Seeing Liz review this here made me remember I once played this! I wrote a really long essay on it that I don't really agree with (please don't dig it up.. or do...)

Perhaps the epitome of the 'teach the player without using words' late 00s/10s philosophy of game design - a not-bad rule of thumb that could (generously) be interpreted as 'maintain some level of clarity/consistency/ design in a way that people can figure out more complex things themselves' that was ultimately twisted into pure idiocy about NEVER USING WORDS that forgets that COMPLETELY NOT USING WORDS ONLY WORKS IF THE GAMEPLAY REALLY FITS OR YOU CAN ASSUME A PLAYER HAS LEGACY KNOWLEDGE FROM PAST GAMES. Sure it's not a bad idea to try and convey puzzle mechanics to players through the experience of using them, but then 10 years of video essays later and everyone thinks it means to make an overwrought first level that 'teaches you how to double jump without using words'. NO!!! THE PRINCIPLE MAKES SENSE IF IT'S SOME PUZZLE GAME LIKE THE WITNESS WHERE THE PUZZLE RULES MAKE INTUITIVE SENSE BUT WOULD BE CLUNKY TO STATE OUTRIGHT!!!!

But... The Witness!! Why do I like it? Why, it has a deep philosophy about the humanity of mankind... NOT!!! I like this game because the puzzles are fun to solve, they interact with the environment, and they sort of acknowledge that a fun part of puzzle solving is failing, walking away and coming back. It incorporates walking way and coming back into the environment and layout! The island is pretty and fun to walk around! The Witness level design "Bangs". I like the tactile feeling and sound design of looking at the panels and drawing the solutions. I could draw those puzzle lines for days.

Look. If I'm being honest I don't really like pure puzzle games that much. I make my little progress across the level select, inevitably get stuck and then forget about the game. My life is a Brain Teaser, I don't want to just Solve Brain Teasers. I don't want to solve middling puzzles in service of revealing some arbitrary conspiracy mystery: I just want to do some fun good puzzles and see some stuff, and this game has that. Playing this was a "Good Time".

Anyways it's time for "Analgesic Lore": did you know a super early version of Even the Ocean - honorary recipient of a 3.6 average Backloggd score rating - was supposed to be a 2D game about exploring islands with PUZZLES...? Well it was, and it never got anywhere because I just don't like puzzles that much, maybe. Then again I made Sephonie's Linking Puzzle system (ironically that game was on an island), which weren't really 'puzzles', but...

More exploration puzzlers set in 3D. Please! Do it for me!

Almost done with my Hard Toal run! First, the things I think are good

- The romance and setting. Oh babey
- At certain brief points the combat feels really good

BUT...

For the past few years I've espoused these three Ys games (with the order being Oath > 6 > Origin) but coming back to Origin I see a number of problems.

First, the gameplay's whole point of existing is speed and aggression. It feels absolutely the best when you're doing these things and being rewarded for it. For this reason, Hugo's Hard playthrough kind of sucks: he's slow, aiming is fiddly and you're doing so much thinking about your exact positioning as a result.

BOSSES

The boss movesets are often contradictory with the whole 'pulpy dark high fantasy power metal' aesthetic and "fast and aggression feel good!" idea : a gigantic number (perhaps all?) of the bosses are designed around only having particular safe windows to attack. These range from the most obnoxious (Gelaldy, the fire construct, who you must wait for his hands to pound the ground): these feel almost like Zelda/Mario bosses: you're expected to behave a very particular, strict way, waiting for the moment to bop the enemy.

Some bosses employ this logic but allow you to speed up opening these windows: Khonsclard (sand plant) or Velagunder (poison bubble arm beast), etc. However, because the act of attacking them when vulnerable is so boring (they just sit there waiting to get hit) there's a terrible, clunky rhythm to the fights. Some bosses do the same thing but 'hide' this fact - Shion lets you be aggressive to stop his shield but you'll still have to dodge his easy attacks before making him vulnerable again.

The fights that feel best are the one-on-ones - Epona, Galleon, Hugo, Kishgal - but on harder difficulties, their damage output is so punishing that your only option is to learn their moves perfectly. Doing so isn't much of a task, but it turns the battles into basically a Zelda fight of sorts, where your moves are the items - dodge, do 3 hits, dodge, do 3 hits... repeat until dead.

The problem then, is that the difficulty in this game mainly stems from weird hitboxes, dense bullet and attack patterns that are difficult to dodge because of the top-down camera, and poor visual communication. One boss's attacks are dust clouds on top of moving sand! Your position on the screen can be a bit hard to see because of how small you are.

This is still mostly manageable, but it does push you to use the iframe-granting moves which feels messy. Bosses like Nygtilger are particularly bad on this front: the boss is extremely simple, except that you have to stand on it while it continues to snake around and shoot bombs that get hidden under its body.

If the game wants to be about speed and aggression, then the bosses ought to be tuned to reward that. But due to fundamental issues described, playing at high speeds becomes tricky because the game rarely feels like it's up to snuff on the precision of your movement. So the key to success on harder difficulties feels more like holding back and playing slowly, because moving too fast will lead to you getting hit by a nearly-invisible dust cloud, or you being unable to jump due to the 0.25 second delay after an attack (yes really!)

There's nothing wrong with a jump-delay after an attack, but again the enemies/bosses have to be tuned to account for that... otherwise you just end up playing conservatively, because many times bullets or attacks will whip out at ridiculous speeds during that delay window.

LEVEL DESIGN

What I find the most disturbing about Ys Origin coming back to it, is how they twisted shmup's combo systems into this compulsive, flashy and ultimately shallow system of powering up as you do more hits quickly, to gain EXP faster. I think they 'perfected' this system with Origin (compared to 6 and Oath), it makes the regular levels feel like slot machines.

Here's the problem with the level design: again, think about speed and aggression. The levels are disastrously designed: pressing buttons leads to 10 second camera pans, gigantic hitboxes on spike pillars make you move slow and ploddingly, there's generally a ton of Zelda Design all over the place: use the obvious item on an obvious wall, press a button, run over here, etc. There's almost nothing resembling a true puzzle, it's all there as filler.

The enemy design doesn't really work: let's be generous and pretend that I'm not going to grind out levels so I can just blindly mash my way through anything (which the game strongly encourages and pushes you towards).

Due to the gigantic hitboxes and speed of enemy attacks, and the way that enemies rarely combine in a synergistic way - you're encouraged to slowly take your time and pick things off. When designing enemy encounters for a game that's meant to be fast-paced with movement, it's better to have enemies with slower (not necessarily slow) attacks, few to no invulnerable states, and that attack at various ranges. By balancing the combinations of enemies, you can create combat encounters that each subtly feel different. The fast pace is maintained, but without making it incoherent if you choose to play aggressively.

The difficulty, then, comes from trying to avoid the slow accumulation of mistakes. Trying to play fast is impossible in Ys Origin - you'll just group all the enemies together and get stunlocked by something, unless you have enough DPS to overpower them. Your attacks' weird forward motion/tracking will just drag you into some bullet flying at 10,000 MPH.

I'm of the opinion that adding more numbers to Action games doesn't fix anything, it just serves to hide inherent problems. If there were no numbers in Ys Origin's combat or healing items, it would clearly feel kind at odds with itself. You'd be playing at a weirdly slow pace so as to not get hit by the weird overlap of enemy behaviors, you'd be circle strafing and bopping stuff slowly. But with numbers, this is hidden because by the time you're about to complain about anything, you've leveled up 3 times and now everything dies in like 3 hits and so much health items are dropping you can ignore the entire design.

IN CONCLUSION

This game feels very symbolic: only released 3 years before Demon's Souls, it sits at the point right before 3D action games basically started to completely lose their connection to physical reality, shifting from a focus on spacing and movement, and, well, Action, towards the realm of reading animations to perform dodge rolls and parries, waiting for meters to cool down to perform your Magical Gacha Slam!

Ys Origin has at its core something that kind of makes sense, but the entire design of the game misunderstands it. Entire boss battles break if you miss weapon upgrades, stage hazards take out 30% of your health if you overlooked an armor box.

Padding out things with incessant numbers and resistance multipliers, a game designed by math formulas, curves, nerds and spreadsheets, rather than thinking about what it feels like to touch literally anything and how that might be pleasurable if transmitted to a player.

IN CONCLUSION IN CONCLUSION

It's called ACTION for a reason! Designers take note: You don't DODGE ROLL out of the way of a FUCKING CAR, you MOVE OUT OF THE WAY. Jesus Christ!


4/5 because of epona and hugo and setting a game in the final dungeon of ys 1 is sick

Really liked this one, but it has obvious holes that keep it from entering the upper tier of action games; it’s sort of a riff on the Arkham-style counter based combat against groups of enemies, the main distinction being that you’ll be faced with overlapping attacks you can’t simply defensively bait out, and so you have to use props in the environment to whittle down groups and make certain high-value targets vulnerable. While it is possible to fight enemies with just your sword and defensive kit- it’s suboptimal, and the best moments here are when you blend the environmental takedowns with the more traditional forms of combat: knocking them down stairs, kicking boxes at them, and dropping chandeliers on their heads to name a few.

The result is a combat system that ends up being much more playful than its influences, where the toughest enemies aren’t necessarily meant to be fought honorably, but tossed around with some swashbuckling gusto. Was also very pleasantly surprised to see that this extends to the major bosses as well, the majority of which are just as susceptible to environmental hazards and throw regular enemies into the mix as well- nicely avoiding the “boss as rhythm game” design that’s made many parry-centric games feel so rote. This means that the big, climatic moments here end up as some of the biggest highlights, as they push the combat into its wildest and most improvisational moments, and the few times you do fight an enemy one-on-one being so rare and novel that they feel like a genuine break from the rest of the action.

Over the course of its four-chapter campaign, it introduces a lot of ideas and a number of bespoke maps, and I was really excited when I saw that there was an “Arena” mode in the menu, something I expected to be a straight shot of action if the running through the campaign proved to be too diluted, but instead of chasing high scores and really learning each of the individual arenas, it’s a weird roguelike mode. The randomness here comes from the positive and negative modifiers you’ll get after completing each map, with the negative effects being pretty negligible and the choice of buffs being game-ruiningly powerful. Winning the last challenge had less to do with any accumulated sense of crowd control or map knowledge, and was far more a result of constructing a busted build that let me heal constantly and stun enemies whenever they tried to attack. Feels like a waste of a mode, especially since the basic gameplay hook seems like it would lend itself so well to something where you had to consider the ramifications of every stunned guard and hurled piece of cutlery.

Lots of room for improvement and expansion in future, but it’s wonderfully breezy tonally and solid enough mechanically that it should satisfy for the moment. (And consider going for a no-death clear of the campaign on hard if you really want to get some extra mileage out of it.)