, also known as Ys: The Vanished Omens or The Ancient Land of Ys, is a 1987 action role-playing game developed by Nihon Falcom. It is the first installment in the Ys series. Initially developed for the PC-8801 by Masaya Hashimoto (director, programmer, designer) and Tomoyoshi Miyazaki (scenario writer), the game was soon ported to the X1, PC-9801, FM-7, and MSX2 Japanese computer systems. Ancient Ys Vanished saw many subsequent releases, such as an English-language version for the Master System and an enhanced remake for the TurboGrafx-CD system as part of a compilation called Ys I & II, alongside its 1988 sequel Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter. DotEmu has released the game on Android with the following localizations: English, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Italian, German, and Portuguese. Plot Ys was a precursor to role-playing games that emphasize storytelling. The hero of Ys is an adventurous young swordsman named Adol Christin. As the story begins, he has just arrived at the Town of Minea, in the land of Esteria. He is called upon by Sara, a fortune-teller, who tells him of a great evil that is sweeping the land. Adol is informed that he must seek out the six Books of Ys. These books contain the history of the ancient land of Ys, and will give him the knowledge he needs to defeat the evil forces. Sara gives Adol a crystal for identification and instructs him to find her aunt in Zepik Village, who holds the key to retrieving one of the Books. With that, his quest begins. Gameplay The player controls Adol on a game field viewed from a top-down perspective. As he travels on the main field and explores dungeons, Adol encounters numerous roaming enemies, which he must battle in order to progress. Combat in Ys is rather different from other RPGs of the era, which either had turn-based battles or a manually activated sword. Ys instead features a battle system where fighters automatically attack when walking into their enemies off-center. When one fighter comes into contact with an enemy, damage can be sustained on both sides if both combatants are facing each other. Attacking straight-on causes the attacker the most damage to himself, but clipping the edge of the defender causes the attacked fighter to take most or all of the damage. If one fighter contacts the enemy's side or back, only the attacked