Well, I just finished Ys I Chronicles on PC and the main thing I want to say is Dark Fact can seriously go suck an egg… I mean, the fight was off to a bad start when I was instantly vaporized by a hail of hilariously multitudinous explosive fireballs. I repeated this futile effort several times while laser effects danced psychedelically in the background before I realized something must absolutely be off. It turns out the game doesn’t play nice with high refresh monitors (even if you set the game to 60Hz it will run at 144Hz if your monitor is set to that), meaning I somehow stumbled my way to the final boss with some effects in the game running at well over twice their intended speed. Anyway, with that sorted the battle went from literally impossible to seemingly impossible. Fortunately, now that it was about 5% skill and 95% luck, it meant that I had about a one in twenty probability of prevailing, which I eventually did.
Other than that infuriating bit at the very tail end, I had a pretty great time! The game sure showed its age in some areas–there were several items, tasks, and leaps of logic that I sure as heck would have never figured out without a walkthrough (seriously, what is with that bit where you have to smash some random pillar with a hammer to turn off the MGS4 microwave room?). However, the music, the snappy gameplay, and the surprisingly charming characters and writing really propelled me along. The “bump system” isn’t bad at all, and really kept things moving. It was also quite fun to steamroll through enemies toward the endgame. For the most part the bosses played with this system pretty well (see above…). The presentation was great, with special note of the absolutely unnecessarily rocking renditions of Koshiro’s tracks (seriously, this track made for some very excited bumping).
I think I’m ready to continue my journey to rectify my (until now) complete lack of experience with Nihon Falcom games and move on to Ys II. After that I’m looking at maybe Ys Origin or perhaps diving into the Trails in the Sky games. Any recommendations are more than welcome!
