Dawn of Ys has to be my favorite classic Ys game, hands down. The story has its moments even if it’s not considered “canon” (since Memories of Celceta takes more inspiration from Mask of the Sun, the other Ys IV, instead of this one) and the voice-acting is a bit goofy and over-the-top (I won’t judge too harshly since I played with the English fan-dub), but the game is worth playing for the improved bump combat alone… certainly a sentence that I did not expect to say in my life. Take my opinion with a grain of salt here, since I’ve only played Ys I + II Chronicles, but I found the bump combat to be a bit inconsistent regarding its angle calculations in Ys I Chronicles + while Ys II Chronicles + significantly streamlined it, but made bump combat pretty free since I just needed to walk into enemies diagonally and corner them against walls. I find Dawn of Ys to hit a nice medium between these two extremes: walking diagonally into enemies will likely successfully damage opponents, but you can’t just walk and knock back enemies diagonally since they’ll get knocked horizontally/vertically instead. As a result, the optimal strategy is instead to carefully position yourself just off-center of the enemy’s character model center, and then walk into them horizontally/vertically, taking care not to run into walls because Dawn of Ys has no invincibility frames and squeezing enemies into walls will cause Adol to contact their center and take tons of damage. All the while, enemies are constantly repositioning themselves and trying to maneuver around you so they can strike you with their center, making Dawn of Ys’s bump combat a more intricate spacing game of you + enemies trying to correctly run at each other. It’s certainly a much more engaging way to pass the time while grinding for levels to scale up to bosses, since single levels make a huge difference for stat gains to increase your margin of error. Regardless, thanks to a few late game abilities/items such as the Timer Ring (to slow down enemies) and the Solomon Shoes (instakilling foes in exchange for slowing your movement) that make bump combat quicker (but not necessarily mindless due to better AI pathing and lack of cornering) alongside instant enemy respawns once their spawn position is off-screen, I found grinding to be a lot more enjoyable this time around.

I find myself with very few complaints this time around, mainly because Dawn of Ys strikes a nice balance in taking what I like from Ys I and what I like from Ys II, and often improving upon that to boot. There’s a good mix of magic focused bullet-hell shmup-esque fights resembling those of Ys II and more bump-combat heavy fights resembling those of Ys I, and none of them felt unfair: good positioning and quick hazard awareness go pretty far, and you can usually spot enemy attacks and patterns soon enough to successfully dodge practically every attack if you space correctly. Dungeon designs are again, a good balance between straight linear tunnels and sprawling labyrinths; the best dungeons are never pure straight-shots, but also don’t waste your time with excess empty & isolated rooms so you can quickly figure out the correct path and get back on track. The adventure game elements of figuring what to collect and where to use corresponding key items often made the first two Ys games a bit esoteric without a guide, but I find that to not be the case at all here: tells are pretty evident, with tons of context clues dictated by environmental features + nearby NPC dialogue, and the overworld unlocks pretty naturally with backtracking very heavily stressed when necessary (and is fairly quick thanks to warp magic). I’ve heard complaints that Dawn of Ys is a bit long too, but if you compare the total run-time to Ys I and Ys II combined (since they’re essentially two parts of a bigger product meant to be played back to back), then it’s not too bad (10-14 hours for Dawn of Ys compared to 14-17 hours for Ys I + II Chronicles according to howlongtobeat) as long as you don’t spend too much time bumbling about and minimizing downtime from healing + excess grinding with the right strategies.

My only prevalent gripe is that I found the game to be a bit on the easy side (an opinion which I think I’m in the minority for), particularly regarding the last couple of hours. A few of the endgame bosses can be somewhat cheesed with Power Ring + Shield Magic to chip away most/all of their health bar, the final dungeon is extremely short (just a line of singular tunnels that take less than five minutes to run through), and I personally found the final boss to be a letdown: the final phase is a joke once you figure out the obvious blind spots, and I ended up winning on my first try even though it’s always taken me multiple tries to clear the final boss in the other Ys games. In addition, you get a lot of leeway with the Herb + Elixir providing two possible full health restores for most fights, so it tends to be a pretty forgiving game. If I really had to nitpick further, I’d also say that money tends to feel superfluous considering how few items there were to purchase compared to how much money I gained from slaying monsters; Hudson probably could have done away with money in the game entirely and just focused on locking items behind necessary dungeon treasure chests and NPCs as part of progression.

Aside from that, I found Dawn of Ys to be a really pleasant experience. The spritework + animated cutscenes still hold up pretty well, the soundtrack continues to kick major ass because Falcom Sound Team JDK have phenomenal composition embedded in their blood, and the side characters and villains get really great screentime in comparison to Ys I + II (where the villains are mostly in the background doing mysterious shadowy things). I’m gonna miss Dogi when I get back around to running through Memories of Celceta, that’s for sure. All in all, I’m a little surprised by how much I ended up enjoying this considering my more qualified praise regarding the remakes of the originals, and I definitely think it’s worth going out of your way for if you’re a hardcore Ys fan and enjoy the quick bump combat of classic Ys.