This is Console History, a special sub-series of my more general History Lessons series, covering console role-playing games, action role-playing games, Metroidvanias, and action-adventure games in nominally chronological order starting in the late 1980s. The chronology is garbled in the beginning as the scope of the series expanded, but it gets more organized later on. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.
When I first started writing about early console games, I was only planning to play through the Final Fantasy series. Then I decided I should probably go back and play the Dragon Quest series too. Then I decided I should also play a bunch of other role-playing games, and then that I should add some action role-playing games… the result was something of a mess in terms of the timeline, jumping back and forth as I kept expanding my list of games. This post, however, brings my (now massive) list back into order. My last post was about Hydlide 3: The Space Memories, which originally released on November 22, 1987. The original Final Fantasy (the very first post I wrote in this console history series) appeared about a month later, on December 18, 1987. A mere two days after that, the excellent Phantasy Star released. Next came Dragon Quest III on February 10, 1988. And, finally, that brings us to Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter, originally released in Japan on April 22, 1988 for Japanese home computer systems like the PC-88. From here on out, we should be going in chronological order!
As the name suggests, Ys II is a direct sequel to the original Ys that finishes up the story. The connection is so strong, in fact, that both games were later remade and re-released as a single title, Ys Book I & II, for the PC Engine CD/TurboGrafx-CD in December 1989. That’s the version I played, and I’ve already written about Ys I. I then paused my playthrough to cover other games that released between Ys I and Ys II. Now, I’ve gone back to finish off Ys II.