I don’t remember when I first played Ancient Land of Ys—MobyGames lists the DOS version as being released in 1989, which certainly feels right—but I know that I finally finished it in late August 2012. That is a long, long time to be fascinated by a game but not really do anything about it, but I think that gap says something about the game’s unique qualities.
Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately: no one knows how to pronounce “Ys” the first time they see it, and everyone gets it wrong in a different way. So, for the record, mine was “why-ess”, like it was a pair of initials. 1989 was also the year I was introduced to the common Vietnamese surname “Ng”, which is another one of those “impossible unless you know the secret” sort of words.
“Impossible unless you know the secret” also could be said about Ancient Land of Ys itself. I got my hands on the game the way I got my hands on most of my computer games at that point in my life: my mother brought it home from work. She was a high school teacher, and for years the only computers in our house were the ones that she borrowed from school. Of course, I always ended up monopolizing them, not least because their hard drives and the big boxes of 3.5" floppies that accompanied them were always full of games. That disc was literally all I had to go on, but at that point in my life (and this is still pretty much true) I would play anything, so I dove into the game blind, which…
It’s not at all an easy game—it’s short, and the game world is small compared to the other RPGs I was used to (e.g. Dragon Warrior [née Quest] on the NES and Wasteland on the PC), but definitely not easy. Combat is resolved with this weird (but eventually quite agreeable) “bump” mechanic too baroque to bother explaining under this particular umbrella, and it’s not at all evident that grinding is absolutely essential, and the player’s allowed access to insane murder-holes without any sort of warning that he might not be ready for them (“check out the abandoned mine, eh?”).
I never got terribly far in it as a kid, but this didn’t stop me from doggedly trying, trying, trying, getting these weird itches to make another fresh start and this time—! When I think about why I kept going back to it, despite having access to plenty of other games that did make some sort of sense and that could be successfully tackled, the first thing I think of is the music (composed, as it turns out, by Yuzo Koshiro). The theme that plays in town, specifically: there is not a week, I think, that’s gone by since 1989 (or thereabouts) that I haven’t gotten that piece of music—as performed by the trusty old PC speakers, no less—stuck in my head for at least an hour and sometimes more. The second is the sheer mystery of it: no one I knew had even heard of the game, and not even my mother knew whose disc it was. It was like having in my hands something that I had every reason to believe should and did not exist.
Chain of events: I got my fiancee Fishing Resort for the Wii for her birthday, and was so impressed by it that (a) I bought a copy for my brother for his birthday and (b) I decided to look into XSEED Games, the folks that localized and published it, because I so admired the idea that any company would roll the dice on such a (relatively) peculiar and decidedly niche title: they turned out to be a scrappy, passionate little company who’ve brought some really neat stuff to North American gamers… not least of which being the PSP port of Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished, which is the version I, at long last, powered through in a couple of days’ worth of intense and enjoyable play.
Re-presented from a short-lived account of mine I created five years ago, under which cover I intended to tell short, personal stories.