Somewhere around hour 10 (of 35!!) this game turned into my personal purgatory. If this weren’t an Ys game I would have stopped playing, but alas, I have committed myself.

Ys IX has incredibly solid bones, thanks to the most fluid take yet on party-based Ys combat and a host of fun new traversal abilities. Yet it buries those bones deeper than an ancient ruin lost to time. The defining trait of Ys is momentum - flying through field areas and dungeons at high speed, whacking enemies while banger music plays. Ys IX fundamentally misunderstands this, and thereby dooms itself.

The Good Stuff™️, the dungeons and field area exploration, are doled out in 30-90 minute chunks once per chapter. The rest of the time is spent exploring Balduq, a city with no enemies and only one song; sitting through reams of generic anime game writing with bad politics and doing basically-mandatory low-combat sidequests; and doing plenty of tower-defense, a weak returning mode that takes an annoyingly expanded role here. Most of the game’s 35 hours feel like a never-ending slog. The game can and does sing, but it does so too rarely to offset everything else. Combat is so infrequent it took me hours just to get comfortable with the control scheme.

To top it off, the game is visually drab, split between the gray cobblestone of Balduq, the gray rocks of the surrounding field areas, and the gray stone of every dungeon. It also whole-hog imports mechanics from its predecessor without understanding the context that made them compelling. The mapping system is back, but why is Parks asking me to map Balduq, a major metropolitan area full of people? Can’t he just buy a map? There’s a weapons upgrade and crafting system, but you never have enough components because they come from field exploration, and the game doles that out so rarely.

I’m frustrated and disappointed. Ys IX is easily one of the worst games in this series’ long history

Somewhere around hour 10 (of 35!!) this game turned into my personal purgatory. If this weren’t an Ys game I would have stopped playing, but alas, I have committed myself.

Ys IX has incredibly solid bones, thanks to the most fluid take yet on party-based Ys combat and a host of fun new traversal abilities. Yet it buries those bones deeper than an ancient ruin lost to time. The defining trait of Ys is momentum - flying through field areas and dungeons at high speed, whacking enemies while banger music plays. Ys IX fundamentally misunderstands this, and thereby dooms itself.

The Good Stuff™️, the dungeons and field area exploration, are doled out in 30-90 minute chunks once per chapter. The rest of the time is spent exploring Balduq, a city with no enemies and only one song; sitting through reams of generic anime game writing with bad politics and doing basically-mandatory low-combat sidequests; and doing plenty of tower-defense, a weak returning mode that takes an annoyingly expanded role here. Most of the game’s 35 hours feel like a never-ending slog. The game can and does sing, but it does so too rarely to offset everything else. Combat is so infrequent it took me hours just to get comfortable with the control scheme.

To top it off, the game is visually drab, split between the gray cobblestone of Balduq, the gray rocks of the surrounding field areas, and the gray stone of every dungeon. It also whole-hog imports mechanics from its predecessor without understanding the context that made them compelling. The mapping system is back, but why is Parks asking me to map Balduq, a major metropolitan area full of people? Can’t he just buy a map? There’s a weapons upgrade and crafting system, but you never have enough components because they come from field exploration, and the game doles that out so rarely.

I’m frustrated and disappointed. Ys IX is easily one of the worst games in this series’ long history