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2024 is the year of the JRPG, with outstanding games like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth leading the charge for the one of the most exciting eras the genre's ever seen. Those games are big, flashy, and exciting, but I didn't realize how much I'd been missing good old-fashioned JRPG comfort food of the sort we used to get back in the PS2 era until I fired up the Steam Next Fest demo for Ys X: Nordics. Folks, this is the video game equivalent of a piping hot bowl of chicken noodle soup, and I can't get enough.
Ys never got the recognition that series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy did, but the series has been running nearly as long as those titans and it's downright legendary among JRPG enthusiasts. I've only dabbled with Ys here and there, but I've always been impressed by its breezy pacing, rock-solid action-RPG mechanics, and adventuresome stories which see a familiar band of characters continually taking on standalone exploits.
Ys X is no exception, putting you once again in the shoes of series lead Adol, but the twist here is that he's been magically handcuffed to a standoffish warrior named Karja. That gives us both a romantically tinged anime buddy comedy and an excuse to control multiple characters in blazing-fast combat.
Fighting in Ys X is mechanically dense, but it moves. You can instantaneously swap between characters for combo attacks, and they each have their own loadout of special skills that you can spend mana to execute by just holding a bumper and tapping a face button. In the early stages of the demo, I've found myself bashing out skill attacks with one character and swapping to the next the instant I'm out of mana. While you're guarding, you also get access to more powerful duo skills that drain mana from both characters.
There isn't much depth to the combat where I'm at, around two hours into the demo, but there are just enough options at any given moment of action to keep my brain thoroughly tickled. It works well precisely because it's so fast. You can't really call fights against overworld enemies 'grinding' when they're all over in the space of a few seconds.
Ys X ain't gonna win any awards for its looks - it resembles a lovingly remastered PS3 game more than anything - but it's got a ton of nice quality of life features. NPCs with new dialog to share appear with blue chat icons over their head, and those turn gray as soon as you've exhausted their text boxes so you don't waste time talking to them over and over again. Your health quickly restores itself in the overworld so you don't get bogged down with constant healing between battles. Heck, on Steam the demo even has a launch option that lets you instantly load into your most recent save without sitting through all the intro titles.
While the demo's launch coincided with the start of Steam Next Fest, it's not technically part of the event in that the demo will continue to be available after the end of SNF and you can also grab it on PS5, PS4, and Switch if you prefer. It's an absurdly meaty trial that I've barely scratched the surface of, with accounts typically putting it around eight hours of playtime to reach the end. It also keeps up the wonderful trend of letting you carry over your progress to the actual game, so if you get hooked you won't be wasting any time when you buy the full version.
Stop, help, our list of the best JRPGs can only get so long!
