Playing through Lagoon recently, it made me curious on just how it compares to the game its so clearly copying, Ys Books I & II. I’ve played through the DS remake of Ys I & II many years ago, but I’ve never actually so much as looked at the original version of the games. I then realized that I actually have a perfect way to play the contemporary versions of those games via my PC Engine Mini, and set right to work playing through them once I finished with Lagoon. It took me about 18 or 20 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on my PCE Mini without abusing save states.

Ys Books I & II, as its name implies, is the first two Ys games back-to-back, as they are each one half of one larger story: Book I is our hero Adol unraveling the mystery of the tomes of Ys and climbing the Tower of Darm, and then Book II is him actually in the titular Ys and saving it from the great evil that besieges it. Being action/adventure games from the late-80’s, the writing isn’t exactly anything terribly impressive (it’s a bit too exposition heavy and the cast is a bit too packed with one-dimensional characters, for starters), but the voice acting this PCE CD version adds to the PC-88 originals definitely helps it stand out that much more. It’s highly improved by the remakes the story has gotten over the years, but it’s quite impressive for a game this old nonetheless.

The gameplay of Ys I & II is actually a little different between games, but the building blocks are the same, and they share the most important one anyhow: bump combat. Back when making games, especially on home computers, faced a lot more difficult technical hurdles, some games opted to forego an ability to swing your sword at things and instead just have combat decided by how you happened to run at your enemy and make contact with them. This collision-based combat has been since deemed “bump combat”, and while Ys is far from the first instance of it, it’s definitely one of the most famous.

That said, just because it’s historically interesting doesn’t really mean that it’s good, and I think that we’ve since moved away from bump combat for very good reasons. Your power in Ys is determined not just by what sword, shield, and armor you’re using, but also your level, as this game has light RPG-elements in how you get experience points from killing enemies. While there are actual mechanics to the bump combat here (it isn’t all random or stat-based), you and your enemies move so fast that you functionally don’t really have much reason to think of them most of the time. As long as you’re not standing still (in which case you will definitely take a very nasty hit), you’re bump combat-ing more or less correctly.

Ys II adds offensive magic that makes fighting bosses in particular feel far more like your choices actually matter, but Ys I has no such system to benefit from. Bump combat is neat in how fast and simple it is, sure, but it’s so simple that I ultimately felt myself questioning why it was even there in the first place. Especially given just how much grinding is necessary in these games, bump combat often just makes the “combat” feel like nothing but padding between boss fights, and those boss fights are pretty lousy too. Either you’re getting mulched because your stats/equipment aren’t high enough (or that boss has some really annoying gimmick that makes them awful to hit like the one in the mines), or you’re instantly mulching them because your stats are high enough. The final boss of Ys I and especially the final boss of Ys II are some stand outs as for how they really make you use some strategy and reflexes to dodge projectiles and such, but the combat and boss fights in both games are frankly really underwhelming compared to a lot of other action/adventure games we had by the late-80’s.

This wouldn’t be such an issue if the story were good or interesting, which it isn’t terribly, or the level/dungeon design were good, but that’s also sadly not the case. Both games (but especially Ys I) suffer from some really rough level design, and the signposting can make it absolutely maddening on where you’re actually meant to go next. Ys I is packed with necessary plot items hidden in all corners of its dungeons, and it’s very easy to make a wrong turn or just not realize one is there at all, so then you’re stuck wondering just what the heck you missed, wandering around for ages just trying to find some semblance of where to go. Ys II is thankfully far better in this regard, but both games have some pretty rough design in just how sprawling and maze-like their dungeons are, and with basically all enemies fighting the same way (it’s all just bump-to-win) too, it’s not like dungeons really feel all that different from one another anyhow outside of aesthetics. A lot of Ys I & II’s issues are far from unique to them for their era, and a lot of their issues come down to their large ambitions more than anything, but that’s cold comfort in current-year when those failed ambitions just make things frustrating more than they do fun or interesting a lot of the time.

Given that the aesthetics are from 1989, they’re really impressive and show off a ton of just what the PC Engine could do with its fancy CD tech! While they’ll hardly put later games in the 16-bit generation to shame, they’re both very impressive for the time and still pretty now. On that same note, the music is absolutely excellent. Lots of awesome, rocking tracks that underlie the action at hand really well. If anything, they’re so awesome that the action should kick things up a couple of notches just to keep up! XD

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as I ragged on this game for a lot of reasons, I did still quite enjoy it at the end of the day. While the first Ys games really do show their age quite a bit in this, one of their earliest remasters, they’re still fun games and it’s no surprise that the series got so popular off of games like this. I think it’s going to be a hard sell for all but the biggest of retro fans to go back to this particular version of Ys I & II these days when there are so many excellent remakes that Falcom has made since, but there’s still some fun to be found here for those who are willing to look for it.

Rating this is a bit tough cause I really like book 1 and am a bit more cooled on book 2, but I think overall the experience would average out to pretty good! I really like Book 1, it's a short but fun romp and I really like it, with the big downside being the bosses are kinda bad outside of a couple that I like (The Mantis and Oni heads). On the other hand, Book 2 is a game with great scale and some really cool looking environments, but I like the bosses even less than 1 and had to even grind a bit just to beat the final boss which is even more of an RNG hell than the book 1 final boss. I just didn't vibe with it as much as I liked, but overall the experiences are worth it. Collection+ is probably the most ideal to onboard a new player as I once was, but it's fun to go back and check out how they used to be!

Book I: fantastic little adventure game for the PC Engine CD, the progression can sometimes become grindy but generally is paced well, and the dungeons are all huge and spooky.

Minor drawbacks were the sometimes obtuse puzzling (I am not sure if there was any clue to use the hammer on that specific pillar) and the slightly obnoxious backtracking (having to trek back down to the 11th floor of Darm Tower when I was on the 21st was quite the blow to my patience).

However, these were only small hitches in an otherwise extremely fun adventure with simple intuitive combat and a mysterious story unfolding in a beautiful fantasy world. Great RPG adventure.

Book II: I have an MP bar now! This was extremely fun, the puzzles were good and I barely had to look up a guide at all. The one thing I did look at guides for was some of the bosses. The last boss on the PC Engine CD version of the game is a total nightmare.

But the story, the cutscenes, the exploration, the art, the music, were all awesome. Everything was lovingly crafted and it's an extremely impressive game for the time it was released.

I found myself taking notes and writing them in character for this game, too. Roleplaying like this was really fun and helped me keep track of clues to puzzles and things like that which I highly recommend.

The way the story concluded arcs that began in Book I is also impressive. A great game.

Ys : A forgotten Revolution

The 80's were such a pivotal time for the history of video games. If you think making games is hard now, imagine what it must've been like in an era where pretty much everything had to be invented, you didn't have bricks as much as you had clay to build those bricks before you could even build the house itself. To most people, 80’s gaming is now a distant relics of a long forgotten past, something not worth going back to if only for curiosity sake, it seems impossible to imagine than a game this ancient can even impress anyone nowadays and yet to me, Ys 1&2 did and they did it spectacularly well.

The Action-RPG genre was barely a thought in the minds of many people but a small studio by the name of Falcom was going to launch a revolution within the genre, a revolution that will put them on the map not as icons but as pioneers of a new age of virtual entertainment. Falcom pretty much invented the Action-RPG genre with their old classic such as Dragon Slayer and its sequel Dragon Slayer II : Xanadu (the Dragon Slayer series by itself being the converging point of about 3/4th of Falcom’s entire catalog of franchise) but as much as these games were small revolutions in the mind of many, they were not the cult classic hit and aside from a few turbo-boomer, you hear very little people going back to the original Xanadu in spite of its reputation ! But in 1987, Falcom released what will be known as their core-franchise for a long while (until it was later replaced to my regret by a much more ambitious but ever so frustratingly disappointing series that I’ve already covered in details on this account) and this franchise was Ys ! Originally thought of as one big game, the final draft of the project will end up becoming a two-parters with Ys II releasing a year later in 1988, suffice to say that every port of both titles past 1988 bundled them together into one singular entry which to my surprise flows surprisingly well into one another despite an hard reset at the start of Part II.

One of those legendary ports is of course the version of the game I’m reviewing today, the 1989 PC-Engine edition of Ys 1&2 developed by Hudson Soft, to many it is considered the definitive version of Ys 1&2 even with the existence of Chronicles + which is the more widely available version of this game in the year of our lord 2023 but the reason why I decided to review the PC-Engine version instead is because while Chronicles + is a really competent remake worth experiencing and perhaps more palatable to a newer audience, it also operated a bunch of changes (mostly to Ys 1, Ys 2 is rather faithful to the original game) some goods of course and some that comes in complete contradiction with the spirit of the original game and the main idea behind its game design philosophy which I will develop further down the line.

See the entire idea behind Ys started pretty much on the same basis as those of the original Dragon Quest which was released a year earlier and which is to make a genre as complex and complicated to navigate through as accessible and easy to understand for console and their limited resources to handle complex systems that were seen on computer as well and pen and paper RPG at the time by translating and digesting those systems for newcomers to the genre. And even with the original Dragon Quest succeeding to such an absurd degree that it pretty much invented an entire subgenre of Japanese Role-Playing Game onto itself, some developers namely Masaya Hashimoto (main programmer and director of the original Ys) thought that they could do even better to fulfill that idea of making the RPG genre more welcoming and thus different systems were put into place to elaborate on that philosophy.
One of the main things that will strike most modern player as odd with Ys is its peculiar battle system, it’s true that nowadays pushing a button to attack sounds like a evidence but back in the day it wasn’t really the case and in fact for many years, the action-rpg genre used this so called “bump system” from Tower of Druaga to the original Hydlide, it was just the norm at the time and Ys just elaborated a bit further on this idea. To hurt enemies in Ys you simply have to bump into them until they die, simple, yet effective but Ys added another layer that didn’t exist in previous iterations of this system which is that it’s encouraged to bump into enemies from their sides rather than from the front, in one part to deal more damage to them and in another to avoid getting damages yourself ! The system, though simple, has a rather steep learning curve that might throw people off at the start of the game and in fact, the game pretty much forces you to interact with it head on in order to immediately buy the necessary equipment to advance throughout the story. It doesn’t make the best first impression but once you get a hold of it, you will realize that as archaic as the bump system can seem at first, it’s actually quite a brilliantly elegant system even compared to its contemporaries at the time which used action buttons !

Its elegance is due to one core factor that makes Ys such a satisfying game to play in it that every interaction with the world (aside from occasionally navigating menus to equip items which is also vastly simplified compared to most RPGs) is done through movement ! Combat is based on movement and positioning, interacting with NPC is done by simply bumping into them which triggers their dialogue boxes, what few puzzles the game has are also based on movement and of course all these elements converge together into the fact that all of this contributes to the main gameplay loop of the game which is exploration ! Ys is a game of constant motion, never stopping, always rushing from moment to moment gameplay, it’s a game which demands its player never stop in the pursuit of adventure and this feeling of constant motion is amplified by the absolutely kick-ass soundtrack playing in the back.

The main composer of the game is Yuzo Koshiro, a guy that will later down the line become infamous for his work at Sega and even though he didn’t himself rearrange the tracks for the PC-Engine version, he still did more than an excellent job with establishing Falcom’s future legacy of their games being carried by impressively excellent soundtrack. Ys is the series for which the JDK team was formed after Yuzo Koshiro left and it definitely works with Ys fast-paced constantly moving action that make the series seem like it was Zelda for people who like to rush through corridors to the sound of death metal like a Doom Player !

But the Bump System and movement alone couldn’t fulfill the fantasy of an easily accessible yet fun video game for newcomers of the genre. It’s also how straightforward yet not streamlined the progression of the game is. Ys 1 is composed of 2 very small overworld areas, 2 villages, 2 dungeons and of course the final stretch of the game being the Darm Tower, a final dungeon so ambitious in its scope and scale it represents the second half of the game by itself ! There is no need to go heal at an Inn and there’s very few shops in the game ! In fact if you want to heal while on the overworld, you can just stop and wait for your health bar to fill up, in dungeons however you will either need a special ring or use an item to fill your HP bar to emphasize how dangerous adventuring into dungeons feel compared to the overworld.

This simple yet elegant design in both form and execution is ultimately what made Ys 1 a classic which stood the test of time even more than a lot of its successors !
No line of dialogues is wasted, no step towards completing the quest is too bullshit or cryptic and you can finish the game simply by paying attention to the in-game dialogues and putting one and two together. Of course there’s some side-objectives that could trouble your progression but they’re generally well integrated within the main game. In (dark) fact the final boss of the game has a weakness which is a puzzle to the scale of the entire game with the game even tricking you with an higher tier of equipment that will do fuck all to him !

And even the grinding process is thought in a way to always make the player see the horizon of his progress, at the bottom of the screen, you can see all the information you need which includes how much EXP you need to level up and see in real time how much EXP enemies gives you, which hints towards how much work you have to put into leveling up and also the EXP rate is degressive meaning that eventually power-grinding in an area is rarely worth it past the soft-level cap imposed by the game at certain points (you also gain an automatic level up upon completing certain task which is neat) and even if you do struggle with the game, you can pretty much save whenever and wherever you want which is an impressive technical feat for the time as well as great for accessibility.

And here’s where my issue lies with the Chronicles version of Ys 1 specifically, the shinier graphics, the full-analog movement and remixed soundtrack are all welcome additions but Ys 1 as a remake want to both be faithful to the original but also add a bit too much fluff which somehow make the game more archaic in its progression than the original game, the overworld is now big and full of empty spaces that weren’t present in the original game, the PNJ now update their dialogues for every story moment (an heritage from Falcom’s Legend of Heroes series) which is great for worldbuilding and such but also muddles the actually helpful information for game progression under a ton of fluff that’s not necessary to the game’s progression but I think what kills this remake a bit is how they’ve handled the level progression and the bosses !

The thing with Ys 1&2 on the PC-Engine however is that since it was pretty much two games fused together back to back, the leveling curve was a bit smoother and spread out for the entire duration of the two games which is great ! But the chronicles version of Ys 1 and 2 separates them into different executables which means that Ys 1 had to change up its leveling system to accommodate. Now you’re only capped at Level 10 and each level up is a significant boost to your stats meaning that the difference between owning a boss’s ass or the boss owning yours is arbitrarily be about at which level you enter the boss arena and the entire second half of the game is going to be reliant solely on your own skills in navigating the bump combat system which somehow despite the introduction of diagonal movement is somehow stricter than in the PC-Engine version but also the bosses are also badly coded !

Their patterns, behaviors and sometimes collisions are heavily fucked over for some reasons and don’t get me started on the final boss which is meme’d across the entire community for being a complete RNG fest of projectiles and framerate turboboosting, it’s an hilariously bad boss but one that makes it probably more memorable than its more manageable original counterpart, to give you an idea, it took me 1 try to defeat Dark Fact in the original and probably 12 for the Chronicles version, it’s actually ridiculous. Since Chronicles is the more widely available version, most people will probably get out of Ys 1 thinking it’s actually more outdated and janky than it actually was which definitely isn’t supposed to be the goal of a remake, it’s not game ruining or anything but I do think that it needed to be discussed.
I spent most of the review talking about my love of Ys 1 and I somehow still haven’t talked about Ys II, well it’s because to me Ys 1&2 are part of the same whole and most of the qualities of Ys 1 follows through on Ys 2 but even then I do think that Ys 2 is the lesser of the two halves mostly because of a few unfortunate decisions, it’s still a good game but the way it handles certain parts that Ys 1 nailed so much kinda frustrates me. The game is definitely more streamlined than its predecessor, in Ys 1 if you wanted to do certain things out of order to get some of the best equipments right from the start well nothing was stopping you aside from the enemies which you can easily ignore but in Ys 2 the progression is a bit more linear, instead of exploring a world, it feels like you’re exploring a set of levels which themselves are dungeons with their own navigation puzzle and NPC quest to wrap your head around !

Again this doesn’t constitute a flaw but I think that they could’ve expanded on the non-linearity and exploration aspect of Ys 1 even further, as for the combat while the bump system is still into place, this time the game introduces magic such as fireballs and a spells that lets you turn into a monster to discuss with the local fauna, that second spells is especially fun to use to get some fun tidbit and dialogues with the different monsters you’ve been slaying mindlessly so it’s a neat addition even if a bit gimmicky but the fireballs kinda break the flow of combat since they’re pretty much the safer options all the time and all the bosses asides from the last 2 are immune to bump combat and weak to fireballs turning these confrontations into bullet hell segment and even more so when contrary to the Chronicles version of Ys 2 one shot you if they hit you forcing a perfect run.

The overall navigation can also be a bit more confusing at times even with how segmented the game feels, the final dungeon of the game aka “The Solomon Shrine” is especially known for being a bit of a head scratcher the first way though with all of its floors and layers and weird conditions to progress into it and the story and this is something even the remake couldn’t make smoother.

Again, nothing that makes Ys 2 an unworthy successor to the first game let alone a bad game or a bad sequel, in fact Ys 2 focuses a bit more on its narration contrary to Ys 1 since it’s supposed to be the “answer arc” of the duology and in that way, it’s an amazing send-off to the duology and the series as a whole (well until they decided to make Ys III making the subtitle of Ys II “The Final Chapter” a bit of an oxymoron but oh well).

In fact this is also something that surprised me compared to a lot of RPG’s of its era and its how subtly well told the story of the game is which is definitely helped by the game’s presentation on the PC-Engine adding animated cutscenes and dubbed dialogue which is missing from other versions of the game including you guessed it, the Chronicles Version. I think that despite its age and the relative straightforwardness of its premise (Random adventurer investigate a demon invasion and uncover the truth about an ancient civilization), the way it’s told as well as incorporated inside of the gameplay loop really make the story of the game stand out from the crowd compared to a lot of its contemporaries, it’s definitely helped in part by the excellent character design, I mean Feena and Reah alone are mostly carried by how they than by their dialogues but also by the myriads of little details in dialogue and ofc the different book of Ys you uncover, some characters even manage to pop-off like Dogi who becomes a mainstay of the series as Adol’s life-long partner or even Lilia, the happy go lucky village girl who helps you on your quest throughout all of Ys II.
This is also something for which I’m going to give an edge to the chronicles version, if both versions follow the same throughline, Chronicles adds a lot of additional fluff to the dialogues which makes the setting of the game more alive than ever and even some addition that ties the game to the lore of the rest of the series, the ending was also changed to be more focused and conclusive towards Adol and Feena relationship which is all fine by me because I enjoy this couple far more than the Adol and Lilia pairing that seem to be a more natural and less tragic path for Adol to choose from but is also tremendously boring as a result (even if they do some cool things with it in the two different version of Ys IV which we may or may not talk about in a future review). In fact I did get a bit emotional during the ending of Chronicles especially with its new beautiful rendition of Feena’s theme but if I’m being honest I do miss this game having more animated cutscenes and voiced dialog. To me both versions of the story are complementary to one another and in the end, it’s worth experiencing both versions to see which part of which did you like best and to form your own opinion on the matter.

I also mentioned that the game includes its narration quite well within its gameplay loop which makes me think about Adol and how I think Adol is one of the rare valid mute protagonists. It’s been established later down in the franchise that the meta-narrative surrounding the Ys series is that we don’t actually play as Adol but rather one interpretation of Adol based on what he chronicled in his book, not only does this tie well with all the older titles getting remakes and as such have slight discrepancies between the different version but also because that means we don’t need Adol to talk, there has been a few games that made Adol talk and the more recent entry definitely push towards a more talkative Adol but I also don’t think it’s necessary, Adol is a badass adventure who rushes to the occasion and acts like a hero, he’s brave, fearless, strong and part of about 20 different prophecies ! His date of birth is the “Year 0” of Ys universes calendar and it’s all up to the game to make you feel like you’re playing as an absolute unstoppable unit which as I mentioned earlier, the game succeeds thanks to this constant sense of motion, an excellent sense of pacing (a word modern Falcom seems to have completely forgotten about) and a kick-ass soundtrack which as much the soundtrack of Adol’s life than it is the soundtrack of the environment he visits.

I also mentioned earlier how the game hides a puzzle to the scale of the whole game and that’s because the villain goes around stealing Silver tools from everyone, the more you progress through the game and the more you sense that it’s kinda weird for someone to be stealing such a specific item and it turns out that not only is it because it’s his weakness but also because Silver is another name for Cleria a much more legendary metal which was the cause of Ys’s downfall and the invasion of Darm’s demon army ! In (dark) fact, I actually recommend to watch the two ova adaptations which adds a lot of layer to the villain of Ys 1 and his plan on top of having a kick-ass and metal as fuck interpretation of the some of the games more iconic locale but also for all the cute moments between Adol and Feena.

The game is an epic journey and I did feel a great sense of fulfillment when finishing it, both games are also extremely short (about 10h each) which makes for a big satisfying 20h game experience which to my opinion stood the test of time much more than people gave it credit for.

And that’s pretty much the sad conclusion of Ys, while it is a cult classic, it’s hard to expect a younger audience to be enraptured by its proposition. Ys is a game which sadly got eclipsed by a much more clever and ambitious title at the time : the original Legend of Zelda which single handedly defined how 2D Action RPG should be made for the following decade (and will do so again with OOT for 3D action rpg games).

But I like to believe in the real strength of Ys as a game, I think both games are much better than the original Zelda or even Zelda 2 for that matter as well as better than a lot of contemporaries and imitators and in a world where Zelda didn’t exist, we could’ve probably expected Ys to be the cornerstone of an entire genre, but also this wasn’t the case but that’s ok because now Ys has known a new life and has continued for years to come, always in the shadows of giants but with a boundless sense of wonder which captured the imagination of many children and young adults over the years !

And for that, and that alone, I urge you to experience Ys 1&2 and discover how shockingly competent those games were if you’re willing to accept a few of its rougher edges and how different of a take on an action-rpg it is even by today standard in which it feels more of a curious novelty than the proper evolution of the medium it was meant to be, it’s still excellent and I love these games deeply !

Maybe I’ll make reviews for the other titles cause I feel like being a bit more positive on this account with a franchise I actually like !

First game I’ve beaten this year!!! It probably doesn’t deserve 5* for how cryptic the last dungeon, solomon shrine can be. As well as some boss fights that are pretty bad (bat demon guy in book 1. Darm is also one of the hardest bosses in any game I’ve played, if not the hardest). And the combat feeling rather janky at times. But I’ll give credit where it’s due, for a game that was released in 1989, it generally does a pretty good job of giving you hints on what to do next, so I only had to resort to a guide maybe twice for each part of the game. The QoL is also surprising, menu saving is a godsend in this kind of game.

And to cap this off with things I liked about the game:
-Maze level design is fun! The game almost feels like a metroidvania at points because of it.
-Music is fantastic.
-Bump system, while previously stated as janky, still has a lot of charm within.
-Story as well as the world building is decent-good

Bump combat at its finest.
I can't remember exactly when but the first time I tried playing this game when I was 13 or 14 years old, I couldn't even get past the first overworld area. It wasn't until about 18 years later that I was finally able to figure it out but when I did, it was the best decision I had made to replay an older game. The gameplay is obtuse (non-derogatory) but when you get into the flow state with it, it becomes the most satisfying overhead 2D combat system in existence. I honestly have not bothered playing the remakes of I & II but I do not feel like they are necessary when compared to the original intent of design on the predecessors. Has some of the best music in any game hands-down.

kind of interesting to play from a historical perspective but definitely has some issues. this game has an exceptionally bland story. could have been ripped right from a 15 yo dungeon master's notes. the music is nice but considering in both book 1 and 2 you spend about half the game in a single area you're probably going to get tired of a lot of the tracks.
bump system is the defining mechanic w these games aaaand it's kinda whatever. i think it's less engaging than standard turn based combat and feels more stat-checky. in every situation where i got stuck it wasn't because i wasn't dodging or bumping well enough, it was because i didn't have a key item or was underleveled. grinding in this game is much less fun than in a standard jrpg e.g. dragon quest because you have to have your full attention but you're still not doing anything that's really fun, so it's neither relaxing or engaging. book 1 has kind of comically easy bosses, book 2 is more stacked against the player but doesn't feel like there's much strategic depth added, you just fireball instead of bumping most of the bosses
oh yeah everyone in this game calls all enemies "goons". it's very funny. some of the lock and key stuff is also pretty silly in a way i found charming ("yeah sorry i lost this magic orb guess i have a hole in my pocket or something")

Since I started playing this game I got a job, which coupled with a lot of exams, slowed down my time to play games. As a result I took two months to finish these two ones and I don't remember all the tiny details.

It's mostly the generic kind of fantasy story that would show up at that time. I think I overall prefer Ys I better because you are finding the relics of a long lost civilization and I like lore-hunting, though Ys II removes the mystery since it is set in that same civilization up in the sky, which, while in peril, wasn't so abandoned as Ys I would make you think. Ys II has a fun to use magic spell where you can turn into a goon and talk with other enemies to know the whereabouts and clues to puzzles, but otherwise becomes more predictable than Ys I.

People tend to complain about the "bumper car" gameplay of these early Ys games, though my problem at least in these two is that roughly the last third of the game takes place in the same monotonous-looking location, a thirty-floor tower in Ys I and a giant fortress in Ys II, which makes you backtrack all the time and hurts the pacing of the adventure.

Nice soundtrack though
https://youtu.be/ZSJeWCz2cXo?si=priq7rCyHSP-gJvx
https://youtu.be/mCugddr9Tug?si=saKcVVZlpp9zT0Io (this one at 0:54 is god-tier)
https://youtu.be/G-xLS7W5vNY?si=MX9CpGZqJfN_lfud
https://youtu.be/mKW3mJfM3qY?si=OhR9MgqnlnEVOCyo
https://youtu.be/82FQuVh-XGE?si=PohjA84ciwgAJikg

A series of two games, treated as one continuous adventure that has its pros, but with far more egregious cons.

For those who appreciate the visual and auditory aesthetic of the 90's, the PC-Engine version of Ys I & II is a treat. I always looked forward to seeing the next hand-drawn piece of art, reminscent very much of the anime of that time. And my god, that music. This was one of the very first games to utilize CD audio, and they went all out on giving you one of the best soundtracks you'll ever hear. Soothing melodies, heart-pumping rock music, mysterious and ambient dungeon themes... There is so much to savor here.

The combat was unconventional, but intuitive to grasp. In contrast to turn-based RPG games, getting experience here involves bumping into your enemies at specific angles to deal rapid damage. In turn, enemies can do the same to you, albeit there are a couple ways to easily recover your HP, alongside a built-in quicksave feature. It's a fast-paced combat system that may prove more tense than you expect, but I liked it all the same.

With all that said, it was not easy giving this game two and a half stars. I mean, in spite of all that it has going for it, the most important question is... do you like mazes?

Ys's greatest weakness to me, was its level design, and that appeared evident as early as the game's second dungeon, featuring a darkness gimmick. You've got a small spotlight on you, and a series of confusing samey-looking caves with multiple splitting paths. Some of them loop around, some of them lead to dead ends. With my limited field of view, I kept walking around in circles.

This is followed up by the third dungeon, and the final one in Ys I. Suddenly, the game decided that after the last two dungeons lasting approximately 20-30 minutes, it's time for one that might as well be an entire half of the game. Although a number of unique things happen here, there were also many minor annoyances that all added up into something I really wished would've wrapped up sooner. Trial 'n error teleporting tiles, instances of backtracking, repetitive outer rooms that feel like they're there to pad out time, and the same song being drilled into your head over and over, which unfortunately was one of the weaker ones in the soundtrack to boot due to its choice of nasally synths.

All of this really tested my patience, but eventually, I reached the latter half of the package, the sequel. Which, actually was a little better in how it handled dungeon design. That is, until I got to the shrine/sewers part of the game, in which all the worst facets of maze design proceed to unfold all at once.

I simply had no idea where I was going. Things were constantly out of reach, and I had no clue how to get to any of them without hitting the same dead end I've already hit 20 times before. Multiple entrances, multiple exits, and the sewers have two layers of maze, with an upper and bottom floor which you have to figure out the right way to switch between as the game sees fit. A guide did not help. Everything looks the same, so I was incapable of placing my exact position. There was also the possibility I was doing things out of order, but I really couldn't tell. Eventually, I gave up, as it turned out I was about 30 minutes away from the credits. The rest was watched via longplay.

I wanna like Ys, and I want to give it another chance, perhaps with a later more polished game. What worries me is that according to Wikipedia, every subsequent Ys game somehow got a lower score than the previous one, that the series seemingly never reached the highs I feel it should have. It's part of why I've been hesitant to try more of them. However, if there are better much better Ys games out there after all, I'd love to find out about them. I know that there are other remakes of I & II, and they're likely better in some regards. This version of I & II though... god, I love it aesthetically but I don't ever wanna play through these dungeons again. Check out the soundtrack, but perhaps skip the game.

interestin lil action RPG with bump combat thats surprisingly not as weird to control or use as you'd think and INCREDIBLE MUSIC. the OST for this game is god-tier, not gonna lie. The game is a remaster of the first 2 ys games, and while I think Ys 1 is very focused and concise with what it wants to do and be, Ys 2 on the other hand feels really scattered in terms of what it wants to be. Both games end up with you navigating a massive late-game dungeon that will probably take up half of your total play time, so if you aren't a fan of big dungeons and wanna keep moving to different new locations in your games this one might not be for you. The voice acting is also phenominal for its time, most games of this vintage with voice acting sound like they just got 2 interns with a mic to do the voices, but this one actually has voice talent put behind it which is extremely rare, so that's cool too. I think this is one of the finer gems of the PC engine/turbografx, definitely a must play in that systems library.

Having played Chronicles first, this didn't disappoint me one bit, I think it's a very good version of the game, especially for the time it was released, but.

I still prefer the remake for a lot of decisions they made, the presentation, the dialogue feels more fleshed out, the NPCs have their own names, making the game feel more lively and some bosses being more fun (looking at you, Ys II final boss)

Still, Ys: Book I & II PCE was completely ahead of it's time and it's an amazing game that is worth checking out if you love Ys I and II.

When it comes to "technical milestones in gaming history", we think about our Dooms, or Star Foxes, our Mario 64s, our FF7s. But never does Ys Book I & II come up.

This was an epic 20-hour two-part RPG with animated cutscenes, fully-fledged professional voice acting in both Japanese and English, arranged OST using real CD instruments, and extensive side content all in 1989. A 500MB game in a time when games rarely exceeded 500KB. And it was all done by a small Japanese studio. This is one for the history books and it's a shame it doesn't get the respect the deserves.

As for the game itself, though? Haha, bump combat go BRRRRRRBRBRBRBRRRBRRBRR

this game is SUPER fun and an instant recommendation for anyone whos looking to get into more jrpgs
its not a very long game at only around 12-ish hours in total (6 for book 1 and 6 for book 2) but in my opinion that just makes this (or any version of the remake ¯\(ツ)/¯) easier to get into as a firsttimer
bump combat in these games (except mask of the sun nothing works in that game) works way better than youd expect to and the first time you go out into the field and kill monsters is so much fun
the bosses are a fun time (except the bat fucker in the abandoned mine who you literally cant touch without the silver sword) but some of the dungeons (cough cough SOLOMON SHRINE cough cough) are easy to get lost in
the games story is pretty simple but works, especially ys 2 has some really cool moments (esp the part where youre running up the tower with the bell ringing)
this games soundtrack goes SO hard yuzo koshiro did such a good job composing the tracks for this game (first step towards war is pretty much the reason i decided to check out this game in the first place)
super easy recommendation for anyone whos looking for a short but fun jrpg :)