Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. You will work together with an increasing team of friends and allies to survive ridiculous circumstances.
The story is incredible, but the character building is excellent. Great fast paces action RPG with party switching, so you’ll always have 2 playing with you. The story really shows deep friendship development, especially if you ensure to do all side quests and talk to characters at various story points.
I do agree the community discussions have gone to shit. But that’s true of the entire fucking internet. People are assholes when veiled behind anonymity. That’s not a Steam issue. It’s a human issue.
I’ll stick with my Steam cloud saves and game notes and community forums and community guides and custom controller configurations and community controller configurations and overlay and workshop and screenshots and steam deck and steam link and …
Also, the very first game I ever bought on Steam was almost 15 years ago, and it was delisted and has not been available on Steam for over 10 years. Yet I can still re-download and play it right now.
Steam is not the evil corporation people pretend it is. Take your rage to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.
I used a guide to be sure I saw everything and could just focus on the story, which is mainly why I played them. I spent about 15 hours plating both thoroughly. So they’re fairly short. I really liked them. Especially considering when they were originally released.
I’ve played this game to 100% both on the original release, and this re-release.
It’s one of my favorite action rpg’s out there. It’s not special. It never did anything new, really. It originally released around the same time as Skyrim and got forgotten. I still have always felt this game is better and more fun than people give credit for. It’s huge, has tons to do, has bright colorful biomes, goofy characters, silly stories, cool effects, and is just such a charming thing.
Some of my love for it is that it’s just a simple fun accessible action rpg. Some is I genuinely liked the stories. Some of it I liked how cliche and cheesy it was at times. And back when it first released, some of it was just nice to see some actual color compared to Skyrim back then, which I was also playing.
The original release had 2 DLC’s. This is the re-release called Re-Reckoning, which inherently included the original 2 DLC’s, amd then a bit later they did a new DLC called Faresworn that the original release never had. This is from that most recent DLC story and area.
It honestly is a large DLC that overstays its welcome. I know a lot of people think this game is kind of meh to begin with, but if someone enjoyed the original game and story, I think they’ll like the DLC because it has some more closure on the story and it does introduce some neat new gameplay mechanics.
The issue is you gotta really stick with it. It starts out fun to explore a new area, and then eventually you reach this point where it becomes a bit frustrating, but as you get through it, some stuff unlocks and it becomes really cool gameplay-wise. Also there’s a middle semi-grindy part where it felt like the difficulty got unfair, but after some unlocks involved in the grindy pary it got fun again and really became something else.
I think it could have been done a bit better, but overall as a fan of the original game, I enjoyed myself. You just unfortunately gotta push through to the end to get past this kind of middle part that drags.
There’s lots of fun and ridiculous characters too. I think they did a great job having it really feel like it fits the goofy theme of the game world even though it wasn’t the original team.