*=Video
^=Music
All Caps=Recommended
June 2018
Hover mouse over screenshots for commentary.
 The protagonist, Adol, is on a ship that is attacked by a giant sea creature. |  This battle acts as a combat tutorial. |  The ship is going down! |
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 You and other passengers land on an island. |  |  |
 To give you an idea of how important your dialogue decisions are and how much they impact the game, you should know that you can just skip the entire sequence. |  |  Your first encounter with a monster that is way too strong for you. |
 |  Gathering together with some other people stranded on the island. |  |
 uh . . . |  These are the main playable characters for the first section of the game. |  This is just the perfect summary of the game. So verbose and dramatic over something fairly ordinary. |
 The original version of your escape boat. You try to build a bigger one. |  |  |
 Your camp. You can upgrade it as time goes on. |  An early boss. The bosses often had cool designs, but I think I only ever died once against them. |  |
 |  You can fish and give the fish to a giant pelican/person thing for bonus items. |  |
 |  |  |
 |  This does not bode well . . . |  |
 |  Don't worry about this . . . |  Running across a giant tree root bridge. |
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 Some dragon attacked just because I happened upon a mountaintop. |  |  Discovering an ancient civilization. |
 Classic JRPG dialogue. I approach a total stranger and this is what she starts with. |  |  |
 |  |  You randomly find this drawing. |
 |  |  |
 |  The squad. |  Only about thirty hours in before we hear a word in the title. |
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It rhymes with "fleece."
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I've heard praise for the Ys games for years but this is the first one I've ever played. The game takes place on a large explorable island where you fight creatures in real-time, but the combat is pretty basic apart from a dodge mechanic and using (and unlocking) some special moves. You're in a party of three people but only control one at a time, and you can switch between them at will.
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The story begins with your character on a ship which capsizes, and many of the people get separated and stranded on an island. Part of the gameplay involves finding and helping stranded people and bringing them back to camp, and working out a way to get off the island. The more people you rescue, the more help you have to remove obstacles and unlock more portions of the map. Some of the people you rescue also take up roles in the camp, such as preparing food or creating armor.
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The combat is pretty brainless but it's strangely engaging. You'll occasionally come across enemies that are tough and will require you to actually think about what you're doing, but there are a lot of ways to prevent a game over. For example, if one of your characters dies you will automatically switch to another character; when this happens you can just press pause and use an item to revive your fallen comrade and keep playing. I suppose you need to keep yourself stocked with the appropriate items but that's not hard. I think I might have carelessly died on one boss, but that's it.
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The game has a lot going for it but I want to cut to the chase with my biggest complaint: it's a bit hard to describe, but the presentation of the story is just unbearable. Unbearable. Allow me to try to describe what I mean. When characters are talking to each other in a normal game, the game just shows the characters on the screen and has dialogue boxes that you read through and advance by pressing a button. In Ys VIII, there are constant, CONSTANT, slow camera pans and swoops around the character who is speaking, and you just have to sit there and watch it - you can't just read through the dialogue. You'll read a line of dialogue, then the perspective will change to a character's arm and the camera will slowly turn and zoom out until you see their face, and then another line of dialogue will appear, and then the perspective will change again to another character's feet and spin and swoop up to their face, then more dialogue, and on and on and on. A scene that might normally take thirty seconds to read takes about five minutes in this game, and almost all of it is camera swoops. And you can't skip past the swoops to get to the next bit of text. It was totally ruining the game for me, so I broke one of my own rules just to be able to continue the game - I just started skipping over the story. It was the only way to save any enjoyment I was getting out of the game. The story is adequate but the presentation absolutely ruins it.
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There's a lot to like about Ys VIII despite it's odd game design being trapped in 2002. The music is catchy, the story is decent, and there are loads of original and varied monsters all throughout the game. But I honestly don't know what they were thinking with the story presentation. If you can find a way to tolerate the low points then you may find something worth your time, but go into it knowing that there are some major shortcomings.