There was no guarantee that it would turn out like this. After the one-two punch of the first two Ys games in 1987 and 1988, the series would take a number of perplexing turns through the late 80s and early 90s. Ys III, originally intended as a gaiden, was a side-scrolling platformer with only the barest hints of RPG elements. Then the two primary creative forces behind the first three Ys games, Tomoyoshi Miyazaki and Masaya Hashimoto, left to found Quintet before a proper sequel could be developed. Unable to deliver a full game on its own, Nihon Falcom provided a scenario and music for two versions of Ys IV, both released in 1993: Tonkin House’s abysmal Mask of the Sun for Super Famicom, and Hudon’s Dawn of Ys for PC Engine CD-ROM², a highly-polished follow-up to the superlative PC Engine CD-ROM² ports of the first two games. Both versions of Ys IV strive to recreate the gameplay and style of the first two Ys games, but neither has a clue about how to evolve Ys beyond the basic bump combat that was growing stale by 1993.

The real death blow to the series, though, was 1995’s Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand, a late Super Famicom release developed by Falcom that makes the first real stab at defining the future of the series. Ditching bump combat in favor of dedicated attack and jump buttons, Ys V plays a lot like a Quintet game, except it lacks the elegant construction and polish of games such as Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. While it's a memorable adventure with many of Falcom’s classic touches (the soundtrack whips), it’s clearly rushed. The difficulty is wildly uneven, the attempts at platforming fall flat, and technical issues such as loading times reveal Falcom’s lack of expertise working with the Super Famicom hardware. It’s not a bad action-RPG, but it’s not Ys.

The only signs of Ys’s continued survival as a series for the rest of the 90s were well-received remakes of Ys I and II. This is where the story could have ended. Ys could have gone the way of Hydlide or any number of the other influential Japanese role-playing series that couldn’t keep up with the times. Even Falcom itself, by this point reduced to subsisting primarily on low-budget Windows games, seemed headed for a similar fate as its 80s Japanese microcomputer contemporaries. But instead we got Ys VI, the beginning of a remarkable second life not just for Ys but for Falcom as a whole.

After being sucked into the Great Vortex, a thinly veiled version of the Bermuda Triangle, Adol finds himself on the Canaan Islands, a thinly veiled pastiche of a Caribbean island chain dominated by the tension between its native peoples (the Rehda) and largely European colonizers (the Eresians). While the overarching story itself is no great shakes, Falcom’s gift for applying the sweeping grandeur of mythological fantasy bullshit to small-scale settings shines through.

There are only two small towns and a handful of other NPCs, but every character has a name, a character portrait, a personality, and even their own ongoing arcs. The little dramas that play out, from the town drunk turning a new leaf to the two siblings running rival shops, lend the game its heart. Perhaps the strongest of these threads is how the Eresians, largely trapped on the islands by the Great Vortex against their will, have learned to live on the islands. Some have embraced their fate, while others are haunted by it.

Doubling down on Ys V’s more traditional action-RPG mechanics, Ys VI’s combat is built around attack and jump buttons along with a very basic magic system. While it adds some new twists such as leveling up your three elemental swords, it’s surprisingly close to a highly refined version of Ys V’s combat. Unlike Ys V though, Ys VI’s combat is blazingly fast and fluid. It’s closer to a beat ’em up than the stiff action-RPGs of the 16-bit era, with Adol bouncing around against hordes of enemies who occasionally bombard him with danmaku-esque projectile patterns. On normal difficulty, the curve is just right, encouraging a mix of grinding and dexterity, but never rising to frustration.

While there are only a handful of dungeons, they’re all intricate mazes that are deeply satisfying to explore, although nothing here matches the scope and ambition of Darm Tower or Solomon Shrine. The game is on the short side, but highly replayable, with multiple difficulty levels and an optional Catastrophe mode that removes healing items. As with the best of the earlier Ys games, it’s closer to a Metroidvania than a traditional RPG. There’s no overworld, and the two islands that comprise the vast majority of the game can be traversed end-to-end in just a few minutes.

Despite its many highs, Ys VI stumbles in a few places. Pacing is uneven, with an extended exposition drop at the end of the second act in particular killing the momentum for no real payoff. Platforming is unnecessarily fussy, with a counterintuitive long jump mechanic that’s sure to annoy. These flaws pull the game down from all-timer status, but this is still a must-play for fans of Ys and Falcom. A number of key players in the company’s ongoing renaissance, including future president Toshihiro Kondo, worked on the game, and it’s a joy to see them begin to figure out the future Falcom style here. That isn’t even getting into the superb artwork or the spectacular soundtrack, which blends the style of classic Ys music, Ryo Yonemitsu’s beloved Redbook audio arrangements from the PC Engine CD-ROM² games, and modern touches such as drum’n’bass breaks. I already can’t wait to pick this one up again for a Nightmare mode run.

Coming to this after playing Ys I and II felt like a breeze of fresh air in many ways. At its core, Ys VI retains many qualities that I grew so fond of in the older titles. Exploration is fun, the music is absolutely stellar, the story is more grounded and character progression feels super meaningful. However, there are quite a few aspects that this game improved in comparison to its predecessors.

For one, the level layout was way less confusing for me this time around. Unfortunately, we still didn’t get a mini-map in this one (only a large world map that is kinda useless but looks nice) to help get our bearings. That being said, the level structure itself is crafted in a way that made it easy for me to find my way and not get lost. That is achieved by chunking the game world into distinct areas that stand on their own and which offer layouts, that are not nearly as confusing as they were in the older titles. That was a huge relief to me. I cannot count how many times I completely lost my way in Ys I and II as they were a million doors on every screen leading to a countless amount of side areas. Here, that was not really the case. Yes, there were still sections of the game that were rather confusing (talking about a specific cave - if you know, you know^^) but it never reached the heights of frustration that I had felt before.

Same goes for the combat system. In my opinion, Ys VI offers a huge step-up from the bump system introduced in Ys I. We can finally hack, slay and drop-attack our way through enemies and it never felt better. I liked how specific items were required to defeat certain enemies or how I could upgrade my swords to increase my damage output massively. That’s another change I really liked. Pretty early on, you get 3 swords, all with their own moveset and special attack that you keep until the end of the game. No more farming gold for new weapons or losing your mind because you didn’t find a specific chest in a dungeon that contained a better sword than what you had. Here, it’s all a bit more simplified. You still have to farm a resource to upgrade your stuff but at least you won’t miss out on anything just because you didn’t check every single room in a dungeon to find new gear.

Unfortunately, not all that glitters is gold and some new features bring new problems with them. For me, that was definitely the case for the jump mechanic. Jumping around for simple platforming stuff and striking enemies from above is cool and all. However, the game introduces some pretty precise platforming challenges that just left me frustrated. There are many areas in the game where you have to perform a pixel-perfect jump and if you fail, you fall down into the area below and have to backtrack the entire way to try again. And it’s the worst. On top of that, the game features a dash move that I would describe as the single most convoluted jump mechanic that I have ever seen in a game. I wasn’t even aware that there was a dash until I found a chest that I couldn’t jump to. So, I looked it up online and couldn’t believe what I read. You have to tap the move button for the direction you wish to jump to, then shortly press attack for some reason and then press jump. Yes, it’s as horrible as it sounds. Fortunately, I only needed this move once ore twice but my god, did it suck.

So, even though the platforming felt like ass in many areas of the game and the backtracking it led to did become quite frustrating at times, I still had a good time with Ys VI. The boss battles were fun with each boss introducing a new challenge that required a specific tactic to beat them. The world and its inhabitants were absolutely beautiful. It was the first time in an Ys game, that I kind of actually cared for the characters and their fate. The writing definitely helped with that. All characters were interesting, charming or funny in a way that I hadn’t seen in an Ys game before. The story is still very much in the background but it kept me motivated and it wasn’t as cliché as in other JRPGs. So far, this has been my favorite Ys game and I can’t wait to play more games of the series in the future.