Ys Seven

I had never played a Ys game before, and I decided to give this a shot because a friend recommended it to me, and I'm so glad they did. (I just bought some older Ys games to try them out.)

From a purely objective point of view, as I was not a fan of this series because of nostalgia, I have to say this game is one of the best RPGs you could own for your PSP.

PROS:

* Waiting times are extremely reasonable, almost non-existant. I never noticed them.

* I adoreeee the controls. A lot of RPGs with this battle system have button mashing controls, and they can be awkward, but Ys 7 managed to plan them out -almost- perfectly.

* The camera is perfect, it focuses exactly where you need it to and doesn't leave you wondering where you just turned, like some games I've played. (IE: crisis core)

* The battle system is fun and addictive once you get used to it.

* There are side quests to add a bit more interest to the game, which often have rewards great enough for you to go out of your way. In addition, there are some optional bosses.

* The "synthesis" system rewards you for collecting materials to make better weapons and armor. While you can just make it through the game straight out buying your weapons and armor, you will need the synthesis system to gain everyone's final weapons.

* You can perfect skills and unleash them once you have a set amount of SP, which is lovely, because simply hacking and slashing gets old pretty fast.

* The visuals are stunning for a PSP game. It's all in third dimension, lush, and gorgeous. I was constantly impressed by the quality.

* Despite being the 7th (linear) game in the Ys series, you can easily understand this game without knowing anything about it's predecessors. There are only a few subtle hints back to previous Ys games.

* The music is very appropriate and fun to listen to, and it has a nice fantasy feel to it. I never got annoyed with it, and I sometimes do dislike repetitive music. Ys 7 did a good job at being pleasing to the ears.

* The varying difficulty levels are Easy, Normal, Hard, and Nightmare. I beat the game on normal my first try, so normal really is the standard. It has a difficulty level for everyone.

CONS:

* The battle learning curve took me a while to get used to, because I simply wasn't used to active time battles (it's much harder than Crisis Core's live battle system). I think I had to retry 5 times before I beat the first boss.

* The plot, while pretty heartwarming and melodramatic, is not extremely deep. It's a basic adventure plot, with a little bit of character development and a lot of likable characters, but none of them leave that much of a mark on you. However, it is not annoyingly shallow and this shouldn't deter you from buying the game. (This is coming from someone who's played a lot of badly executed games just for the plot.)

* My one gripe about the controls is "flash guard", which requires you to hold L and R buttons at the same time - but you sometimes end up releasing a special attack when you didn't mean to. It can be frustrating until you master the timing.

* No voice acting? I don't really consider this a "con" since I'm still used to old style RPGs where you read things in whatever voice you wanted and made the game your own. I don't think it's that big of a deal, really.

* One final, trivial complaint - I spent SO much time collecting soul stones because I wanted everyone's final weapons. It seriously takes an extra 4/5 hours to grind and collect enough stones.

OVERALL:

My favorite part about this game is undoubtedly the battle system. It gave me a decent challenge and my fingers didn't cramp up horribly after long playing sessions. If you have a PSP and you enjoy action RPGs with a fantasy feel, pick this one up.

Truly a phenomenal game! I am a hardcore gamer, I have every console to date and I play games all the time. I also have two kids and they love games as well.
The games graphics are great, not amazing but really great for a psp game especially since the game offers so much content. There is no voice acting but the dialogue actually works very well. The game is not turn based and you do get a lot of special abilities, so if you're looking for a fast action pace game this is defiantly for you. This is kind of a God of war style fighting with abilities and upgrading weapons all put into a long great RPG. There are lots of bosses to fight and if you are one of those that like to grind and level higher than the area you're in go back later and dominate areas, you can defiantly do that. Overall this game is really amazing for a handheld game. It will keep you busy for a very long time. I have 77 hours of play time on my first character and still having a blast. This game is well worth buying especially for its price!

Ys Seven, the first Ys game I've played, was recommended to me a number of times before I finally picked up a copy. Since XSEED had some hand in the game, I was expecting a fairly good game, and found an excellent one.

Ys Seven is a sort of action RPG, with combat taking place on the field, and consisting of standard attacks, dodges, skills, and special attacks. Up to three characters can be in the party at any one time, and switching between them is easy as pressing a button. This provides for extremely fast battles, although, depending upon your level, battles due require more than just simple button mashing (although at higher levels you can generally clear the field doing just this), as some enemies will guard against certain character's attacks.

Experience is gained each time an enemy is defeated, as well as for each use of a skill. Each character has a base class of weapon, with additional, learnable skills attached, two equipment slots, and slot for an accessory that provides some sort of bonus. So there's a very simple skill tree within the game, for each character, although since skills cannot unlock new skills, it's a pretty skinny tree.

The music is one of the first things you'll notice about the game, as it successfully fades into the background, or grabs your attention, whenever necessary.

The story is fairly good. At the end of the game things are tied up rather nicely, in a rather satisfying manner.

The game itself generally takes between 20 to 30 hours to complete. While it's not recorded, I ended up doing all of the optional missions, created the ultimate weapons (and armors), learned all skills, and I believe picked up most, if not all, of the various treasures, leading me to believe I had near 99% completion. This brought me up to approximately 31 hours of gameplay. There is new game plus, and if you wish to continue after defeating the final boss, you need to reload an existing save.

The game is avaliable in physical and electronic formats - I purchased and played the latter, which requires approximately 450 MB of space.

I give the same 5 of 5 stars, since I was able to get a pretty solid number of hours out of the game, I enjoyed almost every minute I played, and could potentially pick up the game to play it again, whether that means using my final saves or starting again (although I probably would just do the former).