Game OVA Reversal: Episode 1—Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished

Konnichiwa and okaerinasai for even more anime talk with this, a fresh new season of Game OVA. Due to the current text/image limits imposed by the site's in-progress Community User Article system, I've decided to retool things for this season of Game OVA—wherein I traditionally play games based on anime as well as watch the anime in question to see how well served it is by the games—to instead focus on anime based on games instead. Each episode for this season will take a different anime OVA or series or movie that is explicitly based on what was then a pre-existing video game series, if not a direct adaptation of one or several of the games' stories, and I'll do a compare and contrast with the games in question in a more theoretical capacity. That is, I'm probably not going to be playing many of these because they're all fairly well known quantities; it's the anime that's perhaps a bit more obscure this time. Think of it like a text-based, anime-only season of beloved former site fixture This Ain't No Game.

My natural inclination is to shoehorn Ys into anything I'm doing, so that's what we're covering first. Before I get into Awfully Androgynous Anime Adol tearing shit up across Esteria though, let's have a quick summary of previous seasons of Game OVA (keeping in mind images in older blogs are still broken, as of July 2026):

• S1E1: City Hunter / City Hunter (PCE)

• S1E2: Iria: Zeiram the Animation / Hyper Iria (SFC)

• S1E3: Ghost Sweeper Mikami / GS Mikami: Joreishi wa Nice Body (SFC)

• S1E4: Macross: Do You Believe in Love? / Chou Jikuu Yousai Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie (SFC)

• S1E5: Eien no Filena / Eien no Filena (SFC)

• S1E6: Bubblegum Crash / Bubblegum Crash (PCE)

• S2E1: Devil Hunter Yohko / Mamono Hunter Youko: Dai-7 no Keishou (MD)

• S2E2: Armored Police Metal Jack / Kikou Keisatsu Metal Jack (SFC)

• S2E3: Magical Hat / Magical Hat no Buttobi Turbo! Daibouken (MD)

• S2E4: Natsuki Crisis / Natsuki Crisis Battle (SFC)

• S2E5: Appleseed / Appleseed: Prometheus no Shintaku (SFC)

• S2E6: Dirty Pair / Dirty Pair: Project Eden (FDS)

• S3E1: Area 88 / U.N. Squadron (SFC)

• S3E2: Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru / Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru (PCE)

• S3E3: Ushio to Tora / Ushio to Tora (SFC)

• S4E1: Zillion / Zillion (SMS)

• S4E2: What's Michael? / Michael English Daibouken (FDS)

• S4E3: Sonic Soldier Borgman / Cyborg Hunter (SMS)

• S4E4: Dr. Slump / Dr. Slump (PS1)

• S4E5: Kuusou Kagaku Sekai Gulliver Boy / Gulliver Boy (SFC)

• S4E6: Slayers / Slayers (SFC)

The Property

I summarized Ys way back in the day with this primer but suffice it to say it's probably in my top five video game franchises of all time, especially with regards to consistency and longevity. Super Mario and Zelda are pretty much the only other two series off the top of my dome that are as old as Ys, are also still active, and are as consistently great (though this is a reminder to myself to maybe play more DQ games). Ys is an action-RPG series from Nihon Falcom that debuted in 1987 and follows the adventurer Adol Christin as he travels the world inspired solely by his own wanderlust yet nonetheless finds himself embroiled in local trouble wherever he goes, and this typically culminates in soloing some ancient god or other. Adol eats ancient gods for breakfast, fortunately, though he is still incapable of speaking, holding onto equipment between games, or riding in a ship without it sinking. We all have our things we find challenging.

The anime adaptation is explicitly based on the first two Ys games, so we'll focus our rundowns there.

Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished, or sometimes Ys I: The Vanished Omens, and Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter are essentially two halves of one story and the only case of an Ys game to have a contiguous sequel. Here, Adol is a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old adventurer on his first major quest, first investigating the lands of Esteria for missing goddesses and stirring evil, culminating in a climb of the impressive Darm Tower. The second game begins right after Adol defeats the evil mage Dark Fact at the summit of that tower and finds himself on the titular mythical continent of Ys, floating several thousand meters above sea level, where he then gets involved in a struggle to protect the sanctuary from falling unceremoniously to Earth.

The two games were released in 1987 and 1988 respectively and debuted many mechanics and aesthetic choices that Ys would become famous for, including the bump system (in which you purposefully collided with enemy sprites with a specific section of your hitbox to do damage), rapid regeneration (only in exterior locations, and only while standing still), and a long horizontal gauge at the bottom of the screen for both Adol and the current boss's health. Both games debuted on the Japanese PC-88 home computer and saw several ports and remasters/remakes (where they are usually bundled together) over the years, the most prominent of which is Ys I & II Chronicles+: the version available globally on Steam. I'll get more into the particulars of the story once we check out the OVAs, but suffice it to say Adol busts heads and macks on goddesses like the best of 'em.

The Anime

The Ys anime was released as a series of OVAs and roughly broken up into three "books", as Ys was referring to its releases at the time. Book 1 comprises the first four episodes, some of which we'll be looking at here, while Book 2 is episodes 5 through 7 which culminates with the end of Ys I's story. The next four episodes, 8-11, covered the events of Ys II. Plans were scrapped for follow-ups, which may have covered Ys III's adventures in Felghana or Ys IV's in Celceta (chronologically, IV is set before III, though the series isn't really one for rigid continuity—the tenth and most recent game is actually set before either of them). Falcom lent out their internal composer team (a.k.a. Falcom Sound Team JDK) to score the anime, so hopefully I'll recognize some familiar jams throughout the show. It started airing right around the end of 1989, which would've been a few months after the release of Ys III: Wanderers from Ys.

The first four episodes were animated by studio Urban Product and directed by Jun Kamiya. I can't find much about Urban Product—they only made these first four Ys OVAs, Tobe! Kujira no Peek (a movie about kids saving a whale), and the short anthology anime Fukuyama Gekijou—and they were soon supplanted by Tokyo Kids (Terra e..., Gakuen Heaven) for the subsequent seven episodes. Jun Kamiya made his directorial debut here but has since gone on to work on many TV anime, sometimes for a single episode but often for the long haul. Latter cases include Blue Seed, Hikaru no Go, and the semi-recent Kingdom. He also directed a single episode of Armored Police Metal Jack, a previous Game OVA subject. Dunno if there's a connection to be made between cybercops and Adol but I guess we'll find out. Speaking of which:

Episode 1: "Prologue"

A relaxing, lore-establishing episode where we introduce the town of Minea in Esteria getting attacked by waves of monsters on a regular basis, with everyone getting kind of fed up of these dang wolves and treants, before we switch over to an energetic (and talkative!) version of Adol in the bustling port town of Promarock trying to book a ship to this troubled isle of Esteria we keep hearing about. The local foreman's reluctant to give this redheaded kid a boat (how does he know Adol is an insurance risk?) but eventually relents after Adol earnestly works on the docks for a while to pay for the privilege. True to canon, the boat immediately sinks en route to Esteria and Adol washes up on its shores, rescued and brought to town by the roguish Goban and his henchman Dogi (remember that guy for later) and nursed back to health by Dr. Klaus and his colorfully-named son Slaghf. While sleeping, Adol also has an encounter with a mysterious woman who's been "waiting for him to arrive". The episode ends with Adol meeting the fortuneteller Sarah, a moderately important figure in the games, where he receives a crystal dagger "because it seemed important" and that he will be the one to save Ys. "What is Ys?", Adol asks. Oh buddy, lemme tell ya...

The man. The mullet. The Legend.

That's what she said. Sorry, that's not classy enough for Ys. "Doth spoke the maiden."

Our only shot of Dogi in this entire three episode run. And he's advocating for leaving Adol to get eaten by monsters. Friendships don't always start on the most solid of foundations.

Despite the rampant twink energy, Adol does his darnedest to look cool in many of these freeze-frame shots.

Already, the orchestral/rock renditions of Ys I-II's soundtrack is making this whole thing worth it, even if we're taking our sweet time getting Adol to peak monster murdering form. I will say that the leisurely pacing has been a killer so far; have these anime makers not played Ys before? We do at least end the episode with Adol equipped with his trademark armor and sword as he sets out beyond Minea's borders and I guess the show does have to pace itself given how little plot these early Ys games had, but it is highlight perhaps a big issue with choosing Ys to adapt to a narrative-heavy format like this.

Episode 2: "The Book of Hadal"

As with Ys 1's progression, the goal now is to collect a bunch of books that were once owned by the six priests that ruled Ys under the guidance of the twin goddesses. This should let Adol and co. figure out who is responsible for the monster uprising and its link to the lost kingdom of Ys. First though, we get a charming flashback of Baby Adol reading fantasy books (though I guess it's just regular history in his world) and wanting to fight dragons when he grows up. In the present, Adol's trying to find the town of Zepik he was directed towards by Sarah, who claims her aunt Jeba is the one to ask about Ys and its history. Finding a destroyed town, Adol starts to despair but a local rummager (I guess that's what he's doing there?) called Luther Gemma tells him that this is Rastin Village and Zepik is just fine and a little ways up the hill. This is what happens when you're no longer in a video game and you don't get that helpful pop-up chyron with the area's name on it when you enter it. Adol finds this hilarious (it's funny because he didn't know anyone from Rastin) and the two head to Zepik for more lore dumping. On the way, we're told that the monsters took all the silver from Rastin before razing it to the ground: in fact, silver's gone missing all across Esteria. At Zepik we learn about the six Books of Ys and why this and all subsequent episodes are called "Book of Whoosit". Whomever should find all six books will open the gate to Ys, and that's reason enough for Adol to go looking for a bunch of tomes. First stop is the mountaintop Shrine of Solomon (dunno why we're getting him involved): best known in the games as the Palace of Destruction. (Sadly, we are not treated to a rendition of the BGM of Palace of Destruction, maybe the best track of the first game.)

Awww, Baby Adol. Awwdol. Hard to imagine that dragons won't exist when he's grown up, because he'll have killed them all.

I appreciated when the show did these little top-down nods to the source material.

Dang, Exposition Grandma got a mouth on her. Ya done got burned, Adol.

Feena starting to regret choosing the cheaper option for her new manicurist.

The episode gets far more action-oriented after this. Adol climbs the mountain, fighting off skeletal soldiers along the way, and eventually finds the Shrine where he uses the crystal Sarah gave him to open the secret passage into the Shrine's depths. Finding a woman chained up in an ominously large chamber, or boss room as one more versed in architecture might call it, he goes to free her only to realize she was the one who called out to him in his dream. While delicately removing her chains by jamming his sword into them, the wall mural of a giant millipede comes to life and, absent a 20-foot-tall Dan Ryckert wielding a vacuum cleaner, Adol is forced to fight it. He gets his ass beat instead and only barely survives by tricking it into ramming into a wall where it digs through the mountain and falls off the cliff on the other side (so that's where Tremors got the idea from). The woman is relieved that Adol survived, and Adol is relieved that her chains fell off on their own because that hacking was getting him nowhere. He also then finds the first Book of Ys after a wall conveniently shatters and the duo head down the mountain back to Zepik. I'll say the action's not too bad in these OVAs; it certainly captures Adol's lightning-fast reflexes while also still showing him getting nicked by swords or slammed into a wall by these boss monsters, which should ring as accurate to anyone who's struggled through these games with their high difficulty.

Episode 3: "The Book of Tovah"

Tovah is the surname shared by the fortuneteller Sarah and her aunt Jeda (and Goban, but technically Adol hasn't met him yet) so theoretically their book should be slightly easier to hunt down. Sarah's troubled by a recent monster attack, which is causing her assistant Reah (who has the same colored hair as the girl from the Shrine) anxiety, while Adol is laughing it up with his new lady friend. Her name is Feena and she cannot remember anything before she was kidnapped and chained up in that room, though Adol promises to help with her amnesia. Since this is a cartoon, I'm guessing his first idea is hitting her on the head with a giant mallet. Jeda deciphers a passage from the Book of Ys that talks about a mythical metal named Cleria that helped the Ys civlization to flourish; it happens to have a strong resemblance to silver, potentially solving that mystery (dang, and here I thought it was werewolf related). We then spend what feels like half the episode establishing that Sarah's going to get got: she feels it in the air, Goban (her cousin) feels it and checks in on her, Reah probably sensed it earlier, and Jeda reads some magic fortune-telling sticks and realizes it too, and I'm left wondering how more situationally doomed can one person be? Sure enough, a pair of evil wizards sneak into town and turn her into a statue while looking to take the Book of Ys she possesses, so I guess pretty doomed. (In the game she does indeed buy the farm after Adol finds the first book, though some versions retcon it into her falling into a coma: the idea either way is that you're on your own now without the crutch of being told where to go next.)

Feeling sorry for himself after letting Sarah become the newest addition to the Louvre, Adol finally meets Goban and gets a free sock to the jaw to shake him out of his doldrums. Either that or he just has one of those kinds of faces, you know? He can't be moping around when he still has more Ys-cyclopedias to find before he can save Esteria and books don't just grow on trees. Not without a whole lot of pulping and bleaching, at least. After his pep talk, Goban hands over the Book of Ys Sarah left with him to galvanize Adol more than probably the punch did, and we begin the hunt for the third tome. Or, we would, except one of the evil wizards that killed Sarah circled back around to take care of this chosen one dweeb while he's still low level. The wizard is seemingly invincible with the power of darkness on his side, but Adol finally has his number after pulling out the crystal dagger, which magically siphons away the wizard's power and leaves him open to a convenient bisecting courtesy of Adol's sword. Goban bails before Slaghf and the others arrive, since it appears he's infamous as a thief (albeit the Opposite Land type of thief that gives you shit instead of taking it), and the rest of the town celebrates the harvest as Adol and crew mourn Sarah. Reah, introduced as a orphaned refugee of mysterious origins, is then somehow able to interpret Sarah's crystal ball and tells Adol where to go next: the mines just outside of Rastin. We then end on a freeze frame of Adol cracking up as he remembered about the ruins of Rastin again before fading to black (not really, but I would've given the show bonus points if it had).

Way to kill the mood, Adol.

Damn, Tom Skerritt really lost the plot after Picket Fences got axed. Still ended up less malevolent than Kevin Sorbo though.

This shot of Adol getting knocked on his ass reminds me that I never did play that Ys vs. Trails in the Sky crossover fighter. Any good?

I completely agree, which is why I'm thankful the video game industry is so robust right now. I'll just take a sip of coffee and check the headlines real quick...

The Ys anime seems kinda perfunctory but for a 1989 tie-in that rehashes the plot of the game it does an OK job, balancing a whole lot of talking—I guess all that exposition feels more digestible when doled out across a ten-hour game rather than an hour and change of OVAs—with some flashes of what the games do best: frantic-ass combat. Building each episode around one of the six books makes some amount of structural sense if they always had seven episodes in mind, though I recall in the game that those things started falling in my lap one after the other towards the second half, and for as much as I want to keep watching to see Darm Tower (definitely this show's equivalent of the Itchy and Scratchy fireworks factory with how often it appears in the background) I think I'm set after these three. I know how it all ends, after all.

Does it do right by the games?: I'm going to say sure, though it comes off as a pretty dry retelling. We do get more characterization for Adol here, who is the usual silent protagonist cipher in the games, including moments of his enthusiasm, happiness, and sadness throughout these three episodes. While people do tend to throw the word "yuusha" around (translated here as "brave soul", but is usually the term most frequently applied for video game protagonists) he comes off as a relatively down-to-earth teenager with an irrepressible excitement to see the world. The animation can be cheap in spots (no idea if the back half of the OVAs with its different, more established animation team improves things) and whoever did these subtitles wasn't a big fan of consistent naming, but I guess I can say I'm satisfied enough by it. Especially the soundtrack and its remixes. Did I mention how good the music is in Ys? Oh, I did?

Bonus: The Game

Well, I did claim I wouldn't be playing many games for this season of Game OVA but... it's Ys, so I may have booted up Ys III: The Wanderers from Ys for TurboGrafx-CD and played a bit of that (or maybe all of it) for the occasion.

I've completed Ys III once before on SNES (and technically a second time via its The Oath in Felghana remake on PC) but I wanted to check out the TGCD version specifically to witness its—shocker—amazing soundtrack in-context. Ys III already has perhaps one of the top ten soundtracks of any video game and the TGCD version, arranged by professional musician Ryo Yonemitsu, has a very early-'90s anime-inspired sensibility to its equivalent of the original PC-88 soundtrack, which seemed germane for what we're doing here. For many of the game's BGM bangers it's hard to choose between the TGCD and the Oath in Felghana (arranged by Yukihiro Jindo) versions: for instance, Beasts as Black as Night and Illburn Ruins are both better in the former, while Valestein Castle and A Searing Struggle are superior in the latter, IMO. Comparing the tracks across all versions of Ys III is the sort of podcast project that I'd love to be a part of one day but even beyond the music Ys III's just tough, electric fun right around the time the series was starting to discover its stride as a high-paced arcade game tempered by a grind-heavy RPG framework. (You can listen to the whole soundtrack here if you're so inclined; the vibes are truly immaculate. Imagine hearing this from a console game in 1991!)

Quality-wise, beyond the soundtrack, the TurboGrafx-CD struggles to maintain the game's rapid speed compared to other console versions owing to the fact that its hardware is a little less punchy than that of the SNES and Mega Drive. There's a lot of choppiness when scrolling the screen to the extent that it feels like it's missing some frames and it'll occasionally try to do some ambitious parallax scrolling to middling effect. Some of the bosses seemed far more annoyingly unpredictable than in the other versions, while others required figuring out the one place you can safely stand to attack the boss (e.g. there's a rock monster that's flinging a bunch of different projectiles in set patterns, and the goal is to thread the needle between them all to get close enough to do damage). As with the other versions of Ys III the dungeon layouts are all pretty linear with very little in the way of treasure and secrets to find, and you're expected to do quite a bit of grinding early on to get to a level where you won't be insta-killed by the enemies deeper in the first dungeon. The side-scrolling format, unique to this Ys game, was an experiment like Zelda II that maybe didn't pan out (also like Zelda II) but the benefit is that it does give this game a distinct energy compared to the others. It provided the developers different boss ideas and platforming challenges (also a series first, and rarely invoked in other Ys games) to play around with, if nothing else.

I have no idea who this guy is but he shows up during the intro cinematic. When you start the game the cutscenes just have regular redhead Adol in them. Maybe this was meant to be an artist approximation years after the fact?

Here's the rock boss I was talking about. In addition to those two spinning fireballs, there's the three falling stalactites and a boulder of ice that regularly flies out this alcove I'm kneeling next to. This exact spot is the only place that's safe and within jump-attack range of the core on the top right there.

Story's pretty much the same as I remember it, though the localization changed some of the names and left others intact (and curiously, it's a different assortment of changes than in the SNES localization): Illburn or Ilvern Ruins are known as the Alcaino Ruins and the main town is Sarina instead of Redmont, but you still have Valestein (spelt Valestine here) Castle and the starting dungeon of the Tigray (spelt Tigre here) Quarry mines. The final boss went from Galbalan to Demanicus, which feels a bit more on the nose for a big floating demon thing (the Oath in Felghana remake retconned Galbalan to be some biomechanical ancient weapon, keeping with some lore developments from more recent Ys games). One last thing: Voice acting! Despite both series debuting in the same year, Ys managed to beat Final Fantasy to that feature by almost a decade. Of course, for 1991 localization standards it's just about passable but characters do have this odd tendency to sound like they're reading from a script than actually emoting. We'll get there. (Adol's one of the few characters that doesn't speak and thus has no VA, but he does have text dialogue. Odd choice.)

I wasn't impressed with most of the game's visuals, but this 2D Adol ascending this cyclical tower while the background scrolls past was pretty slick, not going to lie. It does kinda resemble A Link Between Worlds though.

Here I am, defeating one of the hardest video game final bosses while getting the "no damage" Retro Achievement for it. I swear that website will be the death of me.

Honestly, I don't quite know where this goes in my Ys III ranking. I'll have to check out the Mega Drive and Famicom versions before I'm ready to pass any conclusive judgment here but based on the soundtrack alone it might be my new favorite version of The Wanderers from Ys. Of course, The Oath in Felghana blows it out of the water, as it does with most RPGs in general.

Anyway, I don't want to stop talking about Ys but I should probably wrap things up here regardless. For later entries I'm going to do some deep research on the weirdest game anime tie-ins I can find, probably several magnitudes more obscure than the criminally overlooked Ys franchise, and have more reactions for you throughout this month and next. Feel free to drop recommendations in the comments also if you happen to be possessed of forbidden knowledge. Mata ne for now.