Ys IX: Monstrum Nox PS5 review

Since I was getting a PS5 for FF7 Rebirth, I decided to try out a few demo games. Ys 9 here was one of the first games that caught my eye and as another ARPG, I ended up playing the actual game after having my fill of the year of FF7 Rebirth. The demo shows precious little about the main game(you can only play for ten minutes and much of that was wasted on me just being impressed by the graphics). The dungeon progression and the exploration in this game were both pretty good. The battles didn't feel as good as Ys Origin, but it was still a pretty good experience all around. I beat it on hard(which was marked on the difficulty selection screen as difficulty level 3 out of 6), and it was a fine experience.

The game's battle progression is at least partially blocked off and unlocked by story progression. Typical for RPGs that are very focused on the story. This allows the players to move forward at whatever pace they want to, which can sort of change the difficulty a little bit. And if you want to change it even more, the game has a decent set of options for NG+.

This game effectively has you recruiting one new playable character each chapter until you have your full roster of playable characters. You also get to recruit minions although they don't participate in normal dungeon progression battles. They will offer various services sometimes such as providing shop/trade or gear modding or even offer rewards for in game accomplishments. They and even those that don't do any of those things may also participate in the 'city saving battles' where the enmity converted into monsters threatens to destroy the city and everyone does their best to slay the monsters or help others to do that.

These city saving battles are generally 1 of 2 kinds: a speedrun where you run around destroying some pink crystals while monsters try to stop you or the main battle of you playing tower defense: protecting a core building while swarms of monsters attempt to lay siege and destroy that building.

The music in this game is terrible, although not quite bad enough to mute it completely(as I did in Ys Origin). I just kept it on the lowest audible volume level possible. Anyway, it's the only reason the art isn't a 5/5.

Exploration was pretty good(navigation was fun and not too crazy, hunting for azure petals was great, etcetera) but I didn't really like having to grind to be allowed to break down barriers. I think I missed my chance to break some barriers because I wasn't grinding during every chapter(you're supposed to harvest a resource called nox in order to spawn some blue portals in order to break extra barriers, but I kind of didn't bother and didn't realize that I can get locked out of breaking barriers by progressing the story until it was too late to do anything about it). I'm pretty sure the game didn't properly explain that I needed to get lots of nox every chapter if I want to explore everything, but I'm not that mad about it, if it really bothered me too much I'd just grind the Nox in NG+ and break the last of the barriers that way. If I liked the battle system enough, I'd suspect some sort of hidden superboss that could be fought if you break every barrier(I don't know if that's really existent, maybe the extra difficulty is mainly tied into the difficulty selection at the start of game, and if that were the case then breaking barriers just gives new rewards like loot drops).

Characters seem to vary a lot in battle effectiveness, and their style of combat can actually give you some really cheesy ways to win if you don't mind taking advantage of it.

Dialogue was pretty good but there are a decent chunk of grammatical errors and probable mistranslations. Still, the game has a message log that you can access to help with the annoying messages between characters that normally only shows one sentence at a time. With the message log you can scroll up and down and get a review of what was said in case you're having a hard time following someone's line of reasoning. The game actually seems to imply a lot of stuff, so even if you are remembering what people are saying properly, it can be helpful to pause and review just so you can read between the lines. The game has very little voice acting, but the voice acting that it has is very good, the voices are generally quite pleasant/appropriate, much like the character models often are. Many characters basically have the same voice(usually NPC treatment). The protagonist barely says anything but he does have a speech near the end of the game, and there are a huge number of times where you get to choose what he says (usually it's just a flavor choice rather than an actual decision to be made) although there's only ever 2 options to choose from and you're just supposed to imagine him saying those words.

The game is clearly inspired by a lot of other RPGs that I've played, such as Tales of Berseria(about the 'magic system' specifically), Ys games(obviously), Tales of games(only because there is a lot of focus on story, big difference though is Tales of has a ton of voice acting but this game barely has any, another big difference is this game actually has good progression, in fact that's the only category this game got a perfect score on...), and perhaps several other games the names of which are eluding me because I forgot the things that I was thinking of that were similar to games I've played in the past.

Story was very confusing sometimes, whether that's due to actual gaps in the script or something else, I'd have to guess it was gaps in the script...whatever the case, it still did better than many other games in that regard. There were a lot of times where they basically cheated and shoved in a bunch of text as if you were reading the scene like from a book and I have no problem with that. Games should do that more often. In fact this game could have stood to do that more often itself.

Exploration: 4/5
Story: 4/5
Progression: 5/5
Art: 4/5
Battle: 3/5