This was a fantastic platformer which made great use of its rogue-lite mechanics. As is common for the genre, after the first couple dozen deaths without making much process, I initially found it a bit too difficult. However, as I kept at it, I come to realize my mistakes I was making and with perseverance, I made it to the game's ending. It was very rewarding. It's quite a casual experience, being a great game to play in short bursts. It loads fast and provides a shortcut key to skip the intro and menu to get straight into the gameplay. There's no save feature but as a single playthrough is short (roughly twenty minutes for me, an average player), there's no need for one. The path to the bottom of the cave isn't entirely linear either, with a number of hidden branching paths to discover, complete with other endings too. There's numerous items and monsters to discover as well, keeping each game feeling very fresh. There are a few flaws though. It was annoying that whenever a shopkeeper or his shop is damaged, even if not directly caused by you, they immediately become hostile towards the player. As the levels are randomly generated, I once saw a chain of events occur right as I entered it, causing this. When this occurs, the difficulty spikes up greatly. Also, when you take damage, you're stunned for a moment, unable to move and going limp. In many occurrences, during this you can be thrown around like a rag-doll and you're quickly able to lose a lot more health than the initial hit. It certainly makes you become cautious of your surroundings, but its a little frustrating that a good game can be over in a blink of an eye. Despite those, I'd highly recommend this game, especially for those who are fans of platformers and/or rogue-like mechanics. In fact, Spelunky is probably the best mash up of these two genres.
As much as I’m a big fan of the Ys series, I found this slightly weaker than the others I had played. Certainly not terrible by any means, but there were a few problems that prevented me from enjoying it as much as the others. I’ll start with the positives first though. As expected from a modern Ys title, this one also had great graphics, music, and for the most part, good gameplay. Although the graphics could be considered a bit dated nowadays, having a low polygon count and low-quality textures, I enjoyed the game’s aesthetic, having some brilliant design on display. It was certainly a long one, being almost double the length of the previous Ys games I had played. I thought the game was starting to wrap up at one point but it threw me for a loop, introducing quite a bit more left to do. As I was enjoying the game, this wasn’t a problem, although it did introduce a fair amount of backtracking through areas I had already previously seen. You do unlock a fast travel system but it’s quite limited in places. This game also introduced a crafting mechanic, having many resources scatted over the world. However, it was substantially undervalued. At the end of the game, I realized that a huge proportion of these I never ended up needing, with only two rarer ones that I needed to grind for. It was probably something that the game was better off not having honestly. Combat was a bit different from the previous games, but it still had the satisfying feel to it which Ys is known for. It included a separate level-based skill system but I never made heavy use of it as most monsters didn’t take much to kill. This was mostly due to the party system, where I would usually switch to another character that had a weapon that was stronger against its type. Good in that members who weren’t in the party still received EXP points during battle, but the AI players could be a little stupid. I'd would rate it a 9/10 for me, but as that's not possible for GOG, I'll round it up to 5.
