Welcome to the dawn of time. Well, 1987—it’s almost the same thing. The PC-88 version of the game you see splashed all over this page is the seed from which all other Ys’ sprang forth from. It’s an Ys that’s not a port or a remake or even a game aware of its legacy, because at the time it didn’t have one. Heck, this isn’t even Ys I, this is just plain Ys, the wraparound adverstrip on the box reminding potential buyers that this new and unknown RPG was made by a little company called Falcom, the same people responsible for Romancia and Xanadu.
Yet even under these humble circumstances, Ys somehow clambered out of the primordial gaming soup fully formed. This is not a rough draft later remakes would build and significantly improve upon: the Ys everyone knows and loves is already here. Look at Adol’s little sword-out walk. Notice how the statues in the temple are exactly where they’ve always been. Stand on the plains just outside Minea village and watch the grass and water languidly spread upwards and into the unknown.
How Adol reaches that point is the one place where this version of the game diverges from the many that would follow. Here his quest begins with the game’s box, the covers and spine designed to look like your very own book of Ys. Even the disc labels get in on the act, described as “Chapter one” and “Chapter two” (appropriately enough, you switch to the second disc when you enter the final area of the game, Darm Tower). This is more than just empty window dressing—this is setting the scene. The tale of Ys then continues in the partially colour hardback manual’s 26 page story, opening with what reads like a fireside chat with an elder about the past exploits of the old hero Adol Christin (complete with name drops of Ys Seven‘s Altago, Ys IV’s Celceta, and Ys V‘s Kefin) before shifting into a more direct recounting of his adventures, opening with him waking up after a shipwreck on an Esterian shore before a flashback to his time in (what would eventually be Ys IV’s) Promarock and then moving back to Adol’s present, his brief misadventures in Balbardo (as well as meeting Slaff, both events only covered in-game in later releases), and his eventual journey towards Minea.
Here, now, in 2023, none of this is new information. We know where Adol goes and what he does. We’ve played those games. We’ve probably played later remakes of those games too. But this manual was printed in 1987. It’s astonishing to see not only Falcom dare to imagine their newest hero had a past and a future as well as a present, but that everything they wrote would come true too.
And now, at last, the game can begin.
So it was a bit of a shock to immediately see the hardware struggle so badly with it. Any time the screen gets a little cluttered with interesting tiles and people—as it unfortunately does in the opening village of Minea—the screen scrolling slows to a wave-like crawl, the PC-88 taking its time to shuffle long strips of visual data off to the side. It was enough to make me want to spend time in the dark caves and other less intensively tiled areas, just so the game would run a little more smoothly. As surprised as I may have been, to hold it against the game would be deeply unfair. You see, about a year before Ys appeared a little game called Dragon Quest had made its Japanese debut: the Famicom RPG that used password saves, had the hero and everyone else you could see facing forwards the whole time, and made you select TALK>SOUTH from a menu if you wanted to speak to a random guard standing below you. Compared to that already ambitious new standard, Ys was a revelation. Ys could show multiple animated characters roaming the land in whatever direction they liked, and its “bump” battle system not only asked you to charge headlong into the enemy, it also took into account which direction the two of you were facing and which of you were moving at the time. It’s amazing to think that Falcom even tried to create an action RPG in this era, never mind actually pull it off.
This simplicity also helped me to see how special some things I hadn’t truly appreciated before really were. Only after playing the game on limited hardware did I really appreciate how brilliant the Mask of Eyes was, this wearable item creating a unique visual effect—a monochrome view that reveals hidden doorways while making enemies invisible, but never gone—any time I want to give it a go. It’s so simple, but so special at the same time, an open invitation to wonder what else is hidden in this magical land.
The desire to impress doesn’t stop there either. There’s real drama in walking down a corridor lined with pillars, crossing swords with a boss made out of bats that reforms and disperses as you fight, an NPC dying in what seemed to be a safe place. The game even, in its own way, goes so far as to keep in mind whether Adol’s standing in the sun or not, the free HP restore he gets from a little fresh air making the game’s interior areas feel just that little bit more dangerous than they would have otherwise.
As Adol wanders around he inevitably gets into more than a few fights—and no doubt gets utterly crushed a few times too, as I often did when I made the mistake of carelessly running around a new area. The fact is, as it has always been, that sometimes he’s just not well equipped or strong enough to face whatever’s ahead and no amount of skilled play can make up for it. The level grinding that extends the game’s short length will never be the most engaging use of anyone’s time but at least Ys successfully softens the blow by making the reward so significant; a single level can turn an impossible boss into a complete pushover, or a nervous run through a tough area into a casual mowing of the local monsters as Adol hoovers up all the treasure chests. It almost feels like Falcom made a simple promise: put in the work and we will make sure this next part goes smoothly for you, no matter how difficult it was before.
Until Ys sneakily rolls up its safety blanket and takes it home, anyway. Reaching the maximum level—a meagre 10—is not just an inevitability, it’ll happen long before you reach the final boss. So, what are you supposed to do when you have all the skills and equipment everyone’s favourite red-haired boat wrecker can possibly carry and nothing you can do can make him stronger? If you’re anything like me, the first thing you’ll do is have a little panic—getting stronger worked so well before this turn of events, I suddenly wanted the occasional bouts of mindless XP harvesting to come back. But after that you’ll hopefully have a little think about it, and realise there’s comfort and kindness in this too. At this point there is no challenge our hero can’t overcome, and that means the back half of the game is Adol’s to win, that giant tower a fitting climax rather than a new roadblock magicked out of a designer’s backside.
Even after all this time and so many remakes, this old game still feels not only like Ys but the Ys, the definitive article. This is the raw material so many of the action RPGs that swiftly followed would draw upon for inspiration (some much more closely than others), and time has only made crystal clear that they were right to do so. Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished is the rules for the genre laid out in playable form, a timeless template even modern games would benefit from studying.
Ys is a true classic. Because of its success, because of its influence, because the series it spawned and the developer responsible are still alive and well today.
But mostly because it’s just that good, and it always has been.
Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 