A masterpiece, Falcom put all their love into making this you can feel it, one the best Ys and one of their best games for sure as well as a good entry for newcomers.

Plot may not be as engaging as VIII but it's still enough to keep me interested for 55 hours and more wouldn't have bothered me tbh. Early it focuses more on the side characters (bros from Karnak), but by the second half of the game maybe even earlier they become sort of useless and lose their interest that's sad, but the story starts after this and it's great. Talking about characters, Karja is a great match for Adol (the 盾の兄弟 thing is peak fr) but I regret that she doesn't have more intimate moments with Adol to deepen their bond even if you can feel it grow as the adventure goes on.

The exploration is fine, having a lot of islands to explore sounds interesting at first but the issue is that they are almost all the same, I mean sure some are one of a kind however the others just look the same and lack "identity”. What I mean by this is that if you take Seiren from VIII for example you got a whole lot of unique places to discover and here there is no such thing.

The boat part is meh, the islands aren’t even at the good scale when you play, like you encounter a small version that look ASS (yeah I know Falcom small company but come on AC Black Flag on PS3 didn’t have this issue) and I won’t mention the fights but since it’s not a major part of the game it’s okay I guess ?

Also overall the OSTs are kinda weak compared to other games but there are some very good tracks so I won't complain about that, and the cutscenes are really great especially during fights that’s the best cutscenes Falcom has done until now I'm really shocked about this fact even though Ys doesn’t get as much budget as Trails.

Now let's talk about the best part which is the fights, even in nightmare they are not that hard if you don’t play like shit, maybe a little bit too easy but inferno really punishes you really hard, anyways damn its fucking fast paced no more type weakness thing just Adol and Karja that you can switch with ease to connect attacks, unlike the previous games the guard here is essential, if well timed it gives you slight advantages and the combi mode with joint attacks is needed too to break shield for boss fights, I FUCKING LOVE IT THATS THE BEST IDEA THEY HAD IN A WHILE. The only thing I would complain about the fights is that even if your guard will break if you time it wrong, you can pretty much go back asap in guard so a gauge for the guard would’ve been a good thing.