It's new to me: Ys Books I & II
True classics that feel great to play and to listen to. You can't ask for much more than that.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
I am admittedly a late devotee to the Nihon Falcom cause, but I’m here now, and that’s what counts. I didn’t have a Turbografx-16 or an NES growing up, none of my friends had a Ys game for me to borrow, and throw in that Ys as a series vanished from North America for years and years until publishers like XSEED started localizing remakes and new entries in the series, and it’s pretty easy to see how I spent more time in the Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star realms as a youth.
So, it wasn’t until earlier in 2021 that I finally got around to playing the original Ys games. Well, the enhanced combo port of the first two Ys games, actually, which released on the Turbografx-CD add-on in 1990, and as a pack-in game for the TurboDuo (which combined the Turbografx-CD with the Turbografx-16 into one system) in 1992. I still don’t have a TG-16, but Ys Books I & II are one of the many games included in the Turbografx-16 Mini, which I will stress once again, rules. A not-insignificant part of how much this mini rules is due to its Ys entry.
While Ys games tend to avoid being connected in too many ways, other than by protagonist Adol Christin, who is the star of each of them outside of the scene-setting, set-700-years-beforehand prequel Ys Origins, these two titles are of a piece, hence their being packaged together. The first game has you collecting the magic books of the vanished land of Ys, in order to defeat an evil that threatens the not-vanished land of Esteria. After Adol vanquishes said evil, he’s transported to Ys, which it turns out hasn’t vanished, so much as risen up into the sky. The game opens with Adol, in your control, returning the books of Ys to the hands of various statues in an underground labyrinth, in order to collect new powers and open a path to a shrine that houses an ancient evil that needs to be defeated in order to finally save Ys, as well as the land below it. You begin the game, stats- and level-wise, exactly where you left off in Ys Book I, except now your screen has a meter for how many magic points you have, since you will be able to do things like shoot fireballs in Book II.
Ys — pronounced sort of like “ease” but with more emphasis upfront — is the one where you bump into enemies, yes, especially in Book I, where you didn’t have any alternative means of attack. At least, that’s how you played the older ones. Ys Books I & II are action RPGs where the hacking and slashing is more implied than anything. You don’t press a button to swing a sword around: you equip a sword, as well as armor and a shield and an accessory of some kind that might increase your speed in some way, and then you crash into enemies. This isn’t a random process by any means: it’s all math, with the game calculating your attack and defense and speed against a given foe’s own stats. You’ll know it’s time to move on to tougher enemies when you’re able to get through your encounters in an area relatively unscathed, and you’ll know you need to be careful about how long you risk incessant crashing into an enemy when they hit you for major damage whenever an attack gets through, or if way more of their attacks are hitting you than yours are landing on them.
It might seem odd at first, but there is a real rhythm to it. You’ll start to inherently know when to back off for a second before charging in again, as a way to reset the math and avoid enemy attacks, and the process of leveling up a bit before you go into a new area is more enjoyable in Ys than in any other classic RPG where grinding exists, be it as a necessity or optional, but advised. Level grinding in Dragon Quest or early Phantasy Star titles or what have you can be tedious and slow going, and was a game mechanic used to compensate for the smaller cartridges of the day, as a way to extend the overall length of the game and experience. Level grinding in Ys extends the game play, too, but it just feels so good to play, that it never feels like the chore that it does in other games of the era. That it’s action-focused, with exploration at its core, too, helps a lot. That you have the Metroid thing going on, where your two feelings throughout are “I’m unstoppable!” and “oh God I’m going to die,” with no in between, helps as well.
You’ll see instantaneous results from leveling, with your protagonist, Adol Christin, getting significant gains from each level in his strength and defense that make noticeable differences in how your fights go. There’s no stopping to admire the stat increases, either: you can go check the status menu, sure, but the game makes a sound effect that signifies a level up, and there is no pause in the action. You just notice that your foes are going down a little easier than they were before the sound effect, and will go down even easier after the next one.
Ys also, like Nihon Falcom games tend to do, balances experience from fights in a way that ensures you’re always able to catch up and avoid being underleveled. How much experience you get is not based on the enemy you fight, necessarily, but what level you are compared to them. Of course, tougher enemies are worth more experience, but how much you actually get from the fight is determined by your own level vs. theirs. So, as you narrow the level gap between you and a particular foe, they’ll start giving you less XP per kill. And when you’re a higher level than they are, well, they can still give you the same amount of gold they used to, so it’s not as if continuing to fight them is useless, but you’ll want to be seeking out opponents that are giving you 30 or 60 or 100 experience points per kill, rather than one or three or whatever you get from the guys you essentially just trample over.
This allows you to catch up in a hurry if you happen to be underleveled in a new area, or if you get wrecked by a boss that it turns out is much tougher than the enemies before him suggested he would be. And again, the grinding process doesn’t take long compared to other games, or at least it doesn’t feel like it does, in part because of how Ys’ systems work. So fluid, so action-focused, so much speed, especially if you choose to play the game in the faster mode instead of the slower, normal setting. I actually played most of the game(s) on the faster speed, since it increased Adol’s run speed significantly, but I would set it back to normal for some boss fights, as projectiles and your foes also move faster on the higher setting, not just you. For traversing large spaces, though, and mowing down entire lanes of enemies by crashing into them at high speeds, it’s basically turbo for walking, and it’s great.
You will do all of this while listening to one of the great soundtracks of video games, too. Here, I’ll embed the whole thing so you can listen to it while you read, and also afterward when you realize it’s sticking with you:
When you discover who composed the original songs for Ys I and II, you will not be surprised that they kick ass: Yuzo Kashiro got his start composing for Nihon Falcom, with work on Dragon Slayer games as well as the first few Ys titles, before moving on to his own company and working on titles like Streets of Rage 2. Kashiro’s (and Mieko Ishikawa’s) tracks from the originals were arranged by Ryo Yonemitsu for this enhanced port, which leaned on the extra audio capabilities provided by the Turbografx-CD format to utilize Red Book audio. Hence the CD-quality sound in the game, since it is using the audio format of compact discs. It still sounds awesome today, but I can imagine that, back in 1990, it was mindblowing to be looking at this colorful, 8-bit action RPG — which looked great, but was very much of its time — while hearing a CD-quality guitar shredding instead of chiptunes.
It’s not just the quality of the audio itself, but the quality of the songs: when you listen to the soundtrack for Ys Books I & II, you’re also hearing the direction a whole bunch of JRPGs and their composers would go in for the next 20-30 years. When I listen to Ys’ soundtrack, I’m also hearing various Tales of games, I’m hearing the direction Sega would put their audio in throughout their time as a console developer, I’m hearing some of the influence that would inspire the work of Monolith Soft’s amazing soundtracks. Motoi Sakuraba is a contemporary, sure, but there is little chance he wasn’t influenced by Ys Books I & II, and since that one guy has composed for Namco Bandai, tri-Ace, Camelot, Nintendo, and even From Software, well, that means you hear a lot of that influence all over.
I’m not saying Ys is single-handedly responsible for how Japanese games sound or anything, nothing to that hyperbolic degree, but it’s hard to deny that other developers and composers did anything besides absorb the sound of Ys Books I & II and then utilize the lessons learned in their own works. No different than how Squaresoft’s gameplay and narrative influence from Final Fantasy impacted contemporary JRPG developers, or how Nintendo’s work on The Legend of Zelda helped define the action-adventure genre for years to come. Ys, and developer Nihon Falcom, play a massive role in the development and refinement of the action RPG, but they’re also responsible for helping to chart the course of sound in video games from the 80s, 90s, and beyond.
Why such influence? The way Ys sounds is part of what makes it feel so good to play, its harmonious marriage between its action and its sound is one that was and should be the envy of everyone else in the same business. Running around bumping into enemies to level up, exploring, and so on is just far more enjoyable when this is what you’re hearing as you do it:
It drives you forward, it compels you to continue on. It knows when to slow things down and pull out the strings, it knows when to slam on the distortion pedal or bring out the heavy-hitting synthesizer. Every choice was the right one, and I knew listening to it the very first time that it was going to be a soundtrack I listened to from then on out, just because. If you’ve played Ys Books I & II before, you know exactly what I mean, and if you end up playing because of what I’m writing here, you’ll come to understand in a hurry, too.
This feeling of being driven forward and compelled to go on isn’t just because of the audio, of course. Ys Books I & II do a great job of pointing you in the direction you need to go, without holding your hand to do it. Ask around in town, and you’ll find out where you need to go, and why you might need to go there. Then you’ll free someone who is trapped, or kidnapped, or you’ll find some specific item that has either been lost by a townsperson or to time: regardless of what it is you find, it will help you in your next task, or, at the least, point you toward it. You’re always moving forward, pressing on, in battle, in exploration, in the story. Adol just keeps going on and on, which ended up working well for the overarching narrative of the Ys series, too. Adol is an adventurer, going from one place to the next, never settling in or putting down roots. He explores, and in exploring he finds people. When he finds people, he finds trouble, and he then goes about trying to end that trouble for the sake of the people.
It’s like a combination of the tales of heroes from ancient myths, who basically walked or rode around looking for evils to vanquish and peoples to save mostly because they were capable of doing just that, or the heroes from westerns, who would quite literally ride off into the sunset after solving whatever trouble the story was centered around. Ys Books I & II don’t tell a story about an entire world that needs saving from a great evil. They tell the story of very localized evils, of very local troubles; though, to the people whose troubles they are, those evils threaten what is, to them, the entire world. At a time when so much media is consumed by always ramping up the threat level to involve the entire world, or galaxy, or universe, even in stories that start out seeming more personal, sometimes it’s nice to experience a tale of a guy trying to help out a few local villages that just happen to be geographically oriented around a shrine containing an ancient evil that a single hero can dispose of, so long as they have the right sword.
No offense to the larger-scale narratives of a Final Fantasy or a Phantasy Star, of course. But Ys is often, to borrow a modern phrase, a game about a little guy running around, and friends, we love a game about a little guy running around. This was maybe never more true than in Ys Books I & II, which may seem dated on the surface, just from reading about how they play. But I promise you, they’re as fun now as they ever were, if only you let yourself experience what they have to offer.
Ys Books I & II are available on the Turbografx-16 Mini — which, again, absolutely worth buying — but that’s not the only place. You can also play an updated version of the duo on Windows, or the Nintendo DS, or the Playstation Portable (though, given some of the reception to the collision detection on the DS edition, maybe you should avoid that particular enhanced port). If you somehow do not have access to any of those platforms, Android and iOS are also options, as those platforms received separate releases for Ys I and II. It’s not quite as hard to find as it used to be, which means folks like myself have run out of excuses for not having played it. I’ve solved that particular problem for myself, at least. You should, too.
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