Once again, I have no one to blame but myself.
I was in the mood for a Action RPG after investing way too much time into Baldurs Gate 3 because I kept making new characters and experimenting with alternative choices, while not actually progressing with new content. It's just a strange quirk I get with those kinds of RPGs. Same thing happened with Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, and Divinity II especially. Digression aside, I wanted to scratch the ARPG itch I get often. I then saw talks of the YS series anytime I look up ARPGs I haven't played before. This isn't my first forte into the series though, that would be with YS Origins. I'll be honest, I don't remember much about that game other then that it was good. I liked what I played, but it didn't stick with me afterwards. It wasn't because of anything it did wrong on a gameplay side, it's just that the story and characters didn't interest me much. I don't know, I feel there's something about that game that I'm missing the appeal of.
Still, a lukewarm first impression is better then a bad one; so why not try another game in the franchise? Out of all the games I looked at, I felt VIII would be the one most up my alley with its action mechanics, and RPG customization and leveling. I knew only a little bit of background going in from the mainline games; such as the main character is named Adol whose a odd "sort-of" silent protagonist, his travel companion Dogi, the soundtrack always goes exceptionally hard, and action is normally kept at a brisk pace. And I thought I knew that these tend to be shorter RPGs, but my 50 hour game file is telling me how much of a fool I was. This game is long, fully-featured, but maybe just a little too loaded.
One thing that I wasn't expecting was the lack of budget. Not a bad thing by any means, more surprising since I assumed a franchise going for this long would have more money going into it. But looking at this game's background more, this came out in 2016 for Vita and PS4. The former explains everything, so expect some very simple and stilted cutscene animations, inconsistently voiced dialouge, and other cost/time saving measures. This is not a crack at the team or the game's quality, this shows me they worked smarter with their constraints as they invested their resources into what Ys VIII excels in. Especially the design of the island and how connected every location feels.
I suppose the most distracting presentation aspect is the voice acting. (Yes I had the dub on. No I will never apologize for being a dubbed degenerative.) Inconsistent is the word of the day. Some aren't too bad. Others are a lot harder to swallow. It felt like some of these actors had only one take to say their lines, or that they weren't clear on the kind of character they'd be portraying. I felt the main characters that you hear all the time were the most well-performed, but there were certainly lines where I'm like "Maybe you could've tone it down". Nothing here felt bad to me, just more distracting.
The story itself, without going into major spoilers, took a while to hook me. There are two plotlines with the Castaway Village being built in order to survive and escape the deserted island the main cast found themselves shipwrecked on, and then you have the backstory of the island itself and the civilization of the previous inhabitants; but I found myself glossing over the latter a lot. I'm not the biggest fan of the "Advanced Ancient Civilization" trope as I'm always more concerned about the present day issues happening to our main cast rather then whatever happened before the main plot began. I've definitely seen it unnecessarily used in many a story where it adds very little to the overall plot but takes up way too much time. I felt myself getting pretty antsy during these sections, but soon enough the game slowly showed its cards and I was all "Ah! That's what you're playing with." The civilization itself wasn't too enticing still, but the way its used to expand on the mysteries infestering in the plot was surprisingly clever and effective. And overall, the story in general became more and more engaging the longer it went on, which made its gradual buildup well worth it.
As a relative newcomer, it is odd that the main character, Adol, is silent but only kind of. He has dialouge options to pick like any RPG protagonist, but he's also shown to speak during combat and will have quips for many things like fishing. Also the fact that he his named Adol. No, not that his name is weird. More that he does have a name that all the characters address him as. Most other RPGs would have the player name the main character if they aren't going to say much anyway; but here you can't since Adol himself is his own character with an already established backstory. It's a real fine-line between a player-insert and having an existing personality, and I was not expecting it to work so well. Even though I don't mind silent protagonists most of the times, there are points when the story actually starts to suffer when your main character doesn't display much emotion or they just blankly stare as other characters have to carry the conversation themselves. Here, it never felt annoying. It was just enough added to make things interesting.
But who cares about emotional feelings, I want to feel physical feelings of pain from mashing the 'A' button for fifty hours straight. OK it's not actually that simple, though fuck, some of those fishing mini-games can genuinely be painful with all that button mashing. You have one combo, plus a charged attack after a few seconds of not attacking, a aerial combo, a downwards strike while your descending in the air, four equippable skill moves, and a limit break super attack. Not a lot admittedly, but they're used well enough for the addictive gameplay loop. Build the SP meter with combos and charged attacks to unleash skills, which will then gradually build up your limit break. Skills vary a lot and are gradually earned as you level up and progress the story. SP gain is real easy, which allows you to unload a ton of skill attacks on the enemy at any point. Honestly, the speed at which this happens is why it almost never gets old. You're never waiting to be allowed to perform the cool attacks, and the higher your aggression then the more SP you build, meaning even more devastating attacks. Still enemies are plentiful and often fast as hell, so you'll need to utilize the game's defensive options. You can either dodge at the last second of an incoming attack to slowdown time, or you can guard before being struck to greatly increase your damage for a short period of time. Both provide full invulnerability. I felt the dodge slowdown was kind of vague to initiate. Even after fifty hours I was never quite sure how close I needed to be to the attack, when to dodge, and what direction to dodge to get the slowdown. Most of the times I would activate it by complete accident. The guard felt a lot more consistent though. It's a pretty tight window, but not having your character roll out of the way meant I was able to pinpoint the timing of attacks much more reliably. And because I played Ys VIII on hard, these abilities were a godsend and incredibly satisfying to pull off as messing up resulted in a huge chunk of health disappearing, but it made success a lot more fulfilling.
Many enemies also have weaknesses to specific damage types, which vary between the party members. Using the correct damage type will break the enemy and make them vulnerable to all damage types. I'm fairly neutral about this. It encourages swapping characters constantly, which is thankfully instantaneously, so you can't stick to one playstyle and make the combat feel stale. But at the same time there's not much more to it then that. I was honestly expecting enemies to start having multiple weaknesses that offers more of a choice of which character you wanted to use while still being a restriction to overcome, or maybe they would periodically change their weaknesses, and so on. Yet because battles are lightning quick, it doesn't linger enough to drag the combat, rather its just enough to add some spice to the many, many fights.
While not the most complicated or even my favorite ARPG combat, it does its job as well as I could've hoped. Even with the few recolors, enemy variety is high from start to end. Characters play distinctly from one a other, especially the ones that share the same damage type. The RPG systems are simple enough to not have a laundry list of menus and stats to manage, but offers a decent amount of customization and equipment to sought after in the short and long term that kept me playing.
Speaking of equipment, it's really interesting how, because the setting here takes place on an island after a shipwreck, there's no traditional currency. Rather every armor, weapon, and accessory not found in a chest has to be crafted. Luckily no items are ever obnoxiously rare and the game catalogs where to find what, whether they're harvested in a dungeon or dropped by a specific monster. Will say, I did use the 5th party member constantly as they could steal items from monsters, so not sure if that affected how much I felt compelled to grind for materials.
With all that said, goddamn this game is long. I was interested in playing through most of it, but there's so much to do that I stopped at roughly 90% completion. Did get the true ending, played through a lot of raids, fought a few secret bosses, cleared every quest, and fished till my thumb actually started to hurt. And the story has you backtrack back and forth all the time. If you drank everytime you had to go back to the Castaway Village, I'd be concerned for your liver. But mercifully fast travel is extremely accessible and load times are very reasonable. If not for those two things then this would've been dire. Still there's so much dialouge and story scenes, a lot of them even optional that are dependent on whether you complete quests at the village (which are timed depending on story progress) or giving gifts to the survivors you find on the island. There's a lot to do, and I did start to feel fatigued by the end, though as mentioned earlier I was enjoying the story more as it went on so things certainly could've been worse.
Even after all of this, I feel I still don't fully grasp the appeal of Ys. I did leave a lot unsaid as it would bloat this review far more then it already is, but I came away from Ys VIII thinking "Yeah that was good". Not too dissimilar to how I felt about Ys Origins, though I liked pretty much everything here in VIII more apart from it being a bit too long. But maybe I felt that way as I was intending to have a small in-between game, and not a fully-loaded RPG. That's definitely on me for not looking into its average playtime.
Also I'm shocked by the lack of love I see online for Hummel. He's literally designed to be a fan favorite character who'd get so popular that Ys fans would get sick of seeing him in every game and spin-off.
I was in the mood for a Action RPG after investing way too much time into Baldurs Gate 3 because I kept making new characters and experimenting with alternative choices, while not actually progressing with new content. It's just a strange quirk I get with those kinds of RPGs. Same thing happened with Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, and Divinity II especially. Digression aside, I wanted to scratch the ARPG itch I get often. I then saw talks of the YS series anytime I look up ARPGs I haven't played before. This isn't my first forte into the series though, that would be with YS Origins. I'll be honest, I don't remember much about that game other then that it was good. I liked what I played, but it didn't stick with me afterwards. It wasn't because of anything it did wrong on a gameplay side, it's just that the story and characters didn't interest me much. I don't know, I feel there's something about that game that I'm missing the appeal of.
Still, a lukewarm first impression is better then a bad one; so why not try another game in the franchise? Out of all the games I looked at, I felt VIII would be the one most up my alley with its action mechanics, and RPG customization and leveling. I knew only a little bit of background going in from the mainline games; such as the main character is named Adol whose a odd "sort-of" silent protagonist, his travel companion Dogi, the soundtrack always goes exceptionally hard, and action is normally kept at a brisk pace. And I thought I knew that these tend to be shorter RPGs, but my 50 hour game file is telling me how much of a fool I was. This game is long, fully-featured, but maybe just a little too loaded.
One thing that I wasn't expecting was the lack of budget. Not a bad thing by any means, more surprising since I assumed a franchise going for this long would have more money going into it. But looking at this game's background more, this came out in 2016 for Vita and PS4. The former explains everything, so expect some very simple and stilted cutscene animations, inconsistently voiced dialouge, and other cost/time saving measures. This is not a crack at the team or the game's quality, this shows me they worked smarter with their constraints as they invested their resources into what Ys VIII excels in. Especially the design of the island and how connected every location feels.
I suppose the most distracting presentation aspect is the voice acting. (Yes I had the dub on. No I will never apologize for being a dubbed degenerative.) Inconsistent is the word of the day. Some aren't too bad. Others are a lot harder to swallow. It felt like some of these actors had only one take to say their lines, or that they weren't clear on the kind of character they'd be portraying. I felt the main characters that you hear all the time were the most well-performed, but there were certainly lines where I'm like "Maybe you could've tone it down". Nothing here felt bad to me, just more distracting.
The story itself, without going into major spoilers, took a while to hook me. There are two plotlines with the Castaway Village being built in order to survive and escape the deserted island the main cast found themselves shipwrecked on, and then you have the backstory of the island itself and the civilization of the previous inhabitants; but I found myself glossing over the latter a lot. I'm not the biggest fan of the "Advanced Ancient Civilization" trope as I'm always more concerned about the present day issues happening to our main cast rather then whatever happened before the main plot began. I've definitely seen it unnecessarily used in many a story where it adds very little to the overall plot but takes up way too much time. I felt myself getting pretty antsy during these sections, but soon enough the game slowly showed its cards and I was all "Ah! That's what you're playing with." The civilization itself wasn't too enticing still, but the way its used to expand on the mysteries infestering in the plot was surprisingly clever and effective. And overall, the story in general became more and more engaging the longer it went on, which made its gradual buildup well worth it.
As a relative newcomer, it is odd that the main character, Adol, is silent but only kind of. He has dialouge options to pick like any RPG protagonist, but he's also shown to speak during combat and will have quips for many things like fishing. Also the fact that he his named Adol. No, not that his name is weird. More that he does have a name that all the characters address him as. Most other RPGs would have the player name the main character if they aren't going to say much anyway; but here you can't since Adol himself is his own character with an already established backstory. It's a real fine-line between a player-insert and having an existing personality, and I was not expecting it to work so well. Even though I don't mind silent protagonists most of the times, there are points when the story actually starts to suffer when your main character doesn't display much emotion or they just blankly stare as other characters have to carry the conversation themselves. Here, it never felt annoying. It was just enough added to make things interesting.
But who cares about emotional feelings, I want to feel physical feelings of pain from mashing the 'A' button for fifty hours straight. OK it's not actually that simple, though fuck, some of those fishing mini-games can genuinely be painful with all that button mashing. You have one combo, plus a charged attack after a few seconds of not attacking, a aerial combo, a downwards strike while your descending in the air, four equippable skill moves, and a limit break super attack. Not a lot admittedly, but they're used well enough for the addictive gameplay loop. Build the SP meter with combos and charged attacks to unleash skills, which will then gradually build up your limit break. Skills vary a lot and are gradually earned as you level up and progress the story. SP gain is real easy, which allows you to unload a ton of skill attacks on the enemy at any point. Honestly, the speed at which this happens is why it almost never gets old. You're never waiting to be allowed to perform the cool attacks, and the higher your aggression then the more SP you build, meaning even more devastating attacks. Still enemies are plentiful and often fast as hell, so you'll need to utilize the game's defensive options. You can either dodge at the last second of an incoming attack to slowdown time, or you can guard before being struck to greatly increase your damage for a short period of time. Both provide full invulnerability. I felt the dodge slowdown was kind of vague to initiate. Even after fifty hours I was never quite sure how close I needed to be to the attack, when to dodge, and what direction to dodge to get the slowdown. Most of the times I would activate it by complete accident. The guard felt a lot more consistent though. It's a pretty tight window, but not having your character roll out of the way meant I was able to pinpoint the timing of attacks much more reliably. And because I played Ys VIII on hard, these abilities were a godsend and incredibly satisfying to pull off as messing up resulted in a huge chunk of health disappearing, but it made success a lot more fulfilling.
Many enemies also have weaknesses to specific damage types, which vary between the party members. Using the correct damage type will break the enemy and make them vulnerable to all damage types. I'm fairly neutral about this. It encourages swapping characters constantly, which is thankfully instantaneously, so you can't stick to one playstyle and make the combat feel stale. But at the same time there's not much more to it then that. I was honestly expecting enemies to start having multiple weaknesses that offers more of a choice of which character you wanted to use while still being a restriction to overcome, or maybe they would periodically change their weaknesses, and so on. Yet because battles are lightning quick, it doesn't linger enough to drag the combat, rather its just enough to add some spice to the many, many fights.
While not the most complicated or even my favorite ARPG combat, it does its job as well as I could've hoped. Even with the few recolors, enemy variety is high from start to end. Characters play distinctly from one a other, especially the ones that share the same damage type. The RPG systems are simple enough to not have a laundry list of menus and stats to manage, but offers a decent amount of customization and equipment to sought after in the short and long term that kept me playing.
Speaking of equipment, it's really interesting how, because the setting here takes place on an island after a shipwreck, there's no traditional currency. Rather every armor, weapon, and accessory not found in a chest has to be crafted. Luckily no items are ever obnoxiously rare and the game catalogs where to find what, whether they're harvested in a dungeon or dropped by a specific monster. Will say, I did use the 5th party member constantly as they could steal items from monsters, so not sure if that affected how much I felt compelled to grind for materials.
With all that said, goddamn this game is long. I was interested in playing through most of it, but there's so much to do that I stopped at roughly 90% completion. Did get the true ending, played through a lot of raids, fought a few secret bosses, cleared every quest, and fished till my thumb actually started to hurt. And the story has you backtrack back and forth all the time. If you drank everytime you had to go back to the Castaway Village, I'd be concerned for your liver. But mercifully fast travel is extremely accessible and load times are very reasonable. If not for those two things then this would've been dire. Still there's so much dialouge and story scenes, a lot of them even optional that are dependent on whether you complete quests at the village (which are timed depending on story progress) or giving gifts to the survivors you find on the island. There's a lot to do, and I did start to feel fatigued by the end, though as mentioned earlier I was enjoying the story more as it went on so things certainly could've been worse.
Even after all of this, I feel I still don't fully grasp the appeal of Ys. I did leave a lot unsaid as it would bloat this review far more then it already is, but I came away from Ys VIII thinking "Yeah that was good". Not too dissimilar to how I felt about Ys Origins, though I liked pretty much everything here in VIII more apart from it being a bit too long. But maybe I felt that way as I was intending to have a small in-between game, and not a fully-loaded RPG. That's definitely on me for not looking into its average playtime.
Also I'm shocked by the lack of love I see online for Hummel. He's literally designed to be a fan favorite character who'd get so popular that Ys fans would get sick of seeing him in every game and spin-off.
5 Comments
@FallenGrace You know that explains a lot. And looking at their recent output, it's kind of insane how they can get a RPG of this caliber every year. Honestly I miss more B-grade games; bigger then indies but smaller then AAA studios. And it seems Nihon Falcom is literally that.
I am curious how later Ys games compare to this one, because being real this had potential to be one of my favorite ARPGs. Not to say I was disappointed, not all. Heck, I could see myself replaying this on a higher difficulty. I get the feeling the pacing will be a lot nicer since I'd be skipping most cutscenes.
I am curious how later Ys games compare to this one, because being real this had potential to be one of my favorite ARPGs. Not to say I was disappointed, not all. Heck, I could see myself replaying this on a higher difficulty. I get the feeling the pacing will be a lot nicer since I'd be skipping most cutscenes.
I love that they're able to fill the mid-range xRPG fix so well, let alone every year. It's no rose garden though. Falcom's dirty secret is that they recruit fans (who are also young developers) and pay them with company culture, not industry-competitive wages. That's how the company's able to keep up its development pace while remaining low-budget. Working there likely isn't that fun when you have to crunch much of the time. It's gotten bad enough that the studio's struggling to keep its famous sound team up to snuff. Ys has been doing quite fine despite the shakiness of this business model, but Trails has had it a lot rougher lately.
I also miss when Falcom could manage releasing not just Ys and Trails, but games from older IPs + all-new ones. When's the last time they did anything as experimental as Gurumin or Xanadu Next? Even the game that became Nayuta no Kiseki started life as a Zwei II sequel before getting the flagship series branding. I enjoy what I've played of Tokyo Xanadu, but it might as well be called Tachikawa no Kiseki. It's getting to the point where I'm looking for indie/doujin takes on Falcom's older games and few come to mind (ex. Astlibra). Here's hoping they can finish Trails in the next 10 years and return to a diverse lineup.
I also miss when Falcom could manage releasing not just Ys and Trails, but games from older IPs + all-new ones. When's the last time they did anything as experimental as Gurumin or Xanadu Next? Even the game that became Nayuta no Kiseki started life as a Zwei II sequel before getting the flagship series branding. I enjoy what I've played of Tokyo Xanadu, but it might as well be called Tachikawa no Kiseki. It's getting to the point where I'm looking for indie/doujin takes on Falcom's older games and few come to mind (ex. Astlibra). Here's hoping they can finish Trails in the next 10 years and return to a diverse lineup.
@PasokonDeacon Oh no, that work culture sounds very unpleasant/manipulative. Was optimistic that a moderately sized development team wouldn't have the many, many issues you hear from nearly every AAA studio. Goes to show that worker abuse can happen at any level of this industry, unfortunately.
I definitely emphasize when a company feels like they're stagnating in their game output, but so long they continue to sell then it probably won't change. Which is a huge shame, as many of the greatest games made are the ones that forge new genres, completely change the fundamentals of an existing franchise, or refine and polish what works to a fine point. Plus a new project is great time for devs to experiment and try new things.
And since you mentioned that game, Astlibra Revision really is a Ys game and now I can't unseen that.
I definitely emphasize when a company feels like they're stagnating in their game output, but so long they continue to sell then it probably won't change. Which is a huge shame, as many of the greatest games made are the ones that forge new genres, completely change the fundamentals of an existing franchise, or refine and polish what works to a fine point. Plus a new project is great time for devs to experiment and try new things.
And since you mentioned that game, Astlibra Revision really is a Ys game and now I can't unseen that.
@AlphaOne2 I have no way of knowing how manipulative or undesirable the working conditions at Falcom are, just that their long-time staff have stuck it out despite the non-competitive pay. And among other reasons, that seemingly comes down to a shared fan/work culture at the company which mitigates these problems. It'll be interesting to see if this changes once their chairman and founder Masayuki Kato's no longer managing Falcom. He's the root of the studio's conservative (one might say cowardly) business and management style. I can't forgive the guy for how he wrecked Falcom's live music/arrangement projects several years back, either.
What's wild is the people running Falcom should know better by now, having gone through an employee exodus at the turn of the '90s due to stagnant wages (and not moving faster towards console game development). They're still too slow to hop platforms and meet their audience where and when it matters. I hope Toshihiro Kondo and his colleagues can move the company towards a more flexible and resilient strategy (let alone pay talented people what they're worth).
What's wild is the people running Falcom should know better by now, having gone through an employee exodus at the turn of the '90s due to stagnant wages (and not moving faster towards console game development). They're still too slow to hop platforms and meet their audience where and when it matters. I hope Toshihiro Kondo and his colleagues can move the company towards a more flexible and resilient strategy (let alone pay talented people what they're worth).
FallenGrace
3 months ago
They make them at an insane rate though compared with other companies. They have released at least one JRPG a year since 2009 I think? They do it by staying pretty mid budget and I think there is a good place for that type of game and company as the quality is still generally very high.
Glad you tried it even if it's not quite your cup of tea. I absolutely love this game.