 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| Ys: The Oath by Lurker 56498 03/25/2012, 4:24pm PDT | ||||
 |
 |
|||
| Bought this on Steam a few days ago and put a good 8 hours into it on normal (highest difficulty you can choose for a new game). I'm at the final boss, but I haven't beaten it yet since I don't feel like dying another 9 times.
JRPG with a completely "frantic" (button mashing) combat system and really fun bosses. Story and characters will make you vomit and hate an entire country. PROS: -Combat can feel really good if you're at the right level to be able to fight enemies on even ground. Too high or too low though and one of you is gonna get stomped real quick. -About an hour in you get the ability to teleport to any savepoint at any time! Even in the middle of 10 enemies 5 frames before you get killed! -The difficulty really spikes as soon as you reach the first boss, so instead of being a lame ass Diablo clone with no loot, it turns into Megaman with swords. -ALMOST no grinding. There were 2 points near the end where I decided to grind for levels just because I found 2 different places that seemed to be made for it. I only spent about 10 minutes in each before the XP gain became almost nothing. Generally if you just kill every enemy you see you'll be exactly as strong as you need to be to beat the boss and move on. -For some reason the music is nothing but guitars shredding all over the place all the time. -Most of the bosses are really really fun and are the whole reason I made the Megaman comparison. You'll most likely die at least 2-3 times per boss while you learn their moves (and then their 50% health power moves) and then it'll be a matter of wearing them down and finding a nice balance between offense and defense -Save points right before every single boss! -If you die on a boss and hit restart, you'll instantly respawn at the beginning of the fight and skip any cutscenes. I can't stress how much I love this. -Magic is more like a rock-paper-scissors kind of deal and MP regenerates to full in about 3 seconds. -No health or magic items. This might be a con for you, but I'm the kind of asshole who refused to use any health items in DMC unless I had already died 20 times. I like to think that it forces the designers to actually balance the fights (of course it doesn't). CONS: -You could get a list of RPG cliches from tvtropes and go straight down. Silent main character saves a girl with a mystical pendant from a sealed evil using a magical sword and the church is actually evil. -You can't even open your menu screen when you're fighting a boss. Forgot to equip that new sword? Fuck you, die and reload from a save and take the extra 10 seconds to walk back over. -Game difficulty is balanced on a knife. 1 or 2 levels too high and you'll bulldoze through everything. 6 defense points too low and the boss will demolish you with rapid fire attacks. Usually doesn't affect things too much though, and bosses are thankfully more skill than jacking up your numbers (even moreso on hard-impossible I'd imagine) -Straight line from beginning to end, and only about 8 hours at (what I consider) a normal pace. There's some hidden items after you get the flying and smashing magics and there's a bunch of missable quests if you don't speak to everyone after every major dungeon, but it's usually just for ore to upgrade your weapons (some give you really good accessories though so it's worth doing them all). This might not even be a con now that I think about it. -Upgrading your weapons and armor only adds +2 or +1 per level no matter what you're upgrading or what the cost (2 upgrades for each piece of equipment. You have a sword, shield and armor). This probably loops back to the whole knife edge balance, but it's still annoying. -Your main character only shows what equipment he's wearing if you have the whole set equipped. This just seems lazy, but I guess it's a good way to remind yourself that you forgot to equip your new shit (that sounds apologetic, I know. It's still shitty). -You CAN rebind keys, but you have to exit the game and run the configuration (and then wait 5 seconds for steam to sync it or it won't work). -On an xbox controller, the default jump key is X, A is attack, and B is magic. This causes big problems if you're against a boss that requires dodging and is immune to sword attacks so you have to hold the right side of the controller like a mouse just to dodge and attack at the same time. REBIND YOUR KEYS ASAP. Also turn on all of the combat control options in the main menu. Most of my cons are probably small and are mostly avoidable if you know about them beforehand (which you do now). It's only $15 on Steam and I recommend it if you have a gamepad of some sort and can stand to flip through a terrible JRPG story. |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
Ys: The Oath by 03/25/2012, 4:24pm PDT  Ys has always been pretty shreddy with music by 03/25/2012, 4:54pm PDT What are these little crystal/branch things I can't pick up? NT by 06/15/2012, 7:24pm PDT Well there herbs, are more bosses than this first one a master class in timing j by 06/15/2012, 8:15pm PDT It gets a little bit better by 06/18/2012, 4:17am PDT |
