Just finished Ys Origin. Yunica Normal.
Amazing game. I love the movement and the move-set, which grows at a good pace as you progress, with the encounter and dungeon design evolving appropriately. I found myself using everything in my arsenal, from the basic combo, to the thrust attack, to the aerial thrusts (both upward and downward), to the colored special moves and their charged versions. Yunica's red special is a shot, and the last move you get is a bomb, which really cements the game's genre as at least shmup adjacent if not an evolution. The boss design and camera reinforce this.
From this point of view, the game is competes with Nier Automata. Comparing the two, I found Origin's default overhead camera preferable to Automata's default player controllable 3rd person camera. Comparing like with like e.g. the fixed side scrolling camera set up both games sometimes adopt, reveals Automata's the movement as the more slippery of the two (I guess because it's not fixed speed movement like in Ys, but not direct analogue control either, there are animation switching delays). As a means of avoiding hits, I much prefer Ys' jump to Automata's dodge.
Anyway, I guess the move I used the least was uncharged yellow, but even that was super useful in some side scrolling sections to attack enemies the level above you. Learning to best use the basic attacks by just ensuring you commit at the right times and get the spacings correct was very fun.
Suffers the one same problem as many of these kinds of games do, which is you can just run around all the non boss enemies. Well, I shouldn't say all. Sometimes you must engage to activate a trigger of some kind. You also do need to be a certain level to meaningfully damage bosses, but there's always one particular mob in each area that gives the greatest XP (and SP) to time invested ratio, and you can avoid all the others. That being said, in the absence of foreknowledge, the natural way to play is to just clear everything, and it's very fun doing so, even though it's not much of a challenge (on Normal).
I liked that it was all just one big dungeon crawl. The dungeon had heaps of variety in terms of scenery and accompanying navigational hazards and puzzles, some taking cue from platformers (e.g. an underwater area, slippery surfaces with rolling spikes, and timed platforms) while others took cue from traditional dungeon crawling (e.g. teleporter puzzles and dead ends). I liked the shop at save point statues system. I liked the navigational puzzles mentioned above. I liked the abridged backtracking. Excellent design all around. All wheat, no chaff.
The aesthetic was all very cohesive. Falcom still milking Koshiro's work on Ys I and II, which is great (the only weird track choice was the jazzy one that plays when Yunica gets knighted). Dialogue did not detract from the pacing, and was generally well written. One part that stood out as strange was in the end when the four younger people declared their intent to stay on the surface and one of the elder members said "Oh we'll make sure to tell your loved ones they'll never see you again"
. I understand more plot is revealed playing with the other characters, but what I did see so far did not do any disservice to Ys I and II and made for a good prequel.
My only regret is that I didn't play on Hard and that I overleveled against some of the bosses so was able to beat them the first time around (including final). I never did any grinding, but sometimes right before a boss I realized I was only a few kills away from a level up so went back to kill a few enemies. Probably wouldn't have mattered on Hard or up, but I trivialized some very fun challenge this way.
