The Ys series has been around the block for quite some time, with the first game hitting the scene at around the same time as the original Legend of Zelda game. Among Nihon Falcom’s pantheon, it’s endured as their most steady franchise with over 35 years of history and iteration under its belt. Over those years, it’s changed and grown in accordance with changes in technology and creative culture. Today, Ys’s numbered entries reach double digits as Adol Christin’s latest journey kicks off with Ys X: Nordics.
Adol Christin Stars in “Nautical Nonsense”
Some explanation for newcomers: Ys is a series that stars the redheaded adventure extraordinaire Adol Christin. Each game chronicles his journeys and trials through various locations across his world, with each story being a “travelogue” he created over the span of his life. Adol’s tales oftentimes feature world-ending plots, mystical weapons that he is sure to inexplicably lose later, and shipwrecks aplenty. Part of the appeal of the series is the sense of myth that surrounds Adol, with his dialogue often being picked by the player or implied through narration. He’s a silent protagonist, but he’s as good as silent protagonists can really get in my eyes. Adol’s stories are additionally told out of chronological order, and this part is especially important for Nordics.
After Ys IX: Monstrum Nox saw Adol at his oldest and most accomplished, Ys X: Nordics dramatically rewinds the clock to when he’s a spry and less-experienced 17-year-old. Nordics picks up shortly after the events of his adventure throughout Esteria and the floating land of Ys depicted in Ys I&II (thus making Nordics his third adventure chronologically), but before the events of Memories of Celceta. Adol, his trusty wall-smashing companion Dogi, and Dr. Flair (from Ys II) are taking a boat across the sea towards the land of Celceta, but Adol’s notoriously awful luck with boats catches up with him before long. It doesn’t sink this time, but rather it’s raided by pirates calling themselves Normans. Their course towards Celceta is derailed as they find themselves effectively stranded in Carnac, a bustling island part of a vast archipelago called Obelia Gulf.
One of the leaders of Normans is a girl named Karja Balta, effectively considered the Normans’ “princess” and daughter of the head of the Balta Seaforce. After butting heads with Adol a few times, they are inexplicably linked by a mysterious chain made out of Mana. Mana is the only thing capable of permanently killing the local immortal infestation called Griegr, and Adol is bestowed his own Mana of fire through a strange seashell harboring the voice of a captured woman named Lila. After meeting some of the local townsfolk and getting to know them, Carnac is quickly brought to smoldering ruins as it is raided by an especially large pack of Griegr who kidnap its civilians. After making a narrow escape on a shabby boat called the Sandras, Adol and Karja are off to find answers about just what the heck is going on.
If that sounded like a lot, it is. This is only a small taste, but part of what makes Ys X: Nordics’ plot so great is its excellent sense of forward momentum. We’d be here all day if I talked about every moving part of the story, but I want to specifically praise the first chapter for giving it such a great running start. Ys X’s chapters aren’t short and the story is very dense with detail and developments happening here, there, and everywhere, but I was never once left with the sense that things were ineffectively spinning their wheels. After Ys IX mostly borrowed a very formulaic chapter structure and dodged important questions it set its player up for until its endgame, Nordics takes the opposite approach and makes the answers feel like mysteries themselves.
I want to spoil as little as possible because plot revelations dramatically enhance the story’s sense of drama and weight. Despite having plenty of mythology and fantasy, what I have to praise most about Ys X is that the story feels very personal and grounded. Each character who joins and contributes to the main story has their own unique hangups and ideological clashes, leaving room for lots of chemical reaction as things progress and escalate. While Nordics is an overall very optimistic story, I also appreciate how many of their personal endings aren’t so clean-cut.
Youth and the Future
The characters in Ys X: Nordics are broadly quite good, but I want to give special highlight to Karja Balta. At first I was skeptical on how well a story centered around two party members instead of the typical six of the post-Ys Seven era would fare, but Karja and Adol’s dynamic might just be the single best the series has ever seen. This is thanks to Karja’s incredible sense of energy that wonderfully contrasts and compliments Adol’s. Karja is cutthroat in her honesty and has a real “let’s get this done now” mentality that means she rarely ever sits on the sidelines, always adding her own dialogue to spice up the story’s sense of flow. Her rapport with Adol also heavily contributes to her character development and growth, and while there are vague suggestions of romance, it’s never so overt as to cloud their sense of brotherhood. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but she may just topple Dana from Ys VIII as my favorite overall Ys heroine.
The residents of Carnac and various inhabitants of Obelia Gulf are no slouches either, especially the Youth Brigade who are introduced early on. Adol being 17 again isn’t for show, as youth and the trials of growing into an adult are an important talking point throughout Nordics’s runtime. There’s Grenn, the wannabe hotshot with little confidence, often taking reckless actions simply to prove his sense of worth. There’s also Cruz, a young man with a passion for boats who feels stuck in his family business by his overbearing father. We also have Rafe, a more lowkey man who keeps secrets and isn’t entirely honest about his goings-on because of his own family issues. We have other characters as well like Rosa and Mirabel, who are additionally struggling to uphold their family’s values amidst changes in themselves and the world at large.
Their stories are simple, but I think simple was the right call since they’re not formal party members like Adol and Karja. Most importantly is that they have satisfying conclusions and are relatable. I’ve also felt stuck riding down a path that wasn’t meant for me like Cruz. I’ve also felt unconfident and made stupid choices because of it like Grenn. I haven’t even gotten to the entirely optional characters, but suffice it to say that they do a great job of further exploring the themes and ideas behind the main happenings of Ys X.
Like in VIII and IX before it, the player has to do quite a bit of exploring and side content to see all of what the story has to offer. I think it’s more fun that way since it adds to the fantasy of Adol’s “adventure”. Seeing the conclusions to character arcs will involve gifting them items and doing lots of side quests to get to know them better. I’m glad they’ve kept this format, as I think it fits Ys’s exploration angle very well.
Villains of Yore
Villains in the Ys series are usually interesting because of how little of the screentime they tend to take up, and sometimes there may not be a true villain at all. Dark Fact is one of the most iconic villains in the series, but he’s in Ys I for all of two minutes (or however long it takes for the player to beat him). This is why it really surprised me when I came across The Trident, Ys X: Nordics’ group of Griegr villains. Not only do they take up a significant portion of screentime, but their actions throughout the plot will pretty much always incur significant changes to the goals and motivations of the characters. Early on, the appearance of one Trident member named Odr concludes with Adol and Karja getting thoroughly thrashed, and Adol stricken with something that forces him to act in a certain way throughout the story.
I don’t want to spoil any of it, as they truly are the catalyst for some of the greatest scenes in the whole story. There’s a specific moment in the back half of the game involving Adol that I might hail as my single favorite moment in the entire series thus far, and the Trident is the catalyst for it. It helps that even outside of this, they’re entertaining for the ways they chew up the scenery and the questions they pose about the state of existence. How does someone’s perspective change when they have immortality? What things do they value, and by extension what is it that they lack innately? Those are open-ended questions that make them fascinating to think about even after the story’s conclusion.
Overall, I loved the story of Ys X: Nordics. It’s one of the very best in the whole series, and in some ways it might even set a new standard for it. It has spot-on theming, and Falcom’s typical isms of detailed worldbuilding and politics are used to great effect to enhance its emotional talking points. When details about the state of affairs outside of Obelia Gulf are brought up, it’s never without purpose. Nordics has a lot to say and most tellingly it gives itself the time it needs to do so, and by the time I reached the credits, I couldn’t have been more satisfied with it.
Don’t Rock the Boat, Baby
Adol Christin and boats get along about as well and oil and fire, but he’s got his boating license this time around. The big new feature to the core gameplay loop of Ys X: Nordics is the addition of traveling across a vast sea with your ship: the Sandras. It’s not quite an open world but it does provide a degree of freedom. As you sail, you can collect driftwood, stop to fish (using the same minigame as in Ys VIII), ride wind currents to pick up speed, and shoot down obstacles with your cannonballs. In terms of exploring the seas, one might be tempted to say this is Ys’s take on The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, but in practice it’s really just Ys with an old-school RPG world map. Still, it was fun seeing all of the nooks and crannies I could discover, made all the better by the surprising number of optional islands there were to discover. It’s a beefy game, but it never felt bloated either.
The main draw of sea exploration is maritime combat, where you’ll load up the Sandras’s various artilleries and do battle with the Griegr’s various fleets to reclaim occupied areas or to progress the story. Sea battles are slow-moving and decisive to contrast the more fast-paced and frantic land gameplay. The Sandras moves and turns slowly, and firing is oftentimes rather slow. But with some good timing and positioning, you can shoot down ships in an instant. There are also special kinds of firing ammo, such as ice cannonballs that slow enemy ships, fire cannonballs that set them ablaze, homing missiles, and missiles that quickly destroy an enemy’s defenses. There are also EX Armaments, especially powerful weapons that you can only equip one of at a time. These can range from a close-range but deadly cannon fire, to a giant laser that tears through the opposition but takes forever to charge. If all else fails, you can embrace your inner Ys I and ram into them.
Although the Sandras may start off as nothing short of a total piece of junk, in time it will become strong as you invest upgrades and collectible items into it. Upgrading stats and weapons over time is an absolute necessity to winning sea battles, lest you want to play the true Adol Christin simulator—constantly getting your boat sunk. Overall, it’s good fun, and a better supplement to the main gameplay compared to the tower defense sections seen in Ys VIII and IX. They’re not as frequent as those were, and sending enemies to a one-way trip to Davy Jones’s locker never got boring. The lategame Recapture missions in particular were a lot of fun, as stronger enemy ships and longer runtimes meant that rationing ammo accordingly was crucial to survival.
Shield Brothers and Landlubbers
The land-based gameplay in Ys X: Nordics is an overhaul of the party-based gameplay seen in the series’s most recent outings. To give a quick rundown: party-based Ys is focused on delivering fast-paced, simple gameplay where you can switch between characters and hack and slash your way through truckloads of enemies with Skill attacks and good timing on both blocking and dodging. Skill attacks are a large variety of attacks learned throughout the game through hitting certain requirements and leveling up. Each Skill has an associated Skill cost pulled from your SP (Skill Point) meter, with the strongest skills dealing larger amounts of damage and having more potent effects. Skill Points can be restored simply by attacking or blocking. Ys X uses a version of this system, and this time around Adol and Karja have their own individual SP meters for their own skills rather than a shared meter among party members like in the past. However, they can also join up in Duo Mode, allowing them to deal higher damage and unleash Duo Skills, which are far more devastating than solo Skills.
I would say that the biggest change to combat, even outside of having only two characters instead of six, is made to player defense. Flash Move and Flash Guard (perfectly timed dodges and guards that made you briefly invulnerable and granted bonuses) are now firmly a thing of the past, in their place we have somewhat more conventional guarding and dodging systems. Taking a page out of Metal Gear Rising’s handbooks, enemy attacks will flash a certain color when they’re about to unleash powerful attacks. Attacks that flash blue are to be dodged, which will be triggered automatically so long as the player is dashing. Attacks that flash red are called Power Attacks, which must be blocked by both Adol and Karja using Duo Mode. If one party is member is dead, Duo Mode is dead until the player goes to revive them (which doesn’t need an item, you just need to hold a button until they’re back on their feet).
The next big change comes in the form of the Revenge Gauge, a gauge that multiplies damage dealt by Duo Skills. As guarding has been changed to a more conventional parry, each successful parry will refill the Revenge Gauge little by little. While it starts at a relatively modest 2x damage multiplier, finding various upgrades and leveling up will eventually bring it up to a nearly 20x multiplier. This then leads to a degree of choice—do you save your multiplier for a big enemy, or do you expend it to wipe out multiple smaller enemies in a single fell swoop? It can be incredibly satisfying to watch enemies get positively vaporized after I built up a big multiplier and watched as my damage numbers reached high quadruple digits.
The last change I want to talk about is one made to healing. In Ys VIII and IX, you were able to heal by simply going into the pause menu and consuming all of the revival items or healing items you could ever need. It sucked out some of the tension in battle, as I carried so many items at once that getting hit never really felt all that punishing. Ys X does away with this, instead returning to the limited heals system seen in Ys Seven. You’re limited by the number of bottles you carry, more of which can only be found by exploring appropriately. If you play on Inferno Mode like I did, these bottles are single use and can never be refilled after you use them the one time. The only way to heal otherwise is through lunch boxes which passively restore HP over time, so playing carefully is still necessary in getting some HP back.
All told, these changes make for a less frantic but more considered combat system. I loved it to bits and think it easily exceeds the combat present in VIII and IX thanks to higher overall difficulty and more regularly reactive mechanics. It strikes a good balance between some of the older games and the newer party-based titles, even if it leans more towards the newer games. While finding strategies is still possible, it never felt like I was able to outright cheat things like in some of the party-based games. If this is the combat basis moving forward, I’m more than satisfied. All the better is that these changes prop up what are, in my view, easily the best boss fights in series history. They’re epic in presentation, challenging, and have memorable setpieces that make them clearly stick out in my mind.
Adventuring
Land exploration in Ys X: Nordics is a fairly straightforward evolution of movement and exploration in Ys IX. Monstrum Gifts have instead been replaced by Mana Tools, various gadgets you find throughout your journey that give you specific abilities to traverse and explore your environment. Some of them feel like rethought versions of the Monstrum Gifts from Ys IX. Mana String is somewhat similar to Crimson Line, allowing you to close distances with enemies and zip across objects in the environment, though it’s more like a grappling hook. There’s a greater sense of flow, momentum, and weight to it, but the idea and application is still broadly the same. There’s also Mana Vision, similar to Third Eye from the previous game, allowing you to see hidden items, switches, and so forth.
We also have some brand new traversal abilities, such as the Mana Ride. At the press of a button, you can hitch a ride on a hoverboard and zoom over water and hazardous terrain, and you can even pick up lots of speed when heading downhill. It can feel pretty good chaining movements between swinging like Spider-Man and zooming along the map at high speeds. You also have the ability to slow time, which has lots of different applications throughout the game. Adol can also burn away wooden obstacles, while Karja can create platforms by freezing water.
The overall level design supports all of these abilities very well. It’s no Zelda, but the Mana Tools provide a great sense of kinesis to the environment. It’s as if the game transforms into Indiana Jones: The RPG while exploring dungeons and environments, and stopping to collect loot and cover all my bases in the environment came naturally to me. Simple-but-fun exploration is one of the things Ys does best, and it’s no different here.
Visuals
I’m of two minds on the visuals of Ys X: Nordics. On one hand, it’s the most modern and lovely Ys has ever looked. Adol and company are modeled splendidly, with a slight cel-shading effect added to their models to give it some classic RPG flair. Since Trails Through Daybreak, Falcom has taken great strides in improving their animations and effects work with their new engine, and it’s no different here. Many of the most important moments in Ys X are given bespoke animated cutscenes, and they look fantastic. Additionally, upon successfully blocking a Power Attack against a boss for the first time, you’re treated to special animations that bring to mind Reaction Commands from Kingdom Hearts II. They look excellent and amplify the hype of these moments.
However, elsewhere is where things get somewhat tricky. While I enjoy sea exploration, there’s no denying that it looks rather crude. Islands look blocky and low-poly, which isn’t a problem when zoomed out, but very much is a problem when zoomed in or given cutscene focus. There’s a specific moment in a later part of the game where characters are in awe of a giant city before them… but all I see is something that looks made of Mega Bloks. It does turn into a proper city when I actually start exploring it, but it’s that brief instance beforehand that momentarily takes me out of the fantasy of it all. Land-based exploration fares much better, but ultimately the game still looks rather simple and it won’t blow you away outside of a handful of some nice-looking areas.
I can forgive some amount of crudeness, but what’s less forgivable is the seeming lack of unique areas compared to previous games. They do still exist, but they are only ever saved for the biggest moments in the game. Otherwise, expect lots of green islands and rocky islands as you’re out exploring. This is a problem that started in Ys IX, and while I’m tempted to say it’s a bit better here, it’s not enough to really matter. It’s a shame when thinking back to the games before, where distinct areas were what often helped titles stand apart in my eyes.
Audio
The music for Ys X: Nordics is good stuff. It didn’t blow me away like previous games, but I thought it was pretty darned good when it counted. Ys’s mix of high energy rock tunes to elevate fast-paced jaunts through fantasy lands is still a fun mixture, and this time around it’s elevated by very good contextual usage. A stormy night may use a more downbeat tune before switching to a song that’s an homage to Ys’s PC Engine days as the storm passes and the scenery is replaced with dewy grasslands topped off by the shining sun and a rainbow. It’s impactful stuff, so impactful that I’m sad that some of the best tracks wound up being some of the most underutilized. Overall, I’d say the music is solid stuff, definitely something I’ll throw in my playlists when all is said and done.
On the other hand, the voice acting is some fantastic stuff all around. As far as the English dub is concerned, Karja may just be one of my favorite performances from Cherami Leigh to date, with her delivering a performance that’s high on energy, yet it belies a slight sadness and dissatisfaction. Her battle lines in particular always got me hyped up. On the other hand, Bryce Papenbrook’s reprisal as Adol comes with some choice changes that I loved. All of his lines this time around are spoken with a higher register, giving the impression of a more wide-eyed and impressionable youth that a 17-year-old Adol ought to be. Even if his lines are few, it’s this attention to detail for Adol’s character that makes me love him as much as I do. The rest of the cast gives solid performances too, especially during the side conversations they have while out exploring.
Verdict
I’m thrilled to report that Ys X: Nordics isn’t just good, but in many ways it represents Ys at its best. I have some foibles with it, such as an occasionally inconsistent presentation and a comparative lack of memorable environments. However, it’s a mostly successful modernization and refreshment in a series that was in need of exactly that. Coupling this with improvements to cutscenes elevating an already great story and some of the best boss fights in the series, and you have a game that won’t be leaving my mind any time soon. I’m always excited for what’s coming next with Ys, but as I reflect on this title, I’m downright impatient as I think of the ways they can push its changes even further. Our 10th is always a big deal, and it’s clear that Ys understood that.
YS X: NORDICS IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another Falcom Action RPG, you might want to check out The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails. Or if you’re interested in an entry for another long-running Action RPG series, check out Visions of Mana.
Many thanks go to Reef Entertainment for a Nintendo Switch review code for Ys X: Nordics.
A hobbyist who took up the pen to write about their favorite pastime: games. While a lover of many genres, Isaiah Parker specializes in Platformers, RPGs, and competitive multiplayer titles. The easiest way into his heart is to have great core gameplay mechanics. Self-proclaimed world’s biggest Sonic fan. Follow him @ZinogreVolt
