I completed the game in 2:34:28 according to the game.
The game is very big, and quite polished, I did not expect even the NPCs in towns would thank me if I visited them again after getting the last ingredient. The picture while the ending text is scrolling is specially nice. All the bosses are unique too, overall there's quite enough content to fill this big world, it's not bloated.
I used the map. I really like that the world is completely open and I assume you can get the 6 first ingredients in any order even if I got them in order, that or that there's a natural path don't matter and are not and are never the question.
I've not played Ys on NES so I don't know if it feels like playing Ys on NES but I've played Ys and I've played NES games and then I know it totally feels like playing a NES game and it totally feels like playing Ys, except with a much more cool storyline, I love the cheesecake storyline, and given that one is not that long this one isn't even much shorter. The game looks very good, I specially like the interface part, the mages when they're black and the very first enemies but when they're I think something like brown or orange. The soundtrack is specially nice too.
The game controls perfectly and fighting and getting stronger feels good, the dungeons feel distinct enough in part thanks to the seven different bosses. What you get to find in chests at least sometimes matters and unlocking the different key items and getting back to smash all the walls I had taken notes of (I was wondering whether I missed the item to smash the walls possibly even in the very beginning for a while), going through the invisible monsters before finding the goggles was fun and so were all the boss fights.
I reached the lvl cap quite early, before the 5th boss. The difficulty was overall perfectly fine in the context, the boss fights were almost too lethal, super hard to dodge and easier to bruteforce with one of the sides winning in ten seconds but that's much better this way than the opposite.
So far I could never find real cream cheese and always ended replacing it by Mascarpone in my cheesecakes. The recipe I'm using only uses half a lemon as fruit, no sauce, I cooked one just last week.