Previous games:
October:100) Guerilla War (NES) (6.0) (10/1) (~1 hour)101) Gun-Nac (NES) (7.5) (10/2) (~1.5 hours)102) Mega Man 9 (PS4, via MMLC2) (9.5) (10/7) (~2.5 hours)103) Star Wars (NES) (5.5) (10/7) (~1.5 hours)104) Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana (PS4) (9.0) (10/25) (49h20m)Whew, wonder why I haven't beaten anything since 10/7? I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with polishing off a 50-hour ARPG, no sir.
So I've already made my thoughts known on the game before to some degree, but I feel like I need to start over proper.
Ys VIII is part of a long line of action-RPGs that have evolved quite a bit over the years, from the bump-era games with a few oddballs like
Ys III/V, the blisteringly quick jaunts of
Ys VI/Felghana/Origin, and the new-fangled modern games with
Seven,
Celceta, and
LoD. After dropping the ball with
Celceta, I had my doubts that Falcom could recover, especially when they announced the "crafting" and "survival" bits.
I was wrong.
Once again, the pacing is extremely slow to start the game. It takes its sweet time showing you the systems it has on offer, honestly playing out more like the intro to
Dragon Warrior VII than an
Ys game. It doesn't help that the dialogue in most of the game is pretty stilted (thanks, NISA). Turns out, though, that once you get past all the exposition bits, the game starts to fall into an interesting loop. Explore a new area, find places to loot and enemies to smash, find new castaways to rescue, go whack a boss, return to base to upgrade weapons, craft armor, and make items, and go at it again. All the while, the bigger your village grows, the more obstacles on the landscape you can remove, and the boss areas often uncover new movement items that allow you to get to new areas. Only the Interception missions, which are basically short base defense segments, really break this up. While not optimal, at least there isn't much else getting in the way of the main game. They, along with the Suppression missions, are just kinda there, merely inoffensive little bits.
This satisfying progression loop pretty much doesn't let up until the very end, where you'll fight through an unfortunately overlong dungeon for the finale. That's pretty much a staple of almost every RPG I've played, but the progression here is mostly uninteresting, no real puzzles, just fight a boss to unlock a path and keep going. The story goes crazy bonkers nuts right at the end, delving into a sort of
Xenoblade-style plot reveal right at the end. It's somewhat interesting overall, but again, the localization really holds it back.
The crafting is much simpler than you'd think. You basically just trade your items for other upgrades, and if you're exploring and beating up enemies, you'll sometimes be short, but not terribly often. You can pretty much always stay in fighting shape. Some bosses will also drop "Fuel Stones" that let you craft bigger and better weapons and armor. You can also spend these items to upgrade your village's defense, and doing so makes the Interception missions easier. One of the more important aspects is the way the game handles healing items. You'll find lots of food around the island, and you can cook up recipes once you find them as well. However, the best stuff is the medicines. Every time you find an empty bottle, that gives you a reusable resource to fill with a medicine of choice. This runs from a simple 60% heal to one that will revive and restore to 100% HP, or even one that gives you a 100% Extra gauge for your super-special moves.
Much like prior modern
Ys games, using skills will level them up, up to a third level. Thankfully, there are items that will help boost this learning curve, and you'll want to use them. You'll likely lean on a few very powerful skills, though, once you get later in the game and your SP resources are less constrained. Not to mention the SP reduction items you can find.
If I'm not mistaken, the bonus content is a bit more exposition with Dana, along with her own dungeon in the past that you can pursue parallel with the main quest. She's pretty ridiculously powerful there, with the power of fairies bestowed on her giving access to two other forms that give you crushing and piercing damage (taking the place of party members). It's a blast to use her combat abilities, and provides a nice change of pace from a certain red-haired swordsman.
The combat still maintains the blistering pace of its predecessors, but the shift to a free camera changes up the combat a bit. Prior games all had fixed views, so it might take a while to adjust; occasionally, the camera will become your enemy. You can jump again, a feature lacking from
Seven and
Celceta. Just change that default control scheme; I find it rather unworkable. I decided to throw the menu on Triangle, lock-on to circle, and moved the run and dodge roll to the R2 trigger.
I saw someone on another board complaining about how boring Adol is. But he has always been a bit of a cipher, and might be the fantasy JRPG version of Samus Aran: a nearly unstoppable death machine aside from the times where the story requires it. Seriously, how many world-ending threats has this guy taken down?!
I haven't talked much about the graphics, because there's not a whole lot to talk about. The shift from the Vita is very apparent. The polygons are very high-res, but a lot of the texturing isn't. The polygon counts are also low. The advantage, of course, is that the game loads blisteringly fast on a hard drive. Transitions are so quick that you can rarely read the tool-tips if you have them enabled. Also, the soundtrack has some rockin' tunes, as usual. I'm sure that's part of the appeal and why you just wanna bust through a wall, Dogi-style. (And as an aside, the game has succumbed somewhat to the weeb market, with some very skimpy outfits on many of the female characters. Seriously, Dana, wear something more appropriate. And Laxia, please, booty shorts are not befitting nobility.)
To wrap this thing up... it's a fantastic game. Definitely a return to form. In some ways, I wish I'd waited for the translation fix, but who plays
Ys for the story, right? It's all 'bout that combat and exploration. I got every treasure chest and all the map covered, even. That's not as hard as you'd think, even. I also apparently got the "True" ending, although I was playing blind. There's a post-game dungeon that I may or may not delve into; there are a lot of games about to vie for my time. But if you're looking for a great action-RPG, this is one I wouldn't skip.
