Ys IX Monstrum Nox - Review

When Falcom announced that they were working on a new Ys game, I was on board, my experience with the series was only with Ys 8: Lacrima of Dana, but I really enjoyed the game. While it did come out earlier in the year on the PlayStation 4, it just released on Switch and PC, which meant it was time for me to give it a go. Could Falcom entertain me two times in row or was it more of one hit wonder, so to speak, turns out it was both.

The story of Monstrum Nox seems simple at the outset, you are Adol Christin, an adventure and the same character from the other games, who upon arriving at the city of Barduq with his friend Dogi, is spotted thanks to his very bright red hair and then promptly arrested and thrown into prison. Turns out that over the years, his adventures have become the things of legend and many folks were curious as to how it all came to be and how he was always in the middle when things vanished, got destroyed or what have you. While in the prison, Adol makes conversation with a neighbouring prisoner, that explains that not all is what it seems here, so after a scrap in the cafeteria, Adol finds himself with the tools to escape and so he does. Though before he can taste true freedom, he is intercepted by Aprilis, a mysterious woman who shoots him with a gun, that transforms him into a Monstrum and then teleports him into the world of the Nox.

While you could be mistaken that all that takes hours, in reality it is no more than a single hour, but while the story pace starts off pretty well paced, it quickly throws on the brakes and becomes slower to get through, than wading through a pool of molasses. Where the story does pick up though is when the game fades out from Adol and his Monstrum pals, all of whom are slowly introduced to you, and fades back in with Adol in prison, which is quite the interesting spin. The problem is there is a lot of nothing to much of the story and that centres around the other Monstrum, each of whom get their own chapter that is used to reveal more about them. While that sounds like it could be good on paper, there are so many flashing arrows of foreshadowing about the reveal of a character, that when the game gets around to telling you who The Raging Bull is, you will have figured it out hours ago.

Balance is also a problem in the quests the game sends you on, early on the playable space that you have access to, is quite limited and while the concept of being locked out of areas, until you remove the barrier is cool, some of the quests you get are often in those locked out areas. In order to proceed to remove the barriers you have to complete side quests, or enter the Nox and fight enemies, the former giving you more Night Shards than the latter. Once you have enough, you can enter the Nox proper and complete an objective, once that is done, the barrier drops and you can move on. The issue isn’t so much with that system, but it is with the side quests in their place, one quest for example has you scouring all the windows around a bathhouse, in order to determine which, one is being used by a peeping tom, it wasn’t fun and ultimately ended with a less than rewarding ending, the catch is though that you have to complete the missions.

Completing missions, while unlocking parts of the city, also fills up the moon on the Night Shard counter, fill that moon up and you get sucked into a massive battle in the Nox and again the balance will test you. Before each big entry into the Nox, the game will tell you the suggested level, giving you a chance to step back and level up some more, should you desire it, but once you are in, you are in. While there are a few times this doesn’t happen, most of your encounters in the Nox have you facing off against wave after wave of enemies, all the while protecting a crystal, if it gets destroyed, you lose and have to start over again. Now the enemies will spawn in locations that are in the same spot each time, so you can get to learn where they come from, but each time I got into these encounters, the game would spawn enemies that could easily take off half of the crystals health and then some, in a single hit. Should you focus on one enemy spawn point, you will likely forget about the others and find yourself losing, over and over and over again. The game does let you retry as often as you like, or lower the strength of enemies and try again, but the strength of the enemies was never my issue, they are easy enough to beat, as long as you make use of the various combat systems, but getting up to the seventh wave, only to have the crystal destroyed by an ambush, is just pure frustration.

Combat can be amazing at times and other times, nothing but a chaotic mess and there isn’t much you can do to control it, whenever you attack an enemy, so do the other guys of your team, but if you start attacking a different enemy, they won’t follow until the first one is down. You can change their attack system, to a more defensive option, but that merely stops them from rushing out and fighting enemies on their own, once they are engaged, they will still stay on that one enemy, there is no way for you to say to fight another enemy. The game uses the same rock/paper/scissors style system that previous games have used, so you will need to swap out to other members of your team at times, but there isn’t a big issue, if you have powerful attacks to unleash. Combat is much like it has been for a few games now and while there is nothing broken about it, it is showing its very advancing age.

Outside of combat, there are all new traversal mechanics to enjoy, most of them are tied to the powers of each Monstrum, so as you add more members to your team, more options are unlocked. Adol, or the Crimson King, as he is known in his Monstrum form, can zip around the city, much like Batman, there are points that highlight when you are within range and a press of a button and you are on your way. Each member has their own offering, but it is really only White Cat and Hawk that you will use to get around, for their ability to run up walls and glide respectively, the others are more about discovering hidden secrets and such. This system does give the game a more open feel, but given that there are countless invisible walls, which then show up as barriers when you get close, it is easy to feel trapped, rather than free to explore.

The barriers are not an issues on the gameplay side so much, as they are in the visual as you can’t see them, until you get close, so you never know if an area is open to you, until you are almost at the edge of it. This highlights a problem, at least visually on the Switch version, the draw distance is so bad, that things are constantly popping in and out, which is not an issue so much in the dungeons, but in the town and fields, it is. Once you get to explore the city on your own, you will see what I mean, people, shops, trees and everything else all pop in as you get close, but even if you get on foot away, they all vanish. I can understand why, the Switch is not the most powerful platform, but how the game handles it is all wrong, there is no slow fade in, they are just there. This wouldn’t be such an issue if it was only the people and creatures of the world, but it is all the small details as well, so buildings will gain or loose detail as you get close or pull away, the end result is a game that is constantly drawing your attention away from what you are doing, to things on the fringes.

The visual issues could be forgiven, if there were not any technical ones as well, but there are a number that make the experience harder to enjoy, the most common is that the game struggles to keep up with the action, when you are in battles. When it is you and the other Monstrums against a few enemies, it is not so bad, but given that you are quite frequently up against a half dozen or more and some of them are very large, the game just struggles. What makes it even worse is that in order to have a chance at surviving these encounters, you need to make use of you special abilities, which add so much to the scenes, which in turn makes the game lag so much it is crazy. Even when you are not in battles, the game can struggle when you are running through the town and it has to populate all the folks in at once, there really are just a lot of issues there.

On the sound side of things, the game is mixed, a lot of the score, the tracks you here when exploring the city, dungeons or in boss fights are solid, but as the score in the city is the same for each location, as you will travel through them often, you will hear them a lot. Once in a while the score will showcase a track that is epic and even a little spooky, but more often than not, the score is just your average mix of tracks. Taking a listen to the vocals, things are ok, nothing great just ok and that comes down to the characters, the jerk sounds like a jerk, the happy one is always happy, they are not doing anything special. Sadly, the game does here what it did in the previous game, a lot of the story is told via nothing but text, but randomly they will speak and it isn’t just the important scenes where they speak, it is random. There was one cutscene where everything started with just text on the screen, but then randomly they started to speak with words and then ended with text only, there is just no consistency to it and it makes it feel weird.

Ys IX Monstrum Nox is a difficult game to recommend, there is a lot to love about the game, the story is interesting and while it uses formulaic characters, it has enough twists to keep you interested. Combat is layered, offering a simple button mashing level for newcomers, but a deeper system for those that want a real challenge, the problems the game has though are hard to overlook. The balance swings to often from super easy and fast, to slow and painful and then there are the constant issues with the performance. If you are a fan of the series, you will likely overlook the issues and enjoy the game, but if you are new to the series, a lot of these will likely frustrate you to no end.

The Score

7.0

Review code provided by NIS America

The Pros

+A story that has enough twists to keep you interested, even if the characters are 1 dimensional

+Movement abilities make the game feel more like a superhero adventure than a JRPG

The Cons

-Balance is so broken, you will fly through parts and get stuck on others for what seems like hours

-Technically the game struggles, a lot of pop-in, dropped frames and constant lag in big battles