izigame.me

I've been playing through the Ys series in chronological order and, for the most part, have enjoyed every game so far. I'm at least 20 hours into this game, and I don't know if I want to continue. By this point in every previous game, I would've finished the whole story... and then some. According to the in-game progress tracker for LoD, I'm not even halfway through. There is so much about this game that is just unnecessary bloat: constantly interrupting cutscenes, raids, spongy enemies, and the least enjoyable grinding in the entire series thus far. Let me break it down.
Cutscenes: by way of demonstration, I'm going to explain a part of the game that I recently experienced. I'm going through an area and reach a bush. The game stops for a cutscene. At the end of the cutscene, I'm informed that one of my party members has left. I turn around and proceed forward a short distance. There's another cutscene suggesting I should go into a cave. The cutscene ends, and I'm not permitted to go anywhere except in the cave. I can't even go five feet to the left of the cave entrance to collect some minerals. I *have to* enter the cave. So I enter the cave. There's a cutscene. I walk a short distance into the cave. There's another cutscene and the party member who just left immediately rejoins. A fight ensues. There's another cutscene... followed by yet another cutscene where we exit the cave. Only after all of that can I just continue exploring the segment of the region I'm currently in. The game is constantly doing this, and it's never anything interesting or world-building. It's just inconsequential things happening over and over again. If there wasn't a fast forward button, this game would be absolute hell. This leads into...
Raids: Shortly into the next area, I'm immediately called back to base camp to deal with a raid. What's a raid? Why, it's a forced tower defense-ish combat segment you have to undergo repeatedly all throughout the game. I hope you don't enjoy uninterrupted exploration because guess what? You ain't gettin' that here. Make enough progress and SQUAK SQUAK RETURN TO BASE! Now you have to deal with fighting waves of enemies (the amount of waves increases gradually) just to be allowed to continue doing what you were doing before. What do you gain from doing the raids? How do you benefit? You don't. You get some mid-grade materials and that's it. Oh, and you're graded on how well you do. Isn't that always fun? It isn't to me... partially because....
Spongy enemies and unsatisfying combat: I'm going to get this out of the way up front: much like Memories of Celceta, you have other party members that you have no control over whatsoever. The only influence you have over their AI is whether they should be aggressive or avoid combat. Further, there are enemy types that require the use of certain kinds of weapons to deal effective damage against them. Let me explain how this combination of factors utterly fails to coalesce. Even if you set your party member AI to aggressive, they often won't attack at all, will wait until you target an enemy before attacking, or will attack very slowly, as if waiting for you to do all the work. Combine this with the weapon type system, and you have to be constantly changing party members. Rather than having an effective fighting force that will attack the enemies each party member is strongest against, your team members will dawdle around attacking random enemies randomly for minimal damage unless you take manual control and use them effectively. This causes some fights to just DRAG because instead of having party members, you have baggage. You have to carry your team constantly. And unlike other Ys games where the difference in levels between you and your enemies meant enemies were either impossible to defeat, a quick fight, or pushovers, now... unless you're 10 or so levels above your opponents... every fight is a slugfest. This makes every area you traverse a slog because, despite being useless in a fight, your "allies" love to draw aggro. Not to themselves, mind you. They draw aggro to YOU. So picture this scenario: you're going through an area. Your party members are roaming around in the general direction you're heading, drawing aggro all over the place but not doing much (if any) damage. A lot of the enemies in the area where you are have HP in the thousands. You're doing maybe 200 damage per hit. On top of that, the enemies don't flinch to your damage unless you "break" them (yeah, it's one of those games), meaning they'll attack right back through your attacks unless you block or dodge their attacks. Oh, but I don't mean like pressing the block button or the dodge button and relying on i-frames. Did you think this was a good game? No, you need to pull off perfectly-timed flash blocks or flash dodges to get any iframes. You can't just sidestep damage because, if the game says you're getting hit by something, you're getting hit. The hit boxes in Dark Souls 2 are better than they are in this game.
I was going to frame this whole review as a comparison to Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin edition, but I decided against it because Ys VIII makes Dark Souls II: SotFS - arguably the worst-regarded Souls game - look like a competent and enjoyable action RPG. It would've been completely unfair.
On top of the unsatisfying combat, the rate at which you gain experience points is so agonizingly slow, it hardly feels like you're getting any stronger for the entire time you're playing. Since this game is so much longer than the other Ys games, it feels like they stretched out the character growth arc to an insane degree and again... it just DRAGS.
The last item of criticism I have has to do with the story (and storytelling) itself. It's definitely a unique take for a Ys game, which is an odd thing to say since it starts with Adol washing up on a beach... but collecting castaways and building a home base is fresh. The problem is that, even at 20+ hours in, there's no DIRECTION here. There are no stakes. There's no world-building. There's no threat. There's a mystery of sorts... but it's so completely uninteresting I groan every time I'm forced to sit through yet more long-winded cutscenes. If it wasn't obvious yet, this game just REVELS in finding ways to waste your time. In the last cutscene I sat through before writing this review, the scene starts with the camera doing these long, sweeping pans over a city. It just keeps going, too: paaaaaaan, cut, paaaaaaaan, cut, paaaaaaaan, cut, etc. It gets nearly comical with just how many sweeping pans it does before finally getting to some dialog. It's completely self-indulgent and pointless. Like I said before, thank god for the fast forward button. Now if only I could opt-out of the raids, too...
The gist: The pacing is terrible for both the story and the gameplay, both of which love to waste your time. The combat is a chore that thinks it's cooler than it is when really it's just padded and sloppy. Your party members are worse than useless. Based on the fact that I've already played through the next game in the series - the Ark of Napishtim - whatever eventually ends up happening in this game seems pretty inconsequential to the overall setting as nothing at the start of AoN references this adventure (I know LoD didn't exist when AoN was made) and none of the characters in LoD show up in AoN except Dogi (who has been in the series since Ys I). I can only hope Ys IX is better, but if this is the direction Ys's gameplay is taking, I don't have much hope.