Designing Ys, Vol. 1: Jenocres

"Falcom's Ys series was one of the biggest games in Japan, while Hudson's version of Ys for PC Engine was regarded as one of the best conversions."

—Iwasaki Hiromasa, Ys I & II director & main programmer, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2, p. 96

The early Ys games rarely seem to get much recognition in the western wing of the world. It's understandable why; the original personal computer iterations from the late 1980s were entirely incompatible with western Operating Systems, and the PC Engine bombed internationally, so their primary home console ports never reached a broad English-speaking audience. From an American's perspective, it might be tempting to think that the Action RPG genre got good with Secret of Mana—but there's so much more behind history's curtain.

In the context of 1989, Ys I & II must have seemed overwhelming. It was among the earliest of the PCE/TurboGrafx's RPG library, preceded only by the first Tengai Makyō game, Necromancer, and Dungeon Explorer. (Which admittedly has more in common with Gauntlet than Dragon Slayer or Tritorn.) While sales numbers for PC Engine software seem lost to time, it's clear from the prominent featuring of Ys in Gekkan PC Engine and other gaming magazines that this was a very significant title in its moment, and we know from Falcom's PC Engine-exclusives that all of the company's games performed well on the console. The PC Engine was something like the Vita of its day, and Falcom was still Falcom, producing games well into 1995 for a system that was abandoned by its own manufacturer in '92. Without this Ys port, we'd have never arrived at Legend of Xanadu or The Legend of Heroes.

Gekkan PC Engine #11, featuring an "Ys Adventure Report" on its cover story.

Place yourself for a moment in December of 1989, having gamed up to that point exclusively with a Famicom Disk System hooked up to a clunky little Sony CRT perched on your bedroom desk. You could've broken down and blown everything on a Mega Drive and Phantasy Star II any time that past year, but you heard everyone and their mother making a stink about the PC Engine in '88 and you swore you'd save up after seeing screens in Famitsu. Up to this point in your life you've been filling your evenings with the juggernauts of the FDS, pirated onto blank Quick Disk floppies like any sensible person: The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, The Adventure of Link, Dracula II, Dragon Slayer IV, and Megami Tensei. The only carts you've bought in a long time were Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest III, moments of weakness on the long road to this. Now the PC Engine is out of its box, seated in the massive CD-ROM² interface unit, and positioned to permanently replace the FDS in your tiny Tokyo apartment.

You flick the power switch and there are twenty times the colors on-screen.

And not just more colors, but Red Book audio, animated cutscenes, and voice acting—by the likes of professional seiyū Ginga Banjō (Mobile Suit Gundam, Fist of the North Star) Watanabe Naoko (Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya) and Mori Katsuji. (Gatchaman, Tekkaman) After Tengai Makyō this was only the second time an RPG had featured voice acting, and attempted to lip-synch its audio with the dialogue. Its international localization was incredible for the year it came out in, being the first English-language game to have an actual voice director and primarily professional cast, with key roles played by 80s TV animation actors like Michael Bell (G.I. Joe, Superman) and Alan Oppenheimer (He-Man, Transformers)—and by a pre-Jimmy Neutron Debi Derryberry, still early in her career.

The disc that first went out to retailers some thirty years ago wasn't just the proof of concept for the format, it was the state-of-the-art. Director and main programmer Iwasaki Hiromasa later remarked in The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2 that before Ys, everyone believed the CD-ROM format was slow; after Ys, "only a bad developer would make a really, really slow game." (Untold 89)

Four months later Final Fantasy III came out and looked like hot garbage.

Same year, vastly superior presentation.

What our hypothetical Japanese gen Xer buying in on the PC Engine in '89 doesn't yet realize is that Tengai Makyō ZIRIA handled the actual scene animation and voice acting much better. But the game beneath Ys' production values is also deeper than the barebones Dragon Quest clone lying at he heart of ZIRIA, a feat accomplished by abstracting and reducing the game's design down to a point where anybody can play but only the dedicated can play well.

Iwasaki Hiromasa was not involved in the original production of Ys, but fell in love with the games on PC while working at Hudson Soft, and was later approached by Hudson Company Director Nakamoto Shinichi to port it to PCE. He was granted the incredible opportunity to work with the fully-commentated source code of the original games—preservation practices at Japanese software companies are infamously poor, as even up through 2002 major developers like Square were clearing out their data to make room for the next project as soon as the previous one was finished. No one had remakes in mind in this era, yet because of Falcom's multiplatform release schedule across many different desktop standards, the tiny studio retained the Ys development assets in time for their definitive port.

It was Iwasaki who came up with the idea of bundling Ys I & II together into one unified game, chose Hasegawa Hiroshi of AlfaSystem as the compilation's other main programmer, and as the game's director also assumed responsibility for casting its voice actors, picking them based on anime VHS tapes he had rented out from the first floor of Hudson's Sapporo Sankei building. (Untold 92 & 94) Iwasaki and Hasegawa took certain liberties with Ys—liberties that director Hashimoto Masaya and scenario writer Miyazaki Tomoyoshi would later give their stamp of approval, declaring that Ys Book I & II was the game they "want[ed] to create." (96)

"You need to understand that in Japan, Ys I and Ys II are really, really, really famous games. Everyone loves them. But I felt the text in the originals was not good for explaining the background to the games. I couldn't change it for Japan though, because they're really famous, and if I change something for Ys: Book I&II, if I changed some text, perhaps a lot of players would complain about that. [...] But I knew that Americans did not know this game, and I wanted to explain it. About the background, characters, and everything. So I changed a lot of text. [...] So I think that Ys: Book I&II for the USA is really the best version—for me anyway." 

—Iwasaki Hiromasa, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2, p. 95

The changes Iwasaki made were extensive. Virtually every common monster had its Defense and Experience values raised or lowered to subtly adjust the game's challenge and level curve. One late-game Ys I monster, the Riffligan, had its Hit Points, Strength, and Defense decreased from 150 to 135, 106 to 98, and 55 to 23, in order to prevent an underleveled player from becoming stuck once locked inside Darm Tower. Overall the amount of grinding demanded for Ys I was reduced, while individual battles in both games became more difficult. Iwasaki also introduced level carryover between the two books, with Adol's level being automatically raised to 34 at the start of II if it was lower. These decisions were informed not just by Iwasaki's experience as a game developer, but as a player—the decision to raise the fifth boss, Khonsclard's, Defense from 83 to 89 stemmed from his personal suspicion that it was too easy, and by how players tended to forget Ys I had a boss between Pictimos and Yogleks/Omulgun.

Ys as a whole is built atop a framework that dates back to 1984's Dragon Slayer and Hydlide, the "bump combat system." (Usually referred to in Japanese as 体当たり taiatari "tackling.") Essentially, the directional pad is the only input the player uses to battle; they joust at enemies on the overworld and bosses in their arenas, ramming through them to deal damage. Ys' implementation of the system is more refined than its predecessors, as the player can avoid mutual damage by hitting their target at an offset rather than head-on. This is a conceit pulled from Xanadu, but the hitboxes in Ys are less ambiguous than in Xanadu. Moreover, Ys has two different speed settings to turn the game into a much faster and tenser experience.

The bump combat system is generally unpopular with today's players, as it's less familiar than having a dedicated button for swinging a weapon in the style of Zelda or Terranigma, but there are a number of advantages to it. Going with bump combat allowed Falcom to create high-speed battles that simply couldn't exist in the 2D Zeldalikes, where the player had to stop moving to mash their attack button once an enemy was rendered vulnerable. Ys I is that rare 80s game to be totally free of button mashing, as the constantly moving enemies require the player to make on-the-fly adjustments to their angle of attack if they want to avoid damage. It's a system that on the surface sounds too rudimentary and crude to have any depth, but in practice requires finesse to do well. Ys is accessible, but it's not easy.

Aside from the gameplay advantages of it, the bump combat system also expedited the porting process—every computer has a set of arrow keys, and every console has a directional input. It's not a perfect system, as the game's lack of diagonal movement results in awkward "stair-shaped" motions when the player transitions from horizontal to vertical input, but as we'll soon see, the bump system has a vast amount of design space available, not all of which was realized within the first two games.

With Xanadu Falcom had innovated a system made up of swordplay and spell-slinging, assigned to the arrow keys and spacebar. Ys picks up where Xanadu left off, but focuses on one half of the system at a time. Ys itself is a story divided into two volumes, with the first book focusing on the melee combat through the directional pad and the second book emphasizing magic through the I button. Those books are themselves divided into two further halves. The first half of Book I sees the player traveling the open fields of Esteria while the second half has them climbing the 25 floors of Darm Tower, and the first half of Book II encompasses the ascent from the foot of Ys up through the frozen tundra and smoldering caverns of the island, before ending with Adol's adventure through the labyrinthian Shrine of Solomon and its interconnected canals.

The journey through Ys Book I is about tracking down the six Books of Ys to discover what happened to the titular vanished island and find a way to subvert the crisis befalling the present-day land of Esteria, but from the player's perspective these are just reasons to set foot in their next sword-and-sorcery fantasy. The six volumes act as the governing structure around the game: when the player has all six, the credits roll. Each book save for the last is guarded by a boss, with volume six having two consecutive bosses blocking the player's path. These bosses will be our main subject of content analysis, as dying and challenging them again accounts for most of the game's playtime.

Esteria is broken up into four principal parts: the towns of Minea and Zeptik, the Shrine, and the abandoned mines. Separate from these is Darm Tower, which the player cannot exit once they've entered. Ys can be loosely described as open-world, as the player's primary obstacle to exploring these areas is the strength of the monsters within them. Unlike more recent such games (Breath of the Wild) skill can't totally overcome those monsters because Ys uses a subtractive damage formula, so damage can be 0. (Attack - Defense = Damage.)

Aside from the monsters themselves, there are several elements in Ys I that serve to pressure the player into following a general sequence and discourage them from exploring specific dungeons until others are cleared. The Treasure Box Key is necessary to open all of the treasure chests in the first half of Book I except for the chest it's found in, and the key itself is nested two floors down into the Shrine, which the player can only access if they have the Tovah Crystal from the old woman in Zeptik village, which requires the player have already spoken with the fortune-teller in Minea and acquired a sword, shield, and set of armor. Without the key the player can't effectively explore the mines, thus discouraging them from acquiring the third Book of Ys before the first two. This type of item placement pushes the player to follow a loose sequence, so that by the time they get the key needed for the other areas, they are already deep enough in the Shrine that they're better off finishing the dungeon before backtracking to explore the rest.

Any player that gains entry into the Shrine will find their progress quickly halted by the first boss of Ys, Jenocres. Jenocres serves as the Barthesian threshold guardian standing between the Shrine's empty upper level and monster-infested lower floors. He does not attack the player directly, but instead teleports around the room, leading the player into the line of fire of one of his six torches. Each torch has a maximum range of about eight tiles, crossing just past the halfway point of the chamber. The flames can briefly meet, but if two flames touch then one of them will immediately recede, so that there is always at least one space to move freely between any two torches. Thus the player is challenged to watch and anticipate the torches Jenocres is luring them into, and find the one path that will let them ram Jenocres while still having the free movement to escape the torches unscathed.

Jenocres teaches the player several critical lessons:

• Unlike regular wandering monsters, the vulnerable parts of bosses do not deal contact damage.
• Charging at an offset still deals more damage than charging normally, which translates to less opportunities for the boss to deal damage. Even though there's no contact damage from a bad bump, there's still a penalty for poor execution.
• Evasion is just as critical as offense, and every attack one initiates should have an escape route out of it.

This last point is the most important, as later boss battles continually revisit the idea of needing to attack "safely." Making unsafe attacks is what leaves the player vulnerable to damage, and ultimately leads to their defeat. These lessons aren't confined to Ys I either—the design elements present in Jenocres even make up the skeleton of Ys II's final boss battle.

Ys has sometimes been positioned as a "beginner's" RPG, made to introduce players to the nascent Action RPG genre with an easier game, the idea being to eventually induct them into "real" games like Xanadu and Tritorn. While in the context of the PC-88 it's easy to see how that line of logic could emerge, it's doubtful for one overarching reason: Ys is hard.

Jenocres is the player's first major roadblock and the first thing that really threatens them with a Game Over. They will likely mount a dozen or so attempts before they finally nail his pattern down and do the wizard in. None of the bosses in Xanadu are that threatening on their own—sure you have the floaty jumps to work out, but the real threat to the player is the player themself, getting too greedy and bungling a run by killing too many enemies and not being able to level up the later weapons and spells. Actual Game Overs are rare in Xanadu. The big threat is just making the game unwinnable and being stuck in the dungeon forever. By contrast, in Ys death is lurking in every boss chamber with monsters that rival the best and worst of Zelda, Castlevania, and Legacy of the Wizard. It's a process facilitated by the game's save-anywhere and regenerating health features, and the player can actually leave Jenocres' room mid-battle to restore all their HP outside before heading back in to reset the fight, giving them the option to know when to fold 'em on battles that are too far swung in the opponent's favor. This boss is supposed to kill you again and again before you realize you can exit and restart.

And when Jenocres goes down, the game really begins...

Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished Omen
Vol. 2: Nygtilger
Vol. 3: Vagullion
Vol. 4: Pictimos
Vol. 5: Khonsclard
Vol. 6: Yogleks & Omulgun
Vol. 7: Dark Fact

Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished—The Final Chapter
Vol. 1: Velagunder
Vol. 2: Tyalmath
Vol. 3: Gelaldy
Vol. 4: Druegar

Further Reading
The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, Vol. 2 – Yakuza, Robots and the PC Engine, John W Szczepaniak, published by Hardcore Gaming 101
"Nihon Falcom – Ys Developer Interview," 1987, translated by Shmuplations
"Ys I and II Developer Interview," 1988, translated by Shmuplations
Colorful Pieces of Game (Japanese, old), Iwasaki Hiromasa.
Colorful Pieces of Game (Japanese, new), Iwasaki Hiromasa