「地獄の門より放たれし闇の命。 生い茂り、すべてを覆い尽くせ！ ブレイクライド！ メイデン・オブ・ビーナストラップ “Я”」
Jigoku no mon yori hanatareshi yami no inochi. Oishigeri, subete wo ooitsukuse! Bureikuraido! Maiden of Venus Trap “Я”!
“Life of darkness released from the gates of hell, grow thick, and cover everything! Break ride! Maiden of Venus Trap, “Я”!”
I want you all to know you haven’t been able to see or reblog this post for three years because tumblr thought it was adult content.
A look back at the humble beginnings of Falcom’s long-running Ys franchise, from the birth of the games in the late 1980s to the political fallout between the president and devteam!
A look back at the humble beginnings of Falcom’s long-running Ys franchise, from the birth of the games in the late 1980s to the political fallout between the president and devteam!
“Pioneer 1 may have damaged the ecological system of Ragol before we were aware of it. So, the native creatures tried to remove the invaders.”
“A huge interstellar transport ship was sent to Ragol. That was Pioneer 1. Pioneer 1 confirmed Ragol as a suitable location to settle on. And a second ship departed. That was us… Pioneer 2.”
The early Ys games rarely seem to get much recognition in the western wing of the world. It’s understandable why; the original personal computer iterations from the late 1980s were entirely incompatible with western Operating Systems, and the PC Engine bombed internationally, so their primary home console ports never reached a broad English-speaking audience. From an American’s perspective, it might be tempting to think that the Action RPG genre got good with Secret of Mana—but there’s so much more behind history’s curtain.
In the context of 1989, Ys I & II must have seemed overwhelming. It was among the earliest of the PCE/TurboGrafx’s RPG library, preceded only by the first Tengai Makyō game, Necromancer, and Dungeon Explorer. While sales numbers for PC Engine software seem lost to time, it’s clear from the prominent featuring of Ys in Gekkan PC Engine and other gaming magazines that this was a very significant title in its moment, and we know from Falcom’s PC Engine-exclusives that all of the company’s games performed well on the console. The PC Engine was something like the Vita of its day, and Falcom was still Falcom, producing games well into 1995 for a system that was abandoned by its own manufacturer in ‘92. Without this Ys port, we’d have never arrived at Legend of Xanadu or The Legend of Heroes.[…]
The disc that first went out to retailers some thirty years ago wasn’t just the proof of concept for the format, it was the state-of-the-art. Director and main programmer Iwasaki Hiromasa later remarked in The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2 that before Ys, everyone believed the CD-ROM format was slow; after Ys, “only a bad developer would make a really, really slow game.”
