Ys Book I&II -- All In One.

I've been playing numerous titles along side of Too Human and one of those has been Ys Book I & II for the Turbo Grafix-16 CD via the Wii and its Virtual Console. Ys has long been one of my most favored gaming series and it's great to see this one being made available to the masses. It's too bad most of them will continue to ignore it. Ys Book I & II was originally released by Hudson in 1990 for NEC's Turbo Grafix-16 CD system. In 1990 not a lot of people were going to shell out $399 for a CD system when the bigger name SEGA had the coolest system on the market at under $200 and Nintendo's 16-bit entry had yet to be released in America. Ys Book I & II easily established itself as the one, must have, title for the Turbo Grafix-16 CD. It combined both of Falcom's Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished and Ys II: Anchient Ys Vanished: The Final Chapter on one CD-ROM. It's hard to believe now, but Ys Book I & II ushered in full motion video, redbook audio, and true voice. It was a graphical and aural Tour de Force. It didn't hurt that the backing gameplay was exceptionally fun. The Ys series is famous for its music. So much so that Falcom still releases Ys music to this day, some twenty-one years later. Ys Book I & II easily has some of the greatest music ever composed for gaming. You have Yuzo Koshiro's brilliant original score for Ys I and the new tracks for Ys II with Ryo Yonemitsu's great arrangements. The music still rocks as much as it ever did. The game doesn't pack the graphic punch it did back in the day. The FMV is laughable by today's standards, but it really did set the course for things to come. The voice work was very impressive back in the day and remains charming today. But again it's not going to wow anyone today. Except for maybe at how far we've come. The gameplay and the core of what makes Ys what it is, are all still firmly in place. The game is still a blast to play. Adol's adventure in Esteria and Ys is still as fun and charming as it originally was. Ys Book I & II is an amazing piece of adventure RPG history that no selfrespecting fan of the genre should do without. And for $8 entry fee on the Virtual Console, it would be criminal to continue ignoring this classic. I can't recommend this one highly enough.