Suffers from a clear desire for an 'adventurous' feel. The towns and outside areas in the first few hours are low on character or inventiveness. It's quite deflating walking into an NPC's house, being greeted with a lovely bit of art for them and then realising all they say is a couple dry lines of dialogue (respect to the snake charmer mind you, that's a great Ys NPC). Loved talking to every person multiple times in 1+2 just to see what cascade of goofy lines they would come out with but quickly gave up on that here. Same goes for some of the cutscenes which agan look great while conveying dull plot details that go straight in one ear and out the other. The ramshackle english fandub is a double-edged sword. It provides a lot of quality charm when at its silly best yet equally it can just be, yknow, amateurish in a way that isn't entertaining and hampers portentous moments that could otherwise imbue mystery into the proceedings. The details of the world as you move through it don't spark anything until about halfway through, at which point they start getting more playful in both writing and design. The dungeons never get crazy but they eventually pull some amusing tricks and the little esoteric interactions you can have within the world that made Ys 1 + 2 so likeable show up more as time goes on.
The change made to how bump slash works is theoretically a fine idea - both diagonal bumping and trapping an enemy against a wall were previously basically just an auto-win so let's neuter them and add some tension back into it. Problem is they didn't replace them with anything. Walking direct towards the enemy but slightly off-center is now the only reliable method of attack, which in addition to getting incredibly dull over the course of a full game becomes frustrating for two reasons: 1) you can now go from full health to dead in quite literally two seconds if you just happened to get caught against a wall by an offscreen enemy or their hitbox does something wonky, and 2) the speed at which some enemies move and the narrowness of the confines you often fight them within are not at all suited to this kind of positioning. It ends up being devoid of difficulty or spice and then all of a sudden it's game over for reasons you couldn't foresee. The bosses are mostly solid though, it's just this moment to moment action that grates.
The OST is fantastic, of course. They definitely had the right ideas in many respects but stretched them out too thin in the pursuit of something more grand. The first two games had a sense of marinating in a small set of lovely places with real charm to them. Goof NPCs you're sad to see go at the end. This one is too eager to move forward in an almost linear fashion and spends too much time on the perfunctory as a result. There's room for that approach in the bumpslash-era Ys format but the balance is off here
The change made to how bump slash works is theoretically a fine idea - both diagonal bumping and trapping an enemy against a wall were previously basically just an auto-win so let's neuter them and add some tension back into it. Problem is they didn't replace them with anything. Walking direct towards the enemy but slightly off-center is now the only reliable method of attack, which in addition to getting incredibly dull over the course of a full game becomes frustrating for two reasons: 1) you can now go from full health to dead in quite literally two seconds if you just happened to get caught against a wall by an offscreen enemy or their hitbox does something wonky, and 2) the speed at which some enemies move and the narrowness of the confines you often fight them within are not at all suited to this kind of positioning. It ends up being devoid of difficulty or spice and then all of a sudden it's game over for reasons you couldn't foresee. The bosses are mostly solid though, it's just this moment to moment action that grates.
The OST is fantastic, of course. They definitely had the right ideas in many respects but stretched them out too thin in the pursuit of something more grand. The first two games had a sense of marinating in a small set of lovely places with real charm to them. Goof NPCs you're sad to see go at the end. This one is too eager to move forward in an almost linear fashion and spends too much time on the perfunctory as a result. There's room for that approach in the bumpslash-era Ys format but the balance is off here