In late 1997, JVC published Falcom Classics in Japan — a collection of Dragon Slayer, Xanadu, and the very first Ys game, all of which released in the 1980s. In Ys, players take control of Adol Christin who finds himself in the town of Minea. A fortune teller warns Adol that an ancient evil is about to overrun the land, and that he must collect the six books of Ys to have any hope of stopping it.
The game is an overhead action RPG, where combat consists of strategically running / bumping into enemies to reduce their health. In-town sequences are used to advance the story and to buy weapons and items. Audiovisually the Saturn Mode has been given the 32-bit refresh, with updated graphics and soundtrack, which incidentally was composed in part by Yuzo Koshiro.
Ys, subtitled Ancient Ys: Vanished Omen, became the subject of focus for Saturn translators / hackers Murzik and Crawdkenny, who worked to make the Japanese text vanish in favor of English. Although the project appears dormant since late 2022, the majority of text has been translated and it is possible to play the game through in English — only the Ys books in the inventory screen and the endgame’s story titles remain in Japanese.
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