First of all, my PC is crap. Really. So crap, in fact, that I'm ashamed to list its specs. Suffice it to say it's a laptop. The OS is Windows 10 64bit. Considering all this, your mileage may vary; if you have a decent PC, let alone a gaming rig, chances are you'll be able to run the game just fine (check Erim_Keene's fixes if you encounter some trouble, it seemed to have worked for them).

With that out of the way, now that I've installed the game and played a bit with it, messing with config and .ini files, here are my list of issues:

- resolution is locked at 1800p. No matter how much you change it, it's locked and will use the same resources whether on 800x600 or 4K, so forget about playing this game if you have a mid-range GPU. This is probably my biggest issue with the game, if NISA fixed this (they probably won't), the game would run smoothly on many more machines, even most 'modest' ones.
- keyboard and mouse support are laughable. You can remap some keys, but movement is always locked to a set of predefined ones, not remappable individually. You either use WASD, arrow keys or that French keyboard setup I never bother to remember. Tough luck if you wanted to use something like IJKL (like I did). Mouse is clunky as hell and even if you turn camera inertia off it never completely goes away.
- v-sync automatically turns off if you turn on fullscreen.
- if you mess with config files in order to tweak the game, you won't be able to turn on borderless or fullscreen from the game menu.
- when I tried starting a new game with fullscreen on, the game crashed for me. The only way to start a new game was to play the game windowed. I can set it to fullscreen during the main menu or when playing the game, but it simply crashes when trying to start a new game, probably something to do with video playback.
- localization is some of the worst I've ever encountered. I only played for one hour (the game runs too badly on my PC for me to advance any more), but I still came across things like "talk to Blue-haired man", when said man's hair is clearly green -- something his dialog window also acknowledges, since he's presented as "Green-haired man" when you're talking to him. I also encountered some terms that completely ignore the translation work XSEED has been making for all these years. It's a game in the same series so, please, use the terms we're used to for years, instead of coming up with new stuff.

Other people seem to be having sound issues and crashes, I haven't encountered any of those, the "new game on fullscreen" one being the only exception.

The game has quite a few graphic options, but none of them do much to remove strain from your processors, and some of those options are even recommended to be left on, for potential risk of "destabilizing the app" (the fact they decided to call the game program an "app" is something that annoys me, but it's ultimately irrelevant, so let's leave it at that). Like I said, no matter what you turn on or off or what resolution you choose, the game render is locked at 1800p and will *always* use the same resources, so those options are more for show than anything else.

All things considered, this was a complete disaster, this port is on par with Dark Souls PC, except Fromsoftware at least had the decency to come forward and say they had no clue of what they were doing, and that they couldn't code for Windows. Let's hope that, just like with the Dark Souls PC port, the fan community fixes this Ys VIII PC port, so it becomes playable by more people. It's clear NISA doesn't have the competence to do it, if seven months later, after two delays, they release a PC port in this state.

I was looking forward to this game, but everywhere I look, people are complaining about the same (very valid) things. Guess I'll skip this one :(

As an aside, in Japan, green and blue is sometimes used interchangeably and turquoise green is often referred to as blue ("wait for the blue light before crossing the road" instead of "wait for the green light"). Doesn't excuse a shitty localization though.

V-sync doesn't work, I get horrible screen tearing and it's pretty much locked to 60fps for me. This is a poorly optimised game for PC. I just got through the first dungeon and it keeps crashing now. I can't progress further because it just crashes every time I go through the exit.

[UPDATE]

(Since I already had this thread for discussing issues with the port and I don't want to hog the subforum just because I'm mad at NISA, I thought about updating my issues in here)

A friend of mine got the game working after the latest GOG patch (minor flickering and the minimap glitch, but reasonable performance and no crashes whatsoever; she played for 6 hours straight with no crashes), so she recommended I should try it, too. I was kind of hopeful, but, sadly, this patch made everything even worse, for me.

The first thing I noticed was that videos stopped working. The Falcom animated logo no longer plays, for me, using this patch, the first logo I see is freaking NIS America's, because that's just an image, not a video. Then I tried going into the options menu, but the game just kept crashing, no matter how many times I tried. So I gave up on it, loaded a save and tried entering the camp menu from in-game, to access the options from there. The thing is, even though the game loads (and runs as badly for me as it did before), when I press the camp menu key, it crashes to desktop. I tried deleting the config file and my saves (after backing them up), but it kept crashing every time I tried going to the options or camp menus. From my personal experience, this patch broke things for me even more than what they were; I used to be able to at least enter both those menus that I now can't, and videos used to play (rather smoothly, even).

I did a clean power uninstall, but I don't feel like downloading 18 GB again so soon. I guess I'll wait until the other patches Steam is getting arrive on GOG, and I'll give it another go.


DISCLAIMER: the reason I'm not posting on Steam's official Ys VIII troubleshooting forums is that I found out I'm actually below minimum requirements to run the game and, obviously, NISA can't try getting the game to work on hardware they don't even list as being supported. I'll keep trying to get the game running (according to System Requirements Lab, Tokyo Xanadu eX+ has roughly the same requirements and I can definitely run that one, played 60 hours of it and finished the story, now going for NG+), but if I can't, there's nothing I can do, I can't complain all that much because this is my fault, I knew I was probably under minimum requirements and still decided to buy the game just because I'm a stubborn Ys fan and part of me kind of hoped the game would miraculously play on my ridiculously low spec machine. For the record, the main issue is the GPU, which is just some lame mobile AMD one with a mere 512 MB, when the game requires 1 GB minimum. This is why I know the game would run if NISA only unlocked the resolution, because that would allow me to substantially lower it, making the game use less GPU resources. Sadly, that's not one of their to-be addressed issues, according to the patch road map they posted on Steam.

No offense, but maybe you should post your specs.
Mine is GTX 970M, i7-6700 HQ running Windows 10.

If your specs are lower than the recommended than your one option is to upgrade your rig, surely there are some reasonable priced GPU and CPUs you could upgrade towards.

My main issue with the game is related to Cores; the game won't run properly unless I set it to run using only 1 single Core (my laptop has 8), but I can't set that in advance without some technical know how.
As such I am waiting at least til the 18th of May to see if they'll patch the Core issue otherwise I'd refund it.