Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished

Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished sends the red-haired adventurer Adol Christin into the cursed land of Esteria, where he must uncover what happened to the long-vanished civilization of Ys and gather the six sacred books scattered across the world. The game is played from a top-down perspective, but instead of a standard combat menu it offers the so-called bump system: you attack simply by having Adol run into an enemy off-center. It sounds like a simplification, but in practice it creates fast, almost rhythmic gameplay, all about angle of approach, timing, and knowing when to back off instead. Progression is more linear than in the computer RPGs of the time, and the player doesn't have to grind through hours of random battles just to move forward.

On the PC-98, the game made the most of high resolution and a legible palette, so the maps of Esteria, the Zemeth mine, and Darm Tower feel sharp and clear; the color-restrained yet strikingly stylized screens rank among the best Japanese computers offered at the time. The music remains the most-cited part of the game to this day — the Falcom Sound Team jdk built, on the FM synthesis of the sound cards, tracks that suit an action game rather than a slow fantasy adventure, and the boss themes burned themselves into the memory of an entire generation of players. The boss fights are, in fact, a discipline of their own: each one has a clearly readable movement pattern that must be read before the healing potions run out.

At the time, this marked a decisive break from the tough, slow dungeons that defined Japanese computer RPGs back then. Ys showed that an action RPG could be accessible, brisk, and still full of atmosphere, and it kicked off a series that continues to this day. Adol became an icon, and his first quest has since received a huge number of ports and remakes. Today it plays quickly, in one or two evenings, and while the bump system takes a moment to get used to, the reward is one of the cleanest adventures of its era. The short runtime is a virtue here rather than a shortcoming: the game never pads itself out, every location has a reason to exist, and the ending arrives before it would have had a chance to grow tiresome.