Ys III: Wanderers from Ys (Ys is pronounced like “ease”) on the SNES was my first exposure to Falcom's action RPG series. At the time, I thought it was just a quirky, side-scroller with cool music, neat visual effects, and punishing difficulty. Dying within seconds of entering the first “dungeon” was my first taste of humble pie with Falcom's arcade RPG series, a craving that had never really gone away.

Since then, I've kept in touch with the series via its North American releases here which, in exploring Falcom's history with the series, meant that I've missed out on a lot. Not only because I didn't have a TG-16 at the time, but because most of Falcom's releases were meant only for the PC enthusiast and video game market over in Japan. Fortunately, especially thanks to explosive growth of the Internet, ordering a title from Falcom has made getting a hold of its titles much easier and my eagerness to learn more about the series was rekindled with The Oath in Felghana.

Adol the Red, Killer of Bosses
 

I had been wanting to write up something about Ys for awhile, if at least to shine a bit more light on this often misunderstood and overlooked series. At the very least, I consider it a way to sort through my own thoughts on the series and share what I've discovered from the truly hardcore fans that follow Falcom's work. The “short” can apply to the the fact that I haven't played every game listed here, so I've done my best to cover those titles with information gleaned from notes taken from other sources in my own journey to learn more about them..

If you're reading this, you're either a big fan of the series, someone curious about it, or someone who just wants to be sure that what I'm going to lay out in this short history is fairly accurate. I'm hoping you'll find something here that should make reading it worthwhile.

I would also like to especially thank Dan "Shoe" Hsu, Brian Shirk, and everyone at Bitmob that had very patiently helped me in making corrections and in proofing this article going forward. Without their incredible help and that of many others, this dedication to Ys wouldn't have been possible.