So, as I mentioned earlier, I’m following up Ys: The Oath in Felghana with Ys: Origin, a game set 700 years before the first Ys game.

I’ve only played about three hours, which has been enough to get past the fourth boss.  Plenty to go.  It doesn’t seem quite as obtuse as the older games, which is probably a mark of change in game design in the mid 2000s.  It also gets serious marks for giving you a choice between two characters at the start – one melee, one magical – and having the axe-wielding spinning-death-ball-of-doom being a cute girl with braids.

One guess which I started with.

Anyway, it doesn’t diverge too much from the Ys pattern in some ways.  Charge through a dungeon maniacally destroying weak monsters, find a save point directly in front of an ominous door, save, walk through the door, meet a boss…

…LOSE to the boss, back off a bit and grind some, come back and beat it down.

The bosses in Ys: Origin are really involved affairs, with lots of stages and special attacks thrown at you, and I suspect the designers had a lot of fun with them.  I’ve certainly had fun figuring them out, aided somewhat by the general principle of “there’s a glowing spot.  I should probably try to hit it” even though the glowing spot is sometimes out of reach and involves, say, knocking the boss to its knees and platforming up its body to reach said glowing bit and poke it a few times.  Thankfully they are fairly slow paced, giving you lots of time to think, and I am happy to report that I have not yet lost a boss fight.

That isn’t to say I haven’t had at least one close call:

The “1/106” in the bottom left represents my current hit points.  The glowing explosion thing represents the other guy dying instead of me.

Life is good.