I almost certainly failed to pick the version of this game that would line up with my review of the first but whatever I don't care.
It might be a bit much to call Ys II the greatest sequel improvement of all time but it's a big one in a way I've never actually appreciated before, probably because it's so easy to think of the two games as just one big game. The pacing is better, the bosses are decent now for the most part (last couple are a little clunky but nothing serious) and most importantly, you can turn into a little guy and talk to the enemies, the greatest feature in video games. If you want me to like your game, let me turn into a little guy.
Y2 is split into basically four acts, with the last one being really long again, and it honestly rules. There's something about Solomon Shrine that I can now say reminds me of Metal Gear. It's a big, semi-open enemy base, you are nominally sneaking in/around it (obviously this is extremely limited in Ys and you are mostly acting as a whirlwind of bladed death rather than sneaking) and things are happening inside it. The bad guys have plans, your allies are also independently doing their own thing. Heck you even have a conch shell that lets you talk to a helper back at base. I could see one getting stuck a few times where progression isn't 100% obvious, such as when the bad guy finds the artifact of power that was dropped and just kinda puts it on a coffee table in a room you saw earlier. That is, to be fair, funny so I forgive it.
Anyway, I dislike that Ys is not a series about massive billion hour games with big parties of characters instead of one madman who can run fast, but the handful of games in this style will continue to be here for me to replay once every 8 years or whatever, so this is okay. I still love Adol and Dogi... my pals
It might be a bit much to call Ys II the greatest sequel improvement of all time but it's a big one in a way I've never actually appreciated before, probably because it's so easy to think of the two games as just one big game. The pacing is better, the bosses are decent now for the most part (last couple are a little clunky but nothing serious) and most importantly, you can turn into a little guy and talk to the enemies, the greatest feature in video games. If you want me to like your game, let me turn into a little guy.
Y2 is split into basically four acts, with the last one being really long again, and it honestly rules. There's something about Solomon Shrine that I can now say reminds me of Metal Gear. It's a big, semi-open enemy base, you are nominally sneaking in/around it (obviously this is extremely limited in Ys and you are mostly acting as a whirlwind of bladed death rather than sneaking) and things are happening inside it. The bad guys have plans, your allies are also independently doing their own thing. Heck you even have a conch shell that lets you talk to a helper back at base. I could see one getting stuck a few times where progression isn't 100% obvious, such as when the bad guy finds the artifact of power that was dropped and just kinda puts it on a coffee table in a room you saw earlier. That is, to be fair, funny so I forgive it.
Anyway, I dislike that Ys is not a series about massive billion hour games with big parties of characters instead of one madman who can run fast, but the handful of games in this style will continue to be here for me to replay once every 8 years or whatever, so this is okay. I still love Adol and Dogi... my pals