The game that brought the party format to the series. Obviously being the first it's got some rough edges compared to the follow up games, but it still holds up remarkably well. The PC port in particular allows this game to shine much better than the PSP could hope to.

Pros: -Extremely fast and frenetic gameplay which feels great and looks awesome once you get the hang of it.
-7 characters to use all with their distinct strengths that can be swapped between quickly and freely give you many options to mix up your gameplay
-Does not waste your time, is a very quick and tightly paced experience that is constantly giving you new and better tools to play around with
-Excellent boss fights that challenge you to learn their patterns or get pummeled into the ground.
Cons: -Despite being a relatively short RPG, it is remarkably grindy. Material gathering doesn't take long overall, but it is much slower and much more boring than anything else you could do in the game and on the higher difficulties you WANT to do it unless you want a bunch of headaches. Skills are even worse, taking far too long to level up and having a needlessly high level cap for getting the most bang for your buck. Sequels would improve on this a lot.
-While the gameplay is engaging, lack of enemy variety can make it a little repetitive if you resolve to fight everything on the way.
-Despite the variety of characters, balancing is not great. Each character has a passive effect on your party and some are just undeniably superior. As well certain characters just have better skills on top of that and Adol being forced in the party limits your composition choices at times.

Overall, while the sequels generally do everything better this game still has its own unique aspects that make it interesting in comparison. Since it's not terribly demanding and only takes about 20 hours to complete, I'd definitely recommend at least a playthrough if you're curious to see how the party focused Ys games started out.

What can I say about Omori? It hits all the high notes in the areas that matter and it probably the most you can hope to do with the RPG maker engine. Excellent art with a lot of visual pop and a surprisingly deep combat system on top of that. Loads of side things to do and lots of flavor text make being thorough with this game a real treat. If I had to say one thing that really holds it back is, like so many other story driven games, Omori lacks in replay value. While there are technically two routes to the game and a random variable that modifies various things in the game, by and large Omori is the same to play every time and the two routes only diverge in a meaningful way in the last quarter of the game. Still, if you're a fan of this style of RPG, this is definitely one of the better ones you could look into. Light horror elements in the vein of Yumi Nikki make it a surprisingly diverse experience as well.

If you like hybridized management sims/RPG's, this is one of the better ones I've played. Certainly hasn't aged very well and coming into it after playing future games can definitely damage the fun, but as a starting point it's excellent (Especially if you can immerse yourself in the time it was created) . Biggest downsides are a weak new game plus system that doesn't carry over nearly enough and a lousy system for endings. Can't say I'd recommend playing it more than twice as a single game as it takes awhile to get to the end and the variance in endings leaves something to be desired. If you love crafting and classic RPG's though, you'll feel right at home playing this and it's fun to master the systems of the game and see how much you can optimize a playthrough.