I’m always in awe at the dedication that long-running Japanese game developer Nihon Falcom has for their legacy series like The Legend of Heroes and Ys. Most game franchises this long in the tooth might have gone through some reboots or massive changes in style or direction at this point, but not Ys. This series is a lot like Final Fantasy in how each entry can update and reinvent itself, but each game still features the same protagonist Adol Christin and the same sort of high-fantasy, treasure-hunting vibe that the series is so closely tied to. Well, all except for Ys IX: Monstrum Nox, which shot for a wildly different tone and atmosphere that was honestly a welcome change of pace. While Ys X: Nordics introduces just as many meaningful changes to the formula, it ends up coming a lot closer to being the sort of bright and vivid expedition adventure that the franchise has been known for.
Ys X: Nordics technically takes place after the second entry in the series, but that only matters if you’re a diehard fan analysing every crumb of minor NPC dialogue for hints of lore like a rabid fanboy tying the various Legend of Zelda timelines together. This is essentially a standalone adventure about a young swordsman named Adol who gets himself roped up in some trouble while hitching a sea-fairing ride on a large ship.
A raiding party of Normans arrive, who are a very 11th century viking-inspired clan of peoples, and Adol soon finds out that the ship he’s on is helmed by bandits and that the raiding Normans are actually just protecting their village. After arriving on land and making camp with the Normans, Adol finds himself mysteriously stuck to their princess leader Karja Balta by a mysterious glowing chain – kicking off a series of events that sees Adol involved in a mysterious, ancestral battle involving undying creatures, clashing clans and more.
While I was impressed by the story of Ys IX, I felt like it didn’t hit the mark as well with the character-specific writing and little moments of interaction and bonding between the crew. I feel like I walked away from my time with Ys X: Nordics with the opposite feeling. This game has some of my favorite character writing and interactions in the whole franchise. Adol and Karja bounce off each other so well, and despite every game in the series throwing a new temporary ally into Adol’s arms, Karja is one of the rare ones who feels like such a perfect foil and companion to Adol’s energy and vibe that I wish she would become a series mainstay going forward.
On the other hand, the overarching story didn’t do much to impress me. A lot of big moments kind of happen for the sake of happening, and the overall adventure ends up feeling less like a grandiose emotional adventure and more of a flashy and silly anime-fueled action romp.
If anything, that sometimes mindless story helps put you onto the rails for some of the most fun combat the Ys series has ever had. The last few entries in the series had you controlling a party of three characters with different weapon types, swapping between them in real-time depending on the weakness of the enemy you were facing. Ys X: Nordics does away with the weapon weaknesses and the three-person party – instead, you only play as Adol and Karja, and you play as them at pretty much the same exact time.
Now, your main gameplay focus is building combos by linking your special attacks together, but using the same special attack twice in a row kills your combo, and certain special attacks drain way more SP for the character who used it than others might. You quickly fall into a rhythm of not only swapping between each character’s unique sets of skills, but also building up to your strongest attacks by first using weaker ones so you can extend your combo, give your meter time to charge, and effectively deal with your enemies. It’s an incredible change that adds more agency and thoughtfulness to the combat than there’s been in this series for ages.
The other major gameplay wrinkle in Ys X: Nordics is the ship exploration and combat. In the same vein as a AAAA game like Skull & Bones, you can navigate a seafaring vessel across the massive amount of oceans and small bodies of land that make up the expansive world of the game. It isn’t quite open-world in terms of scale, but there’s far more to see and explore than I was expecting.
For the first few chapters, though, your ship is kind of boring. It’s slow, and it doesn’t have much in the way of firepower, but as you progress through the game and do things like tackling the enemy fortresses or deal with side quests you’ll quickly upgrade your arsenal and ship capabilities. There’s some clunkiness to the way your ship handles that I imagine could be ironed out in a future entry, but it’s still a fun enough distraction to help tie the otherwise pretty linear dungeon encounters together.
