After playing through all the Soulsies this year, this felt like a reminder of why I usually DON'T like action RPGs. Maybe I've grown too used to their deliberate combat speed and minimalist mechanics, but the combat in Ys melted together into an undifferentiated sea of numbers flying off enemies as they soaked up damage. I kept learning special move after special move but I could never figure out which to use when and why so I would just jam buttons almost at random (and usually win anyway). Flash guard and evade were almost enough to pull it back out to something I felt like I could engage with, if they didn't feel like an ancillary feature of the primary goal of jamming the right buttons to maximize DPS.