First impressions are important, and Ys Seven has done well in that respect.
Ys Seven starts off shortly after a cease-fire order between two warring territories. Two adventurers from Europe (Adol and Dogi) have been tasked to venture out into the once-enemy territory. Naturally, having been enemies in recent past, Adol and Dogi aren't quite welcomed by higher-ups and the military. A recent earthquake results in the pair, being adventurers, to spot anything that the military might have missed, whereupon the pair find a magical stone that grants Adol a special power and the adventures begin.
The game, I find, can range from quite easy, when fighting the monsters that can be found regularly along the paths, to rather challenging, when fighting bosses. My first impression from the first boss was "Whoa, this is overwhelming." The first boss has over 4,000 HP and on average the pair dealt about 10 damage per hit, so naturally this was going to be a long fight. Unfortunately, even with 3 Iko extracts (which recover 50 HP), I was still unable to defeat the boss with both characters alive (when Adol went down, it still had about 1,500 HP, so I gave up). The lesson I learned was that upgrading your equipment is highly necessary for boss fights. Judging the difficulty of bosses by that of the regular monsters outside is a very big mistake.
Developing a sense of strategy depending on what attack the boss uses will also help immensely in this game. Fortunately, the bosses will give some sort of sign (often blinking) to indicate when they're about to initiate some sort of special attack to help get the player ready. Unsuspecting players (or those unfortunate enough to wind up in the path of the attacks, such as myself) will find themselves taking significant amounts of damage.
On the up side, combat is very fast-paced and you can dash around on the map to get around quickly (and can be used to avoid unnecessary fights). Upon defeating enemies, they will drop a myriad of different objects (mostly just cash, but items drop quite frequently as well). Items from monsters (as well as plants, springs and ore deposits found distributed amongst the maps) can be used during synthesis at shops to create weapons, armour and accessories that tend to be stronger than those you can purchase from the shop and also tend to be cheaper (gold-wise). In other words, it is recommended to check what ingredients are necessary to create certain items first before deciding which ones to sell off.
The game appears to be a bit more strict on item-holding than most other RPGs. Players who are used to playing games like Final Fantasy or even the Tales of series, in which players can hold 99 or 15 of every item respectively, may find themselves much more confined in Ys Seven. While ingredients still allow for large quantities to be held, players cannot hold many healing items (personally, I thought that it was a bug when I tried to perform synthesis to make more healing items since I had more than enough ingredients).
On the plus side, outside of boss fights, if you simply stand still, your HP will regenerate to full anyways (and there are healing stones outside of boss areas, which I'll touch on in the next paragraph), so you can hack away without a care in the world about your HP when fighting regulars and save those important healing items for the boss to come.
Healing stones can be found sparsely throughout the region, which, as you should be able to guess, heals the entire party. Healing stones should be taken as a warning to players as a "Save NOW!" message, as they are always found before a boss (or a town).
The save system is highly generous. Any time you can open your menu, you can save. In other words, so long as you're not in the middle of a fight. While this is nice, since it means if you're on the go, you can just save and get right back to the game, it also makes it mandatory for the player to know when to save (which shouldn't be difficult with the healing stones where they can be found, but players that might ignore the stones may find themselves needing to go through an entire area again to get back the items and/or experience gained up to that point).
For players partial to original vocals in games, fortunately, while this game doesn't have an option to switch between Japanese and English audio, it does have the option to turn off vocals completely. As far as I can tell, vocals are only used during battles anyways, so turning them off doesn't mean missing out on anything significant.
One small thing that bothers me is the animation. Most 3D games will use the system to animate certain types of actions (in the case of games still using 2D graphics for characters, usually a set of sprites are used for animation) such as standing and squatting or getting off of a bed. Ys Seven doesn't do that. Instead, the engine simply fades in and out sprites that are already in the desired position.
Another small gripe that I have with the game is that Adol never actually talks. At times, Dogi will do most of the talking for Adol; but in others, where Adol is actually talking, you'll simply receive messages that say things like "Adol explained the situation." or "Adol thanked Tia." Considering the player has no control over Adol's appearance / voice / personality / gender / etc., there's really no reason I can see for doing this. It almost makes Adol seem like this figment of the imagination that you could almost ignore save for the fact that he's the main character.
Overall, a very good game that I will continue to play.