Ys isn’t the oldest JRPG property out there, but it’s one of them, and it’s also one of the most prolific. If you ignore all the re-releases and just concentrate on the main series, there is just one period where there was a substantial hiatus (1996-2002). Otherwise, the longest fans have had to wait for a new game to play has been roughly four years. Incidentally, one of those short droughts has just concluded, with Ys IX being released back in 2019. This new game, Ys X: Nordics, takes us to both land and sea, and for the most part, it offers exactly what you’d expect from Ys.
Ys X is actually Ys III, chronologically. The series protagonist, Adol, is a young fellow this time around, exploring the world for the first time on his way towards the grand adventures he’ll get up to in subsequent titles. For any series, there is a point where going back to earlier parts of the timeline to fill gaps in becomes necessary for the overall series continuity. Unfortunately, it isn’t really told particularly well in Ys X. Because Adol’s a mute character that you’re meant to drop your own interpretation over, he never really does anything to suggest that he’s a 17-year-old kid. He doesn’t make mistakes due to the impetuosity of youth. He’s no less brave, nor sure of himself, as he should be for that age. He fights just as well as in later games. Ys has never been the series you go to for rich narratives, but the developers are committed to making the series into the epic journey of one man and it was, perhaps, a mistake to start jumping around the timeline like this.
Essentially, setting the game in Adol’s youth doesn’t really achieve anything and while you could argue that some of its beats foreshadow what is to come in Adol’s career, it’s tenuous and there still doesn’t seem to be any reason for doing it. In fact, counter-intuitively, this game introduces some major character-building moments for Adol and because these are, for obvious reasons, never referred to in the subsequent games of the series (chronologically speaking), all the developers have done is undermine the authenticity of the character across the series. It is an unnecessary own goal of continuity breaking.
Putting aside the questionable decision to make a somewhat-prequel, Ys X follows the Ys formula very safely. The main “hook” this time is that Adol’s in “pirate” (more like Viking) territory, and finds himself magically connected by glowing handcuffs to a woman who just happens to also be a part of this “pirate” community. And so they set off on a journey to figure out how to unbind themselves, and end up helping a bunch of people along the way.
That sense of adventure is always core to the Ys experience, and Nordics does it particularly well. The world is filled with nooks and crannies to explore, and this time around you get a ship as well! This allows you to move from island to island and significantly expands the scope of the adventure, giving you a whole region to cruise your way around, and Nihon Falcom were not messing around with making this a tool for exploration. If you’re just following the quest markers you’re doing the ocean exploration a disservice because there are entire optional islands to discover, fishing to kick back with, treasure maps to follow, and questlines for various characters. It genuinely feels like the developers wanted to make this the centrepiece of the Ys X experience, and they’ve really done a good job of being comprehensive with that.
And, of course, there is plenty of ship-to-ship combat, too. Just give yourself time to get into the rhythms of this, because Ys X’s ship combat does something completely different for the series, to the point that it’s initially off-putting: It slows things down. An entire series that has been built on the fastest possible action gameplay for the genre actually feels sedate and downright tedious in the early moments. Over time you’ll start unlocking upgrades and abilities that will make the stuff that happens on the ocean more interesting and nuanced, but prepare to feel a massive contrast between what Ys offers on ground Vs. on the ocean at first.
The ground combat is as fast and flashy as ever, right from the start. You’ll be following the same basic formula of every Ys title to date, in that you’ll travel from some kind of hub (usually a town), across some open-ish space teaming with common enemies, before descending into a linear dungeon filled with more difficult enemies and a boss that will really test you. Combat is a button-mashy mix of regular attacks, specials and dodges, and no one is ever going to convince me that this series is nuanced. It can be challenging and will certainly test your skills on the higher difficulty setting, but then so does a SHMUP. No one’s going to say a SHUMP is a thinky, tactical genre either. The point is that the sheer pace of Ys X limits the depth of thought that you’ll be putting in as you bash away at the buttons.
To be more blunt about it, Ys X doesn’t have the intricate tactical combat system of a Tales of series. Nor does it demand patience and counter-attacking like Final Fantasy XVI or the FromSoftware titles do. These are all action RPGs, but Ys X makes the others look subtle and sedate. In this one, you bash things at extreme speed until they die, except for those brief moments where you scamper out of the way before they can hit you with their big attacks.
To help you with hitting things over the head, hard, Ys X has the team-based system of the two characters being bonded. Normally the AI will handle whichever one you’re not controlling, but there are special abilities that can leverage both characters together to do some particularly impressive damage. It also provides additional protection, and because of this, you’ll be relying on it heavily to see you through much of the game.
Outside of that combat, there is an impressive skill tree that allows you to tailor your characters, and therefore customise how they go about bashing things on the head. It’s not the most intricate skill tree you’ve ever seen, but it’s a nice addition that gives you just enough agency to get you thinking and experimenting. It also has the benefit of making the battles themselves explode in light and colour. During the quieter moments, Ys X looks like a fairly uncomplicated mid-budget anime JRPG, visually but jeepers does it look good in motion.
Ys and I will never be best friends. I love storytelling in my RPGs, and Ys is quite firmly committed to making me press buttons instead. More than ten games into the series and I still wish the developers did something, anything, to make Adol interesting enough to be a frontman that has more entries now than most of the absolute greats of fantasy literature. He’s no Thomas Covenant or Pug, that’s for sure. Still, despite this dispute between myself and the series, I can appreciate what so many others live and why this has become such a cult favourite over so many iterations. No other JRPG property does extreme-paced action as well as Ys, and with Ys X, that quality is supported with a sense of wonder and adventure in the exploration that makes it very difficult to put down.
