One of the first noticeable things is the music. It's good and it's Falcom, but it's not Ys good; a lot of it feels like generic JRPG music as opposed to the rocking, blood pumping tunes of previous games.



Ys games have always traded between driving rockers and more varied, sometimes slow tracks. Seven's even more diverse than usual (vs. Celceta which has more fast tracks but less quality overall), so you'll go from slower Kylos themes to percussive Segram stuff. None of this feels "generic" since I can describe the specific cool things about most of Seven's music, how it differs from previous and future Ys (or even Nayuta), and the continuing differences between Sound Team jdk and other Japanese VGM people.



CUTSCENES. Lots of them! Nothing introduces an high-octane action game better than forty minutes of cutscenes and a large town filled with generic NPCs that say nothing of interest, I tell ya.They're unskippable too, so cheers to trying again on a harder difficulty.



Good thing fast-forward exists. I'll view this stuff again because I believe it's where XSEED made the majority of text edits, but the altar scenes aren't worth it at all. Can't agree on NPCs since this game actually has a lot of asshole characters in Altago City, or rather odd personalities in the tribes, which are fun to follow. I find the NPCs better here than in Celceta at least since they're more connected to what's happening all over Altago.



Every enemy in the game is a massive bullet-sponge, bosses to a ridiculous degree (and this is on Normal).



Can't deny, there's more sponginess overall vs. the mid-2000s games. I don't agree on the scale of HP increase, but it's a bit better tuned in Celceta on Hard.



Having to swap characters every other monster is frustrating, it really burns out the feeling of "flow" that the otherwise solid action should keep.



Snapping's damn fast even in Seven, and you combo through groups of enemies as much as in previous games regardless of the character.



Constant dodge-rolling to avoid attacks feel sloppy.



Never felt this. It's not like hovering in air all the time isn't better or worse, just different.



A successful Flash Guard not actually stopping an attack is a mind-numbingly moronic design decision.



Some attacks have splash damage you can't avoid, but spamming Guard for longer-hitting moves isn't an issue for the most part.



Characters have way too many skills and the leveling system for them is rather time consuming. Granted, leveled skills seem to have gradual gains, but it still feels like it really discourages changing skills out or experimenting with new characters when you're discarding something you've built up for so long.



High levels only matter at endgame, so I'm fine equipping skill-leveling accessories on characters to max out the skills I know will have utility later on. Elk has the worst skillset by far, followed by Mishera who still has a unique ranged advantage over Aisha. The others have some interesting things to try out, and Dogi always cleans up.



Thankfully, I seem to recall that a pretty sizeable amount of this was fixed up in Celceta (which needs a PC port far more than Seven did), so that gives me a bit of confidence that Ys VIII will be pretty good.