Designing Ys II, Vol. 4: Druegar

Did you know the PC Engine was the first console to have turbo buttons built into its official gamepads?

This is the honest solution: stand in front of Druegar and flip the I button to turbo. This boss was not correctly balanced. It takes more damage than it dishes out, which is something that will come up again with another Ys II boss. Even without turbo buttons, some rudimentary button mashing will win the day.

The intended solution for taking down the big spider is to build on the Velagunder strategy, positioning oneself just within its radius and mashing the magic button to spam spells into it. Between bouts of this the player is supposed to shadow the boss' movements, making quick but precise adjustments to line up their shots. It doesn't matter because you can, with very minimal movement in the international versions, just spam the Fire button and win a fifteen-second damage race. Sure you'll end the fight with a sliver of HP left, but so long as you have at least 1 point remaining when the last shots are fired, you'll get it all back when Druegar goes down.

It would be sad coming off of Gelaldy, but this boss doesn't happen that fast. See, the second half of Ys II is a remarkable shift from the first: it takes place entirely within the confines of the Solomon Shrine, so just put this track on loop for three hours straight and you'll have an idea of what the endgame's like. It involves constant backtracking, and alternating between human and animal form to solve puzzles and defeat monsters--which would be pretty nice if it didn't leave you underleveled for Druegar. Visually the environments do show more variation, with the dark gates of the shrine giving way to the murky sewer making up its underground canal, and the pearly austerity of the goddess palace, but the soundtrack doesn't reflect any of this. This is where the combat system being so repetitive harms Ys I & II the most, as it falls on the sound design to carry the aesthetic experience of the game, and that loop just isn't enough.

The second half of Ys II does capture the feeling of subterfuge and stealthily moving around an enemy encampment, but it does so without the same progress metrics found in the first game's dungeons, and without respect for the player's time. The Shrine is a slog for the sake of being a slog, populated with key items that are used once and then forgotten, and because these markers serve as the player's only measure of progress, they lack a defined sense of advancement as they go through the dungeon. So the issues with this arc of the game aren't limited to something as simple as rebalancing Druegar, it's an issue with the structure of the endgame, with the player having to constantly warp back to locations and return to different parts of the dungeon.

Yet while Druegar was easy to the point of mindlessness, the boss that follows is an exercise in frustration...

Designing Ys II, Vol. 3: Gelaldy

Among the seven bosses of Ys II, Gelaldy stands out for being the most polished. Velagunder was boring and Tyalmath underwhelming, and the boss immediately after Gelaldy is downright embarrassing. But the boss of Burnland/Burnedbless has a distinct attack pattern that meshes well with the magic system and creates phase-like sequences of interaction with the player. It's not a multiphase boss in the Dragonlord sense, but just slightly more complex than the likes of Nygtilger and Khonsclard.

So why does Gelaldy work? The fight begins with the big green guy simply chasing the player around the arena, immune to both physical and magical attacks. After the player leads him on long enough, Gelaldy will stop and heave up a tapeworm, causing the player to now be pursued from two different angles. After evading the tapeworm for a bit, Gelaldy will recall it and loop back to the beginning of his pattern.

The key is that Gelaldy's points of vulnerability are when he is either spitting up or horking down his worm. At any other time the Fire spell will simply bounce off of him, while at these moments the player can blast away at the big beheaded beast. This property is what creates the fight's victory sequence; the player evades, then fires while Gelaldy is setting the worm up, evades again, and then fires when he's taking it out of play. Mechanically it follows a pattern in Ys II—Velagunder was vulnerable after attacking and Tyalmath immediately before, now Gelaldy is vulnerable both before and after his attack sequence. Having a sequence to the fight makes it more engaging for the player than Ys II's previous bosses, as it gives them cues to pay attention to and something to plan for during the moment-to-moment play. It's no Dark Fact, but you're always watching for that opening while going up against Gelaldy.

On a broader level, Gelaldy represents a kind of threshold in the gameplay of Ys II. Every Ys boss takes place before a doorway that represents some kind of major change, whether that's acquiring new information through a Book of Ys or even traveling to the land itself. The journey up to the point of fighting Gelaldy has been about ascending up towards the peak of the island, while the journey after is about saving its people and undoing the hundreds-year-old circumstances that placed it in the skies of Esteria. There's not any particular deep significance in what he is as a monster, but it's important that this boss leave an impression on the player as they're going between these two components of the storyline.

(Also of passing interest is that this specific section of Ys II seems to have impacted Toby Fox's Undertale. He's already listed the music of the duology as influential, but the PC Engine/TurboGrafx version's Burnland and the later Ys Core areas seem to have influenced Hotland and the CORE in Undertale.)

Count your lucky stars that this boss turned out so well. Boss #4 is frustrating in an entirely different way...

Designing Ys II, Vol. 2: Tyalmath

Like Velagunder before it, the second boss of Ys II is invulnerable to physical attacks. After completing their descent into the Mines of Ys and their subsequent ascent through the Ice Park, the player solves a brief illusion puzzle and finds themselves confronted by a monster that casts fire magic of its own.

While Velagunder had to be attacked immediately after firing, Tyalmath instead requires the player to take advantage of an opening just before he attacks rather than right after. (In practice the boss is vulnerable both before and after, but if the player wants to survive then they need to shoot first at least once.) Similar to Dark Fact, the difficulty of the fight comes from Tyalmath being able to fire in eight directions while the player can only do so in four. It also comes from Tyalmath having something the player doesn't—being able to bump. The player now feels the full weight of losing the original combat mechanics, as Tyalmath tries to simultaneously shoot them down with fireballs and chase them around the arena to ram them into the snow.

The most interesting aspect of the fight is how Tyalmath uses perspective to convey the illusion of depth, jumping up "towards" the screen and becoming bigger or smaller depending on how close he is to our own world. It's an impressive visual effect even on the original PC-88 hardware, but it also betrays something about Ys II: this game is much more an aesthetic showcase for the computers and consoles it was published on than it is a mechanically sound game. This is far from the last boss in Ys II meant to show off hardware power, but it is one of the more blatant.

Fortunately, boss #3 marks a significant upswing over what came before.

Designing Ys II, Vol. 1: Velagunder

Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished—The Final Chapter was a much younger game when Ys I & II first debuted. A common misconception even among Japanese players was that Ys II wasn't planned in advance, but was made as a separate project in response to the first game's financial success. Iwasaki himself debunked this in his Untold interview:

"In the history of Ys, it is said Hashimoto and Miyazaki made Ys I and Ys II as two parts, two separate projects. This is not true. The original plan for Ys included the contents of both Ys I and II. However, that would be too much content for the floppy disk capacity of the era, so they decided just to make the first half. Then, after Ys was a hit, the sequel was greenlit. [...] I know that when Hashimoto and Miyazaki made Ys I, they didn't know if they could make the second part of the story. If Ys I had not sold enough, then perhaps they could not have made Ys II. But Ys I had big sales, and they were able to finish it. This is true, but lots of people still believe Hashimoto and Miyazaki planned them as separate games. 

I heard the truth from [Yamane Tomo/Amagi Hideyuki] and also I know because of the comments in the source code for the games. For example in Ys I, the final boss is Dark Fact, and his messages were cut. They were removed or "commented out". Originally in Dark Fact's messages, he says Feena is [REDACTED] and after defeating the player he will hire her as a maid. But this is commented out. Because if Miyazaki and Hashimoto had used that, then Ys I would not be seen as finished. Because no player would understand that - "Why?! Why is Feena [REDACTED]? And why does Dark Fact say that?" So Miyazaki and Hashimoto cut that message, and Dark Fact only says something like, 'Welcome, but you die here.'"

—Iwasaki Hiromasa, Ys I & II director & main programmer, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2, p. 99

(Yamane and Amagi are the same person under a pseudonym; Yamane on the original Ys and Amagi on Hudson's remake. Incidentally, Dark Fact's messages were restored for the Famicom version.)

As I noted at the beginning of this series, the focus of Ys II is on magical combat rather than physical. It's easy enough to see how the first Ys games fit together as two halves of a mechanical whole, but in this case the team's original vision may have been a little bigger than they could reasonably realize. There are six spells in Ys II, which gradually replace the Books in the player's inventory as the game progresses. Despite this variety, one spell dominates gameplay to such an extent that I would call it the defining mechanic of II: Fire.

In most RPGs magic represents an exponential escape from the linearity of melee combat, capable of targeting different elemental weaknesses, providing buffs and debuffs, healing party members, affecting speed, and even expelling enemies from battle entirely. In Ys II magic serves to simply grind the flow of the bump combat system to a halt. This is exemplified by the first boss, Velagunder, who is designed to teach the use of the Fire spell.

The player that reaches the first boss without having learned magic is in for a rude awakening.

Velagunder is completely immune to physical weapons, so the Fire spell is the only means the player has to damage him. His pattern is the simplest of any boss in the first two games; Velagunder aligns himself with the player's position, pauses, and fires out a row of five shots with gaps between them. The player is to quickly step into one of the gaps, then step back out and shoot Velagunder straight in the chest with the Fire spell. Velagunder is only vulnerable immediately after firing, and done too early or too late the spell will simply bounce off him. So the player's strategy is to sidestep Velagunder's shots then stand there, mashing the magic button until one of their spells bounces off, and realign themselves with the gaps.

In direct contrast to the tense high-speed weaving-and-charging gameplay of the Dark Fact battle, the Velagunder fight is one where Adol is constantly starting and stopping. It's nowhere near "seamless," the seams are everywhere, and this transfers to the battles against random mobs where the player finds themselves coming to standstill in the middle of dungeons to mash magic into crowds of monsters.

The fact that Adol cannot move and use magic at the same time creates perpetual interruptions in the flow of play. Regular Fire spells have no functional cost when compared with Adol's bottomless supply of Magic Points, and the ability to hold enemies at bay while bowling them over with the knockback from the spell makes it disproportionately powerful compared to tackling them head-on. Weapons still matter, as the damage a spell deals is derived directly from Adol's Attack stat, but those weapons will rarely if ever meet flesh. The Fire spell can be further enhanced with the Eagle and Hawk Idol items found on in the game's dungeons, which add homing properties it, and the spell eventually grows even stronger as Adol levels up and becomes capable of plowing through multiple targets at once. Even if the player wanted to not to use this incredibly powerful mechanic, the bosses are explicitly designed to be invulnerable to everything but it.

Instead of creating a dynamic supplementary system, magic turned Ys II into a bad shoot-'em-up.

Most of the game's other spells aren't especially useful, either. The other five spells consist of Light, Return, Transform, Time, and Shield. Light magic reveals hidden doors in the bottom parts of the map by filling them with light, which is useful in the mines when you're still unaware of the mechanic—then it becomes trivial to spot them on your own. Return has a much longer shelf life, as it allows the player to warp to the entrances of specific safe zones like the villages of Ys, and so the player comes to depend on it well into the endgame.

Transform is probably the second most useful spell, as it turns the player into a monster, allowing them to both bypass enemies without fighting them, and talk to them for clues. This does carry the risk of the player not being strong enough to overcome the subtractive damage formula, as they need to gain experience points to finish the game, but it also acts as a built-in dungeon shortcut that lets the player simply turn on Transform when they need to get back to where they were after warping out mid-dungeon.

Time and Shield arrive so late in the game that there's almost no opportunity to use them, with the former being prohibitively expensive to cast and only working to stop basic enemies in their tracks, and the latter only being available during the final boss battle. We'll get to it eventually.

While Velagunder contrasts strongly with Dark Fact immediately before it, it also contrasts with Jenocres, the boss that began this whole series. There's much more going on with the Jenocres fight, and the elements of it are easier to intuit; while Velagunder's immunity to physical attacks is foreshadowed by one of the sage statues the player finds, Jenocres used mechanics that were already established from the moment the player first set foot in Esteria, and the torches' layout in that battle gave them an opportunity to step back and learn the pattern without putting themselves at an immediate risk. Whether you look at Velagunder as an eighth boss or a first, it's not a pretty picture.

The next boss, while visually impressive and less mechanically offensive, continues to develop Ys' slow burn on magic in a direction that doesn't see real fruition until many hours later.

Designing Ys, Vol. 7: Dark Fact

The final battle of Ys is perhaps its most iconic moment, and the culmination of everything the bump combat system represents. The player enters the 25th floor of Darm Tower armed with six of the seven Books of Ys, having only just learned the name of the black-cloaked man they've been chasing across Esteria, and just as soon as the player gets to meet Dark Fact they find themselves facing him in battle. The meeting with Fact is by no means short—dying and challenging him again may account for as much as an hour of the game's six-hour playtime. But unlike the encounters with Vagullion or Yogleks and Omulgun, the battle against Dark Fact never feels "cheap" or "unfair" to the player; they always know exactly why they died, how they could have avoided it, and what they need to do better to prevent that from happening again.

Let's break the elements of this battle down:

• Dark Fact is a moving target, but his movement is not unpredictable like Vagullion. He follows a set path, tracing out what may be the worst figure-eight in the world across the arena. As they continue to rematch Fact, the player becomes better attuned to this pattern and intuits the best ways to connect with him.
• Every time the player successfully damages Fact, the tile they hit him on is destroyed. If the player is standing on that tile they die instantly, though it's easy to avoid. The resulting pits are impassable, so the more damage the player does to Fact the more ruined the arena becomes and the harder it gets to maneuver. Effectively planning around hitting Fact on the corners and edges early on will lead to the player's movement being less restricted as the fight progresses.
• Fact periodically sends out one to two fireballs that explode in eight directions. Like Nygtilger, this is an unequal fight; Fact can shoot in twice the number of directions the player can move, which is where much of the challenge comes from.
• Although Fact does not speed up, as the fight goes on he sends fireballs out with greater frequency, and the erosion of the arena creates a gradual loss of options for the player. In contrast to what came immediately before him, the final boss of Ys builds intensity as the clash continues. Urgency is placed on the player to escalate with the boss, doing what they've already learned to do but faster and more precisely. The convergence of multiple eight-directional shots from different parts of the screen and overlapping holes in the floor pressures the player into the tight gaps between "death zones," providing a small taste of the kind of gameplay that would later define the bullet hell genre in the late 90s and early 2000s. (Later remakes extend the comparison even further.)

Essentially, the player is to avoid all of the fireballs (of which there can be as many as 16 on-screen at one time) and maneuver around the collapsing arena while making contact with Fact himself. In addition to all these action elements, there's a puzzle to Fact—the player has to equip the entire set of Silver equipment rather than the stronger Flame Sword and Battle equipment. This is toned down in the PC Engine release, as Fact spells out when the fight begins that they can't win without it:

"The name Dark Fact will be the scourge of all men to come! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh you are brave, but you are also a fool! You have no chance without the protection of the Silver equipment!"

This was an addition made as a result of many players of the PC releases not picking up on the supporting cast's hints that the Silver Sword, Shield, and Armor, all had to be worn together to damage him. The PC-88, X-1, and other Ys releases lacked such an overt explanation. Iwasaki originally wanted to have a second audio track prepared, where Dark Fact panics upon seeing Adol in the full Silver set, but memory restrictions made this impossible.

The battle with Fact having eroding terrain is its most important feature, as this is how Falcom incorporated into the final battle the field elements of continually adjusting Adol's position while running through new territory. By integrating this with the principles of making safe attacks, always having a line of retreat open, striking at offsets, and evading projectiles, the Dark Fact battle brings together the disparate elements of Ys into a concentrated high-speed finale. In the age of romhacks and superbosses that kind of design might be hard to appreciate, but in the context of this being just three years after players were first cutting down Ganon and slaying Dracula, it's an impressive body of innovations. If there is fault in it, it's that the boss as-is often doesn't last long enough for its battle theme to be fully played out.

The Action RPG as a genre hasn't really changed that much even between 2009 and 2019—the big names in town are Nier Automata, Monster Hunter World, Breath of the Wild, and Kingdom Hearts III, but the mechanics they're drawing on came about with the turn of the millennium. Their moment-to-moment play isn't so radically different from the lineage that informed them: Dark Cloud, Kingdom Hearts, and Phantasy Star Online, all codified the control schemes and standards that today's ARPGs depend on. Meanwhile the battle with Dark Fact in 1987 and '89 is night and day not just to Xanadu, but to the final bosses of games released in the very same years as Ys. We would be hard-pressed to find anything in the 80s that surpasses it from any genre, making Ys a fitting conclusion to the decade and the capstone of Falcom's work in this period.

...Or it would be, but there's a whole extra game on the disc.

Designing Ys, Vol. 6: Yogleks & Omulgun

We arrive now on the doorstep of the endgame, at the worst boss of Ys I: Yogleks and Omulgun.

(Nobody knows which head is which, but I always assumed Yogleks was purple and Omulgun red.)

The idea behind the fight is fairly straightforward. Both heads float around the boss arena, bouncing off of the walls. Each head is surrounded by a ring of fireballs, one moving clockwise and the other moving counterclockwise, which slowly expand and contract as they orbit the bosses. In order to damage them, the player has to quickly dart between the fireballs as they get an opening, strike the head, and come out of the ring unscathed. To prevent the player from simply staying inside the ring, the heads magically swap positions every time Adol gets a hit in; only the red head is vulnerable to damage.

There are a number of issues with this fight. The first is that because the fireballs rotate in opposing directions, the head-swap means if the player doesn't correct their course immediately after making contact they'll run straight into the swapped head's fireballs as they try to exit the ring. The second is that it requires a level of pixel-perfect precision not found anywhere else in the game—Adol has to start charging while his sprite is still aligned with the lowest fireball of the two he's trying to squeeze between, and make minute adjustments to get out unscathed. The third problem is more an issue of the boss' comprehensive design: it gets easier as the fight goes on, rather than escalating in difficulty.

See, as Yogleks and Omulgun lose Hit Points, they also start to lose fireballs, one per every quarter of their maximum health taken off. Most video game boss fights escalate in challenge the further the player can make it, thus passing through one phase establishes they're ready for the next. With Yogleks and Omulgun, the player starts the fight able to handle the last phase, which results in a denouement when they finally get past the first two and the tension dissolves.

Most players take issue with Vagullion, but I would contend that Yogleks and Omulgun are the boss that really needed to be fine-tuned. They start out disproportionately difficult compared to the bosses before and after them, on a scale that one can't help feeling it was a mistake, and end up disappointing the player that actually sees their fight through to the end.

Of note is that Falcom's official user support query outright calls the boss impossible without the Flame Sword, which would otherwise be an optional weapon, and strongly recommends acquiring the Battle Armor and Battle Shield rather than relying on the Silver set. Their recommended strategy is to sit in the corner waiting for the red face to draw near before charging through it, as the middle of the room leaves the player too vulnerable to damage. As many players concluded back in the 90s, a riskier alternative is to charge the red one in the room's center as the two heads are converging and catch it a second time after the swap.

So we've just had two badly designed bosses in a row. It would have been entirely possible for Ys to have peaked at its fourth big battle and never fully recover. Thankfully, the final boss of Ys I is also one of the best bosses in any 2D video game.

Designing Ys, Vol. 5: Khonsclard

"Among the bosses of Ys I & II's Ys I, there's a very minor boss in Darm Tower called 'Khonsclard.' ('Rock' was a popular name among the staff.) 

In fact, if you ask a player of the PC version to name the bosses, they'll say 'the first boss,' 'centipede,' 'bat,' 'mantis,' and 'face,' but it's rare to hear 'rock.' Instead they'll say 'Dark Fact' for the sixth boss. 

Next to the surprisingly difficult mantis, faces, and maze of mirrors right after it, the strategy is surprisingly easy. Usually it's figured out right away, or with bad luck it might take two tries. It seems to leave a weak impression...or that's the kind of boss I thought it was, anyway. Truthfully in the PC Engine version of Ys I & II I felt it was a complete mistake." 

—Iwasaki Hiromasa, "Game Developer Failure Teacher in Ys I & II"

In a 2016 the hashtag #ゲーム開発しくじり先生 (#GameDevFailureTeacher) began trending on Twitter, with game developers sharing stories of design failures in games. The tag had branched out from #同人しくじり先生 (#DoujinFailureTeacher) where doujin content makers had shared their own stories, which itself was responding to the popularity of the TV program Shikujiri Sensei - Ore Mitai Naru Na!! ("Failure Teacher - Don't Be Like Me!!") a variety show where various professionals showcased their failings as an example for others to learn from. Ys I & II director and main programmer Iwasaki Hiromasa chimed in on his blog, Colorful Pieces of Game, to recount a story from his end—his efforts to rebalance the game's fifth boss, Khonsclard.

"When I was doing debugging and balancing, I was bothered by how weak Khonsclard was. 

It was always a free win. 

But when I looked at the source code, the HP, Attack, and Defense values were fine, so I thought it was just easy because I already knew the strategy. 

Why did I think the numbers were wrong? 

Since you can see the boss' HP in the first place, that couldn't be it. And the damage formula is so simple it wouldn't be easy to make a mistake. 

Except for Darm, the actual damage formula is as follows. (Darm uses a unique process with a special offensive and defensive table.)

• Damage dealt = Adol's Attack Power - Enemy's Defense Power

• Damage received = Enemy's Attack Power - Adol's Defense Power

(Defense Power is basically the sum of of equipment. After that ring modifiers and the rest are applied.) 

With this terribly simple formula, standard parameter balance is created by looking up the boss' Attack and Defense Power using Multiplan. The balance between "face" and "mantis," there's nothing off about the numbers there. 

That's why even though I thought 'Doesn't it seem too easy?', since it wasn't a bug, and nobody's going to complain if it's weak, and there were a ton of other bosses and goons to balance...I naturally turned my attention to bugfixing, and reducing the ready-to-burst memory. With so much to do, I just said 'well, whatever' and let it be. 

I feel bad saying that, but I figured that because the strategy being easy wasn't a mistake, and it was such a forgettable boss, it wouldn't be a big deal even if it was a little weak. 

(Actually, the PC Engine version's balance got various complaints from PC version fans, but nobody ever said 'the rock is too weak.') 

So Khonsclard stayed a free win, and the master copy for the Japanese release was submitted."—Iwasaki Hiromasa, "Game Developer Failure Teacher in Ys I & II"

Of Ys I's seven bosses, Khonsclard stands out for its lack of presence. Its basic pattern is to float towards Adol and spew rocks in a radial pattern, with significant gaps between them for the player to weave through. It's the only boss in the first game where Iwasaki felt the need to adjust its actual stats in the transition from Japan to the United States, gaining 6 points of Defense to increase the number of hits the player needs to destroy it.

"And then it was 1990. 

I returned to Hudson in Hokkaido to begin work on the international version, but first I decided on three things.

• No rewriting the title. Just use all of it as-is. It's already in English, after all.

• Rewrite all of the confusing parts of the scenario. Since the original isn't sacred, it could be thoroughly revised.

• Balance it for American tastes—punchy and hard.

It became crucial to discover any mistakes and to rebalance the product. 

We decided to adjust the overall difficulty level for an American audience, adjusting the experience points so that the game would not be as easy as the Japanese version. At the same time, I decided to double-check that weakling Khonsclard. With all that in mind, I read through the source code and found an outrageous mistake. 

In addition to the boss' HP, Attack Power, and Defense Power, they actually have one additional standard parameter. That would be the time between receiving one instance of damage and the next. 

At the same time a boss receives damage, a counter is set for its invulnerability, during the specified VSync. For example, if the counter is set to 30, it will be invincible for approximately 0.5 seconds, and conversely, if it is set to 3 the boss will be damage-able after 0.05 seconds. 

And of course there's no memory available, and no reason to have these kinds of numbers as some easy-to-understand table, so naturally the whole thing was set in a special boss program one at a time, but the variable I set was a huge mistake.

(It would be tempting to say that it's not serious, but it really is. The "IDA address" orders are 3 bytes + the place where the data goes is 1 byte so the total is 4 bytes, but the IDA # variable is 2 bytes. It was incredibly important that we reduce the size by 2 bytes...otherwise there wouldn't be enough memory.) 

Although I don't remember the exact numbers well, I think the standard value was 30 (so, once every 0.5 seconds) while I faintly recall this one being 3. 

The rate of damage received was 10 times normal, so it died it extremely quickly."

—Iwasaki Hiromasa, "Game Developer Failure Teacher in Ys I & II"

The solution to Khonsclard's fight is to run towards its rocks rather than away from them; to chase its clockwise motion and bump along the sides of the boss' shell to damage it, thus staying right behind the boss' line of fire rather than in front of it. Of course that level of precision is extremely difficult with four-directional movement, so the player is likely to take damage while executing this strategy, but even when slightly below the intended the level their output exceeds Khonsclard's. In theory, the boss is meant to encourage the player to chase the backs of attacks rather than run from their fronts, which plays into the boss that follows. But in practice, Khonsclard is kind of a mess.

Khonsclard is made up of a scarlet core and a body of rocks levitating around it. Ordinarily, a player would conclude that a boss made up of a core surrounded by debris would have the core as their weak point. There's a good deal of precedent for this: the enemy ship in Star Castle, the Big Core in Gradius, and Mother Brain of Metroid. With Khonsclard, the solution is completely counterintuitive—the debris is the vulnerable part and the core deals damage, with the optimal strategy being to run multiple complete squares around its body. It's a perhaps-unfortunate reality that games can't just be internally consistent, they have to exist in relation to the world around them, and this is where Ys fails to take into account everything else that's out there. It's not exactly surprising that the battle is so forgettable when it plays out like this and ends in seconds.

Nonetheless, it could be worse. Khonsclard was just forgettable; what follows after is actively malicious.