If you enjoy Nihon Falcom's games, especially their groundbreaking action-RPG Ys series, know that Ys VIII is one of the best games they've ever made. Engrossing story, lovely art direction, fluid fast-paced "easy to play, difficult to master" gameplay, superb soundtrack. Having said that, as of right now, this PC port by Nippon Ichi Software America (NISA) is one of the worst ever made -- think Dark Souls level of PC porting. Resolution is internally locked at 1800p (even though you can set it to two other resolutions by using command lines and/or hex editing the game's exe file), there are sound bugs, a minimap glitch, 8-direction control instead of full 360º freeflow, the game keeps crashing to desktop for no discernible reason, there is some extreme flickering on at least two locations (epilepsy warning, by the way, since NISA still hasn't put up a warning of their own before they fix this), and a few other people keep coming across different bugs, crashes and overall issues with the game. Graphical options are as barebone as they get, and mostly for show -- turning them all on or off doesn't seem to have any major impact on how the game looks and, especially, how taxing it becomes on your machine. Some people have been getting lucky with the game (perks of playing games on PC, what might be broken for some may work for others). If you own a pretty beefy PC and if you're feeling lucky, by all means, get this game, because it really is amazing. Just be wary of the broken package it comes in. Also: unlike XSEED, who got us used to top notch Ys translations, NISA's EN localization is pretty mediocre (the first version was even worse, but thanks to the PC delays we only got the revised one), so be aware the translation is not that great, either. In short: absolutely great game that most PC players can't enjoy due to an appalling port by NISA. It would get one star from me for the port alone, but the game is so good that I have to at least acknowledge that.
A lot of people reviewed the Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy they played on consoles. I, too, played this game way back when, on the Nintendo Gamecube and, yes, it is one of the best titles that console had to offer, sadly extremely underrated and overlooked. The thing is, while this THQ Nordic PC port *is*, in essence, the same game, it's a pretty lousy port, and I truly hope they address some of the issues the game has, right now, with a patch -- sooner, rather than later. I know 3D platformers are best played with a controller, but at least they're somewhat playable with keyboard and mouse. This port, sadly, has very unintuitive keyboard controls (action buttons are Esc, TAB, F and Space, and they can't be remapped), while mouse controls the camera with no context sensitive or attack button mapped to the mouse buttons. I only played through the tutorial areas of both Sphinx and Mummy, it didn't take me too long, but it's enough to see how bad this port is. They added some graphical bells and whistles, but, to be fair, I would prefer to play it in 800x600 looking like it originally did, with no anti-aliasing, no multisampling and no option to adjust field of view, since it already looked great as it did back in the day, and have them focus on a *proper* intuitive control scheme for the keyboard and mouse. Not to mention the sound is all glitchy, though that may be just on my end -- a lot of times, sound effects will keep looping until I leave an area or a cutscene starts, just to be replaced by another loop of different sets of sound effects. I can still play the game, it's still as charming as it ever was, but the gameplay didn't translate well to PC, especially with such a lazy team doing the porting. Play this with a controller, if you have one, stay away from it if you only have a keyboard and a mouse. The game gets four stars from me because I loved the original console release. This port, however, would have deserved two stars, without nostalgia weighing in.
If you're not blinded by nostalgia, no amount of hype will live past what this game does wrong. It's still a good piece of entertainment, I'd say, just not worth the flawless 5-star status it enjoys on GOG. Then again, this is GOG, so reviewing games based on rose-tinted glasses is to be expected.
