Ys V: Lost Kefin, the Missing Kingdom
Every long series has a lost chapter; Ys keeps hers in the desert.
Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand arrived on Super Famicom in 1995, the series' first numbered entry built for a console first. It experimented again, an attack button, a shield, jumping, alchemy-driven magic, and it was made deliberately gentler than its predecessors, a decision the faithful have debated ever since. An expert-difficulty revision, Ys V Expert, followed in 1996.
Ys V is the gap in the modern shelf: while I through IV have all been remade or re-released for current machines, V has had no equivalent revival, and it never received an official English release in its own era. For collectors that makes the Super Famicom cartridges, and the novel and comic anthology that surround them, the whole of the record.
THE SAND KINGDOM
What V triedA new hand-feel
V's button combat sits halfway between the bump era and the Napishtim reboot: historically interesting precisely because the series later chose a different road.
Kefin itself
The lost city of Kefin, a desert civilisation that vanished into the sand, gives V the most melancholy setting in the series: an Ys-sized ruin before Ys.
The paper trail
An official novel of the original story draft and a comic anthology exist for a game many fans have never played: the branches of Ys V are easier to read than the game is to find.