The History Of Ys
Falcom’s president, Toshihiro Kondo explains the rich legacy behind its most celebrated franchise
We occasionally have a problem with RPGS here on Retro Gamer, and we’re sure many of our readers can relate to it. As adults, sometimes it’s just hard to juggle work, life and the latest epic adventure. We don’t want to avoid them, but we do sometimes find ourselves wondering if we’ll see them through to the end, such is the trend towards large and complex games in the genre. Thankfully, we’re not the only ones who have struggled like this, and it’s not a new problem – and that’s why Nihon Falcom chose to develop Ys, a different kind of RPG.
Falcom had already had a major RPG hit in Japan in 1984 with Dragon Slayer, an action RPG for a variety of Japanese computer systems. The following years saw the company follow up with Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu, Xanadu Scenario II: The Resurrection Of Dragon and Dragon Slayer Jr: Romancia. Romancia is particularly interesting, as it was an attempt at simplifying the genre, featuring just one attack button, no customisation and very few statistics.
This philosophy of simplifying the RPG carried forward to Ys. In an interview for the book Challenge!! Personal Computer AVG & RPG III, programmer Masaya Hashimoto explained that Ys was created with a desire to make an accessible game that wasn’t aimed at hardcore RPG fans. There was a conscious effort to avoid lengthy level grinding processes, and players were allowed to save anywhere to avoid losing progress. However, the biggest simplification was the use of the ‘bump’ combat system. When playing Ys, you never need to hit an attack button – you simply run your character into an enemy to deal damage, preferably slightly to the left or right rather than head-on.
The bump system was a huge key to the early appeal of the series, as we’re told by Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo. “You can blow through enemies really quickly, and it’s really fun,” he begins. “Practically
With 30 years of history behind it, Ys is an elder statesman of the Japanese RPG scene – but it’s not nearly as well known as some of its contemporaries. Nick Thorpe speaks to Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo to discover its complete history...
everybody who plays the game brings that up and says how much fun it is to blast through enemies. The people who came before me at Falcom told me, when I first started working on the Ys games, ‘You know the feeling of popping bubble wrap? It feels really good and you can’t stop. That’s the way Ys should be.’” Indeed, that’s a lot of what players will do until they discover the main thrust of the game – guiding hero Adol Christin to gather the six books of Ys, following a doomsday prophecy from Esteria’s local seer, Sara.
Of course, the team also had challenges to contend with. One of the biggest was the small size of the characters – Hashimoto found that he was unable to enhance storytelling with the use of facial expressions and designer Ayano Koshiro had wanted to make them larger, but it wasn’t possible within the framework that had been built. Map design also proved problematic, as the perspective that had been adopted meant that it was impossible to display doors leading to the east or west. Somehow, all of these were overcome and the game was completed in just five months.
Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished launched for the NEC PC-8801 in June 1987, and ports for other popular Japanese computers followed throughout 1987. The game was a hit and made its way to the Famicom and Sega Mark III in 1988, and the latter version was translated for English-speaking Master System owners, giving Ys its first exposure outside of Japan. The game then appeared on computers in North America thanks to the Kyodai publishing partnership. Critical reception was positive – Computer & Video Games awarded the Master System version 92%, with Julian Rignall describing it as “massive and thoroughly engrossing,” while The Games Machine compared it favourably to The Legend Of Zelda in a 90% review.
Ys II quickly followed in 1988, and was a direct sequel to the first game which used much of the same technology, though it did offer improved graphics. The plot followed immediately from the ending of the original game and followed Adol’s journey to the floating land of Ys. The big change in this game was the addition of a magic system, with a number of spells available including a fire spell which was essential to defeating most bosses. Despite the critical acclaim received by the first game, Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter didn’t receive an international release in its standalone form. It was instead introduced to English-speaking audiences as part of the PC Engine game Ys I & II, a key driver of Turbografx CD sales in North America and the first release to adopt the nowcommon practice of combining the first two Ys games. The two games are now so closely linked that they even placed as a single entry in Famitsu readers’ top 100 games ranking in 2006.
If the first two Ys games are notable for their similarity, the third is notable for how it departs from the initial games. “Ys III, unlike Ys I & II, is a side-scrolling game. When I first started, I died really early, and I can remember thinking, ‘Man, this game is hard!’ I’d been told that the Ys games were friendly to newcomers and beginners, but I didn’t end up feeling that way at all,” recalls Kondo. Indeed, Ys III: Wanderers From Ys took the game mechanics from the previous games wholesale, and simply translated them into a platformer-style format akin to the Wonder Boy games and Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link. This necessitated the inclusion of an attack button for the first time, as ‘bump’ combat was no longer possible.
Having resolved the problems of Esteria in the first two games, Adol chose to travel with his new friend Dogi in Ys III. The pair went to Dogi’s homeland of Felghana, where the townspeople were being threatened by soldiers from Valestein Castle. Lord Macguire was scheming to acquire a set of mysterious statues, and would seemingly stop at nothing to get them – so naturally, Adol felt the need to step in.
Ys III: Wanderers From Ys appeared on NEC computers in 1989, and soon followed to a wide variety of console formats including English versions for the PC Engine CD, Mega Drive and SNES. While it isn’t a terrible game, Ys III is considered to be something of a black sheep of the series, largely due to the move away from the top-down perspective. However, Mieko Ishikawa’s soundtrack is considered to be one of the very best in a series renowned for great soundtracks. A faithful side-scrolling remake with rebalanced gameplay and high-resolution 2D graphics was released for PS2 in 2005, but sadly only in Japan. That isn’t the end of the story for Ys III, as we’ll discover later, but the game did mark the point at which the series took an extended leave of absence from Western markets.
Ys IV appeared on the PC Engine CD and SNES, and was a confusing project, as Kondo can attest: “One thing I remember vividly from this time is wondering, ‘Why are there two versions of this game?’ What I learned when I entered the company is that Falcom is not a large company. We only had the resources to come up with the game design document, then give that to somebody else.” Hudson Soft took charge of
Ys IV: The Dawn Of Ys on PC Engine, and Tonkin House developed Ys IV: Mask Of The Sun for the SNES.
The two games turned out to be quite different, but they did both return to the top-down perspective. “[With Ys III ] people were happy that a new Ys came out, but by that point they associated Ys with the ‘bump’ system. The fact that we returned to that perspective was something that fans were really happy about,” says Kondo. The Dawn Of Ys reverted to the system used in Ys II, while Mask Of The Sun revised the magic system by including the likes of harnessing elemental swords as a means of casting spells.
“When i first started, i died really early, and i can remember thinking, ‘Man, this game is hard” Toshihiro Kondo
The two games also shared a plot and setting, with Adol making a journey to Celceta, where he first encounters the deadly forces of the Romun Empire. However, the two games differ on a number of key points, and fans have their own views on which is better – fans of The Dawn Of Ys contend that it is more enjoyable to play, while those who champion Mask Of The Sun note that the plot was closer to Falcom’s design document. However, the two were able to exist side by side. “One of the cool things about having multiple versions of the same game is the fan reaction, in that all of the Ys games are purported to be Adol’s journals, and we as the players are reading through them,” Kondo explains. “The fan theory was, ‘Maybe they’re just different translations of the source material?’ So the fans took care of it, creating a solution.”
The final Ys game of the Nineties was Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom Of Sand. Ys V chronicled Adol’s first adventure on the continent of Afroca, where he searched the Xandria region for the mythical lost city of Kefin. This was Falcom’s first attempt at developing a Ys game for home consoles, and a game which sought to add more involvement to the combat element of the game. The ‘bump’ system was abandoned for good in favour of a more traditional setup – attacks required the player to press an action button, and you could also jump and even actively defend with your shield. The traditional visuals were also abandoned, with characters given more realistic proportions compared to the cartoonish characters of earlier games.
The transition to console development might not have gone as smoothly as Falcom had hoped, as
Ys V was quickly succeeded by Ys V Expert in early 1996, just a few months after the original was released in December 1995. The game had been criticised for its lack of difficulty, resulting in this second release. Neither game is amongst the top tier of action RPG games for the SNES, and at present, Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom Of Sand remains the only chapter of the story without an official English translation. It was also the last brand-new Ys game for eight years.
What was it that stopped the flow of new games after Ys V ? “This is only speculation, but I believe that there was nobody at Falcom championing the game, to say, ‘I want to make the next Ys,’” Kondo reveals to us. But by that point, Ys was already considered to be a heritage series in its home of Japan, and even a lack of new games couldn’t keep the series off the shelves. “The thing about Ys is that it’s a milestone in Japanese game development history and it’s a game series that nobody doesn’t know about,” the president explains. “For the people that entered the company around the same time I did, all of them probably entered with an affection towards the series. When I first entered the company, what I did for a while was to create remakes of the old Ys games.”
When the Ys series reached its tenth birthday in 1997, the first two games were remade in the form of Ys I & II Eternal. This kicked off a major project of remaking and updating the older Ys games for modern platforms – not only would Ys I & II Eternal be continuously updated and revised, but external developers gave Ys III an enhanced 2D remake, and both Ys IV: Mask Of The Sun and Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom Of Sand received full 3D remakes. The third and fourth games have since been internally remade again, resulting in Ys: The Oath In Felghana and Ys: Memories Of Celceta.
While most companies have embraced making their back catalogues available in some form, few have shown such commitment to modernising their classic releases. “The thing I was told is that a great movie is a great movie, no matter when it was made, and you can do the same thing with games,” responds Kondo when asked about the philosophy behind this approach. “The content of these games, the core of what made them good, is still there. Because of that, we can remake them. That
way the person who wants to play again can do it, but because it’s modernised and updated for new hardware, that allows new fans to get into the series – and that’s also important.”
According to Kondo, it was tackling these remakes that gave the team the sense of ownership needed to finally push the Ys series into the future. “As a matter of course, during making these remakes, the team gained a feeling that ‘we want to make a new one too, we want to see what Adol’s next adventure is’,” he explains. “We’d just made Ys I & II Eternal, and we were told, ‘Okay, it’s time to make Ys III Eternal.’ And we said,
‘No, we’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge of game development and design – let us make Ys VI, please.’ We were finally able to convince the founder to allow us to do that, and that’s where Ys VI came from. So this was a natural progression of working on the series, and my team was the one which took on Ys VI.”
Ys VI: The Ark Of Napishtim took Adol to the furthest reaches of the Ys universe seen so far, the Canaan Islands, where he awakens after being attacked by Romun ships. It also introduced a new graphical style, featuring 3D environments and prerendered 2D sprites, and retained the more involved combat of
Ys V. The game was initially released for PC in 2003, and Konami picked it up for a PS2 release in 2005 – bringing the series back outside of Japan in the process. Reception to the game was mixed, but broadly positive. Eurogamer offered it 6/10, noting that it had “really quite nice graphics, lovely artwork in parts and fantastic music”, but complaining that “it’s hard to escape just how old-fashioned some of the game mechanics seem to be”. This didn’t matter, as the return of Ys quickly picked up into overdrive.
By the mid-noughties, the Ys series was as active as it had been at its peak in the late Eighties. This led to the first ever prequel in the series, 2006’s Ys Origin. As it was set centuries before the events of the original game, Adol doesn’t star in the game – instead, you can choose between three characters with their own combat styles. The plot concerned the original battle between the land of Ys and demonic forces. The twin goddesses Reah and Feena had disappeared from Ys and returned to the surface, having seemingly gone to Darm Tower. Convinced that Ys would not survive without the goddesses, the six priests of Ys organised a search party to find them, and that’s where the player comes in. The game was a PC exclusive for over a decade before coming to Playstation Vita and PS4 in 2017, and the game received a better critical reception than its predecessor.
However, it’s unlikely that we’ll see a game like Ys Origin any time soon. “Ys I & II are iconic games and Ys Origin was a love letter to them, so I’d like to make Ys Origin II and continue that story because I really like exploring that aspect of the lore,” Kondo admits. “However, the general consensus in the company is ‘let’s do something new’ so I don’t know if or when I’ll have time to do it again. Of course, the setting of the Ys lore is that there are over 100 of Adol’s journals, and we’re only at eight, so we need to get going!”
Indeed, the next Falcom-developed game in the series was the next numbered instalment, simply titled Ys Seven. This was the first game in the series
“I was told is that a great movie is a great movie, no matter when it was made, and you can do the same thing with games” Toshihiro Kondo
to be developed primarily for a handheld system, as it made its debut on the PSP in 2009. Adol and Dogi travel together once more, this time visiting Altago, where strange earthquakes have been disturbing the population. However, the fact that Adol wasn’t travelling alone would become significant beyond plot points for the first time, as he is accompanied by other party members during battle. “When developing for consumer systems, we needed to keep the whole screen lively, and that’s what led to the party system,” Kondo explains. “Adol is obviously the focal point while playing, but you have other characters on the screen doing other things as well to create this really vibrant, interesting look.” Ys Seven was well-liked by the press thanks to its addictive combat, with an 8/10 score from games™ broadly representative of its reception.
The most recent game in the series is Ys VIII: Lacrimosa Of Dana, which was released for Playstation Vita in 2016 in Japan, and worldwide for Vita and PS4 in 2017. The game has placed a broader emphasis on other characters than any Ys game before, in particular thanks to a new character called Dana, a mysterious girl who appears in Adol’s dreams. “One thing that we discussed is that for 30 years, Adol has been the main character, and for 30 years we’ve been seeing things
from his perspective,” explains Kondo. “The big focal point when developing Ys VIII was how to overcome this problem, if you can call it a problem. So the solution was to have sequences in the game where Adol is dreaming, and seeing the world through somebody else’s eyes. That allows us to do something new with the perspective while still being faithful to the idea that this is Adol’s story.”
“We needed to keep the whole screen lively, and that’s what led to the party system” Toshihiro Kondo
But Dana isn’t the only other character who matters in Ys VIII. “Up until now, it’s been Adol’s tale by himself,” says Kondo. “In Ys VIII, you’re on a passenger liner that sinks, and Adol has to find the rest of the passengers so you get to see all of them and their stories. The amount of people that are involved in the story and have their own arcs through it is much greater than in previous Ys games.” This plays into the game design in the form of side quests too, according to Kondo. “Because you’re searching for companions who were with you on the boat, in addition you’re on a deserted island that you’re mapping, so when you find these people they come together and build a village, and you’re able to grow that village throughout the course of the game.” Ys VIII has done very well with critics, with the PS4 release holding a commendable score of 85 on Metacritic. Praise for the game is focused on the engaging characters, the large amount of additional content besides the main game’s quest, and a combat system which allows for fast and satisfying battles.
Despite the ups and downs of Falcom itself and a lengthy period outside of the international spotlight, the Ys series has endured because it maintains its status as an approachable entry point to the Japanese RPG scene. With easy-to-learn combat and self-contained stories, it’s not hard to jump into a Ys game – yet for the long-term fan there’s plenty of interesting lore to discover, and depth to the combat systems that ensures that they remain satisfying over the whole course of the game. That satisfying feeling of popping bubble wrap has never gone away – and so long as it remains a fixture of the Ys series, the Ys series will remain a fixture of videogaming.