When I first launched the game I had many issues with it. Here are some settings that helped me play it. I'm currently at the beginning of chapter two, so it helps at least a little.

My Screen Settings: 1920x1080, Borderless, VSync off (forced with NVidia control panel + triple buffer)
For audio issues try changing your audio device.
In the Graphics tab disable Map Shadows, even if the game says not to do it, it fixed the crashing for me.

Hope that helps a little.
And have fun with the game.

Thank you for your helpful post.

Sadly, the game runs like crap for me, but that's mostly because I'm running it on my laptop, which is not a very good PC (admittedly not a gaming machine). Still, I can say that I haven't encountered any sound bugs, and with every graphical setting set to Low I can play the game, despite major framerate drop and stutter. I might try turning even those "Don't turn this off or the app will crash" options off, let's see if it helps my potato of a computer to run the game (it plays Tokyo Xanadu eX+ just fine, and the engine is pretty much the same).

As a side note, if I run the game in any setting other than windowed, any time a video starts playing the game instantly crashes.

NISA didn't do a very good job with this port, but at least the game is out, and hopefully I'll have a good enough PC to run the game in a couple years, when the fan community fixed most of the stuff that's still wrong with the game.

Technically, yes, Ys VIII is the first NISA-published game on GOG, but with all the delays "in order to fix it for PC", they eventually released The 25th Ward: The Silver Case earlier. So that would be NISA's first available title on GOG.

I love Goichi Suda's games and I have The 25th Ward wishlisted, but considering how mad I am at NISA for screwing up an Ys game, I'll probably never buy it.

I'm seriously willing to enter crowdfunding campaigns in order to send XSEED money just to make sure they always manage to outbid NISA when getting publishing rights for Falcom games.

Heck, I want XSEED to port and localize ALL the games, if they could get their hands on Square Enix and Bandai Namco releases some of my favorite series might not be plagued by crappy ports and excessive broken DRM that they'll never patch out...

In a thread on steam they have stated they're working on some fixes, also linking to a page for troubleshooting.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/579180/announcements/detail/3228394392727675778