If you want an engrossing but casual space sandbox where you carve out your own corner of a shared universe, this game is amazing. I LOVE this game, but to be helpful I'm going to call out the negatives that you might want to know before clicking Buy: - it's a casual game. Thin story, almost no difficulty. The game has tons of systems like exploring abandoned frigates or building an underwater base or managing a settlement or building your own fleet of cruisers and frigates; but all of these take place in isolation from each other and are individually kinda pointless beyond ticking them off as things to try. - multiplayer is quiet on GOG. You might want to buy on another store-front with more players. The game does have cross-platform cloud saves so you can buy another copy on a different platform/store later. - the base-building in the game offers an opportunity to craft your own little base in your own corner of the galaxy; but updates to the game change the RNG and can spoil your ideal base (your base can suddenly be buried underground or your paradise planet can become a hellish nightmare). Also if you think you found an unexplored region to make your home, you can log back in to find the game shows another player as the discoverer. - while updates to the game have packed it with content and really raised the bar on graphics; at some point the game lost its original aesthetic. The game used to be "1970s Sci-Fi Art Simulator" but somewhere in updating the graphics and adding more ships and ship customizations, that got lost.
A thoroughly enjoyable game; though it's neither classic Ys nor a modern JRPG. I really enjoy it as what feels like a Dreamcast-era RPG but many folks might just feel it is too thin. Playing on Hard, the game is generally easy but your health can get sapped quickly even when backtracking to earlier areas. Rather than being a nice skill challenge, it's more a chore to maintain healing. The game is missing the satisfying progression of earlier games where each new area is very dangerous but yields a ton of experience, and every chest or checkpoint is a small achievement. Celceta instead has sprawling maps with the majority of chests having common (pointless) contents. Also of mention is the graphics - despite the graphics being like a Dreamcast/Vita game, it has a demanding rendering pipeline and on an older PC it took some tweaking of the settings to avoid the game running at 10FPS or less. This feels a little silly. It's nice to have options but some players will want to jump in with modest default settings. With all that said, I will reiterate that this is a thoroughly enjoyable game and if the store page screenshots look appealing then you are likely gonna have a great time here.
It's a nice game but I experienced a couple of negatives I didn't see mentioned in other reviews: 1. The amount of tricky jumping involved. Admittedly not that many instances, but it's a small game with not much combat challenge so the frustrating jumps really stood out. 2. Almost no challenge on standard difficulty; and the classic Ys leveling seemed broken for me. Instead of each area seeming deadly for 1-2 levels, every area is only mildly threatening and after a couple of screens exploration I had gained the extra levels to make the area outright easy. I definitely had more fun with Oath in Felghana and with the original PC Engine Ys I and II It was definitely worth trying and I'm glad to have it in the collection, but I'm not sure I'd ever play it again.
For some reason I was expecting a city-builder game made super casual via simple tile placement gameplay. I was a little underwhelmed to install the game and find out that it is almost entirely just tile-placement; with extremely basic graphics. The little towns you build have no needs or functions, they are just a pattern on the tiles. There's no sense of creativity or ownership of the resulting map; it's just the result of trying to score well for tile placement. A few hours in, and it has grown on me. There is a simple but pure enjoyment in laying down more and more tiles; and a good feeling of self-improvement. Each map feels a bit better laid out and a bit more like a real terrain map than previous games. And the mission/goal system makes each game feel worthwhile, even if the map didn't turn out perfect. I'm still a little underwhelmed that the game doesn't do a bit more to make the maps feel alive; either graphically or in gameplay mechanics.
After about 5 hours I'm very happy I tried this game but I hit a point where I don't feel I want to put more time into it. It's not apparent that the game has any longer term goals. There's certainly lots more to do in terms of potions, but the game doesn't really seem to give you goals in terms of a story or an "economic victory". So I'm putting the game down for now. Plus points: + Looks lovely + Smart and innovative potion crafting system. If alchemy mechanics in games interest you; stop reading this review and buy the game. + Quite a relaxed game where you can just spend day-cycles in the game running your shop and not progressing things at all. + Well designed in terms of giving you freedom to choose whether you want to be profitable; renowned; or a master in alchemy. Minus points: - As mentioned, it's unclear if I'm heading towards a story or economic victory, and that means I don't want to spend time on the game's chore tasks for progression. - Skill upgrade system seems too simplistic - available upgrades give a pretty raw improvement (profit %, XP increase) that could have been flattened and the upgrade system could just be removed. - Brewing perfect potions requires precision and the controls can be too sensitive and lacking in feedback; leading to an imperfect potion from a split-second of incorrect input.
A lovingly crafted game that delivers a great horror story. The game makes an effort to build its setting with locations and characters that exist in the context of the setting and aren't just there to carry the story. I love the graphics and sound - they are reminiscent of high quality MSDOS or Amiga games. The game sounds great, with solid voice acting and music that seems to perfectly hit what the developer intended. It's not perfect. There's some technical jank - when your character moves far away or closer to the screen, they move at the wrong speed; and your sprite is scaled in a way that doesn't respect the art styles pixilation. There's also some audio crackling when certain background music tracks are playing. In terms of puzzles - I don't like games with obtuse puzzles so I was glad to see this game's puzzles are on the easy side. All the puzzles fit the setting and your character. There's not many locations, you can hold space to see all interactive items on the screen, and your journal tracks intermediate goals - which is a great quality-of-life inclusion. A criticism of the puzzles is that they are largely gated in a very linear manner. Each step only works in order. This makes the puzzles quite simple and probably many will think they are far too easy. At the same time, I found the linear gating frustrating because the next step is very often something you thought of earlier, just not when the game wanted you to try it. So worse than falling into the point-and-click pit of needing to exhaust every item on every interactive element; you are in the worse situation of needing to start over and also retry every previous interaction. Anyhow, I still say this is a 5 star game for how well the game delivers a horror story. If you like the intersection of horror fiction and point and click adventures, this game delivers!
A lot of this game is janky and dated (it looked dated when it released...), and there is an entire spectrum of opinions on whether this game is laughably bad or the best RPG ever made. I say, if you are an RPG or fantasy fan, you MUST try this game. I love it and I could spend hundreds of hours exploring the single island in this game. You honestly might dislike it, but I think the game is worth the price for the amount of effort that went into it. Future Elder Scrolls games simplified things, and we might never see a game comparable to Morrowind ever again.
Definitely worth grabbing at sale price if you like trying out arpgs. I'm unsure if I prefer it over Sacred 2 like other reviewers. I think I prefer 2, but the grittier tone looks better than the bright 3D models of 2. This also feels more like a well-crafted CRPG whereas 2 feels more like an MMO. Some plus points: * Easy to get into and fun to learn. Manual doesn't explain everything, but you can use save/loads or simply experiment to see what things do. * An open map. The campaign takes you on a linear tour around it, but you can go explore. There's not a huge amount to find, but the game world overall feels open and cohesive, when other ARPGs are very obviously linear. * Good variety in the player classes and lots of choices for a character build, beyond just picking a single stat or skill to min/max. * HUGE variation in loot drops makes it interesting to keep playing, and means there is a variety of potential drops to suit various builds. Some negative points (largely coin-flips of the plus points, heh): * Limited fast travel options. There's no "town portal" ability and a limited number of static portals to use. It's also very easy to overlook new portals when exploring the map. * While there's a lot of flexibility in builds, there is also a chance to create a bad build and the game has no point reset system. It's part of learning the game, but a character you put 10s of hours into could end up useless. * No shared stash! The game drops loot for all classes but has no shared storage! Check the discussion forum for a workaround, but it's effectively an item duplication glitch, you're on your honour to only use it for shared storage! * Occasional crashes (seems to be when using skills and not totally random) mean frequent hard saves are needed. Since you need to save frequently and the game is bad for backtracking, the game's respawn system is useless, just reload!
Running on Windows 10, I am unable to save my game and the game crashes when I try. The discussion threads for the game show that several people have this issue, and there's a suggestion that an update to the GOG release caused the issue. It's a shame because the game seems to be packed with content. I was also getting the issue where spoken dialogue cuts off a split second too early - this is a shame but if it was the only issue I would probably still enjoy playing.
...well, not really... Gets compared to Zelda but to me seems more like a gothic version of Ys. Items and abilities are granted at a very quick pace, and the game is really well designed in terms of gently hinting at needing to use your new abilities; and though the game is most linear it offers just enough reward for re-checking areas. That kind of design might seem pretty standard - it's seen in games like Darksiders, Souls-series and countless Metroidvanias. But for '96 this is very sharp and conscientious design. If the screenshots on the store page look even somewhat interesting to you; this is a must-play. There are some fairly obvious janky elements to the game - gaudy 2D graphics, lots of Z-buffer drawing bugs, long pauses when music loops etc etc but all of these are completely forgivable as you press forward to just get a little bit further and enjoy the story along the way.
