The game that brought the party format to the series. Obviously being the first it's got some rough edges compared to the follow up games, but it still holds up remarkably well. The PC port in particular allows this game to shine much better than the PSP could hope to.

Pros: -Extremely fast and frenetic gameplay which feels great and looks awesome once you get the hang of it.
-7 characters to use all with their distinct strengths that can be swapped between quickly and freely give you many options to mix up your gameplay
-Does not waste your time, is a very quick and tightly paced experience that is constantly giving you new and better tools to play around with
-Excellent boss fights that challenge you to learn their patterns or get pummeled into the ground.
Cons: -Despite being a relatively short RPG, it is remarkably grindy. Material gathering doesn't take long overall, but it is much slower and much more boring than anything else you could do in the game and on the higher difficulties you WANT to do it unless you want a bunch of headaches. Skills are even worse, taking far too long to level up and having a needlessly high level cap for getting the most bang for your buck. Sequels would improve on this a lot.
-While the gameplay is engaging, lack of enemy variety can make it a little repetitive if you resolve to fight everything on the way.
-Despite the variety of characters, balancing is not great. Each character has a passive effect on your party and some are just undeniably superior. As well certain characters just have better skills on top of that and Adol being forced in the party limits your composition choices at times.

Overall, while the sequels generally do everything better this game still has its own unique aspects that make it interesting in comparison. Since it's not terribly demanding and only takes about 20 hours to complete, I'd definitely recommend at least a playthrough if you're curious to see how the party focused Ys games started out.

its got a pretty good gameplay loop, not nearly as grindy as ys 6, but its got a couple issues holding it back. i've not yet beaten the game. without spoiling, i'm only shortly past the island with the sea seal. it feels like i'm 3/4 the way through the game, if i had to guess. so take these opinions knowing that.
anyway, my issues are as follows;

1, it interrupts the game with cutscenes far too often and they go on for way longer than you'd expect, and frankly its story isn't good enough to really do this. you can skip most of it, so i guess thats fine, but you shouldnt feel the need to

2, the skills take way too ​long to charge. with so many of them, and they each level up to 10, and leveling them up is a pain when you cant use them that much, especially some of the later skills that use way more SP. its a pain

3. the additional party members you get for certain areas feel useless. this might be something fixed later on when/if i get party members back, but so far, when i get a new party member, they're a level or 2 below my current party equivalent that the game thinks i'll swap out for them. there are 3 damage types, and you can only have 3 party members out at a time. there are enemies weak to certain damage types that will resist anything else. now then, if i get 2 strike types in a spot where there are next to no enemies weak to pierce, it wouldnt be so bad, but there are always enemies that are weak to pierce. same if you get 2 pierce types, theres always enemies weak to strike. adol uses slash and you can't swap him out. however, you can swap his weapon for a a different damage type later in the game, as another party member with slash joins you. its largely to ease you into a certain party member leaving the team so you still have all damage types and it spices things up a bit, but its the first time in the game a new party member doesn't feel like a poor replacement that you probably shouldn't even bother with.

these arent game breaking issues, and individually none of these are really THAT bad, but together, they hold the game back
these issues were also improved in the ys 4 remake on the vita, memories of celceta, which i actually like quite a bit, and i wouldnt mind another smaller ys game in this formula. maybe an ys 5 remake? please?

its not a bad game by any means, its got simple but alright combat which makes simple grinding pretty fun, mashing the guard button just as the enemy attacks to fill your special gauged feels great, bosses are great and well thought out, you can play as dogi for the first time, i like the party system a lot, and just overall its not a bad game by any means, just flawed
but thats just my two cents

Edit; i beat the game today and i need to add that it just goes on for like 5 more hours than it needs to, and the game practically expects you to grind in the final stretch, the final dungeon is a moderately short and easy one, but if you even want a chance against the final fight, you need to grind your team to level 60, even the guys you dont use, and you need to grind a shitload of materials for synthing, which is easily the worst part about the game. farming items is a miserable slog and the items you get are barely worth it.
and the additional party members only becomes more apparent as you get so many party members with so many skills that the game expects you to level, but you don't earn enough sp to really use skills that often. sure you can use rings that cut required sp in half, or increase skill xp you earn, but there are so many other rings that serve objectively better purposes. the multiple characters also becomes a problem when you can't switch adol out and can only have 3 members out at a time, so you just kind of end up using the same guys for most the game, as theres no incentives to really switch until it bites you in the ass at the end when you have to use characters you literally never touched to fight a phase of the final boss. the game goes on for way too long, the combat eventually just feels mindless and unengaging outside of bosses which are odd difficulty spikes, even if you grind, and the game loves to interrupt the story with cutscenes that just go on and on. i mentioned that way earlier, but it remains a problem throughout. not a terrible game by any means, but it really makes me appreciate memories of celceta.

Probably my least favourite Ys game so far, but at the same time it's also cemented itself even further as one of my most beloved series. Because if I can still end up enjoying the worst as much as I did then thats a great deal more than I can say about a lot of other games. With Ys Seven you get the sense they were focused more on trying to set down the necessary foundations for something greater down the line, ideas that would be expanded upon in Memories of Celceta, but wouldn't be fully realised until Ys 8.

The gameplay loop is as addictive as ever, the heart of the game doesn't falter too much despite the slightly more than inane choice to remove the jump button making the combat feel that much more one-note in comparison to its predecessors. Character switching makes up for it though, I suppose.

Storywise? Yugh, talk about bloated... Ys games usually do quite well for themselves considering how lightly written they are, what you have here with this entry is gross overambition. A narrative slog, overwritten, utterly boring, clichéd and trope reliant to the bitter end, and just too damn long. I've got no shame in admitting I started skipped cutscenes, something I do so rarely I can't even recall the last game I did it with!

Slightly negative towards the end there, but I had my fun. In 2022 it's a game I'd struggle to recommend to anyone but avid Ys fans, and even then it's a tough sell when everything that came before and after demands so much more respect.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Decent entry in the ys series and the first to use the party system. Definitely a rough first outing in that regard. Normal combat still flows well, but the boss fights can range from piss easy to infuriating due to high amounts of health or poorly-designed patterns.

The game's pacing is weird as you basically have to go around the world twice to go to a second dungeon in each area. This makes the second half feel somewhat redundant. I would have wished they used the extra time to develop the party more if they were going to do this, but it feels like they missed an opportunity there.

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.

A pretty solid entry in the Ys series all around. I'm still not huge on this version of the combat, but I kind of mind it less here than I did when playing Celceta? Maybe it's just because I'm used to it now, maybe it's because it's balanced a little differently, but by the end of the game Adol would walk in a room do 2 SP attacks and everything would die instantly so I got some enjoyment out of that. The overworld here is a lot less annoying to traverse than in Celceta as well, meaning I spent a lot less time fighting the same trash enemies over and over which probably helped as well. The dungeon design is definitely the star of the show here, this is maybe the most solid entry that I've played so far in that regard. The progression through them feels really smooth, and the puzzles are pretty simple but satisfying.