Okay… First thing is first. If you read my review of the translation for the first Ys on the NES you know that I wasn’t a fan of the game… at all. The translation itself was great, and I appreciated being able to play it for the history aspect of the Ys series since I’m such a big fan of Ys III on the SNES, but the gameplay isn’t only dated, but it’s just really, really bad. IMO, it was extremely boring and laughably unbalanced. The bosses were uninspired and insanely hard even with the best gear and maxed out levels, due to the bad combat mechanics.

Ys II, though far from perfect, was a vast improvement on just about all of this.

The layout of the levels and even the graphics themselves seem to have gotten an upgrade. Although the basic walk-and-attack battle scheme (like Hydlide) is still in play, it gets a huge boost by the addition of Fire magic to take out baddies from a distance until you’re strong enough to not worry about a game over every 10 seconds without constantly saving your game. Because of the use of magic, this one reminded me more of an 8-bit version of “Lagoon” for the SNES than Hydlide. Bosses, save for one, are actually a bit too easy this time around… but I’ll take that over the difficulty of the first game.

All that being said, I still found myself getting quite bored when I got lost about 2/3rd’s into the game and I broke down and used a FAQ for the rest of it. There were several instances while I played where I couldn’t imagine I’d ever figure out what to do without a FAQ. Without giving any spoilers, the one that comes to mind is using a particular spell that you never use again in the game in one particular room to make a treasure box with a mandatory story item appear. As far as I know, nobody ever tells you to do that even in cryptic fashion. I have no idea how you’d know to do that on your own. (My one suggestion if this translation ever gets an update would be to change one of the villager’s unhelpful texts to say that you’d need to do this if I’m right and there is no clue in the game to do it).

I did notice a few minor bugs. The first one is translation related, and was likely due to some limitation on text. When you get the Whisper Earring, the text box saying so is pretty messed up. Not game breaking at all, but it looked a bit out of place for an otherwise excellent translation.

The other two might have been bugs in the original game. The first one was during the dialogue in Hadat’s house when you get the Rira Shell. Before I got it, the game froze up and had weird glitched out graphics. When I reset the game and reloaded I didn’t have this problem a second time. The second one is the Goddess Statue in Dolga’s room is invisible. Any time I walked into this room it was empty but she would talk to you and you could interact with her. Neither of these bugs are game breaking (well… as long as you make sure to save before getting the shell), but again they just seem out of place.

Other than that, everything was great from start to finish. I enjoyed this one much more than the first, at least for the first two thirds of it that didn’t require a FAQ anyway. I can’t wait to play the 8-bit version of Ys III next!

Thanks again to MakoKnight and team for putting this one together for us.

Recommended at least to try out for any 8-bit Retro RPG fan. Being a fan of Ys in the first place would probably be a plus though.