Ys Book I & II: The CD-ROM Landmark
The first RPG on the first console CD-ROM made the whole industry listen.
In December 1989 Hudson Soft rebuilt Ys I and II for the PC Engine CD-ROM², and NEC carried it west in 1990 as Ys Book I & II for the TurboGrafx-CD. It was among the very first games to spend a CD on what CDs were for: Red Book audio, animated cutscenes, and recorded voices, in an era when a cartridge RPG spoke in text boxes.
The disc held 732 megabytes: 41 music tracks, 24 minutes of character voice acting, and 20 minutes of animation. The English localization was one of the first to use voice dubbing at all. OMNI Magazine named it Game of the Year for 1990, and in 1992 it became the pack-in for the TurboDuo, the closest thing to a system-seller the format ever had.
WHY IT MATTERED
A proof of concept with a plotVoices, first
Important characters in Book I & II do not just have portraits; they speak, in English, in 1990. RPGFan's retrospective called it "the first RPG on the first video game console CD-ROM"; the voices are what everyone who played it remembers first.
The arranged soundtrack
The Red Book arrangements of the PC-88 originals became the canonical sound of early Ys for a generation of Western players, and the disc doubles as a soundtrack album in any CD player.
The template
Every later Ys remake, Eternal, Complete, Chronicles, is measured against this one. It set the expectation that a Ys re-release is a re-creation, not a port.