Just finished this as my first Ys game and I'm not as positive on it as a lot of other people seem to be.

I've heard people say that Ys VIII has one of the better stories in this franchise and let me tell ya, that's not exactly encouraging. I have some amount of tolerance for convoluted stories but I do have a threshold where it starts to get too much. For the majority of the game I was on board with the plot, but the nonsensical elements ramped up until the ass-pull true ending where the story lost me. What's worse is that I grinded sidequests and menial tasks in order to get this ending so I'd get a satisfying conclusion to this game that I spent a long time on. I wish this game and other games didn't have requirements in order to avoid getting the bad ending because I did not enjoy the grind. And even though I didn't get the so-called 'Bad Ending', It still feels like I got a bad ending... as in a lackluster, poorly written one.

But I wouldn't be bothered by the ending if I didn't care about the story up to that point. And yeah, I enjoyed a lot of aspects of this game's story and characters. The protagonist and his makeshift JRPG squad are castaways on an Island after their ship sunk. It's a pretty neat setup for a game like this and I enjoyed how simple it was at the beginning. But they added a lot of new elements to the story, which was okay at first because some of these elements were interesting... but some of the added elements just muddied the parts that I liked about the story.

I've talked a lot about story so far and from what I understand the Ys franchise isn't usually about the story. But I have similarly mixed opinions on the gameplay. Ys VIII is an Action RPG, which is a genre that sometimes feels confused as to what it is. Are you an action game? Or are you an RPG? Or are you a Jack of all Trades, Master of None? Well in my opinion an Action RPG like Ys VIII should be judged mostly as an action game, because for all intents and purposes that's what it is. RPG elements like equipment and defensive stats matter somewhat in battle, but for a lot of encounters I was able to ignore these things by simply dodging the enemy's attacks. So it's not purely strategic in the way a turn based RPG is. And for that reason I can't help but be underwhelmed by the fact that so much attention was put into the RPG elements of the combat while the action was nothing special.

Ys VIII's combat is okay. Not amazing. Definitely not even close to being Platinum Games level, even when you compare it to some of their weaker combat systems. Enemies in Ys VIII have a bad habit of not reacting visually to being hit, which makes combat look stiff and lifeless. Hits don't feel like they have any impact. I do think they managed to design a number of interesting boss encounters, but I never thought that the action combat felt great to play. Interesting game design, but poor game-feel. What I did like about the combat system is that you have a ton of moves for each character that you can allocate to four move slots. This slightly alleviated the game-feel problem because at least I was using moves that I thought felt the best to use. It definitely didn't come close to solving the issue though. Another thing that I appreciated about the combat system was that status effects required certain items to heal. As an Action RPG skeptic, things like that really help justify this genre's existence.

I found things to like about this game but no individual part of it was a slam dunk. The story has its moments, but I'm left unimpressed on the whole. The gameplay has its moments, but I'm left underwhelmed. The exception to all of this is the incredible music, which is what made me interested in playing this game in the first place. When the Falcom Sound Team is firing on all cylinders there's no word to describe to the results but magical. So I'd be interested in playing another Ys game, even if only for the soundtrack. But I do think it would take a Ys game that's a giant improvement over this one to really get me to care about the franchise.