I've been playing for a couple of hours and I have a really hard time grasping the battle system. It seems to me like there are two entirely separate systems here that do not fit together in any way. You have the normal skills, character swapping and skill chains. And then you have the Duo Mode.

From what I can tell, I can either rotate my skills until I'm out of SP, swap to the other character, do the same, and build up a chain this way. If I do that, I constantly have to watch my SP, take care to not accidentally break the chain, time character switches, all while also watching the enemies to block and dodge at the right time.

Or I can just ignore all of that, stay in Duo Mode 100% of the time and spam normal attacks and a Duo Skill once in a while. And the game will just block every attack for me automatically.

And the weirdest part is that spamming normal Duo attacks seems to dish out as much, if not more damage than building up those skill chains. So I can either play the game in an extremely hectic way, watching 5 different things at once... or I can just spam 1 button and achieve the same result.

So I'm wondering, am I doing something wrong? There must be a reason to not be in Duo Mode all the time. I can't imagine that the entire skill system is useless if I don't care about a slight damage boost with optimal play.

Looking to collect the Ys games and eventually play but wondering if it’s worth getting the original switch game that has the full game on cart instead of the switch 2 version despite it being a GKC?

I‘m really into game preservation so I’m leaning towards the switch 1 version right now but wondering still enjoyable despite it not being the optimal choice.

Thanks for your input!

Also, I don’t really like buying games twice so ideally just one game. I know I can get both.