located link towards the middle (it looks like normal text, but I think it’s underlined), which directs you to Sourcenext’s site. [Image]
- Hit the big download button (the download is 1.6 GB and takes up a few more GBs before the installation is complete). [Image]
Note that if you close the window or go back to the Groupon page, you may lose your link. If so, you can try from the beginnng with a different e-mail.
Install
- Double click the EXE file that you downloaded, this will extract all the relevant files.
- Locate the extracted files and double click the new EXE named インストールする (it’s name is in Japanese if you can’t read it here). If successful, you will be directed to the Ys Origin installation.
- During the Ys Origin installation keep pressing the left option (Next) and the files will be installed to your PC. I’m not sure if steps 2 and 3 are actually needed, you may be able to play the game from the yso_win.exe application found in the original extracted files.
I’ll repeat again, I don’t know if you’ll be able to download and/or install the game properly. So if you don’t feel like taking a gamble and wasting your time, don’t try it.
I managed to get it working earlier, and there’s no telling how long it’ll last.
Once you run the downloader, it’ll extract to a folder and then you can go to GPYS -> YSO_WIN -> yso_win.exe to launch the game there.
Make sure you have your non-unicode (System Locale) set to Japanese or you could run into issues.
Something else to note: You can run Fsetup3.exe in the GPYS folder to actually install the game and get all the shortcuts and whatnot. Of course, if that fails, just run yso_win.exe in YSO_WIN.