Preface bias on tastes in in Ys' and Kiseki/Trails because they are controversial these days.
Ys' - I love Oath & Origin, VI is alright, VII/Celceta/VIII I do not like and find them boring
Trails/Kiseki - I love them until Cold Steel which I feel was a mess, a mishap and CS4 blew the finale
Trails/Kiseki - I love them until Cold Steel which I feel was a mess, a mishap and CS4 blew the finale
Coming from CS4 and Ys VIII before that, my opinion of Falcom was not great. I'd picked up Ys' IX - Monstrum Nox - last year when it came out, but Falcom games had fallen from "day 1" to toss it in my backlog and play at some point for me. Cut to Covid-quarantine backlog catchup, and catching up on Link's Awakening a couple weeks ago, and that gave me a bit of a Ys' adventure feel (seriously, replace Link with Adol in that game and you have a Ys' story). So afterwards, I felt in the mood for some Ys' and it was time to finally play this for better or worse.
Turns out not only did I love Ys' IX, but it's given me faith in Falcom as a developer and writer again after some staleness. Now I'm looking forward to Hajimari no Kiseki again, whereas I was ambivalent about it a month ago.
Ys' IX is honestly more a spiritual new country entry of Trails than it is a Ys' game and this is going to piss some people off.
When Ys' changed from a fast paced single character action platformer arpg to a longer party based loot game with Ys' VII, it split a lot of fans, myself included. Ys' VIII tried to change once again by taking this new style of Ys' and making it really long and talky at 40+ hours and adding tower defense. To me while VIII was definitely influenced by Falcom's Trails of franchise, Ys' VIII still felt like a Ys' story and a Ys' adventure just with a whole lot of dialogue & cutscenes. To me the writing & story quality felt fairly similar to the rest of the Ys' games just a bit better written. But the core of the scenario/cast still felt like the dialogue/cutscenes were focused on giving Adol reasons to explore and hit things, not focused on providing story & character drama. As a result of the general style of Ys' plots & character writing, I've never found any of the Ys' stories or characters particularly memorable. They were good enough to service my enjoyment of slashing things but that was about it.
Ys' IX's writing quality is night & day from traditional Ys' writing.
Rather than the story being there to service the action and exploration. Ys' IX is a story & character drama first where the action and adventure is secondary and exist to service the character development drama & feels.
If you've played a Trails game, Ys' IX structurally plays almost exactly like one. It's a slow slice of life paced chapter-based story where you do slice of life sidequests to develop the setting, the NPCs and the main cast. Through the episodic questing hints of the political instability and magical/supernatural mysteries are dropped and those are slowly filled in while developing the cast, until in the endgame everything comes together and everything is connected and payoffs off satisfyingly.
The structure of the scenario with political and magical in a country that connect current events to past history is so similar in design to a Trails scenario, that they could have taken Adol out of this and just made it one of the Trails arcs for one of the smaller countries that they haven't covered and they almost wouldn't have to change a thing. You could describe Ys' IX's scenario as Adol wanders into a Trails of country. (although here it's mostly restricted to one city, but that's not that far from the Crossbell games though the scope here as a single game is smaller).
Scenario-wise I'd say the only things missing from your standard Trails country arc are a cast of villains that match up 1:1 with the heroes and that Ys' IX is slightly less epic in scope. In terms of world changing finales I'd put the scope and excitement somewhere between an FC game and trails SC game. Plot-wise Ys' IX's scenario even lines up mostly as a Trails FC and SC scenario all in one 40 hour game, but going into that is spoilerish.
So since the game is character drama and story based rather than combat/gameplay-based. How's the cast?
Great! It's a really good main rpg party cast that are likeable and interesting and all dealing with their own personal issues. They gel together well and by the end you'll walk away missing them. Been a while since I've played a jrpg with a good party cast like this.
The story itself is fairly good in jrpg terms too. It's intelligent and filled with smart characters who act in believable ways. They're generally less cliche which has always been one of Falcom's strengths. The characters, and even the support NPCs (who are very good & interesting characters as well) feel like actual people living in a real city instead of just videogame archetypes. There's also the kind of mysteries you'd expect from a Trails game and a good amount of twists in the endgame. The story overall is interesting and ends well.
By having an interesting story with a great developed cast and setting, Ys' IX became the first Ys' game ever that I cared about the story and wouldn't rather just be skipping cutscenes to get back to the action. In a lot of ways Ys' IX feels like a soft reboot of the franchise. It still has a lot of callbacks to the previous games, but it also feels like a fresh start for newcomers in establishing a character and world based story series. There's even some nice setups for future games in other regions.
To badly translate Dogi here talking about Ys IX's adventure compared to previous Ys' games:
Exploring mountains and oceans are nice, but this time, this might be a different kind of nice too
Ok, how's the gameplay? This is a Ys' game after all.
It's good. The game plays pretty similar to VIII and the last few party rock/paper/scissors based games. The main difference is that the dungeons have much better level design than ever before (at least since VII -> current). This is because the game gives the player traversal platforming abilities and as you get a new party member you gain their traversal ability. Then when you do the next dungeon it will be designed to focus on using that traversal ability as well as the previous ones you've gotten. It's not quite Zelda and there aren't puzzles and platforming that will have you scratch your head, but it's fun and mixes up the skill spam enough to make the dungeons the most fun they've been in years.
All the characters are fun to play as and each has a bunch of skills as usual. There's a solid amount of dungeons and throughout town there's little portals that if you walk into they'll turn into a 10-30 second battle right there with no loading if you just feel like jumping into the action (and you'll need to grind these a bit if you want to 100% the game).
Boss fights are solid. Each dungeon usually has a mid-boss and a final boss. There's some well designed ones including some cool 1 on 1 fights similar to a Vergil DMC fight (but not as good). I've always felt since VII that some occasional bosses have some questionable timing on the just guard/dodge, but that might just be me.
There's also the return of TOWER DEFENSE....yay :|
Well it's a bit better here. Not much, but a bit. It's better integrated into the actual plotline and it feels faster and easier maybe? Also I think there may be fewer missions total. Not sure on that. While I don't like tower defense at all in Ys' and feel like it's just thrown in because it's cheap to develop since there's no new assets and pads out the game length, I think Falcom could make the tower defense in Ys at least a little better by adding in a planning/building phase at the start where you can actually place decoys and other things where you want them.
I kept dying in a stupid mission near the end because even though I had like 4-5 decoys they were all automatically placed on one side of the base I was supposed to protect and a few groups of enemies would spawn on the other side and destroy the base in like 5 seconds before I could do anything. Well it turned out that if you fully max out the decoy upgrades you eventually have enough that it places them all around the base in 360 degrees, but if you could just place them yourself it'd be a better & more satisfying solution imo.
Assassin's Ys'?
Outside of the dungeons, bosses, tower defense, sidequesting and cutscenes, there's an Ubisoft-light sandbox city filled with collectibles to pick up and places to climb. The traversal abilities you get are a lot of fun and navigating around the city was a joy. I ended up 100%-ing the city (and basically the whole game)* just because it was so enjoyable collecting every blue feather. The mini-map is extra helpful too in showing all the landmarks and things to find.
Plus I want to give a shout out to the mini-map for making sure that you never miss a quest in the game. Coming from Trails and having to use spoiler-free wikis to make sure I still found all the hidden quests each chapter, this was nice. You can see the whole game world on the map and easily see all the sidequests at any time.
Compared to a modern ubigame sandbox, this is definitely about a decade behind in how basic it is, but hey, it's a fun little side thing and I haven't played any other Japanese game I can think of that tried to do the ubisoft sandbox thing, so it's fun and different.
*It's interesting looking at the trophy completion data for this game. 65% of players finished the whole 30-40 hour game and 30% did 100% of the content. For gaming in general that seems incredibly high and shows Falcom's fanbase are very dedicated.
The graphics are good in budget context. The environment is simple looking, but the characters look about as good as CS3/4 imo and better than past Ys games. The music is eh, alright. I feel Falcom has kind of phoned in CS4 & Ys' IX's osts. It's perfectly acceptable Ys' music but like CS4 there wasn't one standout track for me. Last Falcom game that I really loved some of the tracks was CS3 with the opening/final dungeon song and a few of the boss battle tracks. Ys' VIII also had a few great field tracks too. Maybe Hajimari no Kiseki will get their music back to the heights it used to be. That would be nice.
In the end, through a lot of Ys' IX, I was still thinking "this is a good game for what it's doing, but it still doesn't compare to Oath/Origins"
But after finishing it Ys' IX -Monstrum Nox-, I think it's my favorite Ys' game in the franchise. Though with a caveat that Oath/Origins still have better gameplay than it. This may not be all Ys' fan's cup of tea, but for me and how I felt about the last few entries, Ys' IX did the unthinkable. It made me actually care about the story, cast and world of a Ys' game. Heck it had me researching the world lore from the past games to get a better idea of how everything fit together politically. I thought Ys' IX hit all the notes and things I want out of a Trails entry better than the entirety of Cold Steel did and I thought the cast here was better than Cold Steel's cast. I also think this has a better story than CS.
Overall I went into Ys' IX with low expectations and burnt out on Falcom, not expecting to like another Ys' game again until they changed the formula back to Oath/Origins/VI style or something new, and unexpectedly came out of this game with my favorite Trails game since Ao no Kiseki/Trails of the Azure. If you like the Trails games, Ys' IX should be a nice treat. If you don't like Trails, but like the Ys' games, or don't want Ys' to be Trails...I have no idea if you will like this, you may even hate this.
It was exactly the kind of game I wanted from Falcom and it made me walk away with a smile.
Addendum on Trails, CS and faith in Falcom storytelling ability (no actual game spoilers):
Ys' IX really makes me feel like Falcom have always been good writers/scenario designers, but that with Cold Steel doing a story arc over four games and a ton of years was just beyond their scope and development got out of control and it became to much of a mess to steer the ship back on track. Ys' IX shows me that Kondo and his team still know how to write good tales and they haven't dulled their talent. It's not their best story/writing, but it's good and I'll take good with potential for really great again. Hopefully Hajimari no Kiseki reinforces this next month as well with another good story. If they are back to pulling off good tales when they're not doing four game arcs, then I just hope to all the gods out there that when they do Calvard next they stick to a two game storyline max to tell the tale.
