Ys X First Playthrough: Chapter 6
0Chapter 6 finally threatens to throw a curveball at us, and is starting to lay on some foreshadowing for a future plot arc.
Meanwhile, it turns out that I probably overlooked a few things that could've been tackled multiple chapters ago. And I'll have to take back what I said last time about being surprised there were no recapture missions in Chapter 5, because I suspect there was one and I just completely missed it until now. (Makes me wonder just how little can be permanently missed... or why the game uses chapters at all, which is kind of a beef I've had with multiple of the past few Ys games, but if anything the chapters make more sense in this one with how goddamn linear it feels.)
That being said, one of the capture missions I encountered has now taken the cake for worst room in the game, a stark "upgrade" from the "suddenly moving mana string hooks" room near the end of Chapter 5. The problem here is, it's in the middle of a segment that allegedly has a time bonus - but I can't imagine any player actually getting any bonus out of it. I also can't imagine anyone actually having performed any QA whatsoever on that room, it's so terrible. But they apparently did "enough" QA to conclude "hey some of these requirements are impossible, so just give players an S rank even if they fail multiple bonuses altogether." The phoning in continues.
So I mentioned a curveball, which is... Adol and Karja get to split up, for spontaneous reasons that really never get a reasonable explanation. That, however, gives way to a bit of a surprise, and a reminder of something that happened way back at the end of Chapter 1, which I admittedly pretty much forgot about because 30 hours of gameplay and multiple weeks of real-world time have passed since then (and suddenly I am reminded of CrossCode, which I dropped because the entire game felt like filler). But then that curveball very quickly ends, and seemingly provides another excuse for Karja to grow even closer to Adol. Between this and a couple of hints dropped even in sidequests, something is clearly brewing.
So, it's time for me to have some words again about how this chapter concluded, as I did last time. This chapter's final """dungeon""" is easily the most impressive so far. I still air-quote it, because it's still just 4 linear rooms. But the mechanic they added - which honestly feels pretty lazy - actually made for a reasonably interesting (but still short-lived) experience. And once again, as with Chapter 5's final island, I feel like I am getting glimpses of Ys IX.
With how many quick glimpses of actual promise I've seen spread out across what is otherwise an overall watered-down bland slog in terms of gameplay, I can't help but suspect the dev team was gutted and is barely a shadow of its former self, and frantically worked to piece together what they could figure out without actually knowing how to build a competent and compelling Ys game.
Anyway, I digress. We need to talk about... the chapter's final boss fight. Last time I complained about the blandness of the arena, and that's probably true this time too, but you don't have much time to think about that with the stunts this boss pulls. The thing is, the first half of the boss fight is almost a freebie. Moreover, this boss...doesn't really move, just warps, which feels like extremely lazy design - at that rate why not fully commit and just render the boss in a constant T-pose?
But the truly heinous boss design doesn't become apparent until you've entered phase 2 and then whittled down 90% of their health - when suddenly they warp away and begin an impossibly fast attack both in terms of travel time and fire rate. If you don't manage to dodge it, you will get stunlocked and hit a dozen times before the game will honor your inputs again. This gave me a ton of trouble, because I was trying to specifically dodge it... but it turns out that as long as you're holding the dodge button to run, YOU WILL AUTO-DODGE. I'm pretty sure the game never explicitly taught this? The tutorial had given me the impression that speed attack dodges require specific timing...
So like, the entire first phase of the boss is a snoozefest, most of the second phase is also free, and then suddenly you hit the point where the boss is either completely impossible, or free as long as you're holding the correct button at the correct time. The trouble with this is, again, that attack has extremely fast travel time, so you're likely to get hit when it restarts (which it will, before you are ever given a chance to hit the boss again). This is complete garbage.
I continue to be in this only for the plot at this point (which seems to be promising something by the end of the following chapter). If I'm lucky, at the rate they're going, maybe we'll see half of a competent actual dungeon by the end of the game, but I refuse to get my hopes up.