The Ancient Land of Ys: Won! (and Final Rating)

There's no "congratulations" screen, so this will have to do.

Wow, right? I didn't expect it to be over that fast, either. But it actually took longer than you might think, as I essentially played it for 16 hours straight yesterday.

As you can see from the screenshot, my name isn't "Adol" after all, it's "Arick." I didn't find this out until late in the game, when someone addressed me. But it seems like all of the proper names changed between the original versions and the DOS version. The villain in at least one console version, for instance, is Dekt, not Malificus. I suppose that's to be expected when (as we covered yesterday) the very title of the game changed for the DOS port.

Anyway, what I took to be the "opening area" of the game--the city, a nearby village, a cave, and a palace--was in fact the "only area" of the game, and the side quests I got at the beginning, which I took to be representative of a slew of side quests that would be forthcoming, were the only side quests. The game was still bigger than it seemed--much more vertical than horizontal. The cave, the palace, and the ending tower all had multiple levels and multiple bosses.

I suspect this would actually suck in battle.

I didn't take great notes or capture copious screenshots, I'm afraid. I was just trying to plow through it. Getting to the end was a process of finding a slew of items in various treasure chests, including a sword, armor, and shield of silver; keys; special items like a rod and a hammer; necklaces and rings that would allow passage into otherwise-forbidden areas; and so on. There was a lot of backtracking involved including a particularly annoying bit where I got all the way to the top of the tower and the endgame, only to find that I needed to turn around and go back down most of the tower to get an amulet from a guy in a dungeon. That backtracking took almost 90 minutes by itself.

I thought this might be heading for the first example of a CRPG romance (the one on the left, wankers), but this game wasn't quite that sophisticated.

At one point, I rescued a damsel from the palace named Fiina. She had lost her memory but turned out to be one of the ancient goddesses of Ys. The game could have done something with this, but it doesn't--Malificus just drops this information on you at the end. I should point out, because I don't think I did before, that there are lots of NPCs in the game, but there are no dialog options; you just read what they say.

Combat never got easy, but increasingly powerful weapons and armor helped, as did a magic ring that gradually restored my health even indoors. Aside from the backtracking, five things annoyed me about the game:

• Most of the "side quests" turned out to be interlocking bits of the main quest. For instance, the recovery of the Rodane seed was necessary to talk to a Rodane tree and recover a silver shield needed for the final battle. So that still leaves Might & Magic with the only true "side quests" so far.

• Upon entry to the final tower, there was one of those tiresome "taken prisoner" scenes in which I lost all my silver items. I had to slowly recover them from chests in the tower later.

Here's an original plot device. I wonder if there's a way out of this cell?

• The game allows you to collect healing potions, but it doesn't allow you to use them (or access your inventory at all) when in combat with bosses, when you most need them.

• I maxed out my experience points way before the end of the game. That is very annoying--there should always be reasons to kill more enemies. I maxed out the gold, too, and instead of freezing it at the max, the game flipped it over to 0! Fortunately, by that time there was nothing to buy (another thing I don't like).

Oddly enough, the max number of experience points is the same as the max number of rows in Excel 2003, and the max hit points is the same as the max number of columns!*

• In a lot of the dungeons, you have to take doorways in the southern end of rooms, but very often you can't see, or can only barely see, the doorway at the edge of the screen. This was responsible for a lot of my backtracking, as I thought I'd thoroughly explored certain levels when in fact I had missed huge sections.

Can you see that doorway just south of me?

Balancing all of this: the game was fairly short. And the boss combats (one to retrieve each book) were quite challenging, each requiring some new tactic to avoid attacks and land my own attacks.

This double-headed thing could only be damaged when its two heads came together. In the meantime, I had to avoid its spinning fireballs.

I had to replay the endgame seven or eight times before I finally defeated Malificus, who had transported me to a platform flying through the firmament and was flying around, shooting fireballs at me. Every time I hit him, another piece disappeared from the platform, so I had to avoid both his fireballs and falling down the holes. I kept trying to record it, but since I kept dying, I eventually gave up. Here's a recording of that scene that ends with me falling off the platform:

And here's a recording that picks up after I finally kill Malificus and see the end game:

By the way, I figured out later that a lot of the boss combats would have been simpler if I'd cranked the CPU speed in DOSBox down to an era-accurate level.

As is my wont, since the gameplay for Ys only took two sessions, I'll do a quick GIMLET right here in this posting.

The game's backstory is somewhat nonsensical (really, what does this metal have to do with anything?) and its trappings are undistinguished fantasy fare. The explorable world is very limited--more a "small hamlet of Ys" than an ancient land. On the plus side, your actions do affect permanent changes in the game world, and the NPCs acknowledge it (4).

There is no character creation: everyone starts playing Arick with the same statistics and equipment. Leveling is swift and satisfying in the first half of the game and then suddenly (and maddeningly) freezes to a halt at about the halfway mark. This is one of the few games of the era to give you experience point rewards for quests (3). NPC Interaction is important--you learn valuable things from them, and some of them are interesting--but it is all one-way (5).

NPC "interaction."

Regular foes vary only by icon and toughness, and I didn't know what most of their names were, but the boss foes are quite original, and figuring out the best tactics to defeat them was slightly fun. This is another game where the enemies constantly respawn, but to no real benefit since the experience and gold stops doing you any good (4). There is no magic in the game (aside from a couple items), and combat involves charging into creatures, with the added tactical complexity of trying to achieve the right angle--interesting, but not enough to redeem the combat system (2).

Boss fights were challenging and interesting; the rest of the combat was not.

You have a basic variety of equipment, but it is all found at fixed locations, and none of it is dropped by foes (3). The economy is maddening: although you need money at the beginning of the game, after you've purchased a few fundamental items, there is no reason to keep collecting all of the gold that the enemies offer you (3). The game has a main quest and fooled me into thinking it also had side quests. There is only one ending to the main quest and no way to role-play it (2).

Graphics are decent enough, if a bit small. Sound is the bloopish variety of the time. The controls are extremely basic, as you would expect from a console port, but intuitive enough (4). Gameplay is mostly linear, given the limited game world, and there would be no reason to replay it. The boss fights do add a satisfying level of challenge, and the game doesn't overstay its welcome (5).

The final score of 35 seems about right. I wouldn't have wanted to play it for much longer, and the score would have been much lower without the challenge and tactics of the seven or eight boss fights, but it was an acceptable way to pass a couple of CRPG sessions.

Next stop: The Bard's Ta...no, wait. Arcanum had to go and do some research. We have to do Zeliard first.


*That was a joke. I know why this is.

Game 45: The Ancient Land of Ys (1987)

The game has several names depending on platform. The DOS version is the only one that calls it precisely this.

       

The Ancient Land of Ys

Japan
Nihon Falcom (developer and publisher)

Released in 1987 for PC-88, PC-98, MSX, Sharp X1, and FM-7; 1988 for NESand SEGA; 1989 for DOS and Apple II GS. Some versions known as Ys or Ancient Ys: Vanished Omen.

Date Started: 27 January 2011

             

By the Power of Grayskull, another Nihon Falcom game. They are apparently going to be a big part of my life from now on. I was having fun the last few days, blazing through some minor titles on my way to 1988, but there's no half-assing this one. Unlike Sorcerian, Ys has a full main quest. One last dragon I have to slay before I can enjoy the rewards of the 1988 golden age.

The Ys opening town.

Like Sorcerian, Ys is fundamentally a console game, requiring a minimum number of controls--basically the directional pad and two keys for inventory and status. I would say something like "the influence of The Legend of Zelda, which came out the previous year, is obvious," except that I know next to nothing about the Japanese CRPG market and never played Zelda except for maybe two hours as a 13-year-old, so I'm worried I don't know what I'm talking about. [Later edit: I was right about not knowing what I was talking about. See LordKarnov42's contributions in the comments.] I should point out that unlike Zelda (as I understand it), the character in Ys does gain experience points and levels. There really can't be any question as to whether this game is a proper CRPG. I'm not saying it's a great one, but it's in the right category.

The back story of Ys is dripping with metaphor: the land was once peaceful and happy, but when a farmer discovered a precious magic metal called "kureria" (the uses are left vague), the land was stricken with sudden wealth, income inequality, and natural disasters. Sick of the destruction, the people of Ys gathered up all the kureria, stuffed it into a vault in the Holy Shrine of Sarumon (yes, really), and erected magic statues to guard it. Things returned to normal. But many years later, an evil wizard named Malificus has seized the six Books of Ys, which hold the secret to kureria and has taken the metal. "Only by recovering the six Books of Ys can the people hope to regain their land and end the evil reign of Malificus." But five of the books are being guarded by "huge monsters" and Malificus himself holds the sixth.

Ys is one of the few CRPGs of this era to feature side quests.

Neither the manual nor the game tells you who you are, but I gather from the MobyGames summary that the character is Adol Christian, and the starting town is called Minea. You don't get the main quest right away. Instead, you get a few side quests from exploring Minea and a village nearby. Already I've been tasked with:

• Dealing with some robbers who have been harassing the bartender.
• Find a seed called the Rodane seed.
• Find a stolen harmonica for a distressed songwriter.
• Recover a lost ring for a one-eyed man in the bar.
• Recover the Silver Bells, treasured symbols of the village, from a band of thieves.

Little NPCs wandering around the town help you with these quests by giving you hints. You have to talk to them through the cumbersome method of standing in their paths until they run into you. For instance, after I got the quest from the one-eyed man, an NPC told me:


 
This was the first quest I solved, though it took me a while to kill enough monsters to get the gold needed to buy the ring from the pawnshop owner. With the reward from the one-eyed man, I bought a proper suit of armor and shield, at which point I was apparently equipped enough to get the main quest (or at least the recovery of the first book) from Sara the Fortune Teller. More on that below.

Um...what are those "many things?"

When I played Sorcerian, I lamented about how basic the combat was, involving simply mashing the spacebar until the enemy dies. Well, Falcom apparently decided that even that was too much for Ys. In this game, there isn't even an attack button; you attack enemies by charging directly into them, much like in NetHack. There are, however, some tactics to this combat: you do more damage, and avoid damage yourself, if you charge into them from the back or side instead of the front. This is, in fact, the only way to survive at the opening level, when you have only 20 hit points. You thus have to dexterously dance around your enemies, watching their movements and looking for openings. Much more interesting than Sorcerian. Once you have a shield, head-on charges become a little less damaging. In the comments to Wizard Warz, LordKarnov42 clued me in that enemies can't hit you if you're slightly offset from their path of movement, but still in contact with them, although getting this just right (especially in dungeon corridors) is difficult.

Outdoors with tiny little enemies.

If you can survive combat with a single creature, you just need to run off to a safe corner and stand still for a bit, and your hit points recharge fairly quickly (at least, outdoors). Despite this, I have died many, many times since starting the game; some of the enemies are brutal. Unfortunately, their little icons (everything in the game is tiny) don't correspond to the pictures in the game manual, so I can only guess at what I'm fighting outside the walls of Minea. Black knights and mutant dwarves, I think. After I gained a few levels, with consequent increases in strength and hit points, the battles went a lot faster. Enemies that used to take a few hits now simply disappear with a satisfying bloop as I charge over them.

The inventory screen.

There are a number of things I like about the game, starting with the number of quests, and the fact that you get experience point rewards and gold for completing them. These seem like such staples of CRPGs these days that it's easy to forget their comparative rarity in this era. How many games so far in my blog have featured side quests? Exactly two: Might & Magic and Sorcerian, and it's hard to count the latter's as "side quests" because there was no main quest. Leveling is a process of grinding your way through dozens and dozens of respawning enemies, and yet it's still fairly quick, and the results are satisfying. Finally, the game has a reasonably complex inventory of swords, armor, shields, magic items, and special items.

The beginning of the main quest.

My gameplay so far has centered on Minea and its environs. As I said, I solved the ring quest right away, but most of the other side quests involve defeating a band of thieves who have holed up in the mountains. Meanwhile, Sara wants me to recover a Book of Ys from a shrine in the mountains, but my first few trips there show that I'm not quite strong enough to defeat the big bad.

The video below shows a little bit of the gameplay, including combat. As you'll hear, the sound effects are still a bit primitive. There's music in the game (as Taylor pointed out yesterday, much inferior in the DOS version), but oddly, you can only have music or sound effects, not both. As you'll see, I accidentally managed to record myself getting killed.

Before I sign off, I should note the correct pronunciation is "ees," and Ys is an ancient mythical city, said to have existed on the shores of Brittany. Without giving too much away, I have a lot of experience with the mythology of this region, and I was only vaguely aware of it (there are a lot of local legends like this), so it's amusing that a Japanese company made it the centerpiece for their game series. I suppose all it takes is one employee who once read a book. Or is it just a coincidence? (Obviously, the original name would have been in Japanese.)

The Ys series includes nine games going right up to 2006. Most were developed for consoles and Japanese PCs; only a handful were ported to DOS or PCs, so we won't be visiting the land of Ys again until Ys V: The Ark of Napishtim in 2003 and Ys Origin in 2006. I hope there's not a lot of plot in between.