Ys VIII: Lacrimosa Of Dana is being released for the PlayStation 4, PC and Vita in about two weeks and various websites have started publishing their reviews for the title. Based on the buzz from the Japanese release I already knew the game was going to be solid but it is reassuring to see that many English publications are also praising the game. My main concern with the English release specifically was the quality of the localization, since Ys VIII is being translated by NIS America instead of XSEED this time around, but most critics seem to say that the text is serviceable. My impression from the demo that was released yesterday was that the translation was a bit stiff, along with the voice acting, but certainly passable. Here are links to some of the reviews:

• Kotaku (Positive)
• Game Informer (8.25)
• RPG Site (8)
• Dual Shockers (9.5)

I've already got my PS4 copy pre-ordered and it has been a while since I last seriously played a Ys game so I'm excited to jump into VIII. Anyone else picking up Ys VIII on September 12th? Or is the month so crazy full of games that you'll be passing on the title?

I'm definitely picking it up on Steam. Falcom can do me no wrong but it's cool to see it get such positive reviews anyhow.
The PC port of Ys SEVEN is out on Steam in like 4 hours and I'm buying that too. Hopefully I'm done with that by the time VIII comes out. Also I'm hoping they release that PC port of Tokyo Xanadu eX+ sometime this year because I really want to play that too.

@boonsong: I believe Tokyo Xanadu is coming out sometime in November on the PC/PS4. There is also another Falcom title being released for the PC this year by XSEED called Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection, which is basically a spiritual sequel to Gurumin (another Falcom game I love). Usually we only get one or two English Falcom games in a year if we are lucky but there are six coming out in 2017, not including a number of fan translations as well. Real great time to be a Falcom fan.

@lentfilms: Ah, cool, I was worried it wouldn't release until next year.
I did not know about Zwei, but I used to play the shit out of Gurumin on the PSP. That game was awesome. I'll have to check out Zwei then.
I don't know what it is about Falcom and Action RPG/Dungeon Crawlers but they make them fun as hell to play.

Man, I rented Ys 1 for the Sega Master System when I was a kid. I only vaguely remember being disappointed because it was supposed to be an RPG, but it was nothing like Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy or Phantasy Star. Maybe I should give the series another shot sometime I find a whole lot more free time.

@sinusoidal: The series has certainly changed a lot since the Master Systems days, you no longer just bump into enemies to damage them for one thing. I've read that Ys VIII is pretty long, maybe around 30-40 hours, but the nice thing about the older entries in the series is that they are not a very big time commitment. Titles like Ys: The Oath in Felghana, Ys VI or Ys Origin are only about 10 hours long so if you wanted to jump into the series through one of those games it wouldn't eat up all your gaming time like most RPGs.

I played through this on the Vita a little over a year ago, and will probably be rebuying the console version once it's got some to get a discount. It's a great action game, and the best version of the party combat they've done yet. The skills are varied and fun, the flash guard/dodge move ideas they've been using since...was it Memories of Celceta where that first showed up, or Seven? I kinda forget, places a bigger emphasis on paying attention to enemy attacks and such, which makes higher difficulties a lot more fun than past Ys games. I hope this release draws attention to the series as a whole, I love Ys!!! But I still prefer the single character style, I'm hoping they can make something like an Origin 2 with the Ys VIII engine. Either way, please check this out if you like action RPGs. Shame about the localization, but the story in these games has never really appealed to me and I was skipping most of the dialogue after a while anyway to get back to the hacking and slashing. You're really not missing much, Adol falls off a boat and has to get some memories back. The difference about VIII is that its about 5 times longer than previous games so you really get to feel the pain of Adol falling off that boat.

As an aside, that Vita version kinda blew me away with how well it ran and the graphical fidelity they were able to draw out of that system. Makes me wish Sony gave a single crap about supporting it at all, it had so much promise...

I am a HUGE fan of the Ys series (particularly II and Origin), but I don't really enjoy the 3D ones as much. Something about the style of the combat in this series has always felt better to me with 2D and sprites. I did play the demo for VIII and was at least a bit more engaged with it than I was with Memories of Celceta, but I'm still a bit skeptical at spending money--especially $60-- on a game I don't know if I'd like. I'd rather just go back and play one of the older ones again, honestly.

@intraining: Yeah, I've never been able to get into the party-system Ys games but I did enjoy the demo for VIII quite a bit, so maybe this will be the game that finally gets me to like the modern Ys style.

@wemibelle: I actually never finished Ys II or Origin, I started them but got distracted for whatever reason. Oath of Felghana might be my favorite in the series but what makes II and Origin your favorites?

I bought Y's Origin thinking it was Y's VIII, no idea why I did.... So, I'm trying Origins out until VIII goes on sale, holidays are coming up soon.

@lentfilms: Origin was my first Ys game, so that's probably a huge part of why I like it so much. I also really enjoy the multiple characters, the flow of progressing up the various floors of the tower, and the mix of extras and challenge modes. It just feels like the pinnacle of that second generation of Ys games (after the original top-down ones and before the party-focused ones). As for Ys II, I think it fixes the problems I had with the combat in the original, by making hitting and avoiding enemies a bit easier. It also builds on everything the first did and makes it better, resonating with me extremely well.

I have the PS4 version on pre-order. Would've preferred the Vita version, but it's a hard sell considering how much content you're missing out on. Same with the upcoming Tokyo Xanadu.

Anyway, I'm not even an Ys fan, honestly. I fooled around with some of the older ones, and played about 20 hours of Seven but never beat it. My main gripe with it was how the bosses were all major tests of endurance. They go on for like 10 mins, but they're just simple dodge-and-attack bosses.

It's a shame considering Nayuta no Kiseki's bosses are extremely varied and much shorter. It's the best action game they made made in my opinion (though second to Gurumin as my favorite).

Anyway, I skipped over Celceta as a result as it just looked like more of the same, but I'm willing to give Ys another shot. The bosses didn't seem that long from the demo at least, but who knows as that was still early-game.

Well, technically Zwei II is a sequel to Zwei!!... But they're not bringing over the first game as it's quite dull and extremely archaic.

Nayuta no Kiseki on the other hand, is pretty much just Zwei 3 in all but name, with the male character being melee and the female character being ranged-magic just as with the Zwei games.

But yeah, for people unfamiliar with Zwei II and Nayuta no Kiseki, they're best described as hybrids between Gurumin and Ys.

Welp, PC version of YS VIII got delayed at last second. Hopefully not too much of a delay, still have to finish Ys SEVEN though (at the last boss).

@wemibelle: Oath of Felghana was the first Ys game I played to completion so that has a lot to do with why that game is my favorite as well. In terms of the older bump-system Ys games I really like Ys IV on the PC-Engine, although it is not technically a "canonical" entry in the series for all that matters.

@axersia: I know that Zwei II is not technically related to Gurumin in any way but the gameplay/presentation is so similar that it is more of a sequel to that game than the original Zwei. Also I played Nayuta earlier this year and I agree that it is one of the best Falcom action games I've played in recent years, certainly better than the last two Ys titles (Seven and Celceta). Another reason I'm so excited to play Zwei II later this year is because it was made by the same development team within Falcom that created Nayuta, so I'm hoping it is similar in quality.

I was wondering how long it would take before someone spelt Ys with an apostrophe. Crazy how the spelling of a game's name on a single Master System port can cause such long standing confusion on how the title is spelt. Although a lot of people also spell it that way as a joke now.

So I guess the localization is bad enough that the person who made the site for persona 5 will do one for YS & for v3 when it's out -_- kinda unnecessary in my opinion

@edjack: I've played about 20 hours of Ys VIII so far and it doesn't surprise me that translators are finding plenty of errors in the game's English script, people were even finding big mistakes in boss names and the like in pre-release videos. I know almost no Japanese, so I can't point out any translation mistakes, but even I can tell that NIS's localization is poor. The English is just plain hard to read in certain places, with plenty of oddly worded sentences and grammatical mistakes all over the place. There are also a lot of inconsistencies in the styling of the script. Like in the games opening hours where the descriptive text changes from being written in the 1st-person to the 2nd-person to the 3rd-person all in the same scene.

Besides that the script is full of other errors like characters saying "We need to find them" when they are talking about a single person and an assortment of other problems.

The script is functional since you can understand the story and get the gist of each character's personality but it could have been a lot better. I personally found XSEED's scripts for their Ys releases to sometimes be bland or read kind of flat, at least with the games that didn't use an old fan translation, but they were at least consistent and free of errors (plus the blandness of the theirs scripts could have just been the fault of the source material).

I'm still enjoying Ys VIII a lot, and I'm even finding myself getting invested in the story, but that is in spite of NIS's poor translation of the game.

To be fair, this is very common usage in English. It may not have been intentional in this case but slavishly sticking to rules of written grammar is a bad way to localize speech.

@quantris: I know this is a common mistake in game localizations, and if it was the script's only problem I could forgive it, but when it happens several times in important cut-scenes it is evidence of a rushed or sloppy translation. Also having a game full of grammatical mistakes is never a good thing. It is okay for characters to talk naturally but Ys VIII's dialogue often sounds robotic or Engrishy.

edit: Sorry I gave a bad example, the actual quote was more like "I can't believe we thought they were a monster" and the character was talking about a single person.

I would agree in some parts of the script yes it is funky, but the zone names aren't really imo cause the jp eng already sound weird so I guess the way nisa approach it was make it weird in eng. Heck in the jp version there a dungeon that has the word Zone in the end that makes it sound like a sonic level. But funny though, akasy handlement of Tokyo Xanadu was a bigger mess from what a online friend told me. Typo, grammar errors, untranslated text, and it also term issues. There also a character called Rem and her first appearance the text box says remu. And no one says anything about it xD

The buzz I was hearing about Tokyo Xanadu was that Aksys went a little too far with their localization choices and ended up altering some of the characters' personalities with their script changes. I hadn't heard about the typos and untranslated text, hopefully all that is fixed in the console/PC release later this year.

There was something similar in Ys VIII where the manual says that Adol is 21 years old but the game says he is 20 in the first cut-scenes. Not sure which is wrong, the manual or the game. I think I also noticed that the Romun Empire was spelt without the "u" once or twice.

Been playing this any moment I get for the last week. It might be the best looking game on Vita? I'm constantly in awe with what it's pulling off graphically. Yes it slows down a little here and there, but overall it's super impressive.

This is quite possibly my favourite game this year. I did have to buy some of the DLC outfits though because the defaults on Ricotta, Dana and Hummel are attrocious.

Oh and I'm a person who loves a shitty translation given the right game and the story isn't that important here so I'm basking in the terribleness of it all.

I can't believe the PC version is still delayed.. And no new release date has even been hinted. What the fuck are they doing? I was so looking forward to jumping into VIII after beating SEVEN.

@mikachops: I'm bought the PS4 version but I'm enjoying more with on Vita via remote play.

I'm enjoying it so far, definitely better than Memories of Celceta, though I do miss the XSeed touch as far as localization occasionally.

This ended up being one of this year's big surprises for me. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I kinda just picked it up on a whim after not liking Seven as much as I wish I did. I expected to knock it out in about 20 hours or so, and it ended up being twice as long! That's crazy for an Ys game!

I also just happened to stumble into the true ending without knowing there was one, so I was quite happy to find out about that after the fact, otherwise I would've missed out on the true final boss. Basically, complete all the sidequests, recruit all the castaways, give them their gifts, and you'll be OK.

In any case, this became one of my top 5 games of the year. It fixed everything I disliked about Seven, and the somewhat middling translation just made me feel nostalgic about the PS2 era. Still don't think I'd rank it higher than Nayuta no Kiseki, but it's a damn fine action game.

Since I was in an Ys mood after beating it, I considered picking up Celceta as well, but after looking up some footage it's just too much like Seven and not something I wanna play right now. I do have the PS4 version of Origin coming my way, though.

Wooo! Just Platinum'd the game and man it's the best Ys game so far after Seven was released. NIS didnt do a very good job localizing it but its passable. After a second run its kind of funny seeing the mistakes like forgetting to dub a few lines in english lol.