Ys SEVEN

This review is being written from the perspective of someone whose only other Ys game was Origins, so my expectations of this game are colored by that, even if this game may be a better entry when talking about the series as a whole. Similar to Origins, there isn't all that much interesting or complex outside of boss fights. I don't mind these segments too much in either game as I think of them as down time so I don't mind them being simple and this isn't were my big problem with the game comes in. My biggest issue is that boss fights are boring. Since you're going to have 3 people fighting the boss at any one time the devs need to balance around all party members having the strongest available gear at a certain level hitting the boss at once. The problem with this is that the party members aren't always working towards hurting the boss so boss fights drag on way too long. This isn't so much a problem with the party system itself as much as it is a side effect. I think there isn't much issue with the system conceptually. Having different party members with different moves and different attack types can add a nice bit of variety. I think the system would've really benefited from just having one character out at a time and balancing around that level of damage output. You could also bump up the amount of damage bosses do to compensate for them not being able to hit all party members at once. Now onto the boss mechanics. Simply, there aren't that many and they tend to be simple and don't impact you as much as I feel they should. The first boss with would I could actually call a mechanic and not just an animation you need to dodge is the third boss and it's the basic "hit this to reveal weakpoint" and "there's going to be a couple mobs summoned." Compared to even the second boss of Origins this is a bit of a letdown. There are a couple issues I have with how skills work, but I can't really explain it due to character limit. I should mention I want to give 3.5 stars.

So I started the game on HARD difficulty it doesn't have any description but thinking that I'm quite an experienced player (though not in this particular genre) I may be able to manage. I've spent half an hour wondering around the town, spoke with every NPC, yet they kept saying to me that I should return to them later after I explored the town, I got annoyed and went to look up a guide, turn out I needed to revisit a place where I already been in order to trigger a cutscene... well that's quite annoying game design... anyway let's continue... So after 1 hour of game time I finally left the town and been able to kills things, only trash monsters but the combat felt really good, though the controls were a bit confusing. Then I reached a boss fight. I have to say this was the most difficult boss fights I ever experienced in a video game, I was genuinely amazed/surprised that for a first boss on just HARD difficulty I'd get such an insanely hard boss. I tried beating it for quite a long time my best attempt was when I got it to 1/3 HP and after several more tries I wanted to save my game turns out I can't, you can't save the game during boss fights, and I didn't have a save game just before it since I didn't know I would need one and didn't want to fight all the trash again, so I went on YouTube to watch a boss fight guide, what I found is a guys beating the NIGHTMARE mode boss, and he started out so badly that I would have died for sure right at the start if I did the same thing, this made me realize that the fight requires you to get some gear. OK whatever I reloaded the game went on grinding trash mobs for 20-30 minutes bought new gear and then returned to the boss. It became totally brainless fight I barely had to do anything other than attack. It was such an illusion destroyer. Anyway the combat feel quite good but as you can see the game design questionable at best. I can see how people could enjoy the game, but my experience was exactly great.