Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga Digital Limited Edition and new remaster features detailed

by Mikhail Madnani on 09 October, 2025

refint/games has detailed the Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga Digital Limited Edition and new online and multiplayer-focused remaster features ahead of the game's launch on October 10 digitally for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Steam, GOG, Epic) in the West.

For Steam, a Digital Limited Edition will be available until October 17 featuring the Ys vs. Trails in the Sky Collective Music Files and Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga - Digital Art Book. If you've not kept up with the release, Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga is a crossover fighting game originally released only in Japan for the PlayStation Portable in 2010. It will finally be available on modern systems this Friday for consoles and PC digitally. A physical release for consoles is in the works via Limited Run Games.

You can find the details for this Digital Limited Edition via refint/games below:

Hi everyone,
With the release date being just a couple days away, we wanted to announce the contents of our Digital Limited Edition! This bundle will be available for purchase for a limited time only.
Ys vs. Trails in the Sky Collective Music Files
This is a 2-in-1 set featuring the following 2 albums:

"Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga Original Soundtrack": The original soundtrack of the game, featuring unique tracks for the game as well as key arrangements.

"Falcom Best Sound Collection - All in All -": A collection of curated tracks and deep cuts from throughout Falcom's history.

As part of the Limited Edition, you'll be able to have these tracks as part of your Steam Soundtrack library, available to play them separately from the game whenever you want!
Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga - Digital Art Book
This is a brand-new art book that features unique key art from the game, detailed designs from both playable and support characters, and a few behind-the-scenes sneak peeks for the main characters!
Whether you loved the scenes from the opening, want to take a closer look at promotional art made exclusively for the game, or simply want to check out all character art on full display, this digital art book is the perfect companion piece for the game.
Available: Oct 10, 2025
The Limited Edition purchase period is set to last during the launch week, and will end by the end of Friday, October 17th 2025.

In a separate news post on Steam, refint/games detailed the online and multiplayer features available in the remaster covering rollback netcode, local multiplayer, and more. You can find the full post below:

Hi everyone!
With the release being just a couple days away, it is now time for the second entry in our Remaster Features Overview series. If you haven't read the first part of the series yet, which mainly goes over all the visual enhancements, I highly suggest you take a look at it! As promised there though, with the way how the game looks out of the way, we'll explain the context around how the game plays. But first of all, here's some historical context from the original release.
The game's original release on PSP featured 2 modes that are going to be relevant for this topic:

Network Mode, which used the PSP's Ad-Hoc functionality to play with other systems in the vicinity.

Free Mode, where you simply could choose your own character to play as, and play against up to 3 other CPU players with any configuration you want, including handicap and teams for yourself and other players, etc.

Those 2 modes filled the expectations of the original platform just fine, but the way people played the game, which was 15 years ago on a handheld, is very different from how people are going to play today in home consoles, PC, and, well... handhelds again! And with that comes a new set of expectations that we seek to not just fulfill but surpass, which we also believe is going to be the main draw of the remastered release.
Expanded Network Mode options
We'll talk about the Network Mode, which was the original way to play the game with your friends. The Network Mode option now offers multiple sub-modes that let you connect to players in different ways:

LAN Mode: This was a must-have as a very basic option, especially for our fellow DRM-free folks. This is a no-strings-attached LAN Mode that, as the name might imply, uses your LAN (Local Area Network) to find other players connected to the same LAN to play together.

Local Mode (exclusive to Nintendo Switch): This is very similar to LAN Mode, and the most identical to the PSP original Network Mode. Just like the original game, this will find other Nintendo Switch systems directly, no LAN required, and let you play together with them. This is offered on Nintendo Switch only due to it being the only platform currently providing this sort of functionality.

Online Mode: This is probably the most awaited addition of all: Indeed, the barriers of distance are broken, allowing you to play with players from all over the world through the internet. This requires no additional accounts at all: just start the game through the storefront you bought it from and it will work like magic - you'll be able to play with other systems across the internet. You can limit visibility of your lobby, find your friends with lobby codes, and set a lobby password to control who gets in.

And just to be clear: With this release, you'll be able to get over the barrier of platforms, as LAN Mode and Online Mode are fully cross-platform! No matter what platform you or your friends are playing from, everyone gets to play together! (You're not forced to, though - you can turn it off if you really wish to do so.)

(you can't see it, but these are a PC, a Nintendo Switch, and a PS5 playing together!)
LAN Mode and Local Mode are of course really good options to have, but they're quite analogous to the original release. Meanwhile, Online Mode is the most wanted novelty that we really wanted to bring, but with that came new challenges as the game was programmed with low latency in mind, and not really made for the high and unpredictable latencies of the internet. This fortunately has a solution that I expect fighting game players to be quite familiar with:
Rollback Netcode support
To address the conditions inherent to the internet, the game's original delay-based netcode has been replaced with rollback netcode powered by GGPO, which helps the game feel as responsive as if you were playing locally. This is considered the gold standard for netcode by the majority of the fighting game community, so we worked really hard to get it working, which was challenging as the game was not made with this in mind and had to be slightly retooled.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but to put it in easier terms: instead of delaying your button presses so that your opponent's button presses arrive at your console in time, it lets the game directly process your inputs for visual feedback while it predicts the button presses your opponent did to keep the game going. If the prediction was wrong and your opponent's input was different, it rolls the game state a few frames back to where it made the incorrect prediction, and resimulates those frames with the actual inputs that it got from the opponent.
This process happens in the background mostly, but in cases where there's lag, it can be apparent that the game is doing this in the form of apparent teleport/jittering from remote players. This is why the game also mixes in just a little bit of delay-based netcode, where some delay is applied in order to make the visual jittering less jarring. Even with this, the default delay feels lower than the delay of the PSP version. If you don't like delay at all and want your inputs to be reflected immediately, or if you'd like more delay due to your connection not being that stable, this is completely possible as well, as we leave the configuration of how many frames to delay at the hands of the player. If you're not sure though, we recommend you keep the default settings (3 frames). In cases of severe lag (around 200-300ms and higher), there is going to be visual jittering regardless. This is due to the nature of how rollback netcode works, so please keep this in mind!
We recently showcased a match which was conducted on Network Mode via the internet, so please check that out too!
Offline Multiplayer
All these new options for Network Mode are very nice indeed, but this release is also coming to home consoles and PCs, and you might want to play with your fellow Falcom fans while just having a single console and a bunch of controllers waiting to be connected. Supporting this type of local play was also a high priority for this release.
To meet this demand, we have expanded Free Mode in order to allow for up to 4 local players to play together, sharing the same screen while having the camera accommodate all players by zooming in and out to keep them on screen. As we mentioned in our previous entry, some geometry was revised for the expanded view that ultrawide brings, but these improvements incidentally also apply to the case where the camera zooms out, up to a certain point at least. We hope that with this addition, Ys vs. Trails finds a spot as one of your go-to party games whenever you meet with fellow Falcom fans.

(Adol, those flames aren't gonna reach Estelle from all across the map...)
There's just one more thing that I want to cover that is related to both Network Mode and the Offline Multiplayer functionality that we just went over. Both are great additions to the game indeed, but what if you find yourself in a situation where you have a friend over, but you want to play with 2 other friends across the town, the country, or the planet altogether... or maybe you have 2 big screens and want to share less of the screen by giving each 2 players their own screen... what can you do about it?
Mixed Local/Network Multiplayer
Network Mode supports starting any of the 3 already described sub-modes with up to 3* players on the same system. We thought there was value in having this for some players, especially from my own experience, so it was definitely something that we wanted to support.
*Just for the avoidance of doubt: It's only up to 3, because if it was up to 4 local players, you'd just be playing Free Mode, as 4 is the maximum number of players.
With the original release tied to its original platform and Network Mode, we really wanted to offer the most flexibility that we possibly could, so we hope that with all these options you have no obstacles when it comes to playing with your friends whenever, wherever, and however you want. And continuing from that, we'll head over to inputs:
Input Options + Remapping
The original release had some basic options to allow remapping battle inputs, but it was a bit limited in configuration. In contrast, it has become a staple of recent Nihon Falcom releases to offer very extensive input remapping options. I'm glad we're able to continue the tradition by offering full input remapping across the game for controller players as well as mouse & keyboard players:

Alongside that, the controller type can be detected automatically in most cases, to offer you the correct button icons for your type of controller. In general, there are the following additions as well:

Vibration support as feedback for certain gameplay elements.

Configurable stick deadzone to accommodate controllers that need it, just in case.

Skills can be remapped directly to keys/buttons, which is crucial for mouse & keyboard, but also brings another option for today's controllers that have additional keys as well.

On PC, you can disable the controller for a player. This makes the controller available for the next player. This comes in handy when you want to play with mouse and keyboard, while you want to let a friend use a controller. In this case you'd disable the controller for Player 1, which would make the first controller available to Player 2.

Also on PC, you can map keys to Player 2 through 4. They have no keys bound by default to avoid confusion, but in case you ever need to, you can simply assign other keys in the keyboard to that player and let them use it.

You can set the button icon type for each player individually. While you're going to see button icons for Player 1 most of the time, this option is useful in case your Player 2-4 friends are in the middle of customizing their skills and want to see what buttons/keys are assigned to them without having to do the round trip to the Title Menu's Option screen.

Conclusion
With multiplayer being the key focus of this game, we really wanted to make sure that we could accommodate all the play styles we could think of that were feasible, so I hope you look forward to the release with the assurance that you'll be able to play with your friends, with the only requirements being either owning the game on one of the supported platforms, or just being nearby and having an additional controller (or even just a portion of a keyboard!)
With the release date of the game being in just a few days, our final post will be done at the release date, and will focus on quality of life features and some platform-specific enhancements that round out this remaster, including returning fan favorites as well as game-specific bits.
I hope to see you on the release date!
Best regards,
Adrian Graber - Producer & Lead Developer @ refint/games