Ys Is Simple Though

There's a redhead with a sword. Maybe he swings it, maybe he doesn't, but there's adventure either way.

Some Thoughts on Ys II

Spoilers!

Now there's a game with ambition far beyond its competence. It adds shooting action to the good old bump combat, but the way enemies are knocked back based on their facing rather than where they're hit and the fact that you have to wait a million years to fire again if your fireball has to pass off the screen whereas you can machine-gun anyone in seconds if you hit make it unsatisfying. It tries to dial up the adventure aspects with little gimmicks you might use once or twice and endless backtracking across a senseless mass of buildings and sewers.
Ys itself is an unsatisfying land for adventure. That ancient vanished land of magic and mystery turns out to be three villages with a bunch of monsters all over. What have the monsters been doing for all those centuries before Adol showed up? Chilling, I guess. What have the Ysians been doing? Inbreeding, probably.
The game lacks a sense of place and, therefore, a sense of progress. Where is Solomon Shrine in relation to the rest of the island? I dunno, over there. It's not like you climb to it or anything. Why do you have to go through a lava area? Who knows? What are those tiny rooms in Solomon Shrine for? Adol feels like he's passing through unrelated areas, not making his way toward an ultimate destination.
The characters aren't really characters and the story isn't really a story. The way cleria relates to everything else is weird. It seems as if it's just thrown in sometimes. "You have to defeat the demons, and also, cleria. The magic created demons, even though Darm says he's ten thousand years old, so we have to take away the magic, and also people mined silver, which did something. Maybe." The whole thing, for all the backstory put into it, feels less satisfying and less real than killing some jerk who's doing something bad for more power.
I'm going to be entirely honest and admit that no, I did not remember Feena. That wasn't really much of a moment. They knew each other for approximately forty minutes.
The slow text is bad, and forcing you to sit through it every time you check up with old NPCs or want to restore your MP. Little moments like how the initial conversation with the goddesses triggers both when you enter the room and when you leave it waste your time and make the game feel sloppy.
All in all I give Ys II my knockbackinest rating, bird in a platformer/10.

Notes on Ys IV: Mask of the Sun

Spoilers!
People talk about going back to the first Pokemon in the second Pokemon, but nobody's talking about putting half of Ys I in Ys IV.
What a lame bunch of villains. It isn't even entirely clear what they think they're going to get out of this, let alone what they'll actually get. All that monster stuff seems like a distraction from their plan if anything.
Waiting for story sequences before you can fight a boss for real works better when your attack is not running into them and hurting yourself if they're invincible.
Dying on bosses because they were invincible works better when you don't have to read the dialogue or sit through the earlier phases every single time.
The earlier bosses were fine though.
This is an Ys tradition, but making the player go through a bunch of narrow corridors at the end when bump combat is all about maneuvering is an unfortunate decision.
Leaving aside the villains, the heroes were also lame and the minor characters lacked character. The starting lost item miniquest in Ys I gave the world and people more flavor than the entirety of this game. Overall this game deserves my most "feels like an Ys knockoff" rating of Xak/10.