I expected to hate this game from my first few moments with it. It seemed like just another obscure JRPG hack and slash with faulty writing and crude mechanics, not to mention some seriously ghastly visuals. I'd slogged my way through about two hours of the game and kept thinking, "when's the fun going to start?"
But then something happened: the game started to be really awesome. It was a subtle, slow climb to that point, but everything started to click. The action RPG elements started to coalesce into a challenging, interesting system that works almost as well as, say, A Link to the Past. The storytelling started to venture from the standard "you're the wunderkind of prophecy who has to save the universe!" into a kind of long-form myth-making that, while perhaps not unusual for the fantasy genre, is certainly handled better than I expected at the beginning of the game.
So Ys isn't the type of game to make a good first impression. Thank goodness it's (relatively) popular in Japan, then, because I doubt that any of these games would have any sort of audience in North America without the reassurance that, yes, they do get better.
You start the game as Adol, the protagonist of the series, a wanderer who has somehow survived a harrowing trip on a boat and landed on the beaches of Barbudo. Barbudo is part of the larger nation of Esteria, a land overrun by monsters (shocker!) and which happens to have a giant, mystical tower at the center of it. The first few hours of the game basically have you doing errands for people around the various towns in Esteria, who are all too willing to just spill their guts about important plot points to you without any provocation (seriously, there's no "talk" button in the game, meaning that if you run into somebody accidentally, be ready for long-winded speeches about whatever ills may have befallen the town). This aspect of the game isn't really handled very well. While this is a two-decade old RPG adventure and hews closely to template of games of that era (think more of Final Fantasy I or II than IV or VI), it's a little disappointing to see that even in the DS remake, this element wasn't given a bit more polish, especially when compared to a game like Dragon Quest IX, which essentially has the exact same set up.
Luckily, though, things change. I don't think I'm spoiling anything, since it's right there in the title, but Esteria isn't exactly what it seems. You soon discover that the land was formerly known as Ys, and the only memory of it is sealed in the Book of Ys (this Ys differs from the actual myth of Ys in that I don't think that the game's Ys sunk into the ocean). Finding that book would change the history of Esteria forever, but there are powerful forces who have an interest in keeping things the way they are. It's perhaps a little bit cliched in it's good vs. evil struggle, but I found this part of the game much more fascinating than the plot concerning the mostly paper-thin characters.
Ys has its roots in the NEC computer as well as the NES, and in the gameplay, it shows. The system is perhaps a bit rudimentary (in the original, you literally had to run into enemies to kill them, though thankfully this has been updated in the DS version to include an attack button), but very satisfying. Enemies explode into bags of money when you hit them with your sword, and the ability to string together combos – not to mention the various tactics needed to not die – make the combat feel pretty intense. It's simple in exactly the right way.
Less successful is the fact that to change weapons, and more importantly, to use items, you have to dig through an unnecessarily convoluted menu system, and some dungeons require you to go through the item menu all the time. It's just a small annoyance in an otherwise fluid, quick, and responsive system.
This is a hack and slash through and through. If you played this game on a PC, it would feel almost exactly like Diablo, with a very similar atmosphere as well. The dungeons, while not actually being randomly generated, almost feel that way, with weirdly jutting out angles and dead ends abound. It requires you to be on your toes all the time, because even though the minions you come across are more or less pretty easy to dispatch, you might come across a mid-level boss by accident and without the proper preparations, have your ass handed to you. Of course, you could take advantage of the regenerating health system to your heart's content and be fine, but… wait, why is there a regenerating health system in this game?
OK, so Ys is flawed in a lot of ways, but more importantly than all of that, it's fun to play and does some interesting things with narrative. It's not anywhere close to one of my favourite games, but I'm looking forward to trying out more games in this series.