Years ago games were never easy for players to conquer. Everyone had to practice their skills a lot and to fail again and again in order to get a victory, of defeating a little monster.

Combat is never an easy piece. It is undoubtedly true. Though video games today are getting easier and easier, action game still belongs to a small number of players. But fortunately, we needn’t recite all the tricky command list in most times, and even newcomers can have fun with an entry level.

Adol Christin, a young adventurer with red hair in the Ys series, witnessed the changes of this trend for over 30 years. Developed by Nihon Falcom, this ARPG series stand out for its simple combat mechanisms.

Starting from the Ancient Ys Nation,, Adol has traveled over 10 areas of the world. In earlier series of Ys, a player only needs to control Adol run to hit the enemy (the “bump attack” system). Years later, Ys VI came with a three-dimensional game system and introduces the jump mechanism and the top-down view. The player could only attack or move in the combat, but the player had to avoid attacks from enemies and find a chance to attack. Ys VII introduced party system, stun meters, skills and a flash guard system. The series are keeping evolving and staying their own combat style.

Ys’s fast-paced combat systems are well-known for its simplicity. A player can get started with the system very quickly and enjoy fun within minutes. Details are polished well to give efficient feedback to players and to create a fluent and engaged experience. For boss fights, strategies and operations are more focused on providing an intense and challenging experience. The Ys series succeeded in creating different kinds of combat systems that are simple to learn but not that hard to master.

It is really a huge challenge to make such a combat system that has an appealing and engaging and is also easy to start with. Some designers tend to make the mechanisms more complicated to make a game challenging, but often mechanisms will look too frustrated for new players and make it harder to provide a fluent experience.

The first Ys title was very different from other games at that time. It led the trend of reducing game difficulty to provide a friendlier experience to players. The automatic attack system did benefit a lot without making the game too simple to conquer. Such design method is utilized in almost all the Ys series.

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, the latest Ys title, also experimented a lot on how to bring a more fluent and in-depth experience to players. The two mechanisms, flash guard and flash move, are introduced and act as an important role in the combat system. Inspired from similar concepts like “Witch Time” in Bayonetta, designers put more efforts on integrating these into existing mechanisms. With the help of stun bar, players have more chance to trigger the stunned state to attack enemies, and flash move/flash guard magnifies the benefit of the stun bar.

Different kinds of feedback play an important role to integrate all parts of the combat system. Quicker response to operations and appropriate feedback for different hit behaviors help a lot with this goal. For example, the Ys series chose to apply shorter stunned states to avoid it from interrupting the fluent fight experience; any obstacles that occludes the scene are hidden to reduce the possibility of interfering with fighting. A lot of details have been polished towards this unified goal, and they succeeded in achieving this goal.

No one will be interested in a game that is too hard to try. However, combat is never an easy piece. The Ys series are just great examples of keeping the balance between these two sides.