The Time Ys Now

This is how I heard of Ys:

In the summer of 1998, between my junior and senior year in high school, I became interested in console emulation. Someone had loaded a then-popular NES emulator called Nesticle onto the school’s network, along with a ROM of Contra, and either hid it skillfully enough that the faculty could not find and delete it, or else was very persistent about reinstalling it if it did manage to get deleted. It wasn’t long after this that I had a version of Nesticle on my parents' computer, running all sorts of Nintendo games I’d never had the means to own.

At some point, it occurred to me to wonder about the possibility of other console systems being emulated. It turns out that the console systems that hadn’t been emulated (or in the process of being created) comprised a pretty short list, even in those days. So I started looking for games for the TurboGrafx-16, because I owned the system, but had come by it secondhand, and had very, very few genuinely decent games for it. I’m not sure why I was so interested in it, to be honest. The only possible explanation I can come up with today is that it interested me to see what a system would be like, what sorts of games it would have, when its makers weren’t involved in the increasingly desperate pissing contest between Nintendo and Sega that had dominated the 16-bit era. Also, my friend Josh was willing to sell it to me, along with five games, for about forty dollars. This was a deal I was not prepared to turn down.

So anyway, I was behind the computer late one night (my usual habit in those days was to be up until the small hours of the morning playing games or looking things up on the internet, so it was probably at least one o’clock in the morning, and very likely much later) looking for sites that might host downloadable TurboGrafx-16 ROMs. And I kept hearing mention of this game called Ys, or maybe Y’s; nobody seemed to be able to spell it consistently. The general opinion seemed to be that Ys and its sequel were the sorts of games that justified owning the system.

I couldn’t find download links for any of the Ys games, and it puzzled me until I learned why: the games being referred to specifically were for the TurboDuo, a CD-based add-on system for the TurboGrafx-16. Prior to this, I hadn’t been aware such a thing existed. At the time, the idea of downloading a CD’s worth of data was laughable. This was AOL dial-up, five hours per month (after which hourly charges kicked in), in an era when five hours seemed entirely sufficient for a person’s internet needs.

I know, I know — I’m old. Kids, lawn, etc.

But I was hooked, anyway. The idea of owning Ys, in some form, any form, had infected me somehow. The sheer elusiveness of the thing made it desirable. My curiosity made me want to learn more. The more I learned, the more I wanted it. Ys became my holy grail. (A couple of years later, Panzer Dragoon Saga would do this to me also).

Fun facts about Ys that I learned during this weird obsessive phase include:

1. Ys I and Ys II were originally computer games, released on a fairly popular Japanese PC (I don’t remember which model).

2. The soundtrack to the original games was composed by Yuzo Koshiro, possibly one of the first game music composers to reach any real level of fame and recognition as such.

3. The TurboDuo games I had originally read about were simply the first widespread release of the games in the U.S. (a PC version of the first game had been released Stateside, but does not seem to have done well).

4. Ys I and Ys II are almost always presented together. Whenever a new version of the first is announced, the second is guaranteed to follow.

5. The games feature an odd control scheme in which there is no attack button.

6. Ys I and Ys II may be the most remade and ported games in the history of the video gaming. Go on, see for yourself.

7. The games have basically nothing in common with the legendary lost city which shares the name.

8. The music for the games is also pretty great. I discovered this for myself when I bought a CD titled The Very Best of Ys at the local comic book store, back when they carried anime and video game soundtracks, anime and manga.

9. There was pretty much no other incentive to go to said comic book store.

A few years after this (somewhere around the summer of 2003), there were rumors of the PS2 version (itself an adaptation of the late-90s Ys I & II Eternal PC remakes) being brought to the U.S. I remember this distinctly, because I had downloaded the trailer, and was watching it obsessively on my first laptop before said laptop broke down utterly due to a relatively minor issue (the hard drive was physically broken).

A couple of years after I left the Army, I eventually managed to procure copies of the PC versions, Ys I & II Complete. Then I just had to wait for the English translation patch for Ys II to be completed (since the games are originally in Japanese, and this particular version never saw an official release in the U.S.

As unnecessary as it probably sounds to talk about all of that, it’s an integral part of my experience with these games. For the longest time, Ys was not a game to me. It was an experience, an idea. I listened to the music, I watched the anime that was based on it, I soaked up as much media as I could, but the game itself, the core object upon which all of these other things were founded, was absent. And so every time I sit down to play the game now, there’s a little bit of that allure of the unattainable still left. When you spend so long wanting a thing, even if that want is not overpowering, finally having that thing becomes an odd experience. There is a part of you that has difficulty processing the fact of that ownership, and is paranoid that the object may vanish.

So, what are these Ys games like?

Well, superficially, Ys resembles The Legend of Zelda. But where any given Zelda is about half action game and half adventure game, Ys is half action game, half role-playing game. The Legend of Zelda typically has you seeking out tools which serve the purposes of either allowing you to more thoroughly navigate the game’s world, allowing you more varied combat options, or both. You are presented with puzzles, which require the intelligent application of your tools to solve – this is the adventure game element, which lends a layer of depth to the otherwise fairly mundane walking-around-and-killing-enemies sort of game you’d have without it.

Ys is more like an RPG. The “obstacles” are strong enemies in maze-like dungeons, and the usual solution to these problems is to gain experience points and level up enough to meet the challenge. There are periodically items to be obtained, but rather than tools, these items are most often simply plot coupons, single-use items designed to allow passage through specific barriers. The game may slightly expand your skill set, but overall, what is asked of you as a player is mainly to become more competent with that skill set, and to become stronger.

This is not a bad thing. It is, though, something that makes Ys different from The Legend of Zelda, which it is often compared to.

Our hero is the wandering youth Adol Christin. Adol is an adventurer, traveling the world to see new and interesting things. Ys I deals with his journey in the land of Esteria, which was once the site of an ancient but advanced and enlightened civilization, called Ys. But the ancient land of Ys is no more; it is nothing but a legend in Esteria. Where it once stood there is now only a crater, and at the rim of that crater stands the Shrine of Solomon and Darm Tower, the latter of which is said to be the abode of myriad demonic creatures.

Esteria is surrounded by a storm barrier through which no ships have been known to pass, but Adol is a determined sort, and figures he can make it through. And, though he does encounter the storm barrier, and his ship is wrecked, he manages despite the odds to wash ashore, half-drowned but alive. From here he explores the land, and finds that Esteria seems to be on the edge of collapse, with monsters roaming the countryside at will, and most people scared to leave their settlements. Cities and towns are heavily fortified or protected by magic, and the monsters responsible for the danger seem to be continuously pouring out of Darm Tower. And so Adol makes his way there to face the unknown evil that has cast its shadow across the land.

By itself, Ys I would be disappointing. It’s good, but short. Now, I like short games – I felt that Ico was just right in terms of length, as the older I get, and the more responsibilities I have, the more I appreciate a game that can give me a quality experience without demanding too much of my ever-shrinking free time. But Ys I can be beaten in five hours, possibly less. There are only three towns (the earlier versions only had two), and three dungeons. To be fair, the final dungeon is Darm Tower, and it quite literally takes up the latter half of the game. But still, the game is tremendously short. This may be part of why Ys I and Ys II are almost always presented as a set.

See, Ys II picks up literally moments after Ys I ends. After a climactic final battle at the top of Darm Tower, Adol is sent flying through the sky, to land in the ancient land of Ys, which has been floating through the sky for centuries. There, he must find the source of the evil that menaces both Ys and the world below, and try to set right the wrongs of the distant past.

Ys II is a much longer and more varied game, and expands Adol’s skill set to include a handful of magic spells, though some of these are of limited usefulness.

I sometimes wonder if Ys I and Ys II weren’t originally designed to be one game, then cut at some point in development. The early Playstation RPGs Arc the Lad and Arc the Lad II experienced something similar to this. Supposedly, the original Arc the Lad was meant to be a launch title for the Playstation, but the proposed design for the game was far too ambitious to be completed in time. Rather than compromise, the development team simply placed an end on the game at a certain point, and continued making the rest of it as a sequel. Ys I and Ys II feel much the same, considering the two essentially tell a single story between them.

Now, I can’t deny that this two-part story is somewhat simple, even cliché at points. But it’s just deep enough to feel appropriately urgent, and not much time is spent expositing to the player. There’s just enough background to make the world feel real and interesting, enough story to make you want to keep going, and not so much of either that they really interfere with the flow of the game.

There are some curious design choices present, though. And these seem to remain constant not just in the various remakes of Ys I and Ys II, but also in the wider series.

Perhaps the most famous of these is the lack of an attack button. While not all of the entries in the series have this “feature” – in fact, only Ys I, Ys II and both versions of Ys IV do – it has become one of the more memorable aspects of the first two games. Instead of pressing a button to attack, Adol simply rams into enemies. The key is how this ramming is carried out. A direct collision harms Adol just as much as it harms the enemy, if not more, and it’s easy to get yourself killed in a hurry if you’re not paying attention. The proper ramming technique is to collide with your enemies in an off-center fashion. This deals plenty of damage to them, while Adol takes none. The easiest way to achieve this is by using diagonal maneuvers, though early versions of the games only allowed for four-directional movements.

At first, this combat system seems irredeemably stupid. Even when I was obsessing over the games, I worried that this was going to be a deal-breaker. But no – it works. Once I got the hang of it, I wondered why I ever thought it would bother me. In a way, it’s actually kind of nice; certainly it’s efficient. Grinding for an experience level or two is a lot less objectionable when there’s so little real work involved in the task.

Another odd design quirk is that you can usually only have one item (aside from equipment like weapons, armor and the like) ready for use at a time, and when you’re in a boss battle, you cannot change it this item. You can pause, but your menu options are unavailable. Also, many of the most desirable items, such as healing potions, can only be carried one at a time. If you already have one in your inventory, you can’t pick up a second, no matter how much sense it would make to have multiples. If the game was less well balanced, this would bother me considerably. As it is, it’s probably just my RPG player’s instincts kicking in, demanding I have as many of a healing or restorative item as it is possible to carry, just in case.

I do also need to take a moment to comment on the music. Ys, as a series, has probably some of the most consistently high-quality music I have ever heard in a video game. The style swings back and forth from orchestral to hard guitar rock and back again, and points in between, and there are few soundtracks I’ve been more keen to own than the Ys soundtracks.

As far as actually finding the games, well, that’s gotten a lot less difficult recently. A few years ago, Nintendo released the TurboDuo versions of the games on their Virtual Console. More recently still, Atlus brought out the Nintendo DS versions of the games in the form of Legacy of Ys, though this version is sort of the ugly one out of the lot. It uses scaled-down two-dimensional sprite graphics for the characters and enemies, and awkward, blocky 3D graphics for the landscapes. It's not bad, just visually awkward.

Even better, XSEED localized Ys I & II Chronicles, the PSP version of the original two games, for the U.S. early in 2011. Based on the Ys I & II Eternal versions from the late 1990s, this is probably the definitive version of the two early games. XSEED also seems to have a sense of humor when it came to advertising the games, too.

Like He-Man, but with better animation and less clothing

For several years, I had heard Ralph Bakshi’s name thrown around in reference to American animation, but had never seen any of his work. I was intrigued by descriptions of the work, which ranged from “adult, in the sense of possessing sophistication and intelligence,” to “adult, in the sense that it is at war with the Disney notion of how animation should be done and who it should be done for, and in fact tackles subjects and themes Disney would probably prefer to forget even exist”. He also created a doomed animated adaptation of the first half of Lord of the Rings, which, now that I think about it, may be how I heard of him in the first place.

I’ve been hesitant to explore any of Bakshi’s works. This is mostly owing to the reading I’ve done about him and the animation he has produced. The idea I get, reading about him, is that the quality of his output seems to be about as irregular as the ECG readout of a heart arrhythmia patient. At the same time, I’ve been fascinated by the skill he puts into his animation. So, finally, I broke down and watched Fire and Ice.

I don’t know why I chose this movie specifically, except perhaps that I knew if I picked up his version of Lord of the Rings, I would be incapable of giving it a fair chance. I would be disappointed from the word go. And there’s a part of me that is somewhat attracted to sword-and-sorcery, or “low” fantasy; it’s why I own copies of all the original Kull and Conan stories. And God knows there are times when Fire and Ice feels like a lost Robert E. Howard story.

Apparently, this movie was a collaboration between Bakshi and fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. If you don’t know who Frazetta is, just imagine every generic fantasy painting you’ve ever seen where the woman is wearing a chainmail bikini and the man is wearing nothing more than a loincloth and a helmet, and brandishing his muscles as much as his sword or axe. If the painting you’re thinking of wasn’t created by Frazetta, then it was created by someone who was inspired by him.

The story of Fire and Ice opens with a woman narrating, in the finest William Shatner style, the central dilemma. There was an evil sorceress named Juliana who had a son, Nekron, and she tutored him in all of her dark arts. They live far to the north, in a place called Icepeak, and from there they are using their dark magic to push a massive glacier ever southward, with the end goal of covering the world in ice and then ruling it.

Nekron seems to be satisfied with alternately lounging or brooding on his throne, moving the glacier occasionally and calling it a day, but his mother has somewhat grander designs. Under the guise of sending an envoy to King Jarol of Firekeep (who appears to be the only leader left in the world capable enough or willing enough to put up any useful resistance to Nekron) in order negotiate a truce, she has her minions kidnap his daughter Teegra.

Teegra’s curvaceous physique is drawn with loving detail. Anyone could make her costume; all you need is some string, a single handkerchief and a pair of scissors — and you’ll have some of the handkerchief left over when you’re done, believe me. It would seem sexist, except the men are just as scantily clad, and just as much attention is paid to the muscles of our heroes as is paid to the ample bosom and well-rounded hips of our heroine. It’s equal-opportunity objectification, is what I’m saying.

Teegra, however, is actually more intelligent and less useless than the average bikini-clad fantasy princess, in that she has both the wits and the drive to escape her captors on multiple occasions. Sure, she’s a damsel who quite frequently finds herself in distress (at one point, she briefly winds up in the clutches of a lesbian sorceress), but thankfully she believes that her options for dealing with said distress should involve more than “wait for rescue”.

Our hero, though, is Larn, a tall, scarcely clad warrior from a village recently decimated by Nekron and his sub-human minions (no, really, they’re seriously called sub-humans). He manages to escape the destruction of his village and is heading south when he runs into Teegra in an ancient and abandoned temple complex. The two spend an indeterminate period of time there together, presumably falling in love, until an unfortunate accident causes Larn to be separated from Teegra and nearly eaten by what seems to be a freshwater kraken. Teegra, mourning his apparent loss, is recaptured by the sub-humans and eventually carried off to Nekron and his mother.

Larn follows her, always just a few steps behind, and falls in with the mysterious warrior Darkwolf, who looks for all the world like some terrifying cross between Conan the barbarian and the goddamned Batman. Darkwolf seems to have devoted his life to the wholesale slaughter of Nekron’s minions (and, ideally, Nekron himself), and it is obliquely hinted that he may be something other than strictly human.

The rest of the movie concerns itself with Larn’s attempts to rescue Teegra, Teegra’s attempts to escape Nekron, and Darkwolf's habit of murdering every sub-human he happens across.

The movie has little in the way of plot. Most of the events of the story are simply random tribulations that occur as the characters are on the way to some other goal or objective. It’s mostly entertaining to watch, but serves no purpose in terms of actually telling us anything about the story or characters. As odd as it is to say about a movie that clocks in at just under an hour and a half, most of Fire and Ice is fluff.

Granted, it is gorgeously animated fluff. Bakshi employed a technique called rotoscoping, which is sort of the hand-drawn equivalent to motion-capture in three-dimensional CG animation like that seen in Avatar or 2007’s Beowulf. Basically, Bakshi filmed live actors performing all the action in the movie, and then had his animators draw over it to create some of the most fluid, realistic animation you will ever see.

The action, then, winds up being fairly realistic, and oddly subdued at points. Early on, when Larn is attempting to escape through the trees from his sub-human pursuers, the chase is not the sort of high-speed pursuit you might expect. Rather than dazzle the audience with a speedy chase, Bakshi gives us a much more deliberately paced escape which heightens Larn’s growing sense of worry and alarm as his pursuers, who seem far more nimble, close in.

Likewise, the fighting is usually quick and the moves employed by the characters are sharp and utilitarian. The only long, drawn-out duel is between Larn and Nekron, and it manages to be a tense affair mainly because of how obvious it is that Nekron is toying with Larn.

Where the movie falls apart is with its characters, who are barely developed, if at all. Nekron is a completely stereotypical megalomaniacal sorcerer with (mostly justified) supreme confidence in his powers and the inevitability of his conquest. Except for when he strips down and takes up a sword to spar with Larn, he never deviates from this one-note presentation. Larn himself is never much more than a resourceful barbarian whose primary motivation is to retrieve his love interest, and Teegra is just as bad. In fact, no one in this cast undergoes any actual character development.

Hell, there’s not even much in the way of dialogue. This is mostly because the mere handful of named characters are often alone, wandering the wilderness with only the violent sub-humans to interact with. And by “interact with,” I mean “slaughter”. The sub-humans certainly don’t talk. They sort of hoot and mutter and gibber indistinctly. Occasionally they yell. But there is no real dialogue for these characters, and in fact, half the time their vocalizations don’t even seem to quite match up to the on-screen actions. Given their dark skin and vaguely ape-like features, there are some unfortunate implications here.

Is Fire and Ice good? It’s hard to say. It goes nowhere, but it provides an acceptably enjoyable ride getting there. The plot seems to have no real logical problems or plot holes, or other similar troubles, but it’s also dead simple. If you aim low and hit your target, that isn’t skill so much as it is taking the easy way out. The animation is, again, stunning. But the lack of character development means Fire and Ice isn’t something I’ll be going back to very much. There’s nothing to dissect, nothing even to think about after the credits roll.