Description
Ys The Vanished Omens Master System
Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished (イース Ancient Ys Vanished, Īsu) (also Ys: The Vanished Omens or The Ancient Land of Ys) is the first instalment of Ys, an action role-playing video game series developed by Nihon Falcom in 1987. The name is commonly misspelled Y’s due to an error on the packaging of an English-language release. Initially developed for the PC-8801 by Masaya Hashimoto (director, programmer, designer) and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki (scenario writer), the game was soon ported to the X1, PC-9801, FM-7, and MSX2 Japanese computer systems.
Ancient Ys Vanished saw many subsequent releases, such as English-language version for the Master System and an enhanced remake for the TurboGrafx-CD system as part of a compilation called Ys I & II along with its 1988 sequel Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter. DotEmu has released the game on Android with the following localizations: English, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Italian, German, Portuguese
Ys The Vanished Omens Master System
Ys was a precursor to RPGs that emphasize storytelling. The hero of Ys is an adventurous young swordsman named Adol Christin. As the story begins, he has just arrived at the Town of Minea, in the land of Esteria. He is called upon by Sara, a fortune teller, who tells him of a great evil that is sweeping the land. Adol is informed that he must seek out the six Books of Ys. These books contain the history of the ancient land of Ys, and will give him the knowledge he needs to defeat the evil forces.
Sara gives Adol a crystal for identification and instructs him to find her aunt in Zepik Village, who holds the key to retrieving one of the Books. With that, his quest begins.
Ys The Vanished Omens Master System
The player controls Adol on a game field viewed from a top-down perspective. As he travels on the main field and explores dungeons, he encounters numerous roaming enemies, which he must battle in order to progress. Combat in Ys is rather different from other RPGs at the time, which either had turn-based battles or a manually activated sword. Ys instead features a battle system where fighters automatically attack when walking into their enemies off-centre.
Ys The Vanished Omens Master System
When one fighter comes into contact an enemy, damage could be sustained on both sides if both combatants are facing each other. Attacking straight on causes the attacker the most damage to himself, but clipping the edge of the defender causes the attacked fighter to take most or all of the damage. If one fighter contacts the enemy’s side or back, only the attacked fighter will sustain damage.
Ys The Vanished Omens Master System
This combat system was created with accessibility in mind. This ‘bump attack’ system has become one of the series’ defining features. Falcom staff have compared this style of gameplay to the enjoyment of popping air bubble sheets, in the sense that it took the tedious task of level-grinding and turned it into something similar to a high-score-based arcade game. According to GamesTM and John Szczepaniak (of Retro Gamer and The Escapist), “Repetition of the act was pleasurable as you developed a psychological rhythm and, even in the event of backtracking, progress was always swift since the player never needed to stop moving.”
Ys The Vanished Omens Master System
Another feature that has been used in nearly every Ys title since the original is the recharging health mechanism, which had previously been used in the Dragon Slayer (to which Ys is the official successor) clone Hydlide series, although Hydlide itself borrowed the feature from the 1980 game Rogue in the first place. Recharging health has since become a common mechanism used in many video games today.
Another great Master System Game – Monopoly (Master System)
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