Does this have the parry spam combat from Ys 8?

[Stormlock]

I like the series in general, but the boss fights in Ys 8 were just awful. It was basically impossible to do damage unless you were doing parries to refill your gauge and boost your damage. And it made you invincible for a while too. Which meant instead of trying to dodge attacks or hit weak points or anything interesting like that, you'd just hug whatever you were fighting, spam the same special attack over and over, and parry it's attacks as often as possible. It was very lame and reduced boss fights to just timing a single button press over and over.

Is that system still in the game? And if it is, is it still insanely powerful?

[Fluff Fact⚙ry]

Ys IX uses the same combat for Ys VIII thus Flash Move (FM) and Flash Guard (FG) along the exploit of combining both of them is still there, and yes, can be super powerful, however, this will be the last game to use this combat confirmed by Falcom (well it's been only 2 games since VIII so I don't mind).

That being said, bosses have gimmicks this time that can drag out the pacing which you might not be able to rely on FG/FM consistently, also the window to trigger FG has been slightly reduced requiring you to do it more closer to "exactness", the same for FM.

And choosing to spam the strongest attack everytime is totally user choice, the game never forces you on that.

[toughnails]

The combat is virtually identical to Ys VIII with only very minor additions such as a Sekiro like grapple hook that lets you throw yourself towards enemies. There's a demo on the store page with two dungeons and multiple boss fights, I suggest you try that first.

To be fair, "flash guard then spam your strongest skill" has been a thing since Ys SEVEN, all 4 most recent Ys games boil down to this simple formula. Older games (like Felghana and Origin) had actual boss patterns, weak points etc, but they turned out to be unpopular with the casual crowd and commercially unsuccessful. Falcom's current audience is mostly people playing for the story and waifus, so you can't really expect much depth combat wise.

[essen]

You have to play Falcom games in the highest difficulty available if you want a challenge. And the challenge will vary between bosses of course.

This game has a number of boss fights where monstrum skills are useful. Hook is obviously useful in most fights, but some of them also need you to fly, to 6th sense, heavy attack, shadow... So there's more variety than in previous games.

Many bosses have two phases as well. Larger bosses have weak points.

Flash move/guard is still important, but you're going to need a little more than that to survive Lunatic.