I didn't know where
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana came from. Certainly I knew the basics of its existence, in it being an action RPG developed by Nihon Falcom in their flagship series, but that's really all. This wasn't a game I could chronologically place down to its release date because my ongoing familiarization with the series is strictly a recent occurrence beyond base generalities, like some version of the
Ys I and
II duology that's handed out to every person along with their certified video gaming license when they come of age. In my mind, the hazy conception that I'd constructed was of a Switch game, as most games turn up in the system's clutches even if they have no place being there from technological standpoint, which surely wouldn't apply to an
Ys game, those that do much through comparatively modest means. But then again, this was to be my first "modern"
Ys experience after I'd put on the breaks upon rolling the credits on its middle period, so who could say what I'd find in an expression so unfamiliar to me which had since risen up to define the series as it exists now.
The realization that dawned on me eventually was the origins of
Ys VIII as a Vita game. This made itself clear through a couple of disparate vectors, but one where I could not have gleaned those roots was in the game's sense and utilization of scale:
Ys VIII is massive, in a way I could not conceive of the series being before seeing it here. It gives you the run of a mostly uninhabited island and does not fudge the details much in the telling for the sake of abstraction; the places feel convincingly huge in terms of what the eye sees, and also in what the fingers learn and internalize of the complexity and vastness of navigating said terrain. The Vita heritage is clued in through the usage of distinct zone-dividing barriers, but it does not feel like a limitation, as so much of the impression the Isle of Seiren leaves one with is evident no matter where one exists in it: standing on the shorelines, trailing the rivers, trekking the highlands, or scaling the land-dividing mountain, the topographical consistency of the setting is constant, downright unbreaking, pushing the draw distance of the game engine to what surely must be its limits. I don't know if this aspect of the presentation was impacted by the PC port's visual settings, but it would be suspect to assume it was conjured up whole cloth in the later ports; it had to have been a core emphasis of the original handheld game as so much relies on it. In that context or any other, it's a spell-binding environmental and atmospheric affectation that completely carries the game's emphasis on charting the unknown, because as much novelty as is brought to the journey through the many distinct habitats and landmark to be discovered, their effect is exponentially strengthened by the reassurance that looking down that valley or skimming the horizon back where one came from, they can still be noted to exist, not having passed on into the ephemeral abstraction of a video game prop, rendered one moment and gone the next.
The strong first impression that
Ys VIII crafts in its choice of setting is directly supported by its given premise. Despite having only a partial first-hand understanding of the series and its conventions, enough of it is stock and recurring, and further bolstered by memetic injokes and nods about its nature that it's not a particularly unknown formula. Adol starts every game arriving or drifting into the vicinity of a new region in his lifelong travelogue of the ancient world that form the individual games's self-contained episodes that are then supplementarily crafted into a largely external, fan-pleasing chronology for those that desire to connect said dots. I dislike the kind of storytelling that arises from this pattern, much as I dislike Adol as the eternal stand-in protagonist: the practical result of this kind of narrative focus on a passerby presence who must still remain focal is that Adol effectively waltzes into cultures he does not understand and has never lived in, and by the end of the game is better at resolving whatever crisis situation inevitably manifests, having done his whitebread good deed and "fixed" the problems of communities, cities, or nations alike in one fell swoop through the simple application of narrative propulsion. They are clumsy, condescendingly colonial stories done to form because the expectation for anything else is hardly ever even contemplated by the writers or their audiences that regard Falcom's basic storytelling as comforting largely because it is so unchanging of form, tone or texture. That same reassurance has been observed by me to a prison of complacency, yearning for a breakout.
When the series gets interesting and challenges its own traditions is either through the absence of Adol, as in
Origin, or in the starting circumstances of
VIII: this is a castaway story upon its introduction, and through many, many twists and turns, even at its end, though its nature by then has changed. It's a concept so strong and so attuned to the conceptual promise and potential of the series that I'm surprised that, to my knowledge, it wasn't done before this game, decades into the run. Adol cannot undermine the local cultures because none exist beyond the queenships and kingdoms of the local wildlife; what is demonstrable of prior human habitation echoes the current population's circumstances, of scattered wrecks and abandoned shelters across the island and nothing more. It is a design choice that frames all the conventionalities, the cliches of modern gaming, as well as the Falcom staples, into a more considered light through what could be cynically discarded as window dressing on the same old. Because this is a game from 2016, there is crafting in it, and while a tiresome concept on its own when applied to the immediate gratification that
Ys usually represents, the system suddenly has thematic legs as there is no economy or pipeline of available services or industry available to the castaway commune--what they use they must forage and fashion themselves, and so a pest of modern gaming is neatly justified. The same goes for the tight-knit interpersonal relations that are always palpably present in almost any Falcom game, especially if they feature recurring little town vignettes to base those around. The couple of dozen and change castaways that eventually congregate in their makeshift village have real, pressing reason to cooperate, get to know each other, and if not bond then at least learn to tolerate one another's idiosyncracies for the simple reason of mutual survival. No artifice is required to sell the formation of the community as it's all so pleasingly necessity-driven, with each person's responsibilities claimed according to their skills and capabilities; the interpersonal shading that results is just the organic development of such relations amidst a situation none can deny or ignore. This is not a game that sets my heart afire narratively at all times, in the moment or at a larger scale, but the foundation that it builds for exploring its own systems and storytelling fundamentals is of stalwart thematic stability and reasoning.
Making those inroads into the island's depths and gearing up for the successively longer expeditions as resources allow forms a gradually clearing picture of the mechanical side of what
Ys VIII allows for. Falcom's history has seen them innovate and trailblaze entire genres, and though it would be foolish to assume a singular studio would maintain such exceptional status or involve the same people within it for decades on end, still there is the association with a company's output that forms audience expectations regardless of the realities one on the audience end can never have a total view of. For Falcom, that is one of relentless consistency, the blessing and curse of their being; one can form pre-conceived notions of their material based on just a few sample cases and not be lead astray much at all in the vast majority of their catalogue. In that light, though the exact manner of an
Ys in the form pioneered by
Seven was unfamiliar to me, it did not behave in a way that required a long learning process as the concepts involved aren't revolutionary, I suspect by deliberate principle; they do not have the previously series-defining askew vocabulary of the bump combat that ushered in the series. What character
VIII manages to fashion for itself seems to be informed by a host of source material external to Falcom's own works, in a move that's counterintuitively perhaps more novel as the studio have long been the lords of their own niches. The skill sparking system is lifted from
SaGa near as I can tell wholesale, down to the terminology involved; the spatiality and sheer enormity of the environmental design pocketed by landmarks feels akin to the
Xenoblade series which has always framed its own sense of exploration through environmental gigantism; the three-person exploration teams darting through wilderness smacking whatever comes their way inevitably calls to mind other action RPGs that define themselves through party play, whether that is
Mana or anything else, contrasted with the previously customary solitude of the series.
Ys does have its own character, however shakily unique it may be, and much of that comes to it through a sort of generically unassuming quality, which then translates to an exceptional sense of restraint when put in comparative terms. Whatever
VIII is, it is no longer that, with the series's antiquated qualities that gave it form having been replaced with another, more patchwork identity in its stead.
The cracks that form in the act of playing
Ys VIII are probably best embodied in the centerpiece of its combat mechanics, in the Flash Dodge and Flash Guard systems. Successfully timing a dodge at the last moment, or in turn pressing the modifier button for skill use with the same timing (there is no block function so a certain risk is undertaken) results in those special states of hyper-speed and a 100% critical rate respectively, and invulnerability for both. Any attack in the game can be parried or just-dodged in this manner, with no exceptions. Though theoretically optional, and a satisfying wrinkle on the combat mechanics, the reality of the systems is more deeply entrenched into how the entire game operates and expects to be reacted to and interacted with. At first, you don't need the techniques; maybe you're even uncomfortable with their timing relative to the enemies' individual tells. The longer the game goes on, the more your own aptitude accrues, and the higher the enemies' health pools climb in turn, so reliance on these chained-together states of invincibility are incentivized through the basic principles of whatever balance the game is reaching at. It wants you to internalize every telegraph and enemy pattern eventually as not an occasional flourish but the baseline of combat itself, minor enemies to bosses both. If you don't, you'll hardly survive or do so without an extreme resource drain, which is another differentiator of the kind of action RPG
VIII represents, where those masses of consumables exist in anticipation of inevitable micro and macro mistakes, and through allowing their limitless stockpiling, the game has "license" to concoct some absolutely absurd hordes to wade through, fishing for parries to get by or serially pausing the game to chuck and chomp down on restoratives. It does not feel especially interesting to play, and the gradual escalation of boss patterns in particular emphasize parrying and counterattacking when absent of risk, as a purely reactive dodging playstyle would either be too unfeasible or protracted by comparison. The game's own cleverness with its supposedly high-execution system eventually threatens to drag it down to an overly simplified, one-dimensional rhythm game with not enough variables present to justify the lopsided balancing act.
The symbiosis that results from something so rote but attention and execution-driven is a factor in the sense of exhaustion that permeates the game. Action games, even at their most staid and lackadaisical, generally aren't sweeping epochs.
Ys made a name of itself not just as the effective codifier of the action RPG concept but through its continued iterative focus, defining itself in an act of streamlining, unbreaking momentum and compact game lengths attached to scenarios that grasped at mythic scale; it was that contrast that made the individually unremarkable components sing.
Ys VIII has scale to embarrass others with, but it has trouble applying that enormity to substantial design or reconciling it with what makes up the rest of it. The necessity to keep up the parry game no matter what devalues the design of individual encounters, and also begins straining in context of how large the game is and how it expects to be played for all that time spent with it. "Pacing" is such a vague concept when invoked in criticism but here is a rare exception where I think it is an issue of incompatible game fundamentals applied to button-pushing pacing that's not suited for them. You are asked too much rapid-fire, high-intensity finger gymnastics for too repetitive processes for too long periods of time, individually or when put together. It even seeps into the supplementary game systems, like fishing, which is conceptually as simple as anything--just tap the button and occasionally move a thumbstick in the instructed direction--but becomes, no exaggeration, the physically most challenging and arduous task in the game when going for the bigger catches. The risk of repetitive stress injury for a video game sidequest is not something I relish in, and it is made all the more unreasonable when it comes at the tail end of dodging, blocking and mashing through everything the game wants you to through its long hours. This is an action RPG attached to a 40 to 50-hour game length, where the inputs of further engagement becomes increasingly intolerable the further one delves in it--some part of that equation should have been reconsidered if not entirely dropped.
What, ultimately, betrayed
Ys VIII as specifically a Vita game? It was a question of optics and sensibilities, associated and traced back to the specific publishing climate of the system in its day. Outside of the PC market not governed by hegemonic first-parties where they've always found their place, porn and erotica works from the suggestive to the explicit in Japanese video games have always moved with the times to a primary host platform. In the '90s, the Saturn was it, and today after the seeming end of the dedicated handheld market, the Switch is the place to be, as Nintendo's ethics as a publishing body extend only as far as marketable inclusivity with no real principles or oversight behind them in the face of profits. For a half-decade in the recent past though, the Vita was the de facto home of softcore exploitation games done to the specifications and strengths of the platform: small budgets, small and dedicated audiences, small prints runs, small profit margins to be met, smaller demands on the developer to keep making much the same kind of iterations on a formula. If this sounds anything like Falcom's modus operandi, it's no accident, as they've long stood as one of the few exceptions as a PC-first developer who have survived the upheavals of the industry through the years, made all the more exceptional in that their output has not been pornographic in nature. Yet it was always of a certain kinship, equally as niche, catering to a comparably small and faithful audience, finding the expansion of their business model in the Sony handhelds of the 2000s, eventually feeding back to a more active console presence through those established routes. The Vita's nature as a platform and the audiences it attracted cannot be ignored for the kind of game
Ys VIII is and what influenced its creation--a porn game it is not, but it has the heart of one.
Before the game can establish the previously outlined strong first impressions, it makes a worse one: the first meeting of Adol and Laxia consists of a walk-on where the former comes across the latter bathing in a stream, clad in a towel. Laxia raises her sword in defense against the intruder, and Adol is shown to casually disarm her; it is not enough to portray Laxia in this state of embarrassment and discomfort for the player's voyeuristic benefit, but she must be subjected to a narrative de-empowering while at it before she's even formally introduced, so as to maintain the functional and relative power of Adol in the dynamic that's established between them--he must be seen as her superior, the game insists. This interaction is then followed up with the towel falling off her body, shaming her further and getting those tantalizing glimpses in, while also supplying the incredibly tired "women's violence against men, what a laugh" punchline to the entire tortured escapade. This is a scene almost anyone has seen in media of this ilk repeated endlessly; that it is so interchangeable does not make it less worthy of mention but the opposite, because it is so normalized as a way to write gendered interactions, and serves as a prescient tone-setter for the relevant subject matter to follow.
The most immediate way to make observations about just who the presumed audience here is supposed to be is through costume and character design. More universally,
Ys VIII subscribes to a style of clothing design that sits directly at odds with what used to appeal about the series in its plain, unadorned functionality of bold primary colours and uncomplicated fabrics. The needs of the character design were shaped by the technologies of the time, where despite not animating much at all in practical terms, the people featured in the games reflected that cel-like animation-friendly design sense, as if they could if they wished to. These limitations no longer exist in the same way, and with them the artists' imaginations are more wantonly applicable to what is possible to be rendered in the three dimensions. I can only conjecture that this lack of restraint is responsible for the absolute fashion messes that
VIII's primary cast are, with no semblance of wearable cloth existing among them; the seams, lines and dizzying patterns resemble overdesigned carapaces the character have been molded and vacuum-sealed into instead of worn attire. It's wearying for all of them, but it's always tied to a sexualized excess when applied to women. All of them wear hotpants or bikini bottoms, and only one has something resembling a shirt. Extending into the supporting cast only marginally improves things, as even there the approach is consistently blatant: cleavage, thongs, high heels, bare legs. It's a game that conceives of a 70-year-old retired gladiator woman, and presents her from the neck down with the thin, toned body of a person less than half her age, afraid to commit to even a semblance of verisimilitude in the frankly exceptional concept that it toys with and then wastes.
The irritations and prejudiced biases of the game just cannot help compounding themselves the longer one lingers within it. A consistent thread is the depiction of body diversity and how it ties to stock stereotyping throughout. All women are thin, hot and/or cute in
Ys VIII, with no exceptions, preferably wearing as little clothing as possible. By contrast, men also are subject to the same kind of body-type-determines-morality-and-worth grading, but in more insidious ways. The diversity in men's bodies ranges from the baseline thin and fit default with special allowance for slabs of beefy muscle which are decreed admirable and desirable in their own way. The only exceptions to this are two characters, one of whom is fat, and through that fatness portrayed as largely irredeemable, a domineering pest of a person who's barely mourned when he ostensibly dies early on and sits out most of the rest of the game. He exists to be laughed at and be irritated by, everything done to such alarmingly specified type that there is no chance of regarding such a character as an actual person within the game's relative narrative sense. He is there to be literally compared to and mistaken for a pig, several times. The other less-than-thin character, in a sort of mundanely rounded way that doesn't reach the realms of mocking caricature but is distinct from his peers, ends up being a serial killer. The third people-comment-on-his-body-size character is partly defined by farting a lot. These aren't accidental decisions, because the game trades in such heavyhanded stock writing for its characters that its reliance on shorthand constructs instead of individuals is what drives the characterization more than anything, and the simplicities of its implicit morals are evident in how it regards people and arrays them into neat little boxes of narrative functions, uncritically propagating those ill-considered ideas and biases as it does so.
Nowhere are those suspect ideas more transparent than in the character of Ricotta. A lifelong castaway and one of the game's six playable characters, Ricotta is, in every way, a child. She talks like one, with her own literature-molded vocabulary tics; she looks like one; she acts like one; she occupies that role in every social situation with every other character, whether a daughter to her adopted father, a little sister to the castaway family unit, or a peer to the other kids on the island. Yet for a game that painstakingly lists practically every character's age in its information pages, Ricotta's age is deemed a mystery, a trait she only shares with the titular Dana. These are contrivances justified by plotting, but their real purpose is obscuring the portrayal of both characters and how it interacts with fetishization in costuming and general presentation. Dana is plausibly in her late teens, but Ricotta? She's of elementary or at the very oldest, of middle school age, and this, again, is not accidental when taken in with other aspects of her design. The visual components that make up her look are so laser-focused around commodified pedophilic signifiers that it's stunning: twintails, fangs, band-aid over a knee, striped arm accessories, thigh-highs. The worst of all of them is her overalls top, which is worn loosely with one shoulder strap perpetually in a state of slipping off. Should it be properly worn, it would not help matters as the fabric does not cover her upper body almost at all, leaving her torso exposed short of exposing the nipples as far as that can be pushed by the modelers. Some of the things that act as dogwhistles about Ricotta on their own could reasonably be read as benign design touches, but all at once, simultaneously acting in tandem with the universal sexualization of women and girls no matter their age speak differently. The game does not isolate its aims to just her either, as a girl whose age is listed as just ten has her underwear visibly modeled under her dress, and a woman of great storyline significance is given the excuse line of having her power drained over the years which now results in all interactions with her being with a child wearing very little at all. This is the legacy of the Vita as a platform, informing everything
Ys VIII shapes itself to be.
The shame of it is that for all the things that the game does to alienate one from it, it's still capable of momentary captivation, even brilliance. It's not a work I would highlight for its writing in the moment, because those instances aren't especially noteworthy beyond a constantly propelling rhythm whisking from one scenario to the next. Even so, the conceptual heights it aspires to, layering yet another self-eclipsing bit of over-the-top nonsense is nothing short of hypnotic in its audacity. It feels at times like a joke at the expense of its entire genre, and somehow the absurdities are still sold through the application of well-honed gravitas, all of which derives from who the story is actually about: Dana, not Adol. Dana is the singular greatest creative triumph and tragedy provided by the game, in much the same way as her textual role plays out. As a deuteragonist, her perspective matters, is consistently featured, and shades the anonymous wanderings of Adol and company with personal stakes and investment no one else could have offered. Her solitary sojourns among the dying days of her culture and people are what lend the game's story the pathos its interweaving convolutions are always in danger of overwriting. It's an inevitability that increasingly as time goes on for us here on this planet of ours, climate change's passing from a theoretical someday to a reality-altering today will shake every facet of life to its core. In this moment when the effects are still "only" in the domain of gripping anxiety for many, the emotional distance exists in channeling those bottled up feelings into the media we consume to distract and occupy ourselves with. I did not expect that a game so gleefully silly, so peppered with dinocalypses and killings of evolution itself would tap into that very real dread and empathy for the people caught up in circumstances that may find myself or the people I care about someday, in the bleak manner of environmental collapse the individual is too small to affect or do anything but emptily rage against when it's already upon them. In a game that mostly deals in feel-good platitudes, one of the last quests one might undertake in it is simply to remember, bury, and pray for the dead. It's an inhumane game in its worst moments, yet capable of great humanity in others all the same.
Dana is what it all keeps coming back to, in what is worthwhile and significant about what
Ys VIII is. Her solo portions are naturally her own, subject to the game's more acrobatic and lightly puzzle-oriented design in a sequence of themed trials; they are the best individual level design the game has in strictly mechanical terms, calling to mind the series past in pleasurable and organic ways. When she makes the transfer from an echo of the past to a participant in the present, she heralds the opportunity to do my favourite thing in all of
Ys: ditch Adol and ignore his existence as much as is allowed. This is a personal ideal, and the extent to which
VIII accommodates one in leaving the posterboy to the wayside is a temporary amelioration only, as it's still invested in the idea of Adol being someone who matters. It's a complete fabrication of narrative significance, and only serves to highlight the faults of this kind of lead character, from the
Zeldas to the
Dragon Quests to the
Personas and any other game which presume a player stand-in and then fix it around a male avatar whose personality is absent but given the pretense of being relevant. Adol is an empty vessel of congregated player habits, assumptions and rituals that form a makeshift character around those actions, but he is still treated as if he's important, not just slightly, but above all other life. This game subscribes to the narrative of protagonist exceptionalism so staggeringly that it just makes it an incidental plot point that Adol's soul shines brighter than all the rest of his species or whatever such bullshit that rationalizes him as the Warden of Evolution chosen by a process of uncomfortable fantasy eugenics and warped natural selection. Adol is the strongest, handsomest wielder of the sword holding the will of all species to live, not because he's anyone, but because he's you. And that in itself is a boring story to tell.
Ys VIII is a game that begins with a shipwreck and ends with a group of miscreants challenging the Origin of All Life to a fight, destroying the concept of evolution and replacing it with a custodian they deem more suitable for the task. It's a deeply, deeply ridiculous spectacle committed to its bit all the way, and should not be shamed for such. Yet within it pulse the detritus of its traditional insistences, some new foibles, and a host of other pitfalls. I don't know whether it's worth celebrating, but it's certainly not something to forget. Whatever the case, it's intensely memorable for everything it attempts, for good or for ill.
