Super fun new combat system, banger music that gets you going, graphics are stylized and look simply amazing, and story... wait, I don't speak Japanese...

I accidentally sold almost all of my level up items on accident thinking I was buying more! I really don't speak Japanese, dammit!!!

Overall, loved the game though! It was refreshing to see them finally take on a new direction with the combat system. Plus, I love min-maxing orbments in the Trails series, so I was happy to see that they brought that! Ship control was janky at first, but I got used to it and the upgrades make things much better.

The ratio of gameplay to story is much better than the previous entry as well. It feels like there's a ton of side content to do, from quests, to optional islands, to the awesome raids, it really is a full-on adventure!

But in the end, neither my score or my review is final, as I couldn't fully grasp the story, nor had the patience to use DeepL enough to understand each piece of equipment. Even though I beat it 100% on Inferno difficulty, I will do it again when the localized version comes and give my final veredict!

(Also, this is my 300th backloggd game. Yay :D)

tl;dr: If you've played and enjoyed a Ys game, you'll probably like this one too. If you haven't, try out VIII first. If you liked VIII but disliked IX, this one is much closer to VIII than it is to IX.

Playtime: 70h 5m, did everything.

Plot: Fine, better than IX. Not a fan of the pacing, felt like it took a while for me to get into it but I enjoyed how everything panned out. Not the biggest fan of the main crew but I like Karja and most of the side characters.

Gameplay: X contains the debut of the "Cross Action" system, a change from the Seven system that was used in 7/8/9. Rather than controlling a full party, it's just Adol and Karja. You can either control them individually or switch into the Combined mode which changes your moveset and lets you guard most moves. Weaving between solo and combination modes was fun and I'm looking forward to seeing how they develop it in the next game.

They also added a system like orbments from the Kiseki series but it doesn't really affect too much, would like to see them develop this more.

Music: Didn't love any of the battle themes but a lot of the zone and town themes are great. Doesn't have the overall quality of VIII and previous OSTs but it's better than IX for sure.

Exploration: I'm biased towards islands and coastal environments so I was a fan (anything is better than Balduq). Some of the zones are a too large and feel emptier as a result. Also, buried treasures are AWFUL. John Falcom, if you're reading this, never do that again. Controlling the boat during ocean exploration is painful, which leads to...

Naval Battles and Maneuvering: The worst part of the game. Controlling the boat is very clunky and simply not enjoyable. Thankfully I was able to S-rank all of them first try because having to redo any of them would be MISERABLE.

Overall, while it took a bit longer than usual to get into it, once the game hit its stride I had a pretty good time and am looking forward to XI.

It takes elements from recent games and does them worse, and the new gimmick (sailing) is far less interesting than Ys 9's cool city. It's probably not a bad game on its own but I feel like I just played a worse version of previous games where the one new thing it offers isn't exciting but also gimps the map design due to confining them to islands.

Story-wise, the plot is something that should have about as much text as Ys 6 but it tries to go for the amount of reading that recent games in the series demand. I like the main heroine and the story does end up feeling more complete and focused than Ys 9 at least, but it gives a bunch of time to the NPCs who are less interesting than the party members in 8 and 9.

Gameplay-wise, guarding is too broken (there were plenty of boss fights where I could stand around and just hold guard on Nightmare) and the enemy attacks are too slow for how much mobility Adol has.

A masterpiece, Falcom put all their love into making this you can feel it, one the best Ys and one of their best games for sure as well as a good entry for newcomers.

Plot may not be as engaging as VIII but it's still enough to keep me interested for 55 hours and more wouldn't have bothered me tbh. Early it focuses more on the side characters (bros from Karnak), but by the second half of the game maybe even earlier they become sort of useless and lose their interest that's sad, but the story starts after this and it's great. Talking about characters, Karja is a great match for Adol (the 盾の兄弟 thing is peak fr) but I regret that she doesn't have more intimate moments with Adol to deepen their bond even if you can feel it grow as the adventure goes on.

The exploration is fine, having a lot of islands to explore sounds interesting at first but the issue is that they are almost all the same, I mean sure some are one of a kind however the others just look the same and lack "identity”. What I mean by this is that if you take Seiren from VIII for example you got a whole lot of unique places to discover and here there is no such thing.

The boat part is meh, the islands aren’t even at the good scale when you play, like you encounter a small version that look ASS (yeah I know Falcom small company but come on AC Black Flag on PS3 didn’t have this issue) and I won’t mention the fights but since it’s not a major part of the game it’s okay I guess ?

Also overall the OSTs are kinda weak compared to other games but there are some very good tracks so I won't complain about that, and the cutscenes are really great especially during fights that’s the best cutscenes Falcom has done until now I'm really shocked about this fact even though Ys doesn’t get as much budget as Trails.

Now let's talk about the best part which is the fights, even in nightmare they are not that hard if you don’t play like shit, maybe a little bit too easy but inferno really punishes you really hard, anyways damn its fucking fast paced no more type weakness thing just Adol and Karja that you can switch with ease to connect attacks, unlike the previous games the guard here is essential, if well timed it gives you slight advantages and the combi mode with joint attacks is needed too to break shield for boss fights, I FUCKING LOVE IT THATS THE BEST IDEA THEY HAD IN A WHILE. The only thing I would complain about the fights is that even if your guard will break if you time it wrong, you can pretty much go back asap in guard so a gauge for the guard would’ve been a good thing.

First of all, I skipped the story dialogue because I didn't want to translate it (still watched most of the cutscenes at least).. so I guess take the 5 stars with a grain of salt?

But this game is genuinely just so fun, super aggressive and smooth combat with some truly stellar boss fights. Falcom really upped their presentation with this game and it does so much for enjoyment.

Killer soundtrack of course.

Despite not reading anything, I still got a really great feel for the friendship between Adol and Karja, really loved it! There was so much personality in their combined fighting styles.

Complaints? Game starts a bit slow and the islands lacked some visual variety, but these are easily made up for.

Kondo's trick proves to once again be unbeatable with what's probably Falcom's most polished game to date.

Every single second of this game is the most insane fast paced fun. All the other times they reinvented the gameplay system the first entry felt very weak to me but X busted through the door with full power and full fun. Only real issue gameplaywise i had was boss healthbars felt a bit too inflated at times.

The exploration in this game is probably the best part about it. Just cruising through areas with the hoverboard or using the hook for swinging simply filled me with unmeasurable joy.

The story is also very great for what it tries to do. There wasnt a time where I felt bored or thought it was meaningless and there was a good amount of great moments for all of the main characters sprinkled into it. The "cast of misfits" that you collect during your adventure wasnt as unique as IX's but it was still a fun ensemble nonetheless especially with the main group.

The side content is basically the exactly same as VIII and IX so I dont have much to comment on that.

The presentation for the game is very good for the limits that it got burdened by from being on the Switch aswell. None of the areas looked ugly. The music was also very good for being a modern Falcom OST. Every single area and event theme was basically perfect with the few weaker tracks being mainly boss ones.

TLDR: I absolutely loved this game and i cant wait to see where they go next with Ys or whatever other non Kiseki title they are working on

as usual, another great ys game! i enjoyed it a lot, although it still is nowhere close to ys 8 (but really i doubt falcom will ever make a better ys game than 8, it set the bar so damn high).
story was great all the way through, basically no complaints there. gameplay was also great and engaging, though while I liked the new combat I don't think it was as fun as the previous combat system. It also felt like half the mechanics weren't explained at all so it took until pretty late in the game for me to fully grasp how everything worked. i also actually kinda liked the ship combat in the end which i wasn't expecting as i really didn't like it at first - the upgrades def made it much more enjoyable. really my biggest gripe with this game though is the simple lack of variety - and this was a problem with 9 to an extent as well - most of the islands blended together and only a small handful have any real identity. in ys 8 discovering a new area was always exciting, whereas discovering a new island in 10 was moreso just hoping for something new. the enemy variety definitely exacerbates the issue as well; it really feels like there are only 20 unique enemies in the game and so when most of the islands are not only visually similar but littered with a majority of the same enemies or basic reskins of them, it becomes really hard for them to stand out. that all said though, it was all still a lot of fun to play and explore, and i still came out of it having had a fantastic experience. hoping whatever's next is even greater! 9/10

So I finally finished Ys X this weekend and there's so much to say.
Is it a great game or a mediocre game?
Hard to say, Compared to VIII and IX, Nordics has made a lot of good changes, but there are also many downgrades for me. Still I enjoy this game like VIII and IX and I highly recommend it if you also like Falcom game.
Now let's begin the review.

It is difficult not to compare X with VIII and IX in the review, because they basically belong to the same template.
Cut scenes and dialogues, land exploration, dungeon and boss fights, side quests and collecting missions, and garbage time scramble fights. These elements are present in each game, with different forms of expression but the essence is the same. People call it trails-ys, which means there are more story and RPG elements while less combat. Ys X is another Trails-Ys, it's obvious.

Combat

The best part of the game and the real fresh stuff that carries the whole game. I never thought the combat system of Ys would be complex, it's just rubbing the attack button and dodging or jumping at the appropriate time. But I did spend some time learning Ys X's combat system.

Unlike VIII and IX, in X, you can only use two characters: Adol and Karja. For me, this is a good change. Multiple but homogeneous characters in action games are meaningless. Falcom finally realizes it. Now breakdown every parts.

Combine mode
Actually guard mode. When pressing R2, a protective cover will be generated. It's very similar to the Royal Guard. If the timing is perfect, you can avoid attacks completely and gain a certain amount of revenge rate, the higher your risk rate the more damage your combine skill can cause. Even if it's half a beat slower, you won't get hurt most time. And when you perfectly block a red attack, it can stun the enemy, trigger a powerful counterattack or counter QTE, and fully recover the revenge rate. Combine guard can resist any attack (even roaring) except for the blue attack. So using combine mode all the time is the safest way to play. Few bosses can break your defenses and combine skill at a high revenge rate is extremely powerful.

Solo mode
I mentioned that the combine mode is the safest, but it is not the most effectivetive. In fact, the solo mode of Adol and Karja is the most powerful character you can use in the ys series. First, we need to retrospect the skill system. It first appeared in Ys seven, but at that time the SP obtain speed was slow and the normal attacks are still mainstream. The acquisition of SP in Ys IX is much faster, but you still cannot use high-damage skills casually. While in ys x, the SP of the two characters are separate, and when using one character, the SP recovery speed of another character is very high. So constantly switching between two characters can achieve sp freedom. In addition, using different skills can increase the chain number, and the higher the chain number, the lower the SP consumption. But this is not the most ridiculous yet, During the animation of releasing skills, you will receive significant damage reduction buffs, almost eliminating 90% of damage. That means you're virtually invincible during the uninterrupted release of skills.

Skills
Back to the skill itself. Thanks to the reduced number of characters, this time the number and quality of skills for both characters are great (Adol 29 skills, Karja 30 skills). The animations and effects for every skill are very cool and dynamic. And falcom has given real distinction to the skills. Some skills blow enemies away, some are downward smashes, some are upward picks, and some allow the character to shift. This enhances player-enemy interaction and allows for some crazy combos.

Mana Seed and Liberate Road
Very close to the orb system of trails series but much simpler. Different types of Mana Seeds provide different types of enhancements to characters. And the way they are connected affects the results. It certainly won't have as much impact as it did in the Trails series but it's the first time you can truly build a character in Ys series.

Enemy design
Some of the bosses are pretty well designed but some are annoying. What puzzles me is that there are a lot of plural boss fights this time. The experience is really bad because it's hard to watch the movements of two enemies at the same time.

Combat is not without its issues. Blue attacks are hard to dodge in melee and don't reward as much as blocking. Normal attacks and dodges feel much heavier than before. Mana outbreak is useless in combat.

Level design
I'm a little disappointed, to be honest. After playing Ys IX I'm actually looking forward to the further evolution of Ys level design. But Ys X is more of a step back, it's like Ys VIII cut into dozens of pieces. Each island is short to explore and full of invisible walls. Levels are mainly based on platform gameplay with Mana String and Mana Boards. It's ok but undoubtedly not as fun as the Monstrum ability. There are plenty of buried treasures but finding them is boring because Ys X's levels are nowhere near as three-dimensional as Ys IX's. Also, the overall number and size of dungeons are not as good as in the previous game. That said I think the level design is generally good, especially if you prefer linear levels. Some parts that remind me of Castlevania PoR, which is good.

Ship combat
It was really bad in the beginning. The ship was very clumsy and lacked firepower. Although upgrades can change all this the ship combats are still rough and stupid. Don't expect it and treat it as a mini-game then it's actually playable.

Story and character
I think the story is much more complete than IX, and Karja is portrayed quite well. The narrative is more traditional without much of a reversal. The writing is Falcom standard you know what I mean if you've played their games. If I had to rank them, I'd say VIII>X>IX.

It's complaining time. Falcom really needs more artists and modelers. Ys X has the same problem as IX. Every island and town looks exactly the same. The variety of textures and decorations is pitifully small and of poor quality. The scene at sea is even more horrible. It's really hard to attract more players. The OST is by far the worst Ys music I've ever heard outside of Ys V.

My final ranking is VIII>IX>X. But I still recommend everyone to try it and I also think X is a great entry point.

It's pretty great. I didn't like it as much as Ys 8/9, but it's a welcome new entry to the Ys series with a fairly distinct battle system compared to the party games. Having Karja and Adol be the only playables works pretty well for streamlining the combat, and the combo attacks/shielding adds a lot of depth to battles. They also do a decent job at discouraging skill spamming—if you use the same skill twice in a row, you'll break your combo and you can say bye bye to decreased SP costs. Boss fights are mostly pretty well designed and push the system to its limits, until you've mastered accurate guarding.

Island exploration is alright, most islands are pretty small and linear, but they use this to provide decent platforming challenges and traversal skills. If you're looking for exploration of Ys 8 or the verticality of Ys 9, you'll probably be disappointed, but the areas otherwise serve for good combat arenas. Biome variety is lacking for most of the game—I hope you like grassy plains—but does sort of get better later on. Somewhat.

Sea exploration itself is miserable at first, you move far too slowly and it feels like a chore trying to find islands. This gets better as you gain upgrades to make your ship move/turn/boost faster, but I wouldn't blame people dropping the game out of frustration before getting to that point. The ship combat itself is... a big miss, frankly, and never gets much better. It's super clunky and tedious, and the most fun you'll be getting is spamming a billion special cannon balls and watching everything go boom.

Visually I think this looks mostly fine. Doesn't look as good as Kuro for sure, and the lack of biome variety doesn't do it any favours, but it's serviceable and the characters look good. I would say it suffers from a distinct lack of 3D art style, but that applies to every modern Falcom game tbh.

Cast was fun, I probably liked them a bit more than 8's (aside from Dana who you can't really beat) but not as much as 9's. Karja is really awesome and a great partner for Adol this game, which they thankfully leave entirely platonic—love their bro bond. Side cast are fine, they have the arcs you'd expect if you've played 8/9, though I did find one character's a little rushed and weirdly handled. Plot characters that are too spoilery to talk about are all really good. Villains are alright, they feel like typical battle shonen villains and most do the job.

The story itself was pretty good—didn't like it as much as 8/9's, but I'd say it's one of the better Ys stories for sure. There is a lot of dialogue, more than I expected, which I don't mind but I could see more traditional Ys fans not being crazy on like Ys 9. I thought the finale and ending were really really good, and a highlight of the game.

There's a fun little secret right at the end that certainly makes me interested in the future of this series! I do hope the next entry takes place after 9 in the timeline, as while this game was more important to the series than I expected, I personally prefer older Adol and would like to see what's going on in Romn. Though an Ys V remake would work too.

Soundtrack is... eh. There are some highlights, such as the final boss and credits themes (second for both), a couple of island and town themes, but otherwise it's pretty forgettable. Par for the course with modern Falcom I suppose, but I honestly found it worse than the soundtracks of both Kuro games.

I think this review came off a bit more negative than I intended, but basically the core of this game is land gameplay and battles, which they really nail. There's also plenty of side content and NPC dialogue that you'd expect from a Falcom game, and it's all fairly high quality (some of those side quests go kinda crazy). It's no masterpiece, but it's one of Falcom's better games imo, and I think there's a lot to look forward to when it's localised. Turns out spending more than a year working on a game is pretty beneficial!

The land gameplay is the best in the series, unfortunately, that comprises maybe 60% of the game? Between boring naval sections and a story that combines the depth and intrigue of 6 with the cutscene spam on par with 9, it feels bloated as hell. That said, it is exceptionally fun in its element, though that element also deviates from what i want from a ys game on average, that being fairly tightly designed linear zones with fun combat and movement.

The linearity is the big problem for me, but beyond that, the game also has really bad graphics and a largely boring soundtrack.

I still rate it fairly highly because it is fun to play on land, but i also cant stress enough that this game is full of holes and anyone who is less willing to overlook the fact that a lot of the game is honestly not that interesting relative to its best part is probably not gonna have that good of a time with it.

It's a very frustrating game to sit through, because you'll be watching very uninteresting cardboard cutout characters talk for as long or longer than gameplay. Ys has never had a MORE intrusive story. In addition, the boat combat is really boring and feels weird for me.

I enjoy Karja and the combat system for the most part, but it feels sort of like an overly generous version of Sekiro because you can get away with parrying almost everything in the game and standing in place, even moreso than in previous titles with flash guard because those games weren't designed entirely around the mechanic.

I'm on chapter 6 (iirc), and I feel like the game still hasn't hit its stride, with two memorable dungeon-like segments so far. It feels like it has a continuous infancy status where it feels like the whole game is JRPG tutorial. Also I'm not sure if it's just the PS5 edition being unoptimized but there is some nasty ass built in delay to the game that wasn't present in IX.

Might come back to it if I get bored but my backlog is too big to spend time when I'm not having fun ATM.

Final review (15-18 hours) - 3/5

Alright, so now that I've gotten more into the game I'm going to abandon it as much as I like Ys. The sea exploration was an interesting idea but it's a bit slow, there's also a lot of other little systems that feel like checklist padding - the many items that upgrade your stats in hard to notice ways, constantly buying new equipment, etc. They're time consuming but barely meaningful. Ship battles are hard to control and a bit clunky, mostly feels like waiting for ammo to reload.

I like some of the movement options (the skateboard and grapple), the idea of holding defend to avoid red moves and dashing to avoid blue is neat, but felt underutilized. It's also hard to make 'work' with how cameras work in these games.

Characters are okay... I liked how the story started with the town but then they kind of scrap the town and everyone ends up on this ship. It kind of becomes typical Falcom story fare since their Cold Steel days, which is like... eh, it's okay in small amounts but it's hard to sit through in a game that seems like it's gonna be 40+ hours.

Level design sometimes becomes fun (weirdly, in an early dungeon), and seems to make use of multiple enemies attacking with interesting level geometry, but a lot of times has that typical "Falcom Filler Feeling" of really big stages, random enemies that don't really stand a chance against you, tons of things to smash to gain items.

I like the idea of the partner combat, but with the skill cooldowns there's just so much information to keep track of that it feels really clunky. Run out of SP on one character? Press Y after a weird delay to swap to the other. As usual there are too many skills and they all kind of feel the same, not much utility difference. There's a mastery system with unknown usage other than adding another number to fill to 100%...

Overall it feels really obvious that Falcom doesn't seem to get enough time to really rethink their systems - it's all these old, stale ideas that didn't really work in past Ys games kinda crammed together. There's a bit of some new ideas shining through that DOES kind of work - finding new islands to explore is fun (until the level shapes start to feel kinda similarish and limited), the idea of the partner system is cool, even if the implementation is bloated.

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Review update 1 (15 hours) - 4/5

I'm downgrading this to 4 mostly because the gameplay isn't really there. I think there are some good ideas they were trying out but it could have used more time in the oven / there's all this other 'compulsive' systems and the flashy character-action skill attack explosions that kind of water down what is working.

It shines at some moments but at other times it's kind of the compulsive 'fill in the blank' stuff (like S-ranking the ship invasion missions) or the normal ys 8/9-esque 'walk through an area of enemies you can mostly avoid'. Lots of re-used minibosses and accessories that don't really have much of a use, the stat/orbment-esque system is also kind of weird because you don't need it on easy difficulties and on higher difficulties it's yet to be seen how useful/required it is.

The tricky thing with stat upgrade systems in fast-paced combat games is that playing at higher difficulty well means you're needing to basically not even getting hit.. so defense trees don't help much. I guess increasing attack means your DPS goes up, but I'm not sure how much time that shaves off a boss fight.

Original review (5-10 hours)
angeline era is delayed because i'm playing Ys X! ha ha

I've yet to really get the ensemble cast together (I just finished the 3rd or 4th major boss) but so far the game focuses on Adol and Karja. It's a welcome change to me as it's both reminiscent of my favorite SK (Since Kondo) Falcom game, Trails in the Sky 1 - seemingly focusing on Adol/Karja and then other characters coming and going. We'll see how that lasts, but it seems like they're the only playable ones, so hopefully there aren't too many of those 'everybody has a turn to say something insignificant' jrpg ensemble dialogue scenes.

It's a little hard to say how the overall feel will come out, but the first 2-3 hours feel very Trails-y with a focus on worldbuilding/visiting towns/minimal combat, although nearing hour 8, it's shifted to more of a normal cadence of town stuff/long dungeon with exposition now and then that feels more reminiscent of recent Ys. I haven't seen a quest log yet (yay!) but we'll see how long that lasts Ha Ha Ha. It feels more 'true' to the pulpy adventurer feel of Adol in a way that Celceta/8/9 didn't really to me.

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But what excites me more is that it seems like Falcom is actually Trying To Do Level Design again. Ys 9 and maybe 8 had a little of this, but ultimately their combat systems were so fast-paced that they still felt like weird adaptations of Ark-era Ys, with the awkward integration of parries/timed dodge rolls.

In X, the pace has slowed down. Instead you are in one of three states:

- Guard (holding R2)
- Attacking/Vulnerable
- Dashing (holding L1)

There are Blue attacks which you auto-dodge when holding L1, and Red attacks which are only guardable with R2. Any other attack is auto-guardable when holding R2. It sounds really simon-says-y on paper but I think it's the best modern Ys combat yet:

Because there's a little delay going from one state to another, I find so far that (on Nightmare, the 2nd-hardest default difficulty) there's an actual interesting friction to fighting. You can't just whip out a dodge or parry at any moment, you have to be just careful enough to look at the enemy and get a few hits in before getting ready for a guard. Multiple enemies can stand at different points on the map and ranged attacks actually hurt, so there's a fun level of awareness you're expected to maintain.

Of course, I think a lot of this friction vanishes if you're playing on easier difficulties, but I think the way difficulty scales here is more interesting than Ys 8/9 with the heavy focus on move memorization/etc. In X you're thinking more about how many attacks it's safe to get in before playing more defensively - and the result is that it feels similar to Ark/6/Origin-era Ys in some ways.

What's narratively nice is that you only have 2 characters to control - and a gimmick is that when you hold R2, you enter 'combination state' - which auto-guards by default, but also lets you use what are basically heavy attacks. The result is that it really does feel like Karja/Adol are fighting as a team, which goes great with the pulpy feel of the story.

Another fun touch is that, while you don't need to 'perfect' dodge or parry, it seems like if you DO time it well enough you get to do a powerful counterattack. Maybe my timing just sucks but I couldn't seem to trigger these more than once during boss fights, but it's fun to see them come out.

There's skill customization and equipment, but so far they don't seem super important - and I like it that way. The point here isn't really roleplaying as it is just seeing the duo grow stronger.

Overall I'm glad Falcom has managed to design a combat system that feels a bit more on-its-own and suitable to the kind of stories they want to tell. Excited to play more!