Thanks! I was really surprised to find this Ys game existed too.

Right?? As a huge Ys fan I feel like this game flew right under my nose.

That’s really awesome! Finding any information on the game was incredibly difficult so this video ended up being really short, haha. You should definitely put all that stuff up somewhere because it’s a small little piece of history that was buried and mostly forgotten. It you don’t feel comfortable uploading everything yourself, there are game preservation websites and unreleased asset databases like “The Cutting Room Floor” that would most likely handle it for you. Anyways, I appreciate you sharing the info since I am a big Ys fan too and am glad you enjoyed the video!

Out of curiosity was it the “History of Falcom” video by Bowl of Lentils?

Yeah, it is nearly impossible to find any information on it. Wish they had preserved the game better.

Thanks for watching! Sad it never made it to the Americas.

Nice, hah! Did you ever have a chance to play it?

@@RewindArcade I got as far making a character and killing a few mobs. I didn't know what Ys was actually at the time so I just thought it was another shitty MMO like Fiesta Online and the like, so I never gave it much of a chance. If you like obscure MMOs take a look at Imagine Online, it's based on Shin Megami Tensei series and was moderately successful in the west. Even has a private server now after it got closed officially haha

Interesting, I’ll have to check it out! The only MMO I’ve really played (and continue to play) is FFXIV so the genre is a pretty big blind spot in my gaming knowledge.

@@RewindArcade FF14 is the best one so you aren't missing much from the others haha The cool thing about Imagine is that there were no classes, you just build your character with skill points, and some abilities had quest requirements. Also you could take almost every monster in the game and have them fight besides you like in the single player SMT games. It was like Pokemon with shotguns lol

Damn, that sounds awesome. I am extra intrigued now!

Yeah, as a huge Ys fan, it's a shame it never made it over to North America and died off so quickly. Is Capcom talking about bringing Dragon's Dogma Online over here? That's the first I've heard of it, but that would be awesome!

@@RewindArcade Capcom isn't but a few people have been working on a server in the US. They've made some nice progress and have videos up on it and some channels covering DD have played what's available.

@@blumiu2426 That's awesome, I'll check it out!

Thanks! 😁

Yeahh, the whole concept just feels like a big swing and a miss sadly. Even though it’s not really my thing, I’d have loved to try it out at least once.

It sounds like you actually got to play it, that’s really awesome!

@@RewindArcade yeah I didn't used to play on the EU server until it shut down......mostly Sundays were fun because of increased drop rate and exp on that day. So you spend the day with a group of ppl farming certain areas for exp,skills card and upgrade cards .

That sounds like a lot of fun, I love when MMOs do special boosts and events on certain days! I’m really sad I never got to actually play the game. I feel like it’s existence has kind of been swept under the rug at this point. 😭

Yeah, I saw that, pretty cool!! This video suddenly got a lot more traffic than usual the past month so I was confused what had happened until I saw the new Ys Online announcement, haha.

@@RewindArcade yes, I wish it was more like Celes Arca this new installment. Celes arca is probably one of the best MMOs out there. If not, the best Turn based one.

It definitely sounds like the game was a big victim of mismanagement and ignorance sadly.

Oh man, you’re right! Hahaha

I could not agree more! I highly doubt we'll ever see it happen, but it's certainly a nice thought.

Yea the problem is that in the late 2000s wow and runescape where dominating the mmo market so most people did not want to play anything else but because the games where so popular a lot of companies made mmos but they all failed now wow and runescape are a lot less popular and people want more mmo's but they are not making as many and a lot of the good old ones have been shut down or ruined with pay2win mechanics. Pay2win was not really a thing yet in the 2000s but now most mmos will have some kind of micro transactions and most new mmo's are also too simple they make the low level game way too easy and only at max level will you get a real challenge in the 2000s they where more balanced.

I am pretty clueless when it comes to MMOs and their history (outside of a lot of time in FFXIV) so this is really interesting to hear. It really does seem like they are risky endeavors that are tough to incentivize people to leave their current MMO and still remain profitable.

@@RewindArcade Yea i remember in the 2000s a lot of mmo's where flooding the market but i did not have the free time and all my time was spend on wow and runescape then in the 2010s i had more free time and wow and runescape became more boring but all the mmo's i wanted to try in the 2000s have been shut down or became pay2win or just worse And there are not a lot of good new mmos nowadays most new mmos come from Korea and they are not good or kick starter games that say they want to bring back the oldschool style of mmos but take it too far and its more like a 1990s mmo the first mmos where too complicated for most gamers Wow and runescape became popular because they had a good balance of challenge but they where easier to get into but wow made things too easy in the early game in later updates and runescape changed the basic combat system to appear more modern but it made the game too different So they made old school runescape later on but wow also tried to bring back the older version but they messed it up they added micro transactions but not new content and old school runescape added new stuff but they ask the players before they add stuff in so its more like a alternative time line for the game without all the bad updates but in wow classic they just make you re do everything over and over but with different stats The cool thing about mmos is that they add more stuff over time so after a few years the game will be huge but wow made a big mistake instead of doing a lot of smaller updates they put out a few big ones and then make a expansion but sometimes players had to wait over a year for new stuff and when they add new raids they will nerf the old ones and the items become useless and your character become so powerful you can clear everything in 1 hit and they also removed a lot of old stuff aaa western companies don't like to make mmo's anymore and when they do they make the mistake of making it too easy and Korean companies love pay2win so they don't make anything good anymore the downside of mmo's is that sometimes the developer changes things in a bad way so it starts out fun but they make big mistakes and you can't go back to the good version most of the time My current favorite mmos are oldschool runescape and ff14 this comment is very long wow.

That was a pretty in-depth explanation, haha. I do get what you’re saying. It really seems hard to get the balance right for MMOs, especially they things are run in the gaming industry these days. I was very surprised at how successful WoW Classic was honestly, but then again I never played the original so I have no nostalgia for it. 😅

I asked around but sadly couldn’t find anything. 😭

@@RewindArcade Such a shame that this game is going to completeley disappear :( that's why it's important for companies to release the source files and let their products eventually live forever.

Could not agree more! There are so many early mobile games that have been lost as well over the years because of it.

The final Client versions for the Europe, Japanese and Taiwanese regions had been uploaded and preserved for years in the main global Ys forum of 2005~2014-ish "Ancient Land of Ys", or "ALoY" for short . It might still be there, who knows. I know a number of people downloaded it as a form of personal backup. Try looking/asking around? The main issue is with Server software. Allegedly, two Chinese private servers had for a short period been set up, but I never found any Server software for it. That would be the hardest part I think. In theory you can make your own server software if you look at all the Server calls being made by the Client software, but I have no idea how much effort, or how possible, doing so actually is. In any case, if you nag enough Chinese people in MMO communities in Chinese, maybe you can find people involved with previous Chinese private servers and get the ball rolling, if you are genuinely interested. This video calls it "the forgotten Ys game", but honestly, it's one of the most remembered Ys games of all time, for some people, like me, as well as for many others out there. While it was a "generic MMO", I was never able to fill the void via other MMOs. No MMO was reeeeeeally all quite like Ys Online like that, in a way, although some loose comparison can be made. Most of the audience were non-Ys-fans, although that varied per region. Europe had almost none (we instead made some of them into Ys fans), whereas Japan had a lot more. Not sure about Taiwan. There were also another 2 official servers, Korea (the original) and China, but we never got to playing those (despite us wanting to at the time). Some also say "it was for a short time", but for many it was many years. Again, depends on the region. The shortest time was the European servers (a bit less than one year, I think), where most non-Asian speakers who experienced Ys Online come from.