Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter

Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter picks up exactly where the first game left off: Adol finds himself in the floating land of Ys, among its inhabitants and ancient temples, and completes the story that the first game only began. Both games were conceived as a single whole from the start, and the second part confirms it — the map is bigger, the story is more talkative, and the characters get considerably more room to breathe. The main new feature is magic: Adol acquires magical rings, the most important of which is fire magic, giving him a ranged attack for the first time. There's also a transformation into a demon, which lets him talk to enemies and reveal parts of the world that a player would otherwise simply have wiped out.

The bump combat system remains, but the addition of ranged shots changes the pace — the dungeons are more complex, full of multi-level mazes and switches, and the bosses demand a combination of quick dodging and careful magic management. On the PC-98, the game continues to make the most of high resolution and delicate work with a limited palette; the temple interiors and icy passages rank among the most visually striking places in the whole series. The music once again outshines much of the competition of the time, and several tracks from the second game have become a permanent part of Falcom's repertoire, which it still reworks to this day.

At the time, the second game was received as a more polished version of a proven concept, and together with the first, it became what fixed Ys in players' minds. Later compilations of both games, released across dozens of platforms, only confirmed that together they form a single story arc. Today Ys II feels like a natural climax: shorter than modern RPGs, but denser, and its final stretch ranks among the best-built payoffs of Japanese computer game-making at the end of the 1980s. Anyone who's finished the first game should practically continue right away — the transition between the two is seamless, and the second part assumes knowledge of the characters and places from Esteria. A newcomer, on the other hand, risks missing half the references, since the game doesn't bother recapping what happened before.