Ys is not a well known RPG series in western countries. This is largely because of its limited release in these territories. Ys 1 and 2 were released for the PC in the 1980’s by Broderbund of all publishers, but the series went into hiding for more than a decade before it finally re-emerged on Playstation 2 with the release of Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim.
The game’s obscurity can be owed in blamed on its creator, Falcom. While most developers and publishers jumped ship in the 80’s and moved to the Family Computer, Falcom felt it prudent to stick with the PC platform, only publishing on consoles with the help of outside development. Considering the huge incongruency and culturally relative PC markets across oceans, it’s no surprise that multitudes of Falcom’s releases remain unknown.
My dirty admission in all of this is that I’m not a big Ys fan. My opinion of the series was colored by horrible ports and botched improvements. I have several rabid Ys fans for friends, and it was about time I validated (or at least attempted to) their downright sickening devotion to the company.
Anyone who follows my twitter noticed that I was desperately reaching out to the collective knowledge of the internet geek community for help on what to buy. Falcom’s history is twisted, winding, and wholly incomprehensible to the uninitiated, and traps are too easy to fall into without prior knowledge. The right people missed the twitter until it was too late, unfortunately, but I came back unscathed, and with a couple quality titles in tow.
Both Ys I&II Complete and Ys The Oath in Felghana are considered to be excellent games. It was hard to choose where to begin my Ys collection, but considering the amount of praise I received after others laid eyes upon the acquisitions, I made the decision that I had made the right choice.
Ys I&II Complete is a compilation of the first two games in their final remade form, while Oath in Felghana is a remake of Ys 3, the black sheep of the series, in the original top-down action RPG style of its predecessors.
The next titles on the list are Ys V for Super Famicom, and Ys VI for PC. Wish me luck!
Yeah, Ys IV is significantly better on the Turbo/PCE (and one of the more exciting games near the end of the life of that system along with Dracula X from Konami), although the Super Famicon one isn’t *so* bad, IMHO, at least it plays like a proper Ys game, which I can’t really say for Ys III or V (which is closer than III but felt clunky to me with the changed game mechanics).
Interestingly, Falcom considers the Super Famicon version of IV the canon one and the Turbo/PCE one an alternate version, as it was handled more by Hudson Soft and RED, I think. Unfortunately, IV never was officially released in any form in English (it would make a great Virtual Console port if Hudson got behind it, though).
As far as I know, the Turbo version of IV is the ONLY version of IV worth playing, right? There’s two completely different versions of IV (neither of which are on PC), and one is great, while the other is horrid.
To be honest, the omissions are another sign I’m just a newbie in the world of Ys. Thanks for the comments, though.
I’m surprised you omitted mentioning the PC Engine/TurboGraphx-16 CD-ROM2 versions of the game, as these versions of books 1, 2, and 4 are among some of the best versions of Ys (and still hold up reasonably well against the PC Ys Eternal/Complete remakes), and the first two are easily available through Nintendo’s Virtual Console. Many oldschool Ys fans got their first taste of Ys on the well-made TurboGraphx port, and the port was one of the first games to get a perfect rating in EGM, for what that’s worth.
Ys Eternal/Complete is a good choice for entry into the series, though, although I felt it had some balance issues compared to the PC Engine/Turbo-Graphx version. Granted, the balance issues may well be closer to the original Falcom game and were possibly adjusted specifically in the PCE version, I don’t recall for certain. But I’d also say that the Virtual Console version of the TG16 port is well worth a download for fans of retro console games.