YMMV / Ys Origin

• Breather Level: The fifth area, "The Blighted Blood" - while not remotely "easy", it's at least easier than the previous area "The Silent Sands", and even the one before that. There are definitely fast, hard-hitting enemies around, but unlike The Silent Sands, The Blighted Blood doesn't throw things like quicksand, moving spike pillars, health-draining flies, slippery floors or Khonsclard. As for the area's boss, depending on the difficulty chosen at the start of the game and the protagonists' Character Level, it either provides a good challenge or turns out to be one of the easiest bosses in Ys Origin; The Claw in particular makes extremely short work of Pictimos with Boost and charged Thunder Claws.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Epona gets appreciation for her enthusiastic and snarky personality with a sharp tongue. Her interactions with Hugo Fact for many players are a highlight of the non-Claw paths.
• Game-Breaker: Hugo has a few tricks that gives him an advantage compared to Yunica Tovah and The Claw.
  • Hugo's "Force Shield" grants a temporary barrier that can absorb one hit when uncharged and two hits when charged. This gives players plenty of room for errors that neither Yunica or The Claw have since they have to time their skills' invincibility frames. While there are some downsides to Force Shield such as its high Mana cost and the ability to interfere with Hugo's normal magic shots, the damage it can negate more than makes up for it.
  • Hugo's "Boost Mode" is the only one that allows him to move during its animation, making it useful in ensuring that he's in a safe spot after the invincibility frames end.
• Moral Event Horizon: Members of the Clan of Darkness have a knack at this in Ys Origin.
  • During Hugo's route, Dalles not only petrifies his Implied Love Interest Epona, but also shatters her to pieces in front of him.
  • In Yunica's route, Zava kills Roy right in front of her.
• Obvious Judas: A Flashback in Hugo's route shows that Cain Fact groomed Hugo to be disloyal to the twin goddesses, telling him that power is everything and played on his Inferiority Superiority Complex towards his older brother Toal Fact. Even if players decided to skip Hugo's route, The Claw's/Toal's route indicates that Cain somehow knew of his oldest son's survival and Fake Defection to the Darklings before the search party deduced it themselves. This makes The Reveal of Cain being the True Final Boss in Toal's route less surprising.
• Porting Disaster: Both releases on the PlayStation 4 and Play Station Vita by Dotemu.
  • For the former, the game came with a lot of glitches that weren't present in the original PC version during launch, from instant game crashes to persistent frame rate and sound issues, with certain boss fights being plagued by these glitches. Thankfully, Dotemu fixed most of these problems with patches, but some issues remain.
  • Meanwhile, the Vita port was free from the bugs seens in the initial PlayStation 4 release, but still suffered from lower frame rates, missing sound effects, unresponsive controls and long loading times post-launch. Speaking of frame rates, some boss fights in the Vita version, particularly one against Zava, can drop to single digits as a result of her on-screen attacks, turning the game into an unplayable slideshow. In fact, when playing as The Claw and getting to the fight against the True Final Boss, the present issues may wind up turning the game into an Unwinnable scenario. Unlike the PlayStation 4 version, Dotemu has yet to release a patch to fix the Vita version.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The cleria found in treasure chests are needed to upgrade your sole weapon. They look like they're optional, but give such huge damage boosts that they are actually required to make some Boss fights managable; the best example is Gelaldy, where you need to remove his hands by spinning the cogs holding them to even damage him. With the weapon on lv. 4 like intended, you can pretty well get them off on one round for each arm. With a lv.3 weapon? About 3 rounds each. This makes battles like these way more tedious and a lot harder than it should be. Missed one? Better check every floor again.
• That One Boss:
  • If you're gunning for the "Don't Start What You Can't Finish" achievement, Yunica's first fight against Kishigal becomes this. He's notoriously fast and starts the fight by straight up shrinking the playing field with two walls of ice pillars that will damage Yunica if touched. You won't be able to escape his attacks properly unless you're constantly dashing around the arena, and even then his attacks are hard to avoid, especially his Limit Break where he summons a very fast ice dragon to chase Yunica. To make things worse, Yunica doesn't have Hugo's advantage of a wind magic that can negate damage for her, which makes the fight a massive test of your skills with her. The fact that you only have to take out half of Kishigal's life doesn't serve as much of a consolation when you're faced with the challenge of his speed and strength.
  • Khonsclard, boss of the Silent Sands section, makes for a frantic fight. The fight happens on a pool of quicksand that pulls to the boss' direction, and you have to destroy its buds to expose the main flower for a few seconds so you can get a few hits in, all while avoiding what amounts to be a projectile storm coming from the main plant. On Easy and Normal, this won't be too much of a hassle, but on Hard and Nightmare, this becomes more than a challenge where you will struggle to keep yourself alive. This is far more aggravating when playing as Toal/The Claw, as his mob area control (which is important when it comes to taking multiple buds down at once) is terrible compared to Yunica or Hugo unless he's on Boost Mode, often forcing you to play smart even on lower difficulties.
• That One Level: The Claw's version of the "Devil's Corridor", which requires him to use Boost Mode in order to avoid taking damage. Unfortunately, Nightmare difficulty cuts down the duration of Boost Mode, meaning The Claw has to spend most of the trip in his normal form. Defeating all the red enemies in one attempt becomes a Luck-Based Mission because this character will be relying on enemy herb drops to stay alive as his Thunder Claw won't be able to heal him quicker than the Devil's Corridor can damage him.
  • Part of the Shifting Sands, specifically, just after obtaining the Silver Chimes, because then the game introduces Moz, tiny Rhinoceros beetles, that deal as much damage as everything else, take as much damage as everything else... and are significantly faster than you, while also stunlocking you like everything else. Until you figure out how to deal with them, it's not uncommon to lose loads of health trying to get past them.