I haven’t played every game in the Ys series, but I did get to a few and I hope to play more. Ys is always an interesting series because they’re fairly standalone so the fact that it’s a sequel doesn’t really matter. All you need to know is that Adol is an adventurer who gets into some wacky world-ending shenanigans wherever he goes. I had a lot of fun with Ys 8, so I was pretty excited for more of it.

Let’s gooooooo!

Developer: Nihon Falcom
Publisher: NISA
Release date: February 2nd 2021 (PS4), July 6th 2021 (PC, Switch)
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4 (PC version played)
Genre: Action RPG

Ys IX features yet another of Adol’s adventures. He heads to Balduq, the prison city. It’s a pretty regular city, except it’s also a big prison facility in parts of it. Upon almost entering the city, Adol is arrested. Turns out he’s been involved in a suspicious amount of shipwrecks and finding (and then losing) legendary magical artifacts and allegedly saving the world from global threats and stuff. Seems some governments think Adol isn’t on the up and up (or even conspiring with sailors to cause shipwrecks). Adol soon decides to escape the prison, but as he’s shot by a lady called Aprilis, which transforms him into a Monstrum. This gives him a “Gift” and makes him stronger than a normal human, but forces him to fight in the Grimwald Nox, a parallel universe of sorts where monsters called Lemures try to break a crystal, alongside a few other Monstrums. So Adol ends up helping with that whole thing. He gets to know the other Monstrums, do side quests to help the city, and frequently invading the prison to find certain people or things inside (alongside investigating why the knights are handling a lot of the prison business and stuff). Turns out there’s some weird stuff going on in the prison, monsters that shouldn’t be there and such. Also there’s a strange amount of entrances into that prison hidden all over the place. Another weird thing is that, while Adol is doing all this Monstrum stuff… Another Adol is in prison, trying to find information for an external contact and also trying to find how to escape. Definitely a few questions in regards to that. Overall it’s a decent plot with a few mysteries, and some pretty satisfying twists and resolutions… right up until the very ending (after beating the final boss) which is resolved by literal deus ex machina. Not a great way to end it, but otherwise there’s a few interesting characters and character concepts here. Not a big fan of the villain but he’s not… horrible. Just kinda bland.

I will just mention this quickly, but why do the graphics suck so much? I had this on the best settings on PC and it looks awful. The characters look great, no problem there (though yeah animations outside of battle are less than impressive, even in cutscenes). The UI is fine. But these environments… am I looking at a PS3 game? I’m playing this on a pretty solid PC, I shouldn’t be able to count the massive pixels on the wall textures from a distance. The environments are so square and cheap-feeling. I don’t remember 8 looking quite as bad even on Switch, though that might be because of the environment being more naturalistic and mystical, so it just looked better because of that maybe? Rather than being largely stuck in a boring grey town? Who knows. All I know is that these textures and very square environments would be impressive on the PS2.

So the game flow is pretty simple. In-between story missions, you get sidequests. Doing sidequests (and also beating enemies in the city from small dark points) give you Nox points. Nox points can be converted to twilight shards, but more importantly, when you get 100 you spawn a portal to the Grimwald Nox. Defeating the battle in there unlocks an area of the city for you, where you can go to objective markers to further the story, or get more sidequests and shops. There’s also some parts of town that may get another Grimwald Nox portal to unlock small, mostly-optional parts of town, so collecting more Nox. Once you’ve done all the sidequests you want (most are only valid before you progress the story, so you should try and finish them all before advancing the plot), you advance the plot whenever you want. And that’s about it. Just go to objective markers and gather Nox to progress. That’s about it.

In town you have several things you can do. There’s 120 blue petals to find and give to a random NPC. There’s 13 recipes to find and make to give to a nun at the church. There’s shops all over the place which sell things of a variety of usefulness. Weapons and armor are the most useful ones of course. Weapons can be powered up if you have materials and money. A fully powered-up weapon is always weaker than the next weapon down the line, which is good to note. A few NPCs have their own function. One checks how many landmarks you found and gives you rewards based on that. One does the same for map percentage, another the same for graffiti found. If you buy presents from stores, you can go to the Dandelion (the bar you’re using as a hideout) and find an NPC to give it to, which makes them more useful during Grimwald Nox battles. A fun thing is that you get special powers both in town and in dungeons for movement, and unlock more as you get access to more Monstrums. Adol can teleport dash to certain specific points. Catgirl lets you run up walls. Hawk lets you glide. Anemona gives you detective vision so you can find invisible secrets. And so on. Each power enables you to find certain things in towns that you couldn’t normally reach. There’s a bunch of stuff to find around town. I will say some powers are less useful than others. The bull’s power is used, like, twice in town, and the Renegade’s is used I think 3 times, but you’re constantly running up walls and gliding and detective visioning and even doing the teleport dash thing.

Combat is kind of what you’d expect from an action RPG, and more specifically it’s very close to how it worked in Ys 8. You can move around pretty freely, and with the run and dash (to avoid attacks) and even some of the Gifts (Adol can teleport dash to a locked-on enemy if it’s close enough) you have lots of freedom of movement. You have an air combo and a ground combo. You can also charge a stronger attack. Holding R and pressing any of the face buttons does a special attack. This costs SP (which doesn’t replenish if you switch characters, it just replenishes over time or with certain conditions), and you can spam these out pretty easily if you have lots of SP. Dashing as an attack is just about to hit you initiates Flash Move, which makes you move faster and enemies move slower, which gives you a ton of extra time to attack, and makes you invincible for a bit. Pressing R as an attack is hitting you does a Flash Guard, which stops the damage, refills your SP and it guarantees crits for a bit. A weird thing with how both those systems work is that you can flash move to avoid an attack, and the slowed down enemy gives you a long window to also flash guard. And because you probably have a tendency to do a skill after doing a flash move, which requires pressing R, it frequently just… happens. You can ruin the shit out of enemies very easily with that. The last big combat element is the boost meter. This goes up as you hit shit. When it’s at least halfway, you can BOOST. This makes you stronger, faster, more resilient, recovers HP overtime. While you’re boosted, you can press L and R to launch an Extra skill, basically a big powerful attack that hits a decent radius around you, which is very useful. You can also pause anytime to use healing items, yay.

So combat is decently fun. Being able to switch characters on the fly is cool. Flash Move and Flash Guard do sometimes make things a bit easy, but they’re fun. One thing compared to Ys 8 is that I find the combat a bit too loose. Ys 8’s combat was a bit loose already, but this one is a bit more loose and I find most of the special attacks kinda useless compared to Adol’s repeated stabs. I’d say a lot of it feels like it kinda lacks impact, a lot of enemies don’t even react to getting hit, you just see the damage number and that’s kinda that. It’s fun, it could be a bit more fun if there was a bit more strategy to the battles beyond “Flash Move and Flash Guard then mash the stabby attack a bunch to win, with occasional boosting and EXTRA skills”.

Fighting in the Grimwald Nox is very similar to normal battles, but you’re defending a crystal thing. Outside of the Grimwald Nox, talking to Dogi allows you to power up different things for these battles. There’s light poles that draw the attention of monsters away from the main crystal, there’s a cannon you can hit that stuns enemies, there’s an auto-gun that shoots gravity bullets and there’s a magic circle that I think slows down enemies within it. With enough materials you can make all of these stronger. There’s portals that pop up which enemies will spawn from then they go to either the main crystal or the decoys to break them. Your job is to kill every enemy before the crystal is broken. This works in waves, so a bunch of portals appear at first, when you kill all the enemies from each it goes to the next wave. Some later missions have extra surprise portals that appear in a usually inconvenient spot. You get points based on a few things, namely killing everything, not getting your crystal or decoys too damaged, and using extra skills. Enough points gives you a better rank, which gives you better rewards. These battles are a bit meh overall, like a less involved version of the defense battles from 8, it’s a lot more freeform since portals can be anywhere around the crystal, but the enemies are also WAY easier to beat. Even the bosses are pretty much just jokes. I S ranked all of these on my first try. Also NPCs that work at the Dandelion provide support… it’s not noticeable, there’s basically a cooldown for them to do… things. Who knows. For variety, there’s missions where you gotta go around breaking the enemies’ crystals… these are pretty lame. Overall, I think you wouldn’t be losing much by not having the Grimwald Nox stuff. If going to one of the portal things and just spending 100 Nox to remove it wouldn’t feel like I was missing something really. It’s only even relevant plot wise at the end when you go to the final boss’ lair.

There’s not much to powering up your party. You get EXP and level up when you have enough. Active party members get more EXP. You need so much more EXP at higher levels though that other characters catch up to you weirdly fast. I noticed that because at some point late game I decided I’d use all my tempest elixirs (one level each) on Adol, so I just gained 9 levels and was way ahead of everyone else… but a dungeon later, all my other characters were caught up. Those 9 extra levels didn’t even end up mattering. Other than this, there’s equipment. 1 weapon slot, 1 armor slot and 2 accessory slots. There’s all sorts of accessories, with the best ones being ones that improved based on things you do (like powering up based on how many enemies you kill). There’s also the skills. You can equip up to 4 skills per character, and hitting things with skills make them stronger. Yay. And there’s Sacraments. There’s a few you can just buy, but eventually an NPC in the Dandelion will build some if you bring him the required materials. Some of them have very minimal use, some are pretty great like reducing EXTRA skill boost gauge usage by half which just breaks battles even moreso since you can boost way more, and there’s the one that makes you run WAY faster making combat even more freeform. Wouldn’t mind some more systems.

And that’s really about it for this game.

Overall

I was weirdly negative in the review, but on the overall I did like the game. I’m just pretty sure I liked 8 more.

The combat is fast and pretty fun, but way too easy and it lacks impact a bit. Specifically, I’d say the issue is that the very first special attack Adol starts with is so good you can kinda spam it to victory through the whole game. I didn’t find much use for other attacks. I don’t recall if 8 was like that, it’s been a while since I played it.

Otherwise there’s a good amount of stuff to do if you like sidequests (and honestly you kinda have to do them to advance the story faster), and there’s a few things you can find that are kinda game-long sidequests as well like the blue petals and landmarks and graffiti. It lasts a good 25-ish hours so it’s a decent length. I like some of the inside joke stuff like the whole reason for Adol to be in prison, but in the end the story is still fine for newcomers.

I do recommend this game, but I’d recommend getting some of the other Ys games first.