One of my all time favorites and the game that got me into the Ys series which I criminally ignored until a couple of years ago. Great hack and slash game with tight controls and high replayability. You're definitely going to play this more than once.

Be advised though, this game is HARD. As in, don't start it on the hardest difficulty if this is your first time playing as this game is actually an old game, not something that was made in the last 3 years. This means this game was developed back when "hard mode" actually meant HARD MODE and not just a slightly harder normal mode where you still pretty much streamroll through the game. I cannot put enough emphasis on this, this game is HARD and you're going to die over and over and over until you finally learn to get good at it.

For people who hate JRPGS and whatnot don't worry, this game, much like most of the Ys series games, is anti grind so you'll never be underleveled. You also don't have to fiddle around with a bloated inventory or anything like that as your character's progression is pretty straightforward (You don't get different type of swords with different properties, just better swords with more attack power so you can just ignore your old gear).

The soundtrack is easily one of the highlight of this game. It's probably one of the, if not THE game with the best soundtrack in the entire Ys series and a pretty close contender for game with the best soundtrack ever.

Getting 100% completion is something only the most hardcore players will be able to achieve due to how difficult the last difficulties are, so be ready to invest a huge amount of time on that dying again and again and again...

Special note: Don't pay attention to the store images, the game actually has full widescreen support which was added shortly after the game came out so it won't look as bad as in those images, don't worry.


Bad stuff:

* Cutscenes. You can't fully skip them, you have to hold a button to autoskip every bit of dialogue and waste tons of minutes doing nothing. This is especially aggravating when you're on your 3rd playthrough or so.

* Xbox 360 controller support: Game has no native xinput support so your left and right triggers wont work. Easily fixable by using joy2key or something but to be honest you don't even need those buttons to begin with.