izigame.me

One of my favourite games of all time and the best Ys game I've played so far.
The story is pretty good, it has a slow start, but around Chapter 3 onwards the pacing gets better and the last two chapters are absolutely amazing. What I really like about it is how there's nearly no character that is left out, each character has their own story and background which you get to know by doing their side quests and almost everyone fulfills a great role into building the village hub of the game.
The gameplay is fairly simple, you have normal attacks, skills, dodge, guard and the EXTRA attack. Skills require SP to use them, and you can refill your SP by attacking enemies with normal attacks, while the EXTRA attack is a special attack that deals a big amount of damage and can be unleashed when you have the EXTRA gauge full, which also slowly fills up upon attacking enemies. You can also perform two moves called Flash Move and Flash Guard. Flash Move is when you dodge at the right timing which will temporarily slow down time and make you invincible, similar to Witch Time from Bayonetta, and Flash Guard is when you guard at the right timing, which will give you 100% chance of critical hits and also make you invincible for a limited time. These two moves might be a little hard to pull off at first, but once you master them they will be very useful against certain enemies, especially late game bosses.
You can have up to 3 characters in your party and change between them during battle (later in the game you get a total of 6 characters, but you can only have 3 in the party at a time) and also 3 attack styles, Slash, Pierce and Break, each one being effective against a certain type of enemy. Each character has one of the 3 attack styles and their own weapon and skills, making each character very different to play.
The bosses while not as hard as previous Ys games they're still pretty challenging, especially in harder difficulties.
The exploration in this game is great, the map is huge and has tons of different places to explore, the more I advanced through the game, the more I wanted to see what was beyond the vast forests and mountains of the island, and trust me, what's beyond the mountains on the north of the island is even more amazing than the south.
The music as expected from Ys games continues to be an absolute banger.
There's also a whole lot of other great stuff that I would like to talk about, but since most of them are spoilers from halfway the game onwards, you'll have to experience it for yourself.
While the game does have its flaws, like having to load every few areas and often force you to do raids (basically some kind of tower defense mode where you defend your village from monsters) in order to progress the story, the positives far outweight the negatives and it's overall an amazing experience.
All in all, Ys VIII is an amazing JRPG in almost every single aspect and I absolutely recommend you play it even if you're new to the series, which isn't a big problem, since almost every Ys game has its own self contained story, the only thing that most of the games usually have in common is Adol being the protagonist and having some very subtle references from previous games here and there, so you can start the series from anywhere.