Just a PSA that certain Ys titles are on sale for pretty decent discounts on Humble right now. I've been wanting to pick up a lot of the older titles so this seemed like a good time to do so. Notably Ys 8/9/10 are not on sale at this time.
Feels very bittersweet to finally finish this incredible game. For context, I'd never played a Ys game before and honestly just picked this game up on a lark on my Switch back during my honeymoon of all things. Now eight years later, a father of two little ones, and well further into my life it felt very sentimental to pick this game back up and finally finish it. Sort of feels like wrapping up an older chapter of my life in a way.
Needless to say, I'm now definitely intrigued to play more of the series. I started up the first chapter of Proud Nordics a few days ago and I'm keen on experiencing what else this series has to offer. Definitely open to suggestions on what else people recommend checking out for new players, but also just hearing about other's experiences with Ys 8! Absolutely stellar gameplay, immaculate soundtrack, and a heartfelt story.
Was trying to download a 40GB game, have over 200 GBs free. Steam says it needs over an hour to allocate Disk Space, very abnormal behavior and not something I've seen until today. Try pulling up the drive in Windows Explorer and suddenly realize all native Windows ops are chugging (and this isn't even the drive with Windows installed on it)
Eventually get Task Manager open and see it has the drive at 100% Disk Utilization. I've never seen this before. I've tried clearing out the download cache, deleted items in the SteamLibrary\steamapps\downloading directory, running Steam as an admin.
Any advice? I tested a much smaller game and it was able to immediately install like normal, no issues at all. Expected behavior.
I haven't finished this game yet, but I'm certainly past the halfway point now while playing on the Lunatic difficulty setting, which is the hardest the game has to offer and the intended experience according to veteran fans of the series.
Man, even though I came into this knowing next to nothing about Touhou I can tell you definitively that this is a *fantastic* DRPG. There are piles upon piles of systems that are all designed to be synergistic with one another, with great care going into their QoL features, making them feel both accessible and highly impactful to your run.
Being able to invest in my characters stats, gear progression, skill progression, gear *sub*stats, and more while also being able to simultaneously swap most of that on a dime to a different party composition just feels awesome. I've almost never felt punished for experimenting or trying out completely different party makeups throughout my playthrough.
The boss fights are IMMACULATE. Each one feels like their own unique puzzle, often requiring you to really re-assess your team combination, plan of attack, how you're going to circumvent their individual mechanics and attacks, etc. I've been doing play by play updates to friends while playing and half the time I feel like I'm writing a novel discussing the unique boss designs and how much I enjoyed the thrill of just barely defeating them on Lunatic difficulty, because I can't just overlevel and beat them down with a stat-stick. The victories feel viscerally earned in a way other DRPGs just haven't.
The map exploration is decidedly fine. Areas tend to have gimmicks akin to pushing boulders, ice floors, hidden paths, etc. and you're rewarded for fully exploring map floors. It's nothing ground-breaking here but perfectly okay.
Trash mob fights are a varied experience of "this is completely mindless and easy" scaling up to "oh jesus this one mob just wiped half my party out of nowhere", but you as the player have a lot of control over dictating that scaling difficulty mid dungeon-delve. You can intentionally brute-force it up to likewise increase your EXP, Gold, and Item Drop-rate output or you can force it to slow down and not impede your exploration of the floors. Again, player choice, agency, decision making! It's good stuff!
The story is passable! The writing is perfectly serviceable and the story is approachable for someone who isn't well versed in Touhou's lore (the game does a very good job of providing character background information to help you understand pre-existing relationships).
Again, really can't recommend this game enough. There is one minor hiccup with Cloud Saves not always working as intended, but hopefully the Developer can work with Valve to iron that out, and there are potential work-arounds being discussed in the interim. I'd recommend you give this game a chance if you enjoy Dungeon Crawlers, even if you know nothing about Touhou at all. You may be pleasantly surprised like I was.