Designing Ys, Vol. 7: Dark Fact

The final battle of Ys is perhaps its most iconic moment, and the culmination of everything the bump combat system represents. The player enters the 25th floor of Darm Tower armed with six of the seven Books of Ys, having only just learned the name of the black-cloaked man they've been chasing across Esteria, and just as soon as the player gets to meet Dark Fact they find themselves facing him in battle. The meeting with Fact is by no means short—dying and challenging him again may account for as much as an hour of the game's six-hour playtime. But unlike the encounters with Vagullion or Yogleks and Omulgun, the battle against Dark Fact never feels "cheap" or "unfair" to the player; they always know exactly why they died, how they could have avoided it, and what they need to do better to prevent that from happening again.

Let's break the elements of this battle down:

• Dark Fact is a moving target, but his movement is not unpredictable like Vagullion. He follows a set path, tracing out what may be the worst figure-eight in the world across the arena. As they continue to rematch Fact, the player becomes better attuned to this pattern and intuits the best ways to connect with him.
• Every time the player successfully damages Fact, the tile they hit him on is destroyed. If the player is standing on that tile they die instantly, though it's easy to avoid. The resulting pits are impassable, so the more damage the player does to Fact the more ruined the arena becomes and the harder it gets to maneuver. Effectively planning around hitting Fact on the corners and edges early on will lead to the player's movement being less restricted as the fight progresses.
• Fact periodically sends out one to two fireballs that explode in eight directions. Like Nygtilger, this is an unequal fight; Fact can shoot in twice the number of directions the player can move, which is where much of the challenge comes from.
• Although Fact does not speed up, as the fight goes on he sends fireballs out with greater frequency, and the erosion of the arena creates a gradual loss of options for the player. In contrast to what came immediately before him, the final boss of Ys builds intensity as the clash continues. Urgency is placed on the player to escalate with the boss, doing what they've already learned to do but faster and more precisely. The convergence of multiple eight-directional shots from different parts of the screen and overlapping holes in the floor pressures the player into the tight gaps between "death zones," providing a small taste of the kind of gameplay that would later define the bullet hell genre in the late 90s and early 2000s. (Later remakes extend the comparison even further.)

Essentially, the player is to avoid all of the fireballs (of which there can be as many as 16 on-screen at one time) and maneuver around the collapsing arena while making contact with Fact himself. In addition to all these action elements, there's a puzzle to Fact—the player has to equip the entire set of Silver equipment rather than the stronger Flame Sword and Battle equipment. This is toned down in the PC Engine release, as Fact spells out when the fight begins that they can't win without it:

"The name Dark Fact will be the scourge of all men to come! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh you are brave, but you are also a fool! You have no chance without the protection of the Silver equipment!"

This was an addition made as a result of many players of the PC releases not picking up on the supporting cast's hints that the Silver Sword, Shield, and Armor, all had to be worn together to damage him. The PC-88, X-1, and other Ys releases lacked such an overt explanation. Iwasaki originally wanted to have a second audio track prepared, where Dark Fact panics upon seeing Adol in the full Silver set, but memory restrictions made this impossible.

The battle with Fact having eroding terrain is its most important feature, as this is how Falcom incorporated into the final battle the field elements of continually adjusting Adol's position while running through new territory. By integrating this with the principles of making safe attacks, always having a line of retreat open, striking at offsets, and evading projectiles, the Dark Fact battle brings together the disparate elements of Ys into a concentrated high-speed finale. In the age of romhacks and superbosses that kind of design might be hard to appreciate, but in the context of this being just three years after players were first cutting down Ganon and slaying Dracula, it's an impressive body of innovations. If there is fault in it, it's that the boss as-is often doesn't last long enough for its battle theme to be fully played out.

The Action RPG as a genre hasn't really changed that much even between 2009 and 2019—the big names in town are Nier Automata, Monster Hunter World, Breath of the Wild, and Kingdom Hearts III, but the mechanics they're drawing on came about with the turn of the millennium. Their moment-to-moment play isn't so radically different from the lineage that informed them: Dark Cloud, Kingdom Hearts, and Phantasy Star Online, all codified the control schemes and standards that today's ARPGs depend on. Meanwhile the battle with Dark Fact in 1987 and '89 is night and day not just to Xanadu, but to the final bosses of games released in the very same years as Ys. We would be hard-pressed to find anything in the 80s that surpasses it from any genre, making Ys a fitting conclusion to the decade and the capstone of Falcom's work in this period.

...Or it would be, but there's a whole extra game on the disc.

Designing Ys, Vol. 6: Yogleks & Omulgun

We arrive now on the doorstep of the endgame, at the worst boss of Ys I: Yogleks and Omulgun.

(Nobody knows which head is which, but I always assumed Yogleks was purple and Omulgun red.)

The idea behind the fight is fairly straightforward. Both heads float around the boss arena, bouncing off of the walls. Each head is surrounded by a ring of fireballs, one moving clockwise and the other moving counterclockwise, which slowly expand and contract as they orbit the bosses. In order to damage them, the player has to quickly dart between the fireballs as they get an opening, strike the head, and come out of the ring unscathed. To prevent the player from simply staying inside the ring, the heads magically swap positions every time Adol gets a hit in; only the red head is vulnerable to damage.

There are a number of issues with this fight. The first is that because the fireballs rotate in opposing directions, the head-swap means if the player doesn't correct their course immediately after making contact they'll run straight into the swapped head's fireballs as they try to exit the ring. The second is that it requires a level of pixel-perfect precision not found anywhere else in the game—Adol has to start charging while his sprite is still aligned with the lowest fireball of the two he's trying to squeeze between, and make minute adjustments to get out unscathed. The third problem is more an issue of the boss' comprehensive design: it gets easier as the fight goes on, rather than escalating in difficulty.

See, as Yogleks and Omulgun lose Hit Points, they also start to lose fireballs, one per every quarter of their maximum health taken off. Most video game boss fights escalate in challenge the further the player can make it, thus passing through one phase establishes they're ready for the next. With Yogleks and Omulgun, the player starts the fight able to handle the last phase, which results in a denouement when they finally get past the first two and the tension dissolves.

Most players take issue with Vagullion, but I would contend that Yogleks and Omulgun are the boss that really needed to be fine-tuned. They start out disproportionately difficult compared to the bosses before and after them, on a scale that one can't help feeling it was a mistake, and end up disappointing the player that actually sees their fight through to the end.

Of note is that Falcom's official user support query outright calls the boss impossible without the Flame Sword, which would otherwise be an optional weapon, and strongly recommends acquiring the Battle Armor and Battle Shield rather than relying on the Silver set. Their recommended strategy is to sit in the corner waiting for the red face to draw near before charging through it, as the middle of the room leaves the player too vulnerable to damage. As many players concluded back in the 90s, a riskier alternative is to charge the red one in the room's center as the two heads are converging and catch it a second time after the swap.

So we've just had two badly designed bosses in a row. It would have been entirely possible for Ys to have peaked at its fourth big battle and never fully recover. Thankfully, the final boss of Ys I is also one of the best bosses in any 2D video game.

Designing Ys, Vol. 5: Khonsclard

"Among the bosses of Ys I & II's Ys I, there's a very minor boss in Darm Tower called 'Khonsclard.' ('Rock' was a popular name among the staff.) 

In fact, if you ask a player of the PC version to name the bosses, they'll say 'the first boss,' 'centipede,' 'bat,' 'mantis,' and 'face,' but it's rare to hear 'rock.' Instead they'll say 'Dark Fact' for the sixth boss. 

Next to the surprisingly difficult mantis, faces, and maze of mirrors right after it, the strategy is surprisingly easy. Usually it's figured out right away, or with bad luck it might take two tries. It seems to leave a weak impression...or that's the kind of boss I thought it was, anyway. Truthfully in the PC Engine version of Ys I & II I felt it was a complete mistake." 

—Iwasaki Hiromasa, "Game Developer Failure Teacher in Ys I & II"

In a 2016 the hashtag #ゲーム開発しくじり先生 (#GameDevFailureTeacher) began trending on Twitter, with game developers sharing stories of design failures in games. The tag had branched out from #同人しくじり先生 (#DoujinFailureTeacher) where doujin content makers had shared their own stories, which itself was responding to the popularity of the TV program Shikujiri Sensei - Ore Mitai Naru Na!! ("Failure Teacher - Don't Be Like Me!!") a variety show where various professionals showcased their failings as an example for others to learn from. Ys I & II director and main programmer Iwasaki Hiromasa chimed in on his blog, Colorful Pieces of Game, to recount a story from his end—his efforts to rebalance the game's fifth boss, Khonsclard.

"When I was doing debugging and balancing, I was bothered by how weak Khonsclard was. 

It was always a free win. 

But when I looked at the source code, the HP, Attack, and Defense values were fine, so I thought it was just easy because I already knew the strategy. 

Why did I think the numbers were wrong? 

Since you can see the boss' HP in the first place, that couldn't be it. And the damage formula is so simple it wouldn't be easy to make a mistake. 

Except for Darm, the actual damage formula is as follows. (Darm uses a unique process with a special offensive and defensive table.)

• Damage dealt = Adol's Attack Power - Enemy's Defense Power

• Damage received = Enemy's Attack Power - Adol's Defense Power

(Defense Power is basically the sum of of equipment. After that ring modifiers and the rest are applied.) 

With this terribly simple formula, standard parameter balance is created by looking up the boss' Attack and Defense Power using Multiplan. The balance between "face" and "mantis," there's nothing off about the numbers there. 

That's why even though I thought 'Doesn't it seem too easy?', since it wasn't a bug, and nobody's going to complain if it's weak, and there were a ton of other bosses and goons to balance...I naturally turned my attention to bugfixing, and reducing the ready-to-burst memory. With so much to do, I just said 'well, whatever' and let it be. 

I feel bad saying that, but I figured that because the strategy being easy wasn't a mistake, and it was such a forgettable boss, it wouldn't be a big deal even if it was a little weak. 

(Actually, the PC Engine version's balance got various complaints from PC version fans, but nobody ever said 'the rock is too weak.') 

So Khonsclard stayed a free win, and the master copy for the Japanese release was submitted."—Iwasaki Hiromasa, "Game Developer Failure Teacher in Ys I & II"

Of Ys I's seven bosses, Khonsclard stands out for its lack of presence. Its basic pattern is to float towards Adol and spew rocks in a radial pattern, with significant gaps between them for the player to weave through. It's the only boss in the first game where Iwasaki felt the need to adjust its actual stats in the transition from Japan to the United States, gaining 6 points of Defense to increase the number of hits the player needs to destroy it.

"And then it was 1990. 

I returned to Hudson in Hokkaido to begin work on the international version, but first I decided on three things.

• No rewriting the title. Just use all of it as-is. It's already in English, after all.

• Rewrite all of the confusing parts of the scenario. Since the original isn't sacred, it could be thoroughly revised.

• Balance it for American tastes—punchy and hard.

It became crucial to discover any mistakes and to rebalance the product. 

We decided to adjust the overall difficulty level for an American audience, adjusting the experience points so that the game would not be as easy as the Japanese version. At the same time, I decided to double-check that weakling Khonsclard. With all that in mind, I read through the source code and found an outrageous mistake. 

In addition to the boss' HP, Attack Power, and Defense Power, they actually have one additional standard parameter. That would be the time between receiving one instance of damage and the next. 

At the same time a boss receives damage, a counter is set for its invulnerability, during the specified VSync. For example, if the counter is set to 30, it will be invincible for approximately 0.5 seconds, and conversely, if it is set to 3 the boss will be damage-able after 0.05 seconds. 

And of course there's no memory available, and no reason to have these kinds of numbers as some easy-to-understand table, so naturally the whole thing was set in a special boss program one at a time, but the variable I set was a huge mistake.

(It would be tempting to say that it's not serious, but it really is. The "IDA address" orders are 3 bytes + the place where the data goes is 1 byte so the total is 4 bytes, but the IDA # variable is 2 bytes. It was incredibly important that we reduce the size by 2 bytes...otherwise there wouldn't be enough memory.) 

Although I don't remember the exact numbers well, I think the standard value was 30 (so, once every 0.5 seconds) while I faintly recall this one being 3. 

The rate of damage received was 10 times normal, so it died it extremely quickly."

—Iwasaki Hiromasa, "Game Developer Failure Teacher in Ys I & II"

The solution to Khonsclard's fight is to run towards its rocks rather than away from them; to chase its clockwise motion and bump along the sides of the boss' shell to damage it, thus staying right behind the boss' line of fire rather than in front of it. Of course that level of precision is extremely difficult with four-directional movement, so the player is likely to take damage while executing this strategy, but even when slightly below the intended the level their output exceeds Khonsclard's. In theory, the boss is meant to encourage the player to chase the backs of attacks rather than run from their fronts, which plays into the boss that follows. But in practice, Khonsclard is kind of a mess.

Khonsclard is made up of a scarlet core and a body of rocks levitating around it. Ordinarily, a player would conclude that a boss made up of a core surrounded by debris would have the core as their weak point. There's a good deal of precedent for this: the enemy ship in Star Castle, the Big Core in Gradius, and Mother Brain of Metroid. With Khonsclard, the solution is completely counterintuitive—the debris is the vulnerable part and the core deals damage, with the optimal strategy being to run multiple complete squares around its body. It's a perhaps-unfortunate reality that games can't just be internally consistent, they have to exist in relation to the world around them, and this is where Ys fails to take into account everything else that's out there. It's not exactly surprising that the battle is so forgettable when it plays out like this and ends in seconds.

Nonetheless, it could be worse. Khonsclard was just forgettable; what follows after is actively malicious.

Designing Ys, Vol. 4: Pictimos

The first half of Book I takes place in a variety of rich environments: the sprawling fields of Esteria, the austere halls of the Shrine, and the eerie darkness of the Mines, its rough and winding corridors intermittently broken up by well-lit central shafts. By contrast the second half of Book I is set entirely in the confines of Darm Tower, which grows ever more bleak as Adol finds himself first imprisoned, then robbed, and finally racing against the clock to rescue a human sacrifice. If Ys had a larger historical presence in the United States, it might have joined the western canon of legendary last dungeons long ago--up there with Death Mountain, the Fortress of Doom, and the Black Omen. But it didn't, so here we are.

The time between Vagullion and Pictimos is vast. In that time the player climbs and retreads nine floors, loses all of the Silver equipment, regains the Sword and Shield, gains five levels, and faces off with some incredibly dangerous enemy ambushes. Thus when the player sees the telltale entryway and the accompanying crest of Ys for the first time in several hours, their first instinct will be to save. This instinct is entirely justified.

Pictimos follows a set of rules rather than a distinct pattern. The boss can only move horizontally, and can have up to three sickles in play at a time, which follow a boomerang motion out to the walls of the arena and then return to the main body. Unlike the last two bosses, Pictimos deals no contact damage. The sickles home in on whatever position Adol is standing in at the moment they're fired; thus the player is pressured to put distance between themselves and Pictimos until it sends out the first sickle, then make a run for the main body as it sends out the next two, ideally outpacing all three of them and having enough time to score multiple hits against it.

Like Vagullion, Pictimos cannot be wholly predicted, as the motion of its main body is subject to random determination. Of the bosses faced up to this point, Pictimos comes across as the best-designed: it rewards observations of its parameters and movement, but has enough variation that the progression of the fight can be unpredictable. In the same breath, it's not wholly subject to the whims of the RNG. It also introduces another recurring play element that becomes pivotal both to the final battle of Ys and to Ys II as a whole: projectiles. The use of homing projectiles sets the stage for the later games' danmaku-like attack patterns, and while needing to evade three sickles at once is a significant step up from past boss battles, it's not so far removed from evading the monsters guarding the Silver Shield that it becomes overwhelming.

If only the next two bosses were so well-made.

Designing Ys, Vol. 3: Vagullion

The single most important weapon in Ys I is the Silver Sword. It is not the strongest weapon in the game; that's the Flame Sword, which it's 18 points weaker than. But the Silver Sword is the only weapon capable of harming the final boss, so unlike the Flame Sword it is indispensable to the player's progress. The credits will never roll without it.

Most games would give the second-strongest weapon in the game to the player in the final dungeon, or shortly before entering it. Ys gives it to them less than halfway into the game.

There are two immediate reasons the player needs to explore the Mines of Esteria. The first is to acquire the third Book of Ys, and the second is to acquire the Darm Key necessary to open the way to the final three books. In addition to these, the Mines are where the game's antagonist hid the Silver Armor required for the final boss, and where the player can find the Roda Seed. This last item is what enables them to speak with the massive Roda Trees on the overworld, which will eventually let the player dig up the Silver Sword from within their roots.

While the player can enter Darm Tower as soon as they have the third book and the corresponding key, doing so locks them off from ever returning to Esteria. To ensure that the player has all of the Silver equipment before proceeding, the last boss faced before entering Darm acts as an equipment check—in other words, it's supposed to be impossible to defeat without the Silver Sword, Silver Armor, and Silver Shield. And for some, it's just impossible to defeat in general.

Conceptually, Vagullion is similar to the Yellow Devil of Rockman fame. The boss begins as a single enemy, then splits into a swarm of bats that fly across the room to attack the player. Vagullion is only vulnerable in its unified form and only for a few frames, and like Nygtilger has a form of contact damage that will harm the player if they bump into its upper body. The pattern the player finds themselves pinned into is to hang close to the swarm, teasing it into attacking Adol, before darting away as it closes in and repeating this process until Vagullion reforms.

While simple in theory, there are several wrinkles to executing this strategy. First, while Vagullion is balanced around level 17, these are the player's naked stats at that level:

HP 85
ST 42
DF 35

And these are Vagullion's stats:

HP 150
ST 75
DF 56

For comparison, these are the player's stats with the fairly-average setup of Talwar, Small Shield, and Reflex Armor:

HP 85
STR 58
DF 45

Vagullion's numbers are dramatically inflated for the purposes of the equipment check, and even with the Silver equipment the bat's output is devastating:

HP 85
ST 74
DF 67

Vagullion goes from taking off a third of the player's Hit Points with each attack to shaving off 11%, but his swarm is also designed to get in two to three hits every time it makes contact, which provides the player with very little room to learn the boss' pattern before eating a Game Over. The player takes 12% off Vagullion with each hit and can bump that up to 24% with the right positioning, so they only need five clean hits to end the battle, but getting those hits in can be difficult because of one other property—Vagullion can feint the player.

The swarm is not required to reform unless the player is sufficiently far away. Thus the player that tries to simply pull away and loop right back, expecting the converging swarm to become a vulnerable Vagullion, gets a nasty surprise when it stops reuniting and instead begins chasing a player that's walking right into its trap. The probability of Vagullion feinting is determined by how far Adol is from the boss when it starts reforming, which director Iwamasa later recalled as being an addition to Vagullion's pattern created by Hasegawa Hiroshi, the second main programmer of Ys I & II. This behavior discourages the player from puppyguarding the boss, and introduces an element of randomness to its pattern that prevents it from being the exact same fight every time.

The combination of high stats, stringent equipment requirements, semi-random attack pattern, brief phases of vulnerability, and contact damage, all make Vagullion one of the most infamous bosses in Ys. It's not the most difficult boss found in the duology, but it is the one that claimed the most casualties in terms of unfinished playthroughs. It's difficult to say if the boss was supposed to be that hard—but at least when rebalancing the game for its "definitive" overseas release, Iwamasa did not see fit to make any adjustments other than the pattern changes Hasegawa came up with, whereas at least one later Ys I boss saw its stats modified and almost all major encounters of Ys II got an overhaul.

Designing Ys, Vol. 2: Nygtilger

Ys I & II mark the beginning phase of Falcom's rubber-band level progression, though it was completely absent in earlier versions of the game. Stronger monsters up to par with Adol's level award more experience, while those beneath Adol award less, so as the player fights new monsters they'll find Adol's level "snapping" to the value the current dungeon is balanced for and then not budging any further. The function of this is made possible by giving each monster a prescribed maximum level at which Adol may obtain full experience from it—for every level over that, the EXP received is halved. For example, at level 9 Lyuses award 8 Experience Points; at level 10 4 EXP; at level 11 2 EXP; and at level 12 and above 1 EXP.

This allows each boss to be balanced for a specific point on the level curve, but because of both this and the subtractive damage formula, low-level runs range from impractical to impossible. Players can usually only function at the exact level specified for each area. The first boss of Ys is balanced for level 4; Nygtilger is balanced for level 10.

That's a significant gulf in experience, and it's facilitated by the layout of the first big dungeon. The player's progress throughout the Shrine relies on thoroughly combing the place over. None of the other treasure chests can be opened until they have the Treasure Box Key from the second basement floor, and Nygtilger's lair is double-gated behind doors requiring both the Ivory and Marble Keys, which are in locked boxes on the third and second basements. The Marble Key is further behind a door that can be only accessed with the Mask of Eyes, which can be found on the first floor but also requires the Treasure Key.

This model of progress—a kind of item checklist the player is gradually filling as they progress—is among the oldest tricks in the developer's book, akin to the item puzzles of Zelda or ability requirements found in Metroid. In Ys it's implemented with a specific purpose for how the game should play moment-to-moment: the continual retreading of past floors serves to bring the player in contact with more wandering monsters, which respawn the moment the player scrolls them out of view, building their character level up high enough in time for them to arrive at Nygtilger. As a resulting, there's no grinding. The player is already as powerful as they should be as soon as they arrive on the boss' doorstep.

The "centipede" as players so often call it is designed to draw the player into a chase. The head is the only part that can damage them, while every other segment is vulnerable to Adol's sword. Thus the player chases Nygtilger's tail while its head chases their own, causing the two to circle one another until they make a misplay and must break apart to find a new position to attack from. The fight contrasts strongly with the patient wait-and-charge pattern of Jenocres, and serves to reinforce a lesson about the nature of dungeons versus overworld areas. While the player was free to exit Jenocres' battle anytime and recover their Hit Points in the hallway, leaving Nygtilger's fight won't trigger the passive health regeneration because they're inside a dungeon area.

The battle can be over in seconds or minutes, but the longer it drags on the more likely the player is to fall, for one simple reason: Nygtilger is faster than them. This is the first of several unequal fights in Ys. In general, the difficulty of the game comes from how uneven the boss design is. Major enemies simply have more resources at their disposal, whether that comes in the form of greater speed or more angles of attack than the player. The simple fact that the odds are against them in protracted battles creates great tension for the player, but at times it can also be a weakness as one of Ys' strengths is its soundtrack, and because of these design sensibilities it can be rare to hear certain tracks ever fully played out.

Once the player has Nygtilger's vulnerabilities and pattern down, the fight becomes simple. However, this is the last fight where knowing such information can grant an easy victory. The next major battle serves as one of the defining gameplay moments of Ys I, and the reason that many players give up without seeing the game through.

Vol. 3: Vagullion

Nygtilger in the Ys anime series.

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