Ok so I'm gonna be honest here, the game comes with the best of intentions

Trying to have this darker and ambitious story and some fun addition to the movement options to make the game flow better as well as taking ideas from Ys VIII and expanding on them

But good intentions is the only thing this game can offer because everything else feels like an insult to my intelligence

First of all, the story might actually be the worst in any Ys game and not only Kondo doesn't know how to write the guy's fucking PROUD of that fact since it's easily the game with the longest script as you spend more time pressing the A button to advance the dialogues in very poorly directed "cutscenes" than anything else

The Structure and Rhythm of the game is absolutely glacial taking cues from the Trails series by having a story where jack shit happens from hour 1 to 30 aside from way too long character introductions that goes nowhere except if you go out of your way to do the side content later on because these characters suck dick and poop, they're incredibly one-note walking anime cliché with a few personality quirk and absolutely zero depth or development (and the few they have get retcon by some of the ending reveal)

Only Anemone and Renegade were somewhat likeable and interesting and for Renegade I'm stretching hard because Kondo just can't write disabled people for the life of him (yeup, sure the curse that traps you inside Paris and forces you to fight monsters every 5h is a good trade-off for getting your legs back)

The game takes also a lot of cues from Ys VIII with the tavern which is a budget castaway village with some of the most forgettable faces in the franchise and the few that aren't forgettable ... should've been part of the main story ???? Like the literal queen of Gllia is here and the conclusion of her revenge plot against the empire to take back her thrones is to become a maid for some cunny fanservice ? And what about Maxim what was the deal with this dude
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In fact a lot of the things it takes from Ys VIII don't work nearly as much here and aren't justified as much, like why do I need to complete the map ? This isn't some random land , it's a big city with a long recorded history, you could probably buy a map at the local book store, even the hotspot you find , they justify this with a tourist agency but goddamn, imagine a tourist agency sending people down dungeons full of ferocious beast to do some sightseeing, wonderful vacations

But the worst thing it took from Ys VIII which was already bad in that games are the raids, which in this game not only are mandatory to progress through the story and explore more of the map , but are also piss fucking easy and a visual clusterfuck that just feels like a pace breaker just to make the game seem longer than it would otherwise be

Don't get me started how you have to grind side-quest and random monsters in the city just to get access to a 50m² area of the map , good job

I'll talk about the gameplay later now back to story

Because this game seems very keen on wanting to have a political conflict being the center of its narrative and this political conflict is handled in the most spineless and stinky way possible, the first chapter is already fucking terrible, just absolutely terrible

Yeah sure we shouldn't give money and redistribute wealth to poor people because all they do is waste it on alcohol and games anyway unlike the elite merchants running the city by exploiting the mines and getting everyone sick in the process but stealing from them is bad and the daughter comes to the conclusion she should start her own start-up to make people smile with flowers

The game is full of liberal centrist bullshit like this, it's so disinterested in actually addressing the problems it puts into light and instead try to fake some anti-manichean narrative where the rebels are "as bad the oppressive regime", the game has some weird accidental or not pro-imperialism agenda where it seems like it wants to point out how bad stuff got since the Romun empire got into place but also don't want to bring solutions to this and outright think colonization is ok sometimes

I'm actually baffled that Adol kind of supports such ideas himself, he who is an adventurer a free spirit as free as the the wind and actively researched and monitored by the empire trying to steal his wing away

The game seem so disinterested in actually addressing the issues that eventually it invents a new menace altogether to shy away from that piss poor attempt at political commentary because Kondo's probably some Japanese pro-imperialistic cucklord who loves the status quo

Because nothing changes at the end of the game, nothing is addressed since Balduq is still a stinking hell hole

But I guess it got slightly better now that a bunch of goths don't have to punch bad thoughts away
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Which btw does nothing since the population is still miserable regardless

The Grimwald Nox is a fake problem and destroying it was a fake solution
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it's hollow

But man the ending stretch of this game is so fucking bad I was fucking shocked Like how was any of this acceptable by any good writing conventions ?

The entire alchemy plots serves only to detract from the main issue of the narrative, the main villain plan is complete nonsense but then turns out he's not even the main villain, the main villain is a random ass guy with barely any teasing at all in the narrative whatsoever that makes the old villain feel like a tragic heroe

Like Châtelard has the technology to spawn infinite demons and dinosaurs

but his plan is to clone the old heroes of the legend to help him fight the empire, sending them into an orphanage, waiting for them to grow up and then tell them to join them and it backfired hard because the game is written by an imperialist hack

All the characters are clones which adds more complications than it solves anything regarding their established character arcs

Cred goes into a random frenzy for no reasons

And his arc is concluded in the blandest way possible

The guy legit had no redeeming quality as a human being but guess he has a heart now or some shit and repressed feeling
And this is the most any of these characters gets in terms of good interesting developments (modifié)
But then there's the case of Adol
So I heard that the foundation for this game story was to make "adol talk" and sure they did that and they even referenced some stuff from his previous adventures but how does any of this have to do with anything ?
The game isn't making some grand intelligent statement or character analysis of Adol and his journey so most of the weird off-shoot fanservice aspect that happens near the end is completely pointless, serves no purpose in the main story either the alchemy shit or the political shit and it's just tacked on there to tuckle on your heart strings and emotionally manipulate you into thinking this is more than it actually is
Like it's so tacked on, one of the spirits is DARK FACT
Like Dark Fact going "Alright adol break the evil monster spawning eggs" is just funny cuz the entire character is just being evil for the sake of it unless they think the anime is more canon than the game remake
And how is Dark Fact a divinity now ? Even less a person Adol as a strong attachment to ?
All the others make sense
(I give Eldeel a pass even thought I hate how they rewrote his character in Celceta)
But Dark Fact ?
Why not Ernst ?????
NOBODY THOUGHT THIS THROUGH
THIS IS GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARBAGE
I'M NOT BUYING THIS NONSENSE
I'm not even gonna elaborate on Zora's plan cuz ... god he's the absolute worst antagonist in the series
Also man Jules in a wheelchair , was that part of the cloning process, how did he didn't got his legs back when they fuse the clone with their original self , the original Jules isn't disabled like what ?!
And even at the end Aprilis goes like "Man I hope destroying Grimwald was the right decision"
BITCH
THERE WAS LITERALLY NO POSITIVES
TO KEEPING GRIMWALD
WHETHER IT EXIST OR NOT ISN'T CHANGING ANYTHING

Because this game love the status quo since it's written by the Japanese JK Rowling

Now you know I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that Ys is a series know for its writing. Even in the best ones like VIII and Origins they have some issues. But when it's such a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge part of the game , it's hard to ignore

o ok the story is bad and invasive, what else ? The Gameplay ?

I'll admit at first the new movement options are pretty neat and running around the city is nice ... in theory

Because it's so Jank most of the times getting around anything feels like a freaking endurance test on top of the game being limited as shit in terms of scope, the city is already small when completed but then there's the whole NOX stuff

That drags the entire thing down with barriers, invisible walls, visible walls, bumpy corners you bump into everywhere

And the worst part is the city is where most of that is put into good use because anywhere else in the game it's an entirely different story, it's like the game designer forgot you had these abilities

You have 3 big empty open areas with random monsters placed half-hazardly and whenever you try to climb a wall, you know, like you've been conditioned to do for almost 30h, it ain't fucking working so you have to go around the small hill until you find a convenient rock platform to ascend

The dungeons are bad, they're all aesthetically bland, it's a 2019 games that's designed like an NES RPG in terms of dungeons

What was you favorite ?

The cramped corridors with brown bricks or the cramped corridors with blue bricks ?

That's literally all these dungeons have to offer and it's freaking boring, the most fun dungeons are the one where you play as Prison Adol who is way more limited , there's like one dungeon in the entire game that feels like I'm playing a modern Ys title

But the game is also EASSSSSYYYYYYYYYY in the most boring way possible, I even tried to up the difficulty up to Nightmare and I was still rolling through the game with no problems, you get amazing stat bonuses items and equipments very early on and with little to no interval or grind necessary, money and ressources become worthless because there's a random chance you get the best items in the game and become the Hulk by mid-game just by opening chests

The bosses are big moving target with little to no interesting patterns and zero reactivity also most of the attacks have this weird delay on them it's... HUUUUUH

You can crimson line to get closer to enemies but other than that the powers have no combat use other than the one where you charge your attack to get SP's which wasn't something you had to unlock in previous games

So the story is bad and the gameplay quickly becomes boring so what gives ?

I don't get it

How do you make an Ys game known for its quick moment to moment action boring and philosophically insulting ?

And people gobbed that shit up

Falcom fans don't know what a good game is or what ?

They're so conditioned to a set standard with this company that they're satisfied with the bare minimum

Oh and the game's ugly as shit

It doesn't even have a good artistic direction like Ys VIII to compensate the PS2 limitations

So it makes the exploration part of that game even duller

Man I kinda wish my last adventure with Adol wasn't that cause I didn't want to leave on a bad impression