Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana

Genre: Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Ys VIII is the latest in a long line of Action-RPGs, and although they all apparently follow the same set of characters, their episodic nature means you don’t need to have played earlier games in the series to understand this one.

The series premise is pretty swiftly summed up in the introduction – Adol and his friend Dogi are adventurers and thrill-seekers constantly looking for new and exciting challenges as they travel the world. In this game, their journey starts with them serving as security on a passenger ship when they’re suddenly attacked by a sea monster that leaves them and the rest of the ship’s crew stranded on a mysterious island.

The game’s characters are all pretty broad anime archetypes, but they’re still pretty likeable and memorable nevertheless, and the game makes it pretty clear early on that there’s more going on here than just a mere shipwreck. It’s not a truly groundbreaking story, but it’s fun and compelling enough to keep you playing.

The gameplay is likewise pretty engaging. The action-focused combat is fun and responsive, and the game does a good job of mixing up what you’re doing, since you’ll be charting the island, searching for survivors from the ship, hunting down crafting components, and performing specific tasks for survivors, to name just a few activities. I kept feeling myself compelled to play just a little bit more to check out some new area or complete a task, and the game’s story progresses regularly as you continue exploring the island. This version of the game also includes all of the extra content from the PS4 version, for those keeping track.

While I thoroughly enjoy the gameplay here, the presentation is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the game has some really nice character designs and an overall good look, with solid voice acting to go with it, and an excellent soundtrack. On the other hand, it’s clear that this game suffered heavily in the visuals department in its port to the Switch. Both the resolution and the framerate have been greatly reduced in this port, and even after patching the game, it still looks rough. In particular, there’s a lot of aliasing and shadow flickering. The game does look better than the Vita version, but if you’re not looking to play it on the go, and can play it on PS4, Xbox One or PC, any of those other platforms is going to be a better place to play this game. I should mention that many complained about this game’s localization shortly after it came out, but it has since been fixed in a patch and any problems that I encountered in this area were negligible.

In the end, I would argue that Ys VIII is one of the best Action-RPG titles on the Switch, but unfortunately the Switch version is far from the best version of this game. It’s still absolutely worth getting if you want to play the game in portable mode, or if you don’t have a better alternative platform to play it on. But if you own a PS4, Xbox One or gaming PC, that’s where you really should be playing this game.

tl;dr – Ys VIII is an Action-RPG where you play an adventurer caught in a shipwreck and charting out the mysterious island he finds himself on while trying to uncover its secrets. It’s a really fun game with a lot of variety, but the graphics of the Switch version are clearly inferior to other versions of the game. You should definitely get this game if you’re a fan of the genre, but the Switch is not the best place to be playing it.

Grade: A-

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