played ys 1 & 2 chronicles. weirdly, 2 ended up being way more of a frustrating stumble than 1...i ended up saying on stream that it was like the first half of my breath of the wild playthrough in the end because that was also a game where i felt like i was constantly baffled by whatever the game wanted me to do and the ways it was communicating it. 1 also has a couple of parts where i was probably not gonna figure it out any kind of quickly but there are a lot fewer mechanics to try when you get stuck and only a couple of the areas have a lot of really confusing loops and dead ends.
i liked 1 a lot, and the couple of little sidequests really bring a lot of charm to a game that is otherwise pretty simple-feeling. of course it's also funny to look at the game with some understanding of game design and spending so much time with people who jump to exploit it. this is a game that seems really determined to prevent people from doing things "wrong," and also doesn't care if you know. and it makes sense since in some of those cases you'd become easily unable to finish the game. like, the bat boss being basically impossible to defeat without the silver sword...is obviously because the last boss is actually impossible to defeat without the silver sword.
i didn't find anything in ys 2 that felt like an easter egg sort of sidequest by comparison, but the transformation mechanic feels really fun, letting you move around enemies easily and creating like an entire parallel structure of people to talk to in the world. (even if a lot of them have tonally weird jokes.) though there were definitely times i got stuck even after talking to everyone i could find...i still don't understand why the hint for where the pendant is is worded like that. overall it's kind of an RE2 to ys 1, with a bunch of new tricks and ideas added on top of the strong core that made up the first game, although...i'm pretty sure in this case i didn't like it quite as much.
i do kind of wonder how much of that is this version, though, because...i have a hard time believing some of these boss fights were so bullet-hell-y in old versions of the game, lol. it seems a little unlikely. though it is funny playing this and realizing that clearly, ys 2 must have had some kind of influence on or descendant in the modern top-down bullet-hell roguelike genre. which, uh, i wouldn't consider one of my favorite genres, and kind of puts the boss fights at a weird disconnect from the regular fights, where they are incredibly twitchy but then in between then you literally just mash directly into guys.
i bought eggconsole ys 1 and turned it on for like 3 minutes to see their "about the game" description (this is the first of those releases i've actually played prior to buying it, so i was pretty curious what it'd say. the "how to play" is the money strat to get a bunch of gold in the first few minutes of the game) and test one thing, which was, of course, diagonal walking. it doesn't exist. which probably is a big part of why it breaks open chronicles in most spots, lol. i'll play it soon while this game is still fresh in my head. i wouldn't say i was totally blown away by these games but i had a good time most of the time and want to see some more.
and i mean, i am in my nihon falcom era after all