For Christmas, among some really random items (such as Guitar Hero pyjamas, a ninja themed pen, and a manga called "My Girlfriend is a Geek"), my awesome girlfriend got me a copy of a PSP JRPG called Ys SEVEN.
What a stupid name for a game series. How do you pronounce this? Do you pronounce it like "whys"? Do you pronounce it the way the letter y is regularly pronounced? How is it pronounced on its own anyway?
Turns out that it seems to be pronounced "ees". Which is weird. Very weird.
Call it what you want, I found it to be quite an entertaining game. Much of the plot is standard JRPG fare - Adol the main character is a generic warrior type with a thirst for adventure. He enters the country of Altago with his friend Dogi. They get imprisoned quite quickly, then released and told to go check out the nearby shrine. They do so, and are promptly rewarded by having to fight a gigantic creature, hearing the voice of a dragon in their heads, and given some strange power. He then needs to visit other shrines so that he can acquire the powers of all 5 dragons...
Stop me if you've heard this before. To be fair though, it throws a couple of curveballs late in the game.
Generic-y plot aside, it gets fun the moment you're finally allowed out of the city and begin messing with combat.
This is an action rpg, so you need to run out and start hacking yourself, unlike most other JRPGs I've played, where you simply give orders to your party members and watch as they slash things apart for your enjoyment. It plays very much like a hack n slash action game, albeit with restricted combos, and the RPG tropes of experience points, levels etc.
Differing characters have differing weapon types. Adol begins with a slash type weapon, while Adol a smash type (he punches things until they die). Later on, characters with piercing types appear. Different types of enemies react to different types of weapons. For anything with a hard shell, you'll need Dogi to punch them. Hard.
If you've played Final Fantasy X, you'd recognise the idea, since you needed Auron (or the utterly useless Kimahri) to deal with heavily armed creatures more often than not, while Wakka would do well against flying creatures. This works off the same principle - including the part where later on other characters can get the same bonus ability types (by the end, Adol can have weapons that do each type of damage, and his ultimate covers all at once).
Half of the fun really is the combat. It does get a touch repetitive, however being a PSP game, its very easy to break it up between other games. The length also reflects this, being able to be finished in around 30 hours (rather than the standard 50 hours for a jrpg). The good thing about this is that it didn't feel like they were artificially adding to the length.
Well, it didn't feel like that until you had to run around every dungeon you've already completed AGAIN, with a second dungeon inside the first dungeon that you originally couldn't access. I would call bullshit on this, as it seems like an excuse to make you run through the same content, but more often than not you get to the second dungeon quite quickly, with a minimal of running through the first one again. It seems more like setting the game in a single country didn't leave the enough room for all the dungeons they wanted to do, and so needed to place them somewhere, deciding upon hiding them in dungeons you've already been to!
Half the fun of the game is in defeating the titanos - huge monsters that serve as the majority of the game's bosses. There are 3 optional ones to deal with as well, that are kind of in the way on random wilderness areas - but if you try to fight them the first time you find them, it is absolutely certain that you will find yourself on the Game Over screen in short order. You need to run for dear life at first, returning when you're much more powerful to deal with them.
On that note, the soundtrack is quite good. Particularly the early-game boss theme. Quite a rousing tune - perfect for annihilating titanos!
All in all, I enjoyed it. Might look into some of the other eeeeeses :P
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