Review: Ys Seven (PSP)

• April 22, 2011
• James Skemp
• review

Ys Seven, the first Ys game I've played, was recommended to me a number of times before I finally picked up a copy. Since XSEED had some hand in the game, I was expecting a fairly good game, and found an excellent one.

Ys Seven is a sort of action RPG, with combat taking place on the field, and consisting of standard attacks, dodges, skills, and special attacks. Up to three characters can be in the party at any one time, and switching between them is easy as pressing a button. This provides for extremely fast battles, although, depending upon your level, battles due require more than just simple button mashing (although at higher levels you can generally clear the field doing just this), as some enemies will guard against certain character's attacks.

Experience is gained each time an enemy is defeated, as well as for each use of a skill. Each character has a base class of weapon, with additional, learnable skills attached, two equipment slots, and slot for an accessory that provides some sort of bonus. So there's a very simple skill tree within the game, for each character, although since skills cannot unlock new skills, it's a pretty skinny tree.

The music is one of the first things you'll notice about the game, as it successfully fades into the background, or grabs your attention, whenever necessary.

The story is fairly good. At the end of the game things are tied up rather nicely, in a rather satisfying manner.

The game itself generally takes between 20 to 30 hours to complete. While it's not recorded, I ended up doing all of the optional missions, created the ultimate weapons (and armors), learned all skills, and I believe picked up most, if not all, of the various treasures, leading me to believe I had near 99% completion. This brought me up to approximately 31 hours of gameplay. There is new game plus, and if you wish to continue after defeating the final boss, you need to reload an existing save.

The game is avaliable in physical and electronic formats - I purchased and played the latter, which requires approximately 450 MB of space.

I give the same 5 of 5 stars, since I was able to get a pretty solid number of hours out of the game, I enjoyed almost every minute I played, and could potentially pick up the game to play it again, whether that means using my final saves or starting again (although I probably would just do the former).

• review
• playstation portable
• sony psp