Various Thoughts

This particular Ys game makes a number of significant changes to the franchise. Changes which mostly serve to turn it into a conventional RPG.

The character visuals are now full-sized rather than being sprite-based, you can now save at any time, jumping has been replaced by dodging, there’s a party system with a large selection of eventual party members along with a crafting system, a number of quests that don’t involve combat, quite a few optional plot-related scenes, and even some (superficial) dialog choices. Combat mechanics are fundamentally pretty much the same with the magic system being replaced by a skill system (skills are learned from different weapons and can be leveled-up) and boost being slightly modified to trigger a single powerful attack, while the boss difficulty is about the same as Origin‘s (the ‘Furious Bird’ and Wind Dragon being the most annoying). Oh, and a block mechanic has been added as well.

I finished the game after ~21.5 hours at level 60 with all but one of the final weapons crafted and the only grinding that had to be done was at the very end; to get the materials for those weapons. Overall I’d say the experience was worth it once you’re able to open the menu to change the practically unusable default keyboard/mouse controls… though it must be mentioned that the storyline (note that one of Napishtim‘s characters plays a major role here), character behavior, and certain plot developments are just as terrible as you’d expect from previous entries.