An enjoyable short romp, just like the first game. Combat is spiced up just a bit with magic (although you will still mainly use bump 90% of the time) music is still amazing, bosses are much easier barring the last two at the end who put up a decent fight.

The dungeons are labyrinthine but it wasn't so bad if you run them a couple of times, even Solomon Shrine, I didn't have much trouble going through them without a map. The canal is another story though and probably the worst offender.

Its a great palate cleanser from long turn based rpgs and never overstays its welcome, final dungeon will need a bit of patience even with a map.

Attempting to play this again was realizing how despite an increase in scope and new gameplay mechanics, this game has some of the most ungodly frustrating dungeon design I have ever witnessed. They are massive, nondescript labyrinths that are absolute slogs to traverse. Ys 1 may have had god awful bosses, but at least its three dungeons were competently designed. You NEED GameFAQ's open for this game, which is something I happily don't have to say for Ys 1 (outside of maybe two or three instances). While there is still a decent game buried underneath all the bullshit this game throws at you., all that bullshit makes for some very heavy detractors from the game's overall experience.

As an immediate follow-up, this is kind of a mixed bag. It trades in the charming, small world map of the first game for a completely linear series of increasingly complex dungeons, with groups of NPCs positioned in between them every now and then. Much like before, you end up criss-crossing these mazes to solve fairly obtuse item-based puzzles, but because the name of the game for this sequel is "bigger" and "more" this ends up getting tiresome quickly, as the complexity and length of the overall quest have scaled way up. Also, there's a lot more leveling to do this time, but really all that amounts to is the unwelcome need to grind in a few spots. There's still a ton of detail in the graphics for each area and the music is, of course, phenomenal^, but much like everything gameplay-wise, the story does not benefit from going bigger and feels like it's overreaching a bit. This is something that I'm very excited to see improved in the remakes - looking forward to finally knowing wtf is going on!^^

Feels like I'm complaining a lot, but this is still really good-looking, -sounding, and -playing for a 1988 JRPG. Been a while since I've played original ZELDA, FINAL FANTASY, or DRAGON QUEST, but I honestly might prefer these two games to them.

^I played the Famicom version and I must say, I think some of the arrangements might be better than the original PC88 stuff!

^^This is not to disparage the work of the fan translation I played - it's quite good. The issues are more down to the very limited storytelling palette of an 8-bit RPG.