Mid-month update~

Ys Seven is done! I literally could not put the game down. Some sort of review-ish like blob of text coming up later.

8/31 edit: Ugh, I better get this in before I snag Valkyria 2. I’ll try to keep this short.

Ys Seven was pretty amazing. As a long-time fan of the series, I was a bit worried about the direction they were going with when they introduced the party concept. I mean sure, Adol always receives help from the locals but he was always the one fighting solo when the time came. After 30 hours on Nightmare, I didn’t really care. It does make a lot more sense story-wise. I think I’m just happy to see Falcom try something a little bit new now. It does lower Adol’s badass factor though.

Worries aside, the only complaint I have is about the difficulty. They let you select any difficulty off the bat, which was really great, so I went to Hard first but then I switched it up to Nightmare. While it definitely was very challenging, it didn’t seem on par with previous games’ Nightmare. I’m not quite sure if it had anything to do with the fact that you now have three characters to work with (giving you three HP bars to work with) or if it was the amount of items you were allowed to work with. On Nightmare this number is 3 for single heal items, 1 for multi/ressurect items.  As the game progresses you gain access to stronger versions of these, so you’re eventually able to build up a huge array of healing items for each boss. I’m not that great at the series despite my love for it – I didn’t know about Flash Guard for the entirety of the game, and pretty much every boss drained most if not all of my items, so I kind of imagine someone who knows what they’re doing having a decent amount of leeway.

Other than that, everything else was pretty awesome. The music (there was never a time where Falcom let me down in this department), the fast-paced yet simplistic gameplay… I guess the story can be called a weak point but Ys has never been known for it. It’s very cliche and Zelda-esque. Really, everything you can expect from Ys is there and that’s all anyone who cares about it will ask for.

If you’re someone who is unfamiliar with the series, I think it will be very fun if you enjoy ARPGs. It wouldn’t be the first thing I’d recommend though, just because I prefer people start from the beginning, especially with the excellent Ys I&II Chronicles port coming soon.

I don’t have much time to talk about Metroid: Other M, but I am done with it and I’ll say this: totally underwhelming. I don’t regret playing it, but there’s so many things to bitch about in comparison to its good traits that I wonder if I should just admit that I hated it. I’ll elaborate more when I get some free time.