There's a lot of discourse about how Ys Seven is one of the more middling games in the franchise but I'm going to be honest... I really liked it! That isn't to say that it reaches the heights of Ys Origin before it or Ys VIII after it (and I will inevitably be making comparisons to the other games in the series that I've played), but I found the whole experience to be another thrilling entry in the series with very few infuriating moments and plenty of hack and slash pleasure.
Similar to Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, Ys Seven is a sort of stepping stone in the franchise, in that it marks the transition between the "Ark era" isometric 2D-3D Ys games and the "modern era" party-based Ys games such as Memories of Celceta and Ys VIII. The graphics can feel a little rough and polygonal for their time given that this was originally a PSP game and later localized to PC, but with the HD Texture Pack, it's not too shabby. You get to play as the chad adventurer Adol Christin and his best friend Dogi, sailing to the foreign kingdom of Altago, now stricken with a mysterious plague, an arrogant defense force that almost immediately throws our red headed hero in jail, and the omnipresent clash between progress and tradition. Tasked by the king to discover the source of the unrest, Adol and Dogi must team up with a flurry of other tribal representatives of Altago with their own stories and abilities in yet another cursed land and prophecy that Adol somehow finds himself at the center once again.
Combat in Ys Seven leans less in the Ark-era angle of jumping and dodging and more in the vein of classic hack and slash with character specific abilities and powers. It's pretty bread and butter combat, with the A button handling the basic attack and holding down the trigger + using ABXY to use abilities that are dependent upon an energy meter of sorts. Added to Ys Seven's movement in lieu of a jump is a quick roll, that allows you to both quickly get out of the way of incoming attacks while positioning yourself to the side or behind of opponents to continue your assault. It's sort of a deceptively simple combat system, because while it's a ton of fun to just mash the A button and go ham, it eventually becomes far more productive to use charged standard attacks to more quickly build up your energy meter so you can unleash a flurry of skills that can provide external benefits via additional damage and extended range. In addition, there's a sort of rock-paper-scissors layer thrown onto all of this via the party system, since there are up to three party members (including Adol) on the field at any time, and each character has one of three different attack types that must be accounted for depending on the opposing foe (i.e. Adol's sword is great against amorphous, fleshy enemies, while Dogi's fists are great against heavily armored enemies, etc) since using the wrong attack type will generally deal significantly less damage. So, there's actually a very solid and often frenzied gameplay loop of rolling around the environments to and fro the various enemies, and quickly switching party members and attack abilities whenever the energy meter builds up sufficiently, despite not retaining the EXP combo multiplier of Ys Origin and Oath in Felghana.
Now despite Ys Seven being an "easier" game due to having multiple party members to fall back upon as well as healing items that can be used in the middle of combat, Ys Seven is still not a mindless game. It is possible to dodge most attacks with the roll, but it doesn't make you invincible; the hurtbox is still active while you are rolling, so while your character is in motion, you can still be hit by waves or projectiles. That's where the flash guard comes in; by quickly hitting the L1 and R1 buttons in succession, you can perform a timed flash guard parry to negate an enemy attack (something that I really wish the game actually talked about; it never mentions this once in the tutorial or the manual and that's probably one of Ys Seven's greatest sins). This also isn't mindless however, because Ys Seven turns the timed flash guard parry into a high risk vs high reward situation; if you mistime the parry and you end up getting hit after the window, you'll take critical hit damage from enemy attacks. In addition, the flash guard doesn't give you an extended noticeable invincibility frame window after a successful parry (unlike Ys VIII), so attacks with lingering hitboxes such as lasers fired straight at you or extended enemy rush attacks will continue to deal damage after your parry. However, your immediate attack combo after a successful parry will deal critical hit damage towards opponents, and successful parries very quickly fill up the energy gauge. There is actually a method to the madness of balancing Ys's aggressive offense with on the fly defense, and mastering this push & pull is not as free as simply mashing A and then relying on one defensive option for everything. As a result, it's incredibly satisfying balancing calculated abilities and attacks in-between dodging and parrying enemy attacks in the middle of flashy, oversized boss fights.
Character progression via item crafting and leveling up is a bit more of a mixed bag. On one hand, I quite respect the character skill level up and unlocking system; each weapon is actually tied to a specific character skill, and you have to use a certain character skill enough times in order to use it indefinitely. It's a nice little way to reward players that remain cognizant of experimenting with different abilities and playstyles, and it gives individual weapons more meaning than simply serving as a stat upgrade. On the other hand, item collecting and crafting can be a little frustrating at times. The systems serve as a sort of conduit of fulfilling most of the side quests to document all the dropped resources from enemies/item hordes and also are raw materials that can be used to more cheaply produce better armor/weapons/healing items without spending money. There are a couple of caveats to this though.
Firstly, rarer drops are often required for certain recipes, and are RNG based. Most of this is circumvented by buying a Luck Medal to almost exclusively get rare drops, but there's also the case of specific item hordes in specific locations producing the exact species of rare item drop that you need, despite these item hordes in the same general vicinity looking the exact same, which can make item grinding a bit frustrating. There's also certain quests that require item grinding for resources scattered throughout the land (with basically no assistance from in-game to tell you where those resources are located if you're trying to farm item hordes). Finding these resource wells is trickier than it looks because the minimap doesn't automatically mark the locations unless you are holding the Silver Telegnosis (which in itself becomes an issue because you have to constantly switch back and forth between the Silver Telegnosis and the Luck Medal for the better guaranteed drops), and even then it only shows the location of a few resource wells within a certain distance instead of mapping the whole area. Finally, there's also a held item that straight up increases the amount of money gained from killing enemies, so it's not like you'll need to spend a ton of resources buying healing items as is when money can be pretty plentiful.
I'm making a particular point out of this, because while most of Ys Seven does not require excessive grinding, the endgame right before the final boss suddenly requires a ton of resource hoarding if you want to construct the best weapons and armor for everyone in your party. It's noticeably worse because most of the materials required for the synthesis of the final equipment are best gathered from the resource wells instead of gathering monster drops, which means this late game resource grind actively takes away from the most prevalent strength of the game. In addition to the problems listed above (items scattered throughout the land especially in areas that you have since forgotten the names of for particular drops, resource caches that look the exact same in a particular area but have different rare drops, etc), the somewhat lackluster AI also becomes more flagrant. They're not the greatest at doing exactly what you want them to do (i.e. dealing tons of damage alongside you spamming abilities and successfully dodging/flash guarding) but they tend to handle themselves well enough and are also supposed to help you collect drops from resource caches to minimize downtime. The key phrase here is "supposed to," because sometimes the AI messes up and just pauses to stare at you while you mash the A button 6 times in a row to collect all the resources from a single cache. As it stands, grinding in Ys is usually not an issue, because the bread and butter combat gameplay loop is great as is, but the late endgame really accentuates the flaws of the item crafting and collection systems and can make the final hours quite a bit more tedious if you want the best equipment. As such, if there are any noticeable weaknesses in Ys Seven, they would probably be these systems.
Despite my gripes here and there, Ys Seven is a fantastic entry in the series, both as a starting point to how easy it is to pick up and for veterans of the series both due to its challenging yet satisfying combat system and also in the form of lore drops, as it often references Adol's legacy as an adventurer across his past exploits. I do think that some of the side characters could have been developed a bit further, but they're still a ton of fun to use and explore regarding their own abilities and attack styles; I especially appreciate that it's a lot of fun playing as the ranged archer Aisha and spamming arrows, but she's not overpowered because there's often more downtime from her weapon skills and the range is good, yet not laughably huge. And the dungeons are fairly solid too, with a bit more sprawl and some added "puzzle" elements via key items (reminding me a lot of metroidvanias) and additional hazards reminiscent of a booby trapped crash course to keep you on your toes. The only other complaint I would have is that I do wish that the jump was retained; it would have added just another dimension to boss fights in being able to jump over attacks while allowing further verticality in dungeons and improving the honestly pretty solid movement in the overworld, something that Ys VIII does fortunately account for. Nevertheless, I really savored my time with Ys Seven as part of my journey through the series this year; it was a nice way to relieve stress and quickly press buttons somewhat aggressively but not too mindlessly, the environments are colorful and quite varied, the antagonist provides a moving touch to the plot thanks to the perfect amount of tragedy, and the soundtrack continues to kick ass because Falcom still hasn't made a single bad soundtrack for their games. Seriously, the opening movie says it all. The final boss fight that requires you to use all your party characters as a sort of reward for all your time spent experimenting and learning the ins and outs of the game is a great cherry on top of the cake.
If you weigh this by the expectations set from playing Ys Origin or Ys VIII, then I can definitely see how Ys Seven could be a tougher draw for you. Regardless, despite the lack of polish here and there, this more than holds up, and should not be missed as yet another fantastic entry in this classic fast-paced staple Falcom series.
Similar to Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, Ys Seven is a sort of stepping stone in the franchise, in that it marks the transition between the "Ark era" isometric 2D-3D Ys games and the "modern era" party-based Ys games such as Memories of Celceta and Ys VIII. The graphics can feel a little rough and polygonal for their time given that this was originally a PSP game and later localized to PC, but with the HD Texture Pack, it's not too shabby. You get to play as the chad adventurer Adol Christin and his best friend Dogi, sailing to the foreign kingdom of Altago, now stricken with a mysterious plague, an arrogant defense force that almost immediately throws our red headed hero in jail, and the omnipresent clash between progress and tradition. Tasked by the king to discover the source of the unrest, Adol and Dogi must team up with a flurry of other tribal representatives of Altago with their own stories and abilities in yet another cursed land and prophecy that Adol somehow finds himself at the center once again.
Combat in Ys Seven leans less in the Ark-era angle of jumping and dodging and more in the vein of classic hack and slash with character specific abilities and powers. It's pretty bread and butter combat, with the A button handling the basic attack and holding down the trigger + using ABXY to use abilities that are dependent upon an energy meter of sorts. Added to Ys Seven's movement in lieu of a jump is a quick roll, that allows you to both quickly get out of the way of incoming attacks while positioning yourself to the side or behind of opponents to continue your assault. It's sort of a deceptively simple combat system, because while it's a ton of fun to just mash the A button and go ham, it eventually becomes far more productive to use charged standard attacks to more quickly build up your energy meter so you can unleash a flurry of skills that can provide external benefits via additional damage and extended range. In addition, there's a sort of rock-paper-scissors layer thrown onto all of this via the party system, since there are up to three party members (including Adol) on the field at any time, and each character has one of three different attack types that must be accounted for depending on the opposing foe (i.e. Adol's sword is great against amorphous, fleshy enemies, while Dogi's fists are great against heavily armored enemies, etc) since using the wrong attack type will generally deal significantly less damage. So, there's actually a very solid and often frenzied gameplay loop of rolling around the environments to and fro the various enemies, and quickly switching party members and attack abilities whenever the energy meter builds up sufficiently, despite not retaining the EXP combo multiplier of Ys Origin and Oath in Felghana.
Now despite Ys Seven being an "easier" game due to having multiple party members to fall back upon as well as healing items that can be used in the middle of combat, Ys Seven is still not a mindless game. It is possible to dodge most attacks with the roll, but it doesn't make you invincible; the hurtbox is still active while you are rolling, so while your character is in motion, you can still be hit by waves or projectiles. That's where the flash guard comes in; by quickly hitting the L1 and R1 buttons in succession, you can perform a timed flash guard parry to negate an enemy attack (something that I really wish the game actually talked about; it never mentions this once in the tutorial or the manual and that's probably one of Ys Seven's greatest sins). This also isn't mindless however, because Ys Seven turns the timed flash guard parry into a high risk vs high reward situation; if you mistime the parry and you end up getting hit after the window, you'll take critical hit damage from enemy attacks. In addition, the flash guard doesn't give you an extended noticeable invincibility frame window after a successful parry (unlike Ys VIII), so attacks with lingering hitboxes such as lasers fired straight at you or extended enemy rush attacks will continue to deal damage after your parry. However, your immediate attack combo after a successful parry will deal critical hit damage towards opponents, and successful parries very quickly fill up the energy gauge. There is actually a method to the madness of balancing Ys's aggressive offense with on the fly defense, and mastering this push & pull is not as free as simply mashing A and then relying on one defensive option for everything. As a result, it's incredibly satisfying balancing calculated abilities and attacks in-between dodging and parrying enemy attacks in the middle of flashy, oversized boss fights.
Character progression via item crafting and leveling up is a bit more of a mixed bag. On one hand, I quite respect the character skill level up and unlocking system; each weapon is actually tied to a specific character skill, and you have to use a certain character skill enough times in order to use it indefinitely. It's a nice little way to reward players that remain cognizant of experimenting with different abilities and playstyles, and it gives individual weapons more meaning than simply serving as a stat upgrade. On the other hand, item collecting and crafting can be a little frustrating at times. The systems serve as a sort of conduit of fulfilling most of the side quests to document all the dropped resources from enemies/item hordes and also are raw materials that can be used to more cheaply produce better armor/weapons/healing items without spending money. There are a couple of caveats to this though.
Firstly, rarer drops are often required for certain recipes, and are RNG based. Most of this is circumvented by buying a Luck Medal to almost exclusively get rare drops, but there's also the case of specific item hordes in specific locations producing the exact species of rare item drop that you need, despite these item hordes in the same general vicinity looking the exact same, which can make item grinding a bit frustrating. There's also certain quests that require item grinding for resources scattered throughout the land (with basically no assistance from in-game to tell you where those resources are located if you're trying to farm item hordes). Finding these resource wells is trickier than it looks because the minimap doesn't automatically mark the locations unless you are holding the Silver Telegnosis (which in itself becomes an issue because you have to constantly switch back and forth between the Silver Telegnosis and the Luck Medal for the better guaranteed drops), and even then it only shows the location of a few resource wells within a certain distance instead of mapping the whole area. Finally, there's also a held item that straight up increases the amount of money gained from killing enemies, so it's not like you'll need to spend a ton of resources buying healing items as is when money can be pretty plentiful.
I'm making a particular point out of this, because while most of Ys Seven does not require excessive grinding, the endgame right before the final boss suddenly requires a ton of resource hoarding if you want to construct the best weapons and armor for everyone in your party. It's noticeably worse because most of the materials required for the synthesis of the final equipment are best gathered from the resource wells instead of gathering monster drops, which means this late game resource grind actively takes away from the most prevalent strength of the game. In addition to the problems listed above (items scattered throughout the land especially in areas that you have since forgotten the names of for particular drops, resource caches that look the exact same in a particular area but have different rare drops, etc), the somewhat lackluster AI also becomes more flagrant. They're not the greatest at doing exactly what you want them to do (i.e. dealing tons of damage alongside you spamming abilities and successfully dodging/flash guarding) but they tend to handle themselves well enough and are also supposed to help you collect drops from resource caches to minimize downtime. The key phrase here is "supposed to," because sometimes the AI messes up and just pauses to stare at you while you mash the A button 6 times in a row to collect all the resources from a single cache. As it stands, grinding in Ys is usually not an issue, because the bread and butter combat gameplay loop is great as is, but the late endgame really accentuates the flaws of the item crafting and collection systems and can make the final hours quite a bit more tedious if you want the best equipment. As such, if there are any noticeable weaknesses in Ys Seven, they would probably be these systems.
Despite my gripes here and there, Ys Seven is a fantastic entry in the series, both as a starting point to how easy it is to pick up and for veterans of the series both due to its challenging yet satisfying combat system and also in the form of lore drops, as it often references Adol's legacy as an adventurer across his past exploits. I do think that some of the side characters could have been developed a bit further, but they're still a ton of fun to use and explore regarding their own abilities and attack styles; I especially appreciate that it's a lot of fun playing as the ranged archer Aisha and spamming arrows, but she's not overpowered because there's often more downtime from her weapon skills and the range is good, yet not laughably huge. And the dungeons are fairly solid too, with a bit more sprawl and some added "puzzle" elements via key items (reminding me a lot of metroidvanias) and additional hazards reminiscent of a booby trapped crash course to keep you on your toes. The only other complaint I would have is that I do wish that the jump was retained; it would have added just another dimension to boss fights in being able to jump over attacks while allowing further verticality in dungeons and improving the honestly pretty solid movement in the overworld, something that Ys VIII does fortunately account for. Nevertheless, I really savored my time with Ys Seven as part of my journey through the series this year; it was a nice way to relieve stress and quickly press buttons somewhat aggressively but not too mindlessly, the environments are colorful and quite varied, the antagonist provides a moving touch to the plot thanks to the perfect amount of tragedy, and the soundtrack continues to kick ass because Falcom still hasn't made a single bad soundtrack for their games. Seriously, the opening movie says it all. The final boss fight that requires you to use all your party characters as a sort of reward for all your time spent experimenting and learning the ins and outs of the game is a great cherry on top of the cake.
If you weigh this by the expectations set from playing Ys Origin or Ys VIII, then I can definitely see how Ys Seven could be a tougher draw for you. Regardless, despite the lack of polish here and there, this more than holds up, and should not be missed as yet another fantastic entry in this classic fast-paced staple Falcom series.
I thought it was bad at first but then I played it and actually enjoyed it a lot
The only thing I did not like was the timed quests
Honestly I find almost any other Ys game I play better than 8 because they did not bore me to tears with a garbage ass story and repetitive mechanics
Also Dogi is a party member so it's fire for that
The only thing I did not like was the timed quests
Honestly I find almost any other Ys game I play better than 8 because they did not bore me to tears with a garbage ass story and repetitive mechanics
Also Dogi is a party member so it's fire for that
If I wanted to press A this much I would've read a VN amarite fellas up top haha
One of my favourite Ys games, definitely the most underrated game in the franchise, absolute top tier soundtrack, boss design, iconic moments, good writing, best villains in the series by far, overall an amazing start for the party system games (this was the FIRST game they made with that system, on an underpowered portable console, and it manages to be so good!!!)
It manages to capture the exact feeling of an Ys game in ways that the other party system games don't exactly do, such as having a limited item usage that keeps the challenging nature of the series pretty much intact, even if this game is not as hardcore as Origin or Felghana (it kinda is on hard mode, which is the mode i played on)
Having Dogi and Geis as party members is extremely cool to fans of the rest of the series, especially if you played VI before this one
There are some things that are not perfect, like the McGuffin hunting for 50% of the game with barely any interesting plot in between but I couldn't care less, the gameplay, the dungeons, the insane bosses and the music easily makes up for that and the payoff is too good.
About the graphics... It's a PSP game. But, there's a texture pack for the PC version that makes the game look pretty good! I was very surprised about the difference in quality, but without it, I'll admit it looks pretty average to bad.
Never understood at all why this game is among the lowest rated in the series.
It manages to capture the exact feeling of an Ys game in ways that the other party system games don't exactly do, such as having a limited item usage that keeps the challenging nature of the series pretty much intact, even if this game is not as hardcore as Origin or Felghana (it kinda is on hard mode, which is the mode i played on)
Having Dogi and Geis as party members is extremely cool to fans of the rest of the series, especially if you played VI before this one
There are some things that are not perfect, like the McGuffin hunting for 50% of the game with barely any interesting plot in between but I couldn't care less, the gameplay, the dungeons, the insane bosses and the music easily makes up for that and the payoff is too good.
About the graphics... It's a PSP game. But, there's a texture pack for the PC version that makes the game look pretty good! I was very surprised about the difference in quality, but without it, I'll admit it looks pretty average to bad.
Never understood at all why this game is among the lowest rated in the series.
this games main issue is the party
not necessarily the party system, mind you. i think its a fine idea that can be done a lot better but this was a nice and humble start
but the party members themselves
there is literally 0 reason to use any team that isnt adol dogi aisha, maybe replace dogi with geis. mustafa/cruxie dont do dogis job as well as dogi, mischera doesnt do aishas job as well as aisha, and elk is just kinda really bad. they can be entirely ignored, however, up until the final boss. not a story spoiler, not marking it as one. the final boss forces you into 2 teams of 3 and adol. each teams respective phase of the fight is quite possibly the worst matchup for that team possible, making it an absolute chore to go through, as explained in the next paragraph.
this is only complimented by the party members braindead AI. they cant combo, they can only use a single attack. they can't draw aggro, and on the off chance the enemy does in fact hit them, it just goes straight through them anyways and theyll keep just hitting once every 2 seconds. when youre not attacking, theyre not attacking. when youre just trying to harvest, theyll either try to help you but get stuck in a corner, or just stand there. multiple times i have been harvesting while an enemy that dogi is super effective against is literally right there and dogi just stands there doing nothing, letting me get hit.
i do not mind item limits whatsoever, hell im a tales fan, but 5 and 3??? fucking 5 and 3. at least make it like 9 and 5 or something.
however, all in all, all of these complaints can be pushed to the side, because firstly this games story kicks absolute ass, and its definitely up there in top 3 (so far), secondly because all of my complaints about the party doesnt mean that the gameplay isnt fun, unlike celceta. celcetas mildly improved party ai was 1 step forward, literally everything else about the game was 12 steps back.
I am so glad to be done with the XSEED ys games before i have to go back to college and using my steam deck. onto ys 8, the alleged "best" one!
not necessarily the party system, mind you. i think its a fine idea that can be done a lot better but this was a nice and humble start
but the party members themselves
there is literally 0 reason to use any team that isnt adol dogi aisha, maybe replace dogi with geis. mustafa/cruxie dont do dogis job as well as dogi, mischera doesnt do aishas job as well as aisha, and elk is just kinda really bad. they can be entirely ignored, however, up until the final boss. not a story spoiler, not marking it as one. the final boss forces you into 2 teams of 3 and adol. each teams respective phase of the fight is quite possibly the worst matchup for that team possible, making it an absolute chore to go through, as explained in the next paragraph.
this is only complimented by the party members braindead AI. they cant combo, they can only use a single attack. they can't draw aggro, and on the off chance the enemy does in fact hit them, it just goes straight through them anyways and theyll keep just hitting once every 2 seconds. when youre not attacking, theyre not attacking. when youre just trying to harvest, theyll either try to help you but get stuck in a corner, or just stand there. multiple times i have been harvesting while an enemy that dogi is super effective against is literally right there and dogi just stands there doing nothing, letting me get hit.
i do not mind item limits whatsoever, hell im a tales fan, but 5 and 3??? fucking 5 and 3. at least make it like 9 and 5 or something.
however, all in all, all of these complaints can be pushed to the side, because firstly this games story kicks absolute ass, and its definitely up there in top 3 (so far), secondly because all of my complaints about the party doesnt mean that the gameplay isnt fun, unlike celceta. celcetas mildly improved party ai was 1 step forward, literally everything else about the game was 12 steps back.
I am so glad to be done with the XSEED ys games before i have to go back to college and using my steam deck. onto ys 8, the alleged "best" one!
I fell in love with Ys Memories of Celceta on the Vita and after finishing it I felt I had to play a game that came before it. Ys Seven was that game, and I found it to be a fun ARPG, but it paled in comparison to Ys: MoC. I can't really place my finger on why that is exactly (maybe the story wasn't as good? maybe the characters weren't as likeable?). It was still a solid game that I'm glad I played through.
im so fucking frustrated
A masterclass of what action rpgs hope to be. Right amount of length, right amount of challenge and if you know the mechanics you wont really struggle. In some cases being able to perfect guard can trivialize things. That said I didn't realize how to do that until the end of the game. Plan to replay it again now that I know all I can do.
Ys Seven pilots the series into a new era, but ultimately ends up feeling like a rough draft. The game has solid bones - a fun and typically fast-paced and dodge-heavy hack-and-slash combat system where attacks build up SP to unleash special skills, as well as a party system to help introduce some variety.
But the game is constantly getting in its own way with weird balancing issues - SP takes waaaaay too long to build up, and bosses are giant damage sponges that draw fights out two to three times as long as they should be. The result is a game that feels both fast and sluggish in its moment-to-moment rhythms. Another key flaw? Only the slash-type characters are really any fun to play as (Dogi hits like a truck but he moves like one too).
I had an okay time with it despite everything. But this is easily one of the weaker Ys games, and the fact that it was by far the longest Ys to date on release really doesn’t help with that
But the game is constantly getting in its own way with weird balancing issues - SP takes waaaaay too long to build up, and bosses are giant damage sponges that draw fights out two to three times as long as they should be. The result is a game that feels both fast and sluggish in its moment-to-moment rhythms. Another key flaw? Only the slash-type characters are really any fun to play as (Dogi hits like a truck but he moves like one too).
I had an okay time with it despite everything. But this is easily one of the weaker Ys games, and the fact that it was by far the longest Ys to date on release really doesn’t help with that
art style wise this entry is pretty good however it being the first game in the party system era Ys games, it leaves alot to be desired. it's one of the weakest games in the entire series. IDK why Turbo loves it
Genuinely think this may be one of the most underrated RPGs out there and a lot of the things it does have not [or had not been] done better. The party system has always been controversial, but I feel like Ys Seven is the only instance where it's ever been married to the classic gameplay in a seamless manner. Items are /actually/ limited, bosses are challenging and telegraph their attack patterns well, and yet you now have access to a cast of different gameplay styles to use at your disposal, with fights being balanced around that. The dungeon design is fantastic and the plot tends to unfold as you traverse through Altago and gradually learn more about it, really evoking a sense of "adventure" in the player. Ys Seven is exceptional and it's a shame it doesn't get the appreciation it deserves.
The first Ys game I ever played and one I overall enjoyed quite a bit.
Unlike previous Ys games, this one has a party based system, which spices up the gameplay and adds a good amount of variety. Admittedly, I didn't experiment with it as much as I should've though.
Combat felt incredibly fluid and was a joy to play.
The bosses were overall pretty good, but the optional bosses were meh.
Like in previous Ys games, the soundtrack doesn't disappoint.
The story felt ok in the first half, but the second half really picked things up.
Unlike previous Ys games, this one has a party based system, which spices up the gameplay and adds a good amount of variety. Admittedly, I didn't experiment with it as much as I should've though.
Combat felt incredibly fluid and was a joy to play.
The bosses were overall pretty good, but the optional bosses were meh.
Like in previous Ys games, the soundtrack doesn't disappoint.
The story felt ok in the first half, but the second half really picked things up.
Pretty nice story, amazing OST and exploring can be pretty fun.
But oh my god the bosses, why are they so bulky. Most of them barely do anything and have such simple patterns, so you are just slapping the boss for like 5-10 minutes. Not the mention the final boss is really not good.
But oh my god the bosses, why are they so bulky. Most of them barely do anything and have such simple patterns, so you are just slapping the boss for like 5-10 minutes. Not the mention the final boss is really not good.
El final es PUTO cine
Mejor que Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom y que Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana
Mejor que Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom y que Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana
Everything about this game is peak. The characters were amazing and I love that Geis makes a return because he was such a cool character in Ys 6 but he didnt have much screentime and this game changed that. The music is amazing, its got an amazing story and brilliant dungeons 11/10
This game's soundtrack was like sex for the ears (i'm still a virgin)
I cannot emphasize enough how important Ys Seven is as a game. Ys Seven is a game that took what made Ys so endearing from prior titles and transitioned amazingly to a 3D environment telling a beautiful and personal story while drawing out the best aspects of Adol's journey. Fueled by Enami's stunning art and Falcom Sound Team's timeless composers, Ys Seven delivers an experience that oozes nothing less than passion and love for the franchise. Add to this Altago, teased as far back as Ys I's manual, which finally comes to fruition through its memorable characters and jaw-dropping settings. Ys Seven is easily one of my favorite entries in this franchise allowing you to regale an adventure so purely Ys it keeps drawing you back for more. It's a game that I think everyone should play, fan or otherwise. Seven is easily one of Adol's most memorable adventures and so important to who he is and what "Ys" as a series means.
Ys Seven : The Odd Duck
During the late 2000’s and early 2010’s Falcom pretty much found a new home with the PSP, it was the perfect niche to set in and be the small but surprising developer people were following out of cult following rather than because they broke new ground. And while we’ll be getting that era of Falcom a bit later over here in the west (mostly through word of mouth and the success of the Cold Steel titles) in Japan, Falcom was still going strong releasing new games and experimenting a lot with them.
Ys will be taking a bit of a backseat in the two years following Ys Origins release, most likely to try and come up with a way to bring Ys to new heights and shake the formula of the franchise so as to not make it redundant. With Felghana and Origins, it was clear to many that Ys had found what is essentially its best formula yet but after Origins already tried to spice things up with additional character to play and a bigger emphasis on lore, worldbuilding and narration, the Ark System was pretty much perfected and Falcom was ready to move on from it as to not make the series redundant.
Ys Seven released in 2009 was in fact the first game since Ys VI in 2006 to actually propel the story of Adol forward in time instead of going back in time and explore other unexplored parts of Adol’s life and in fact it would be the last until Ys IX in 2019 ! But Ys Seven was a big step for Ys for two other reasons, first of all it’s the first fully 3D Ys games ! While the series has dabbled in 3D in the past with the Ark Engine, here the entire game is in 3D, 3D Towns, 3D characters, 3D enemies, 3D environments !
This does give the game a significant boost when it comes to its presentation in my opinion, of course it’s still a dinky ass looking PSP game made on a sandwich budget but for once I can commend the general artstyle of the game hard-carrying the entire package. The game is colorful and full of life and the region of Altago is surprisingly pretty to look at and really varied in its environments taking place in this world equivalent to North Africa, there’s a lot of different locales and inspirations from the fauna and floras of the African continent as a whole from rocky mountainous mountains to huge plains and savannah and I personally just enjoy how much everything pops ! The game has some pretty stunning looking environments at times (but I mean, I like low poly games and old games in general so it doesn’t bother me, just throw pretty colors at me and I’m game !) and even the character models are pretty cool looking, I especially like Adol’s design in Ys Seven, it’s easily my favorite Adol design in the series and I think the scarf really does add a lot to his character.
But the other big change about Ys Seven is the gameplay system which is just so much more than a simple gameplay change but also a change in game design philosophy and narrative interpretation of Adol’s character because for the first time Adol wasn’t going to explore the land of Altago alone but alongside a couple of other characters tagging along the line. As expected it’s a change that was received quite coldly at first and in fact still divides the fandom to this very day much like how some people think that bump combat was the core identity of the series and they should’ve kept it and experimented on it.
See, the entire meta-narrative of the franchise is that we follow Adol on his journey through an interpretation of him rather than an actual person and every game design decision made for the series up to that point actually matched that philosophy.
Personally and even if I got used to it after 4 games, I still feel iffy about the party system not just mechanically speaking but also in terms of consistency and just overall “vibe” so to speak. Adol in the previous game was a mute protagonist and he still is to some degree in the modern titles which gives him dialogue option even if giving dialogue option to a mute character has never been a substitute for proper characterization in my opinion. In fact most of his characterization (outside of the two oddball titles that were Mask and III) was done mostly through the prism of the gameplay and overall presentation of the game !
As early as Ys 1, Adol is presented as a brave adventurer thirsty for freedom and curious about all things. The manual tells you how you’re looking at him through the different travel diaries he left throughout his lifetime until he died at the age of 63 while trying to reach the North Pole which at least set like a “plan” for Adol’s adventure. As such Ys 1 was all about imitating that flow and over the years, the series has had the reputation of just being a faster take on Zelda. Adol in all the previous games is represented as this absolute unstoppable unit of man ready to storm a castle and rush through its corridors, jumping and slashing his way to the tune of death metal ! Adol was a one-man-unit, he was the man of the situation and even if he met a lot of people along the way like his trusted companion Dogi most of his most notable feats were done through his hand alone.
There’s no reason to imagine that Adol would travel the world with a party of people, it’ll just slow him down and really if Adol isn’t capable of doing all the cool shit he can usually pull off on his own, is he still as awesome of a character as he used to be ? Of course, Adol isn’t a loner but he’s first and foremost a machine built for exploring ancient ruins and uncovering secrets, it’s hard to imagine him being the main character of a party where he’ll just be the main swordsman dealing most of the DPS and doing most of the leg work. Also due to his nature as a mute protagonist which was only previously characterized by his action, he is the perfect narrative vessel for projecting your own fantasy of being a cool adventurer !
And that’s to me the core of the issue, because by being part of a party of characters that means that Adol need to transform and become more of an actual character, he needs not to be an avatar, nor an idealized representation of his adventure where he may or may not over-exaggerate certain points, he needs to be a proper human being. And that’s where the party system game to me falls a bit flat when it comes to Adol because he now falls in all the trappings of the “mute protagonist” people like to complain about.
Because he is a mute protagonist with only a couple of dialogue choices that means that his arc is going to be by default very flat and his interactions with the rest of his crewmates are going to be flatter too with no meaningful character conflicts between him and the rest of his crewmate who are going to either worship him like a god or just have a slight aversion to him that’s gonna be solved in no time by Adol doing something cool. The reason mute protagonists are often frowned upon outside of the lack of direct characterization through text is also because they don’t really add much to the overall dynamic of the cast and mostly serve to gas up the players. When it comes to video games, I don’t think you want to be told to be awesome, you want to feel awesome ! You can tell a lot about a mute character through the things unique to the medium of video games and that’s what a lot of older Ys titles did but the modern discourse surrounding mute protagonists changed because the purpose and how they are integrated changed and not always for the best in my opinion.
However, I’m also not entirely against the party system or the idea of Ys games being about a party of characters rather than a single man unit and I think I understand why this change was made in the end. Adol is a guy with a sword and he’ll always be a guy with a sword so to spice things up, adding new characters with different playstyle isn’t really a bad idea and Origins already experimented with the idea of alternate characters so it’s just in the natural continuity of what that game did. On the other hand, JRPG and Action-RPG as a genre has evolved and even the Ys franchise has evolved since the 80’s and that means that now the franchise is on hardware powerful enough to display more text and create deeper more fully structured stories instead of just telling a story through the prism of gameplay alone.
So now, the Ys franchise is trying to appeal more to the wider JRPG crowds which are all used to big adventures where your main characters are joined by a variety of party members each with their own desire, dreams and goals which oftentimes guides the story of the game more than said main protagonist. Heck the Ys franchise was already starting to get deeper more involved story with Ys Origins where the story was more than just a pretext to climb a big tower and was a big part of my and many people appreciation of that game. With this decision, Falcom tried to tie the Ys franchise deeper to the JRPG genre as a whole, not trying to live in the shadow of Zelda or other big franchises for too long and thus these changes while controversial I felt were necessary to make Ys standout a bit more in an highly competitive market. Some people will say that the series has lost its identity since that change but so did many people who thought the same when bump combat wasn’t a thing anymore.
With that bit of ranting out of the way, how does Ys Seven fair up with these changes in mind, well for that we’ll first have to talk about how the Party System even works mechanically speaking. On a surface level, Ys Seven is still your classic Ys game, the combat is fast and frantic with an exciting sense of flow to it. Each blow and attack comes out quick with very little lag and I feel that at least for this game, it’s one of the “faster” feeling games in the franchise. Unfortunately despite the game being fully 3D this time around, the game has removed the option to jump, likely a response to many people complaining about platforming in the Ark Engine titles (skill issues imo). Therefore the game definitely has more of an hack’n’slash Diablo like feel to it which is completed by the combat now adding skills on top of your regular combos.
Instead of switching to different types of magic adding to your base moveset, here Adol and his teammates can learn a variety of skills they can attribute to 4 skill slots, each of these skills cost SP which can be regained by attacking or blocking enemies. You can also charge your regular attacks to deal a more powerful strike which does more damage but also gives you more SP. On top of all of this there’s also another meter on the right which fills up with attack and guarding, once full you can unleash an EX-Skill which is essentially a big super attack which deals tons of damage at the cost of your entire EX-Bar. It’s a system which on surface isn’t too dissimilar to other action RPG’s you might’ve played such as the Tales Of Series with the only difference here compared to that franchise is that everything happens in real time on the field rather than taking you to a separate battle arena each time you encounter a monster. Enemies now also have a stunt meter on top of their health, most regular enemies will die shortly before reaching that point but bosses won’t and once that meter is full they’ll be vulnerable to attack for a short time while being completely stunt, another system we’ve seen far too often in post 2010’s JRPG if I’m being honest.
And this is where the different party members come into play, during regular gameplay, 3 party members can be active on the field, and different party members deal different types of damage : Slash, Strikes and Pierce. Slashers are fast attackers which deals moderate damage and mostly use swords as their main means of attacking (it’s the main damage type of Adol), Strikers are heavy hitters which does a lot of damage but are very slow, Piercers are mostly ranged attackers which attacks from a distance by shooting projectiles (in later games, some non-projectile based characters are added and they’re just super-fast fencers which deals low damage). The main reason why you’d want to switch between party members however is because certain enemies are weak to certain types of attack and thus switching between them becomes essential to claiming victory over some of the tougher enemies.
Overall, Ys Seven version of this system is actually quite decent but a lot of balancing and gameplay issues kinda sours the fun of the system and definitely shows a severe case of “first game syndrome”. For starters, while Adol is still pretty fun to use, I found a lot of the additional characters to be a bit lacking in the fun department. Heavy characters are too slow for me to consider using them for too long and ranged attackers don’t actually have combo and unleash projectile not unlike Hugo from Origins and thus I didn’t find them that exciting to use in the long run. Also the way the game makes characters available is a bit weird, during the first half only Adol, Dogi and Aisha are available with some guest characters joining for the duration of their attributed dungeon before leaving your party. Some of these playable characters join your party permanently in the second half, but by that point your main party is so stacked that there’s no real incentive to use the other characters (keep that in mind, I’m gonna quizz you later) especially when some of them serve similar roles as your main three. I’ve mainly stick to an Adol only playthrough with the only other character other I found fun to use being Geis (a character from Ys VI making its grand return here as a playable character) so let’s just say that the rest of my party was lacking behind in stats and skills since updating them cost a lot of resources (again, keep that in mind).
The characters in question also aren’t the most interesting ones from a storytelling perspective. I found the team of characters in Ys Seven to be thoroughly unmemorable outside of Dogi, Aisha and Geis (two of which are returning characters with long-established roles in the series). Most of them are just random tribesmen associated with the different temples you visit throughout the game and they don’t really stand out more than that storywise except for maybe Cruxie who replaces her brother Mustafa after some story event happened to her. I like Aisha as a character too but she fits into the typical tomboyish princess role you’ve likely seen in many other JRPG’s over the years and thus your appreciation of her will really depend on your fondness for such tropes.
Other gameplay issues come from guarding, guarding in Ys Seven is a bit wack and unreliable mostly because of how loose the game is compared to other titles, dodge rolling makes you travel half the goddamn screen each time you use it and thus placement can be a bit wanky. While you’re not playing as them, the other party members are controlled via AI and let’s say the AI in this game gets pretty wack. From the auto-harvest not activating on ressources points, to them falling off of platforms and cliffs (which wouldn’t be an issue if switching to them didn’t also mean switching places with them !) or ruining your combos with bad attack choices and targeting the wrong enemies. The AI in this game is up to a lot of shenanigans and aside from being spare HP bags and being good at dodging its not great.
Last but not least, the way you learn abilities in this game is quite wack, each equipment you buy has a skill attached to them and to permanently keep those skills you have to farm AP on the enemies, a system not too dissimilar to how FFIX does it. I didn’t mind it in that game since most of the skills were passive abilities but here not sticking to outdated weapon and armor for longer than necessary locks you from having a complete moveset for each your characters and since AP can only be earned by active party members, they will inevitably lack behind for the late game (again more on that later).
But alright that’s the gameplay change but how’s the game itself ? This time around, Adol gets to explore the Kingdom of Altago on the Afrocan continent, a vast place with many different types of biomes and a bunch of tribes trying to survive out there in the wild to take care of each of their Dragon temples. A long-time ago, the 5 Dragons of Altago breathed new life onto the land, their goal being to keep the balance of their elements in check and if that balance had to be broken, the Wind of Destruction might destroy the land to reset the flow of Energy. To stop this, the prophecy talks about a legendary Dragon Hero who will one day make a pilgrimage to the 5 dragon shrines and receive a blessing from each of its dragons in order to stop the upcoming calamity. As Adol and Dogi land in the capital city, they come into contact with two herb sellers by the name of Tia and Maya getting harassed by the Dragon Knights, the elite soldiers of Altago. After a brief altercation, Adol gets thrown in jail, however having heard of his many adventures, the King of Altago tasks him with investigating the local shrines after a couple of earthquakes has been happening throughout the land. Upon visiting the first shine, Adol learns that he is in fact the chosen Dragon Hero who needs to seek the blessing of each of the dragons to stop the upcoming calamity.
As you can see the story of Ys Seven is overall a pretty basic “save the world by gathering 5 McGuffin” plot line seen in a lot of JRPG. Adol and his friends will go to different regions to explore each of the shrines, encounter the tribe's people, team-up with their local hero and defeat a boss at the end. If anything, the story of Ys Seven isn’t that amazing, it’s cliché, quite predictable and at point even boring and with the party members not having much depth it's really hard to think of this story as anything but serviceable (even if the series rarely shined in that department past Ys 1, 2 and Dawn). You can see the twists coming from a mile away and to top it all of the game is divided into two parts which doesn’t help the game’s pacing.
Because yes, after visiting the 5 shrines, some plot shenanigans happens and Adol gets thrown into jail again, gets to revisit all of the shrines to get blessings from the dragons again and… Yeah I don’t think I need to draw a picture here, this game is a bit too long (20h which is twice as long as your average Ys Game) and stretched out for how basic of a storyline it is. It’s also not helped that all of the quick travel points in the second half get deactivated forcing you to re-explore the entire map once again on foot. Sure the game does open some new areas to make the journey back less tedious but it’s such obvious padding that I’m shocked it got past the development phase. Despite my complaints about the story however, I do enjoy the Kingdom of Altago and its lore and some of the ecological and even political elements weave together to spice this pretty basic plot line into something far more enjoyable than expected. Tia for exemple without spoiling too much on what her deal is turns out to be one of my favorite heroines of the franchise and the end of her storyline did manage to make me emotional. What little actual story there is is good but it’s a shame that the whole Dragon Quest™ takes up 80% of the actual runtime of the game to be appreciated.
Since you’re mostly going to spend the grand majority of the game exploring the overworld as well as the different shrines (twice with other dungeons past the actual dungeons in the second half) how do they fare up ? Well this is where the game kinda suffers from its shift in gameplay and the lack of platforming elements, since the game removed the ability to jump a lot of the dungeons are pretty straightforward in design with one path leading to an item which unlocks the path to the boss. That’s not to say they’re not fun to explore or have fun gimmicks and obstacles, but they’re a far-cry from how the Ark Engine games were designed and I even must admit that they have a hard time even comparing to some of the best areas from Dawn of Ys.
The actual overworld connecting each of the towns and shrine fairs a bit better in the level design department with lots of interesting ways all the areas connect to one another and the monsters you fight there being pretty fun to fight with even some world bosses to take on if you feel especially spicy today. I’d say that in general the level design of each area and dungeons while not being able to compete on the same level as the ones from the Ys Engine era definitely compensate with some ideas and they’re overall pretty fun to go through nonetheless. I think the music alone carries the level design here, Ys Seven music is especially good even amongst the high standard of the series and if I’m being frank it’s at least in my Top 5 in terms of Soundtrack for the series.
So everything about this game is stuff that I just enjoy in an OK way but now I want to talk about the bosses…
They kinda… exist… or flat-out sucks…
With the party system, you now pretty much have 3 Health Bar instead of one and much like Ys VI we’re back to consumables items you can use mid-battle, I’m going to be honest, the party-system game kinda drop the balls hard on the bosses just for that reason alone since the challenge becomes quite nonexistent (which is why I advised playing these games on higher difficulties to have some semblance of a challenge). Because you have so much health and resources to manage that health the developers thought it was a good idea to turn every bosses into big fucking HP sponges which take fucking forever to die, I swear some of these bosses probably last up to 25 or even 30 minutes just to deplete their health bar. This isn’t really hard, it’s just incredibly long, boring and tedious for nothing and only a rare few of them have patterns worth giving a shit about. The only boss that I somehow remember is the first one you fight, which actually had some patterns to work with and some fun counters you can pull but other than that and in spite of the designs being pretty clean it’s not glorious.
Which now leads me to talk about the absolute fucking cancer cell that is the final boss of this game.
I failed to mention it until now but this game introduces a crafting system, with resources to gather in order to make better equipment. Some ressources fall naturally from enemies and some are harvested in certain spots in the game forcing you to stop your forward momentum to pick up some flowers and you better gather these resources because you sure as hell gonna need them. Why do I only mention this now ? Well remember when I said that the game had multiple party members but the game rarely if ever encourages you to use them ? Well, I hope you’ve actually been using them and keeping their equipment in check because they’re all going to participate in the fight ! All of them ! So if some of them are behind the curve, you can bet your ass the final boss is gonna whoop the floor with your ass. This is where the game which so far has avoided the sin of being too grindy becomes an infernal fucking grind fest.
To defeat the final boss, you need to have perfect equipment and everyone’s ultimate weapons, otherwise you simply won’t defeat him. To get those, you will have to grind ressources a lot ! And the worst part is that the game actually doesn’t tell you where to find specific resources, there’s not a compendium where that info can be found so if you’re somehow missing an ingredient for a recipe you’re shit out of luck except if you have a guide. I swear on top of having to farm levels and skills and resources for equipment you actually have to fight the damn boss. If you’re underprepared the boss is straight impossible but even with all the appropriate preparation he’s still a pain in the goddamn ass.
He has 3 phases, the first one being the longest since he’s only vulnerable for a set period of time and you have to dodge the rest of his attacks and attack his head before doing proper damage. The second will test your ability to guard and counter something that is almost never needed in the rest of the game and the third phase is a solo fight where Adol finishes the boss. Each phase has an ungodly amount of HP much like every boss in the game and if you fail at any of them, it’s back to the first phase (there’s also an easy humanoid boss fight before fighting him just adding to the frustration.
I guess I could give props to this boss actually having patterns and stuff to care about but god it’s such a pain in the ass. It’s easily the worst final boss in the entire series and perhaps one of the worst bosses in the entire franchise (yes even worse than Dark Fact in Chronicles and worse than any bosses in Mask of The Sun). This single element kinda sours a lot of the impact during the ending which without really spoiling all that much actually managed to get me a bit emotional despite the game’s many flaws.
After everything I’ve just said, you may think that my opinion on Ys Seven is less than favorable but on the contrary, I do actually enjoy the game maybe a tad bit more than most people. I like the setting, the lore, the music, the dungeons while more straightforward are still lots of fun to explore and the story although kind of non-existent for most of it manages to hit with some truly memorable moments which stuck in my mind whenever I think about this game (SHIRTLESS ADOL DAMN SON).
But it’s also fair to admit that Ys Seven isn’t all that remarkable of an entry especially after the home-run the previous two entries in the series were, much like Ys VI it’s a rough transitional period with some well executed ideas mixed with a lot of less than optimal ones. Ys Seven is a game I like a lot, maybe a tad bit more than Ys VI if only for the fact Ys Seven is just simply a lot more fast-paced and fun than that game and also doesn’t have any sort of weird esoteric mechanic such as dash jumping. Ys Seven sadly is just kinda there and just kind of exists and while I may enjoy it more than most, thinking back on it while writing this review almost made me draw a blank on what I can even say about this one.
Ys Seven is a game I don’t have any strong opinion about, either positive or negative, it’s the most quintessential 7/10 ARPG possible with mechanics you’ve likely seen executed better somewhere else, a story which is cliché, basic and quite predictable especially for Ys standard. The game also has sidequests and the fact I’m only mentioning them now during the conclusion shows you how much care was put into them. Overall, Ys Seven is solid, I’m in conflict with some of its ideas, starting with the party system I have some level of apprehension for and it’s not helped that it’s not executed at its best here.
Next time however, I’ll promise you some salt, we’re going to talk about a game I enjoy much less than Ys Seven, the actual version of Ys IV delivered by Falcom… and… thing’s aren’t pretty.
During the late 2000’s and early 2010’s Falcom pretty much found a new home with the PSP, it was the perfect niche to set in and be the small but surprising developer people were following out of cult following rather than because they broke new ground. And while we’ll be getting that era of Falcom a bit later over here in the west (mostly through word of mouth and the success of the Cold Steel titles) in Japan, Falcom was still going strong releasing new games and experimenting a lot with them.
Ys will be taking a bit of a backseat in the two years following Ys Origins release, most likely to try and come up with a way to bring Ys to new heights and shake the formula of the franchise so as to not make it redundant. With Felghana and Origins, it was clear to many that Ys had found what is essentially its best formula yet but after Origins already tried to spice things up with additional character to play and a bigger emphasis on lore, worldbuilding and narration, the Ark System was pretty much perfected and Falcom was ready to move on from it as to not make the series redundant.
Ys Seven released in 2009 was in fact the first game since Ys VI in 2006 to actually propel the story of Adol forward in time instead of going back in time and explore other unexplored parts of Adol’s life and in fact it would be the last until Ys IX in 2019 ! But Ys Seven was a big step for Ys for two other reasons, first of all it’s the first fully 3D Ys games ! While the series has dabbled in 3D in the past with the Ark Engine, here the entire game is in 3D, 3D Towns, 3D characters, 3D enemies, 3D environments !
This does give the game a significant boost when it comes to its presentation in my opinion, of course it’s still a dinky ass looking PSP game made on a sandwich budget but for once I can commend the general artstyle of the game hard-carrying the entire package. The game is colorful and full of life and the region of Altago is surprisingly pretty to look at and really varied in its environments taking place in this world equivalent to North Africa, there’s a lot of different locales and inspirations from the fauna and floras of the African continent as a whole from rocky mountainous mountains to huge plains and savannah and I personally just enjoy how much everything pops ! The game has some pretty stunning looking environments at times (but I mean, I like low poly games and old games in general so it doesn’t bother me, just throw pretty colors at me and I’m game !) and even the character models are pretty cool looking, I especially like Adol’s design in Ys Seven, it’s easily my favorite Adol design in the series and I think the scarf really does add a lot to his character.
But the other big change about Ys Seven is the gameplay system which is just so much more than a simple gameplay change but also a change in game design philosophy and narrative interpretation of Adol’s character because for the first time Adol wasn’t going to explore the land of Altago alone but alongside a couple of other characters tagging along the line. As expected it’s a change that was received quite coldly at first and in fact still divides the fandom to this very day much like how some people think that bump combat was the core identity of the series and they should’ve kept it and experimented on it.
See, the entire meta-narrative of the franchise is that we follow Adol on his journey through an interpretation of him rather than an actual person and every game design decision made for the series up to that point actually matched that philosophy.
Personally and even if I got used to it after 4 games, I still feel iffy about the party system not just mechanically speaking but also in terms of consistency and just overall “vibe” so to speak. Adol in the previous game was a mute protagonist and he still is to some degree in the modern titles which gives him dialogue option even if giving dialogue option to a mute character has never been a substitute for proper characterization in my opinion. In fact most of his characterization (outside of the two oddball titles that were Mask and III) was done mostly through the prism of the gameplay and overall presentation of the game !
As early as Ys 1, Adol is presented as a brave adventurer thirsty for freedom and curious about all things. The manual tells you how you’re looking at him through the different travel diaries he left throughout his lifetime until he died at the age of 63 while trying to reach the North Pole which at least set like a “plan” for Adol’s adventure. As such Ys 1 was all about imitating that flow and over the years, the series has had the reputation of just being a faster take on Zelda. Adol in all the previous games is represented as this absolute unstoppable unit of man ready to storm a castle and rush through its corridors, jumping and slashing his way to the tune of death metal ! Adol was a one-man-unit, he was the man of the situation and even if he met a lot of people along the way like his trusted companion Dogi most of his most notable feats were done through his hand alone.
There’s no reason to imagine that Adol would travel the world with a party of people, it’ll just slow him down and really if Adol isn’t capable of doing all the cool shit he can usually pull off on his own, is he still as awesome of a character as he used to be ? Of course, Adol isn’t a loner but he’s first and foremost a machine built for exploring ancient ruins and uncovering secrets, it’s hard to imagine him being the main character of a party where he’ll just be the main swordsman dealing most of the DPS and doing most of the leg work. Also due to his nature as a mute protagonist which was only previously characterized by his action, he is the perfect narrative vessel for projecting your own fantasy of being a cool adventurer !
And that’s to me the core of the issue, because by being part of a party of characters that means that Adol need to transform and become more of an actual character, he needs not to be an avatar, nor an idealized representation of his adventure where he may or may not over-exaggerate certain points, he needs to be a proper human being. And that’s where the party system game to me falls a bit flat when it comes to Adol because he now falls in all the trappings of the “mute protagonist” people like to complain about.
Because he is a mute protagonist with only a couple of dialogue choices that means that his arc is going to be by default very flat and his interactions with the rest of his crewmates are going to be flatter too with no meaningful character conflicts between him and the rest of his crewmate who are going to either worship him like a god or just have a slight aversion to him that’s gonna be solved in no time by Adol doing something cool. The reason mute protagonists are often frowned upon outside of the lack of direct characterization through text is also because they don’t really add much to the overall dynamic of the cast and mostly serve to gas up the players. When it comes to video games, I don’t think you want to be told to be awesome, you want to feel awesome ! You can tell a lot about a mute character through the things unique to the medium of video games and that’s what a lot of older Ys titles did but the modern discourse surrounding mute protagonists changed because the purpose and how they are integrated changed and not always for the best in my opinion.
However, I’m also not entirely against the party system or the idea of Ys games being about a party of characters rather than a single man unit and I think I understand why this change was made in the end. Adol is a guy with a sword and he’ll always be a guy with a sword so to spice things up, adding new characters with different playstyle isn’t really a bad idea and Origins already experimented with the idea of alternate characters so it’s just in the natural continuity of what that game did. On the other hand, JRPG and Action-RPG as a genre has evolved and even the Ys franchise has evolved since the 80’s and that means that now the franchise is on hardware powerful enough to display more text and create deeper more fully structured stories instead of just telling a story through the prism of gameplay alone.
So now, the Ys franchise is trying to appeal more to the wider JRPG crowds which are all used to big adventures where your main characters are joined by a variety of party members each with their own desire, dreams and goals which oftentimes guides the story of the game more than said main protagonist. Heck the Ys franchise was already starting to get deeper more involved story with Ys Origins where the story was more than just a pretext to climb a big tower and was a big part of my and many people appreciation of that game. With this decision, Falcom tried to tie the Ys franchise deeper to the JRPG genre as a whole, not trying to live in the shadow of Zelda or other big franchises for too long and thus these changes while controversial I felt were necessary to make Ys standout a bit more in an highly competitive market. Some people will say that the series has lost its identity since that change but so did many people who thought the same when bump combat wasn’t a thing anymore.
With that bit of ranting out of the way, how does Ys Seven fair up with these changes in mind, well for that we’ll first have to talk about how the Party System even works mechanically speaking. On a surface level, Ys Seven is still your classic Ys game, the combat is fast and frantic with an exciting sense of flow to it. Each blow and attack comes out quick with very little lag and I feel that at least for this game, it’s one of the “faster” feeling games in the franchise. Unfortunately despite the game being fully 3D this time around, the game has removed the option to jump, likely a response to many people complaining about platforming in the Ark Engine titles (skill issues imo). Therefore the game definitely has more of an hack’n’slash Diablo like feel to it which is completed by the combat now adding skills on top of your regular combos.
Instead of switching to different types of magic adding to your base moveset, here Adol and his teammates can learn a variety of skills they can attribute to 4 skill slots, each of these skills cost SP which can be regained by attacking or blocking enemies. You can also charge your regular attacks to deal a more powerful strike which does more damage but also gives you more SP. On top of all of this there’s also another meter on the right which fills up with attack and guarding, once full you can unleash an EX-Skill which is essentially a big super attack which deals tons of damage at the cost of your entire EX-Bar. It’s a system which on surface isn’t too dissimilar to other action RPG’s you might’ve played such as the Tales Of Series with the only difference here compared to that franchise is that everything happens in real time on the field rather than taking you to a separate battle arena each time you encounter a monster. Enemies now also have a stunt meter on top of their health, most regular enemies will die shortly before reaching that point but bosses won’t and once that meter is full they’ll be vulnerable to attack for a short time while being completely stunt, another system we’ve seen far too often in post 2010’s JRPG if I’m being honest.
And this is where the different party members come into play, during regular gameplay, 3 party members can be active on the field, and different party members deal different types of damage : Slash, Strikes and Pierce. Slashers are fast attackers which deals moderate damage and mostly use swords as their main means of attacking (it’s the main damage type of Adol), Strikers are heavy hitters which does a lot of damage but are very slow, Piercers are mostly ranged attackers which attacks from a distance by shooting projectiles (in later games, some non-projectile based characters are added and they’re just super-fast fencers which deals low damage). The main reason why you’d want to switch between party members however is because certain enemies are weak to certain types of attack and thus switching between them becomes essential to claiming victory over some of the tougher enemies.
Overall, Ys Seven version of this system is actually quite decent but a lot of balancing and gameplay issues kinda sours the fun of the system and definitely shows a severe case of “first game syndrome”. For starters, while Adol is still pretty fun to use, I found a lot of the additional characters to be a bit lacking in the fun department. Heavy characters are too slow for me to consider using them for too long and ranged attackers don’t actually have combo and unleash projectile not unlike Hugo from Origins and thus I didn’t find them that exciting to use in the long run. Also the way the game makes characters available is a bit weird, during the first half only Adol, Dogi and Aisha are available with some guest characters joining for the duration of their attributed dungeon before leaving your party. Some of these playable characters join your party permanently in the second half, but by that point your main party is so stacked that there’s no real incentive to use the other characters (keep that in mind, I’m gonna quizz you later) especially when some of them serve similar roles as your main three. I’ve mainly stick to an Adol only playthrough with the only other character other I found fun to use being Geis (a character from Ys VI making its grand return here as a playable character) so let’s just say that the rest of my party was lacking behind in stats and skills since updating them cost a lot of resources (again, keep that in mind).
The characters in question also aren’t the most interesting ones from a storytelling perspective. I found the team of characters in Ys Seven to be thoroughly unmemorable outside of Dogi, Aisha and Geis (two of which are returning characters with long-established roles in the series). Most of them are just random tribesmen associated with the different temples you visit throughout the game and they don’t really stand out more than that storywise except for maybe Cruxie who replaces her brother Mustafa after some story event happened to her. I like Aisha as a character too but she fits into the typical tomboyish princess role you’ve likely seen in many other JRPG’s over the years and thus your appreciation of her will really depend on your fondness for such tropes.
Other gameplay issues come from guarding, guarding in Ys Seven is a bit wack and unreliable mostly because of how loose the game is compared to other titles, dodge rolling makes you travel half the goddamn screen each time you use it and thus placement can be a bit wanky. While you’re not playing as them, the other party members are controlled via AI and let’s say the AI in this game gets pretty wack. From the auto-harvest not activating on ressources points, to them falling off of platforms and cliffs (which wouldn’t be an issue if switching to them didn’t also mean switching places with them !) or ruining your combos with bad attack choices and targeting the wrong enemies. The AI in this game is up to a lot of shenanigans and aside from being spare HP bags and being good at dodging its not great.
Last but not least, the way you learn abilities in this game is quite wack, each equipment you buy has a skill attached to them and to permanently keep those skills you have to farm AP on the enemies, a system not too dissimilar to how FFIX does it. I didn’t mind it in that game since most of the skills were passive abilities but here not sticking to outdated weapon and armor for longer than necessary locks you from having a complete moveset for each your characters and since AP can only be earned by active party members, they will inevitably lack behind for the late game (again more on that later).
But alright that’s the gameplay change but how’s the game itself ? This time around, Adol gets to explore the Kingdom of Altago on the Afrocan continent, a vast place with many different types of biomes and a bunch of tribes trying to survive out there in the wild to take care of each of their Dragon temples. A long-time ago, the 5 Dragons of Altago breathed new life onto the land, their goal being to keep the balance of their elements in check and if that balance had to be broken, the Wind of Destruction might destroy the land to reset the flow of Energy. To stop this, the prophecy talks about a legendary Dragon Hero who will one day make a pilgrimage to the 5 dragon shrines and receive a blessing from each of its dragons in order to stop the upcoming calamity. As Adol and Dogi land in the capital city, they come into contact with two herb sellers by the name of Tia and Maya getting harassed by the Dragon Knights, the elite soldiers of Altago. After a brief altercation, Adol gets thrown in jail, however having heard of his many adventures, the King of Altago tasks him with investigating the local shrines after a couple of earthquakes has been happening throughout the land. Upon visiting the first shine, Adol learns that he is in fact the chosen Dragon Hero who needs to seek the blessing of each of the dragons to stop the upcoming calamity.
As you can see the story of Ys Seven is overall a pretty basic “save the world by gathering 5 McGuffin” plot line seen in a lot of JRPG. Adol and his friends will go to different regions to explore each of the shrines, encounter the tribe's people, team-up with their local hero and defeat a boss at the end. If anything, the story of Ys Seven isn’t that amazing, it’s cliché, quite predictable and at point even boring and with the party members not having much depth it's really hard to think of this story as anything but serviceable (even if the series rarely shined in that department past Ys 1, 2 and Dawn). You can see the twists coming from a mile away and to top it all of the game is divided into two parts which doesn’t help the game’s pacing.
Because yes, after visiting the 5 shrines, some plot shenanigans happens and Adol gets thrown into jail again, gets to revisit all of the shrines to get blessings from the dragons again and… Yeah I don’t think I need to draw a picture here, this game is a bit too long (20h which is twice as long as your average Ys Game) and stretched out for how basic of a storyline it is. It’s also not helped that all of the quick travel points in the second half get deactivated forcing you to re-explore the entire map once again on foot. Sure the game does open some new areas to make the journey back less tedious but it’s such obvious padding that I’m shocked it got past the development phase. Despite my complaints about the story however, I do enjoy the Kingdom of Altago and its lore and some of the ecological and even political elements weave together to spice this pretty basic plot line into something far more enjoyable than expected. Tia for exemple without spoiling too much on what her deal is turns out to be one of my favorite heroines of the franchise and the end of her storyline did manage to make me emotional. What little actual story there is is good but it’s a shame that the whole Dragon Quest™ takes up 80% of the actual runtime of the game to be appreciated.
Since you’re mostly going to spend the grand majority of the game exploring the overworld as well as the different shrines (twice with other dungeons past the actual dungeons in the second half) how do they fare up ? Well this is where the game kinda suffers from its shift in gameplay and the lack of platforming elements, since the game removed the ability to jump a lot of the dungeons are pretty straightforward in design with one path leading to an item which unlocks the path to the boss. That’s not to say they’re not fun to explore or have fun gimmicks and obstacles, but they’re a far-cry from how the Ark Engine games were designed and I even must admit that they have a hard time even comparing to some of the best areas from Dawn of Ys.
The actual overworld connecting each of the towns and shrine fairs a bit better in the level design department with lots of interesting ways all the areas connect to one another and the monsters you fight there being pretty fun to fight with even some world bosses to take on if you feel especially spicy today. I’d say that in general the level design of each area and dungeons while not being able to compete on the same level as the ones from the Ys Engine era definitely compensate with some ideas and they’re overall pretty fun to go through nonetheless. I think the music alone carries the level design here, Ys Seven music is especially good even amongst the high standard of the series and if I’m being frank it’s at least in my Top 5 in terms of Soundtrack for the series.
So everything about this game is stuff that I just enjoy in an OK way but now I want to talk about the bosses…
They kinda… exist… or flat-out sucks…
With the party system, you now pretty much have 3 Health Bar instead of one and much like Ys VI we’re back to consumables items you can use mid-battle, I’m going to be honest, the party-system game kinda drop the balls hard on the bosses just for that reason alone since the challenge becomes quite nonexistent (which is why I advised playing these games on higher difficulties to have some semblance of a challenge). Because you have so much health and resources to manage that health the developers thought it was a good idea to turn every bosses into big fucking HP sponges which take fucking forever to die, I swear some of these bosses probably last up to 25 or even 30 minutes just to deplete their health bar. This isn’t really hard, it’s just incredibly long, boring and tedious for nothing and only a rare few of them have patterns worth giving a shit about. The only boss that I somehow remember is the first one you fight, which actually had some patterns to work with and some fun counters you can pull but other than that and in spite of the designs being pretty clean it’s not glorious.
Which now leads me to talk about the absolute fucking cancer cell that is the final boss of this game.
I failed to mention it until now but this game introduces a crafting system, with resources to gather in order to make better equipment. Some ressources fall naturally from enemies and some are harvested in certain spots in the game forcing you to stop your forward momentum to pick up some flowers and you better gather these resources because you sure as hell gonna need them. Why do I only mention this now ? Well remember when I said that the game had multiple party members but the game rarely if ever encourages you to use them ? Well, I hope you’ve actually been using them and keeping their equipment in check because they’re all going to participate in the fight ! All of them ! So if some of them are behind the curve, you can bet your ass the final boss is gonna whoop the floor with your ass. This is where the game which so far has avoided the sin of being too grindy becomes an infernal fucking grind fest.
To defeat the final boss, you need to have perfect equipment and everyone’s ultimate weapons, otherwise you simply won’t defeat him. To get those, you will have to grind ressources a lot ! And the worst part is that the game actually doesn’t tell you where to find specific resources, there’s not a compendium where that info can be found so if you’re somehow missing an ingredient for a recipe you’re shit out of luck except if you have a guide. I swear on top of having to farm levels and skills and resources for equipment you actually have to fight the damn boss. If you’re underprepared the boss is straight impossible but even with all the appropriate preparation he’s still a pain in the goddamn ass.
He has 3 phases, the first one being the longest since he’s only vulnerable for a set period of time and you have to dodge the rest of his attacks and attack his head before doing proper damage. The second will test your ability to guard and counter something that is almost never needed in the rest of the game and the third phase is a solo fight where Adol finishes the boss. Each phase has an ungodly amount of HP much like every boss in the game and if you fail at any of them, it’s back to the first phase (there’s also an easy humanoid boss fight before fighting him just adding to the frustration.
I guess I could give props to this boss actually having patterns and stuff to care about but god it’s such a pain in the ass. It’s easily the worst final boss in the entire series and perhaps one of the worst bosses in the entire franchise (yes even worse than Dark Fact in Chronicles and worse than any bosses in Mask of The Sun). This single element kinda sours a lot of the impact during the ending which without really spoiling all that much actually managed to get me a bit emotional despite the game’s many flaws.
After everything I’ve just said, you may think that my opinion on Ys Seven is less than favorable but on the contrary, I do actually enjoy the game maybe a tad bit more than most people. I like the setting, the lore, the music, the dungeons while more straightforward are still lots of fun to explore and the story although kind of non-existent for most of it manages to hit with some truly memorable moments which stuck in my mind whenever I think about this game (SHIRTLESS ADOL DAMN SON).
But it’s also fair to admit that Ys Seven isn’t all that remarkable of an entry especially after the home-run the previous two entries in the series were, much like Ys VI it’s a rough transitional period with some well executed ideas mixed with a lot of less than optimal ones. Ys Seven is a game I like a lot, maybe a tad bit more than Ys VI if only for the fact Ys Seven is just simply a lot more fast-paced and fun than that game and also doesn’t have any sort of weird esoteric mechanic such as dash jumping. Ys Seven sadly is just kinda there and just kind of exists and while I may enjoy it more than most, thinking back on it while writing this review almost made me draw a blank on what I can even say about this one.
Ys Seven is a game I don’t have any strong opinion about, either positive or negative, it’s the most quintessential 7/10 ARPG possible with mechanics you’ve likely seen executed better somewhere else, a story which is cliché, basic and quite predictable especially for Ys standard. The game also has sidequests and the fact I’m only mentioning them now during the conclusion shows you how much care was put into them. Overall, Ys Seven is solid, I’m in conflict with some of its ideas, starting with the party system I have some level of apprehension for and it’s not helped that it’s not executed at its best here.
Next time however, I’ll promise you some salt, we’re going to talk about a game I enjoy much less than Ys Seven, the actual version of Ys IV delivered by Falcom… and… thing’s aren’t pretty.
The way that Adol leans forward and Dogi is leaned back while they run and bounce around the world poking at stuff. Yeah gimme that.
An amazing game in the Ys Series, released before YsVIII but able to show Adols character growth on the past events of what happened in YsVIII. Tia is an amazing character and being able to have Geis as a party member fucking rocks. One of the best Final bosses in the Ys Series and definitely one of the most difficulty due to having phases with tons and health and the last one being an adol 1v1.
This sure was a Game of all time
Nothing special, nothing offensive about this game. It just, exists.
Nothing special, nothing offensive about this game. It just, exists.
Any game that lets you play as Dogi is a game worth playing.
Um jogo extremamente carismático tanto em visual, character design e personagens, com uma gameplay muito gostosa mesmo essa não sendo a melhor versão da mecânica de skills e uma das melhores OSTs da franquia facilmente.
If you are playing in numbered order, this one feels a bit rough. Although there isn't anything exceptional I can point out, Amongst the Ys games, in this one there were a lot more instances where I wasn't really into it, the game starts off slow with the limited skills and, likely because I bumped up the difficulty this time around, there were many instances of damage sponges to prolong the combat. By the mid point, I was in the groove, but after act 2 begins, there was too much option. Skills would rarely be learned as I would get a new weapon before I could finish, characters were left in the dust after picking some favorites (like Ys IV, but with much more severe repercussions) and you are forced to run through the same map over and over.
I was surprised with how well this game is reviewed in the context of the series as this only above Ys V in my honest opinion not bad enough to skip but there's no reason to push yourself with this one. Just enjoy the casual gameplay
I was surprised with how well this game is reviewed in the context of the series as this only above Ys V in my honest opinion not bad enough to skip but there's no reason to push yourself with this one. Just enjoy the casual gameplay
8/10
Limitação X Simplicade X Execução.
Ys seven é um caso curioso.
Ys seven soa muito como um protótipo ou beta de mecânicas e leve design de ys 8 e de plot tbm apesar de não tudo.
A introdução do sistema de ataque terem tipos, slash, pierce and smash, sistema similar a pedra papel tesoura, tem certos inimigos mais fracos a um personagem com dano slash, outros com dano piece e por aí vai.
Quando um inimigo fica atordado, mesmo ele so recebendo dano de um tipo de ataque específico, nesse momento tá liberado a farra até ele se recuperar.
Porém o fluxo de gameplay é muito estável, com só um botão tu troca de personagem, possibilita manter o dinamismo da ação e efetivar estratégias de X formas.
Sem dúvida, o psp é um console que limita bastante o potencial do jogo gráficos, dublagem e etc, mas a falcomm não é lá uma grande empresa, principalmente nessa época, mas eles conseguiram realizar algo muito bem condensado nesse portátil. ( a falcomm acerta bastante na simplicidade dos jogos que ela faz, menos tokyo xanadu).
Muitas fases sofrem da limitação do psp, ainda assim existe uma boa mão que conduz as coisas de forma constante e contínua, a exploração desse jogo nao é absurda, ainda assim é suficiente para levar o jogador a ir atrás dos itens.
(Se jogado no hard esse jogo se torna muito mais divertido.)
Este jogo vai melhorando gradualmenteo nas 5 horas iniciais em diante.
A conectividade das fases, pegar um artefato pra passar de um obstáculo e refazer todo o caminho pra pegar recompensas, achar um item pra entrar na boss fight é feito na maioria das dungeons de forma dinâmica, existe um lampejo forte daquilo que iria fazer ys 8 ser tão bom.
O combate é absurdamente simples, porém funcional o suficiente, ainda que tenha uma baixa variação, as boss fights e algumas gimmicks que o jogo acrescenta dão um consistência maior.
A trilha sonora é ok pra boa.
Não é tão memorável quanto ys origin, ys 3, ys 8, ys 2, mas com certeza é melhora que ys celceta, ys 1 e ys 6.
Innocent primeveral é boa, yukihiro jindo meu herói.
Vacant interference tem seu brilho nas batalhas mais intensas
Mother altago é interessante
Tia é uma ost muito boa
As outras são boas e muitas bem ok.
Citarei as 3 fases iniciais e por que gostei.
A fase do cristal do vento é muito interessante pelo seu fluxo, os inimigos nessa área dão mais dano, mas o caminho é muito simples, com poucas divergências no caminho, mas uma conectividade muito sólida.
E por fim a boss fight é intensa o suficiente
A fase do fogo é ok, mas tem um fluxo muito estável e recompensas boas, junto com uma boss fight bacana, mas padrão.
A fase da floresta a exploração de fato valeu a pena, tudo se conecta bem o suficiente, ainda assim o fluxo dela é um menor, mas ainda assim é ótimo.
A batalha contra o boss dessa área demanda que você saiba utilizar bem os ataques e os personagens e seus atributos especiais.
Menção a dungeon final que é excelente, um verdadeiro chamativo desse jogo e um boss final intenso e trágico.
Claro o psp limita muito mesmo o potencial desse jogo, mas a falcomm conseguiu fazer algo interessante mesmo nesse portátil, parabéns.
Agora vamos a história...
Eu falei que esse jogo soava um protótipo de ys 8, então até na história tem conceitos interessantes ainda que fracos, junto a uma narrativa que particularmente acho ok, podia ser melhor, mas é a vida.
Toda a conexão dos dragões, da febre iskan, do plot final, em conceito são muito interessantes, a execução deixa a desejar, algo que ys 8 abordou melhor.
Não hei de comentar mais sobre a história ou sua narrativa.
Concluindo, foi uma experiência muito divertida e no fim do dia hei de lembrar, afinal o final foi bem bonito e senti que valeu meu tempo.
Limitação X Simplicade X Execução.
Ys seven é um caso curioso.
Ys seven soa muito como um protótipo ou beta de mecânicas e leve design de ys 8 e de plot tbm apesar de não tudo.
A introdução do sistema de ataque terem tipos, slash, pierce and smash, sistema similar a pedra papel tesoura, tem certos inimigos mais fracos a um personagem com dano slash, outros com dano piece e por aí vai.
Quando um inimigo fica atordado, mesmo ele so recebendo dano de um tipo de ataque específico, nesse momento tá liberado a farra até ele se recuperar.
Porém o fluxo de gameplay é muito estável, com só um botão tu troca de personagem, possibilita manter o dinamismo da ação e efetivar estratégias de X formas.
Sem dúvida, o psp é um console que limita bastante o potencial do jogo gráficos, dublagem e etc, mas a falcomm não é lá uma grande empresa, principalmente nessa época, mas eles conseguiram realizar algo muito bem condensado nesse portátil. ( a falcomm acerta bastante na simplicidade dos jogos que ela faz, menos tokyo xanadu).
Muitas fases sofrem da limitação do psp, ainda assim existe uma boa mão que conduz as coisas de forma constante e contínua, a exploração desse jogo nao é absurda, ainda assim é suficiente para levar o jogador a ir atrás dos itens.
(Se jogado no hard esse jogo se torna muito mais divertido.)
Este jogo vai melhorando gradualmenteo nas 5 horas iniciais em diante.
A conectividade das fases, pegar um artefato pra passar de um obstáculo e refazer todo o caminho pra pegar recompensas, achar um item pra entrar na boss fight é feito na maioria das dungeons de forma dinâmica, existe um lampejo forte daquilo que iria fazer ys 8 ser tão bom.
O combate é absurdamente simples, porém funcional o suficiente, ainda que tenha uma baixa variação, as boss fights e algumas gimmicks que o jogo acrescenta dão um consistência maior.
A trilha sonora é ok pra boa.
Não é tão memorável quanto ys origin, ys 3, ys 8, ys 2, mas com certeza é melhora que ys celceta, ys 1 e ys 6.
Innocent primeveral é boa, yukihiro jindo meu herói.
Vacant interference tem seu brilho nas batalhas mais intensas
Mother altago é interessante
Tia é uma ost muito boa
As outras são boas e muitas bem ok.
Citarei as 3 fases iniciais e por que gostei.
A fase do cristal do vento é muito interessante pelo seu fluxo, os inimigos nessa área dão mais dano, mas o caminho é muito simples, com poucas divergências no caminho, mas uma conectividade muito sólida.
E por fim a boss fight é intensa o suficiente
A fase do fogo é ok, mas tem um fluxo muito estável e recompensas boas, junto com uma boss fight bacana, mas padrão.
A fase da floresta a exploração de fato valeu a pena, tudo se conecta bem o suficiente, ainda assim o fluxo dela é um menor, mas ainda assim é ótimo.
A batalha contra o boss dessa área demanda que você saiba utilizar bem os ataques e os personagens e seus atributos especiais.
Menção a dungeon final que é excelente, um verdadeiro chamativo desse jogo e um boss final intenso e trágico.
Claro o psp limita muito mesmo o potencial desse jogo, mas a falcomm conseguiu fazer algo interessante mesmo nesse portátil, parabéns.
Agora vamos a história...
Eu falei que esse jogo soava um protótipo de ys 8, então até na história tem conceitos interessantes ainda que fracos, junto a uma narrativa que particularmente acho ok, podia ser melhor, mas é a vida.
Toda a conexão dos dragões, da febre iskan, do plot final, em conceito são muito interessantes, a execução deixa a desejar, algo que ys 8 abordou melhor.
Não hei de comentar mais sobre a história ou sua narrativa.
Concluindo, foi uma experiência muito divertida e no fim do dia hei de lembrar, afinal o final foi bem bonito e senti que valeu meu tempo.
I love this game a lot and honestly I'm surprised by how this game is usually considered to be one of the worst in the series, it's easily one of my favorites.
Story: Ys isn't typically known for story, but without going into spoilers I'll say I thought the story in VII was one of the best in the series, hell it might even be the best, it's at the very least right up there with Lacrimosa of Dana and Felghana. There were some awesome plot-twists that blew my mind and a pretty unique take on your typical 'chosen one' plot. Ys VII felt like Adol's grandest adventure yet.
World-building: Ys VII has some fantastic world-building that feels much more comparable to the Trails series than it does typical Ys games. I never got tired of the inter-politics of Altago including the tension induced by the Romn/Altago war of the last game and learning all about the vast history of the land of Altago and all its ancestral tribes. There was some great NPC dialogue and quests as well. Also having my fave character from Ys VI return makes me wish the Ys series had more reoccurring characters. Yet again Falcom are proven to be the masters of world-building.
Combat: This was the first Ys game to implement both a parties system, allowing the player to swap between characters instead of just controlling Adol the whole game which is utilized for different enemies that are weak against certain attack types and the modern combat of learning skills and assigning them to different buttons, while it's obviously not as polished as in VIII or Celceta, it's still a super fun and addictive system I never get tired of. I did enjoy that in this game to permanently learn a skill you had to use it enough times while fighting with its corresponding weapon.
Note about the parties system: I do have to mention that your party member AI for the characters you don't control were very broken at times, constantly falling off cliffs, running on ahead to fight other enemies when you're trying to harvest crafting resources, getting stuck behind walls etc. Celceta and Dana definitely improved the AI.
Crafting: Another element of modern Ys games that VII introduced is the crafting system allowing you to gather resources and use them to craft new weapons/armor/items. It's more rough and unbalanced here than in Celceta or VII and there's a lot more grinding required, but it's still a fun system.
Difficulty: With the addition of the crafting system Ys VII became a lot more forgiving and nowhere near as punishingly difficult as the old school games, I only died a handful of times and while I love the challenge of classic Ys, I also enjoy the more relaxed experience of this game. That said it was still harder and more balanced than Celceta which was the easiest game in the series to me.
Graphics: While the graphics themselves are clearly outdated and low-budget they still have a charm to them and I really love the character models and environments. Plus all the anime artwork for the characters has great style that fits the game, aside from Ys IX this game has my fave design of Adol.
Level Design: I thought the level design was fantastic, there was so much variety in the dungeons and all areas of the game looked beautiful. I also love and never tire of the Metroidvania style of exploration of modern Ys games where you get new power-ups that let you backtrack and explore new areas you couldn't reach before.
Bosses: All the bosses felt epic and a lot of them had cool gimmicks you had to utilize to fight them, I also loved how the final boss made you utilize everyone in your party, gave me big Trails vibes since they've been doing that since Sky the 3rd. Honestly my only minor complaint is the fights dragged on a bit because the bosses are pretty big damage sponges with massive pools of HP, but the music was so awesome I didn't really mind much. Which brings me to my next point...
Music: Ys games aren't known for having some of the best damn music in all of video games for nothing. Ys VII was no exception! So many amazing tracks, shredding boss battle themes, relaxing town themes, adventurous exploration themes, ambient dungeon themes, you name it, Ys VII has it all and is without a doubt one of the best OSTs in the series to me.
All in all Ys VII represents a transitioning of the series from that of the classic style to the more modern style with many new additions to the gameplay and while some aspects like the party system, crafting and AI can be rough at times compared to what they would become in the future, I have very little bad to say about Ys VII and this title represents everything I love about the series with the addition of extra strong storytelling and world-building on-top of the fun exploration, addictive combat and a kick-ass soundtrack I always expect.
P.S. Ys VII is also the only game in the series where you get to play as Adol's travel companion Dogi and that alone gives it bonus points.
Story: Ys isn't typically known for story, but without going into spoilers I'll say I thought the story in VII was one of the best in the series, hell it might even be the best, it's at the very least right up there with Lacrimosa of Dana and Felghana. There were some awesome plot-twists that blew my mind and a pretty unique take on your typical 'chosen one' plot. Ys VII felt like Adol's grandest adventure yet.
World-building: Ys VII has some fantastic world-building that feels much more comparable to the Trails series than it does typical Ys games. I never got tired of the inter-politics of Altago including the tension induced by the Romn/Altago war of the last game and learning all about the vast history of the land of Altago and all its ancestral tribes. There was some great NPC dialogue and quests as well. Also having my fave character from Ys VI return makes me wish the Ys series had more reoccurring characters. Yet again Falcom are proven to be the masters of world-building.
Combat: This was the first Ys game to implement both a parties system, allowing the player to swap between characters instead of just controlling Adol the whole game which is utilized for different enemies that are weak against certain attack types and the modern combat of learning skills and assigning them to different buttons, while it's obviously not as polished as in VIII or Celceta, it's still a super fun and addictive system I never get tired of. I did enjoy that in this game to permanently learn a skill you had to use it enough times while fighting with its corresponding weapon.
Note about the parties system: I do have to mention that your party member AI for the characters you don't control were very broken at times, constantly falling off cliffs, running on ahead to fight other enemies when you're trying to harvest crafting resources, getting stuck behind walls etc. Celceta and Dana definitely improved the AI.
Crafting: Another element of modern Ys games that VII introduced is the crafting system allowing you to gather resources and use them to craft new weapons/armor/items. It's more rough and unbalanced here than in Celceta or VII and there's a lot more grinding required, but it's still a fun system.
Difficulty: With the addition of the crafting system Ys VII became a lot more forgiving and nowhere near as punishingly difficult as the old school games, I only died a handful of times and while I love the challenge of classic Ys, I also enjoy the more relaxed experience of this game. That said it was still harder and more balanced than Celceta which was the easiest game in the series to me.
Graphics: While the graphics themselves are clearly outdated and low-budget they still have a charm to them and I really love the character models and environments. Plus all the anime artwork for the characters has great style that fits the game, aside from Ys IX this game has my fave design of Adol.
Level Design: I thought the level design was fantastic, there was so much variety in the dungeons and all areas of the game looked beautiful. I also love and never tire of the Metroidvania style of exploration of modern Ys games where you get new power-ups that let you backtrack and explore new areas you couldn't reach before.
Bosses: All the bosses felt epic and a lot of them had cool gimmicks you had to utilize to fight them, I also loved how the final boss made you utilize everyone in your party, gave me big Trails vibes since they've been doing that since Sky the 3rd. Honestly my only minor complaint is the fights dragged on a bit because the bosses are pretty big damage sponges with massive pools of HP, but the music was so awesome I didn't really mind much. Which brings me to my next point...
Music: Ys games aren't known for having some of the best damn music in all of video games for nothing. Ys VII was no exception! So many amazing tracks, shredding boss battle themes, relaxing town themes, adventurous exploration themes, ambient dungeon themes, you name it, Ys VII has it all and is without a doubt one of the best OSTs in the series to me.
All in all Ys VII represents a transitioning of the series from that of the classic style to the more modern style with many new additions to the gameplay and while some aspects like the party system, crafting and AI can be rough at times compared to what they would become in the future, I have very little bad to say about Ys VII and this title represents everything I love about the series with the addition of extra strong storytelling and world-building on-top of the fun exploration, addictive combat and a kick-ass soundtrack I always expect.
P.S. Ys VII is also the only game in the series where you get to play as Adol's travel companion Dogi and that alone gives it bonus points.
Had this game on Shelved for a while but every time i want to return to it, i remember that the bosses take 10,000 years to kill and that has pretty much killed any motivation to return to this game and that's official now.
best ys game i've played so far. addicting gameplay, good characters, banging ost, and a very nice story to bring it all together. everything i really want in a game. big step up from the other games, which you want to see in a series. enjoyed this one a lot
Story is really good, characters are great, aesthetic fantastic, gameplay isn't perfect but still really fun, music is amazing.
Inexcusable. The game play of 6 and OiF was fine, there was no need to change it. The areas are hollow and the 3 bosses I fought were tedious. A game shouldn't feel grindy and slow when I'm not even 5 hours into it.