- Ys Book I & II
- Ys III: Wanderers from Ys
- Ys IV: Dawn of Ys / Mask of the Sun
- Ys V: Ushinawareta Suna no Miyako Kefin
- Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim
- Ys: The Oath in Felghana
- Ys Origin
- Ys Seven
- Ys: Memories of Celceta
- Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana
- Lacrimosa of Dana (Novel)
- Ys IX: Monstrum Nox
- Ys X: Nordics
- Ys Strategy
- Ys: The Call of Solum
- Ys Online: Ark of Napishtim
- Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga
- Ys (Anime)
Ys VI received a remake not by Falcom, but rather by Restar Games, who reimagined it as an MMORPG for smartphones. Rather than controlling Adol, the player creates their own companion character, who adventures alongside him as he gets swept up in the Great Vortex of Canaan.
The story has all of the same characters as Ys VI and all of the same major locations, and roughly follows the same plot beats, but the game plays completely differently. Despite technically being an MMORPG, you can play single player completely, with NPCs filling in the roles any time you need additional party members. Rather than simply running, jumping, and slashing, you have several attack abilities, each with their own cooldowns. The structure is mission-based, as you enter an area, as you follow the path to the goal and kill more enemies. Along the way, you’ll get tons of materials used to level up your equipment and find other plot-essential items. Newly added is a social system, where you can talk to other characters and give them items. This does a good job of fleshing out familiar faces like Orla and Isha, plus there are plenty of newly added characters to interact with too. You can also raise your own Pikkard partner, who has his own powerful attacks by growing to an enormous size.
Ys Online: Ark of Napishtim has plenty of brand new art and some excellent arrangements of classic tunes, but that’s really the only thing this has going for it. The game falls victim to the same trap as so many mobile RPGs, in that it’s absolutely cluttered with menus and items and currencies that give the illusion of depth, but the gameplay itself is incredibly basic. In fact, most of the time you can set it to autoplay and watch your character venture from waypoint to waypoint, effortlessly smashing anything that gets in its path. The dungeons aren’t even really dungeons since they’re just relatively small areas without any challenges or much to explore. And since this is a free-to-play game, eventually you’ll run into some kind of wall and need to purchase some microtransactions to proceed.
On one hand, this is just the nature of the mobile F2P MMORPG field. But Ys fans, especially fans of the 2000s era of the series, love it for its intense, challenging, fast-paced, no-cruft action, and Ys Online is the direct antithesis of that. It’s a fun world to revisit, but it just makes one wonder what a proper Ys VI remake would be like, one which stayed at least somewhat faithful to the core tenets of the franchise.
The framework for Ys Online also seems heavily based on the popular 2019 mobile Tales of Wind by Hong Kong-based studio Neocraft. Korean Developer FOW Games also licensed Falcom’s The Legend of Heroes: Gagharv Trilogy and turned it into a mobile MMORPG, though it’s different from Ys Online.
