Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana is the high point of the long-running series about the red-haired adventurer Adol Christin, and at the same time the best place to jump in, since the previous entries aren't needed to understand the story. This time Adol is shipwrecked on the cursed island of Seiren, from which, according to legend, no one has ever sailed away. He gradually gathers other castaways, together they build a village, repair the fence against nightly attacks, and above all explore jungles, caves and ruins full of creatures that should have gone extinct long ago. In parallel, a second thread unfolds about a girl named Dana, who lives in the same places, only in the distant past.

Combat takes place in real time and is unusually fast: the player controls one of three characters in the active party, switches between them on the fly and uses three types of attack — crushing, slashing and piercing — against the corresponding enemy types. The key is dodging and blocking at precisely the right moment, which, when performed perfectly, slows down time or boosts your attack. On top of this comes gathering materials, fishing, village building, and defense battles where waves of enemies attack the camp and the player builds barricades. Exploration is rewarded with a generous number of secret paths, and the game maps them clearly.

On Switch the game runs smoothly, and the speed of the combat system makes it an ideal handheld title, since it reads well even on a small screen. The music by Falcom's in-house sound team is a typical rock storm of guitars and keyboards and ranks among the best soundtracks of its time in the genre. Reception was very good, even though the English localization of the original release on other platforms had to be entirely redone due to criticism; the Switch version already includes the fixed translation. Today it's one of the best action RPGs on console, and a surprisingly moving survival story. Anyone expecting a mindless hack-and-slash will be surprised by how powerfully the game's second half deals with the theme of entire civilizations' collapse.