Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana

The game has a strong hook and an infectious, addictive loop that kept me driven from beginning to end. Escaping the island is paramount, and almost impossible without help. This means the objective constantly looming over you is the search for other castaways in hopes to cooperate and establish a means of escape.

All the while, you’ll be met with twists and turns, mysteries and revelations, and wonder and intensity. The story is a perfect illustration of the emotional rainbow, keeping the player on their toes, taking them to unexpected places, and tackling unbelievable concepts. Just when you think you’ve figured the game out, the story is nudged into just a different enough direction to maintain that curiosity as its deceptive complexities are unveiled.

It’s worth noting that I almost completely checked out of Dana’s story before it had the chance to begin. Her first few scenes are told through noninteractive flashback stills, whose presentation are lacking, uncaptivating, and sometimes even hard to follow due to the dialogue text not displaying the name of who’s talking. These flashbacks almost completely repelled me, but fortunately the moment her story escaped them, I flipped and found myself utterly hooked.

As the game’s namesake, Dana is easily the most important character. Her story takes time to manifest and unfold but remained intriguing to the very end. It helps that she is absolutely beaming with endearment and vibrance, matching her personality with her alluring appearance.

You really feel the equal sense of being trapped in a foreign place as well as the thrill of adventure, though the latter is absolutely more prevalent.

Part of what gave Lacrimosa of Dana such a profound grip over me was its tremendous Final Fantasy X vibes: a tropical island littered with the ruins of an ancient civilization, a strong water theme, hints of government conspiracies, and more that I won’t delve into here. I’m a gigantic lover of Final Fantasy X so these details, even if unintentional, were hugely compelling for me.

The characters you’ll discover along the way were a big surprise for me. Lacrimosa of Dana lures you in with easily identifiable and relatable– if stereotypical, characters like the tsundere and the loveable oaf, but these facades are slowly chipped away to reveal considerable depth throughout the game’s entire runtime. What does help break the initial mold a bit is how the cast is pitted against the island they find themselves stranded on. Tried-and-true as it may be, forcing folks from different walks of life into a unified hardship like being marooned on an island is heartwarming. You get to witness the group become united in spite of their initial divide. The game is so adept at bringing these characters to life with their dreams, fears, and quirks that by journey’s end, it felt as though I was leaving my own family behind.

Each castaway nets a handful of benefits, such as new gameplay features and the ability to push deeper into the island by asking the accumulated group to help remove obstructions that bar your many paths. I cannot help but love all of this because it grants every one of them a level of significance while also being one of the many ways the game brilliantly integrates story with gameplay.

I was constantly appreciating the game’s excellent direction. Not a moment passed that I didn’t know where to go or what to do. Even beyond just having an objective from a gameplay standpoint, it’s also great at driving the player forward with an understanding of why they need to do what they need to do. Because the circumstances are so relatable to a primal part of the brain, everything that needs doing make sense and serve as effective devices to push the player toward every new objective.

While I never quite struggled with any particular fight, save for maybe two special cases, combat found an overall fine balance between accessibility and complexity.

I would describe the fighting as simplistic, but not to its detriment. The typical moment-to-moment is a lot of button mashing with the occasional dodge, block, or skill use. Each playable character unlocks a variety of skills to help turn the tide of battle or aid in crowd control. Some enemies are also vulnerable to specific attack types, such as flying enemies being weak to Laxia’s piercing damage while resilient against the other two types of damage. The combination of these systems encourages the player to regularly swap between characters mid-battle in order to be most effective, but it’s important to note that the game is forgiving enough for this to not be completely mandatory. Truth be told, I played the first half of the game almost exclusively as Laxia, and then the remainder as Dana with very infrequent exceptions, and never once did I feel forced out of my preferences.

As far as RPGs go, Lacrimosa of Dana doesn’t dive too deep into the realm of customization or progression. Using the materials harvested on your journey, you’ll routinely upgrade your party’s weapons and craft accessories and armor for benefits such as poison resistance or simple stat increases. You won’t find anything in the way of skill trees though, and while you are presented with the occasional dialogue option, they don’t alter the course of the story. On the surface, these points may sound as though the game lacks growth but that’s definitely not the case. In fact, its solutions to these problems exemplify the very spirit of the game as a whole: simple, instantly gratifying fun. You’ll earn bottles that can be used to brew potions, find recipes to cook meals that give your party temporary buffs, and some character interactions result in permanent stat boosts and trinkets.

One of the coolest systems is the Advanced Gear, which provides slightly more abstract or practical benefits such as climbing vines or breathing underwater. This Metroidvania-esque progression makes exploring the island a constant treat, and I always looked forward to obtaining new ones.

It’s a small detail, but I also have to note that this game has one of my favorite fishing minigames! It’s short, simple, and treads that fine line between important enough to want to do but unimportant enough to not feel like you have to.

While the game can look rough around the edges, I found the graphics charming overall. I really dig the art style, especially the character designs. The environments can look a little too busy with the blurry textures and rough aliasing, and sometimes the game appears flat because of the weak lighting, but it’s still generally pleasing to the eye.

This may be blasphemous to the Ys community, but the soundtrack is somewhat mixed for me. It can be pretty repetitive at times, and I find it otherwise perhaps a bit too energetic. The constant electric guitars and drums ignite a perpetual fire of moving and fighting quickly, which ended up being pretty exhausting after a while. The pieces aren’t bad by any stretch, but I certainly relished in the calmer, more beautiful tracks.

Supposedly the game’s western release was abysmally localized, but this has been completely fixed by now (minus a few typos in the subtitles). I would actually say that the current state of the localization is pretty fantastic and should be a complete non-issue for those concerned.

I tend to ignore video game journals, but Lacrimosa of Dana’s is very particularly thorough and handy. You can track quests, character details, and even collected materials show what their sources are so you can easily find more.