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...