Ys IX: Monstrum Nox is a weird game. Not weird in terms of its story because it has a fairly generic and easy-to-follow plot. The main character, Adol, is cursed with this power and must work together with his fellow cursed compatriots to help liberate a town and themselves. It’s also just a hack and slash RPG.
What’s strange is the fact that this is a game released in 2021 with mechanics that were dated a decade ago. It’s a weird hodgepodge of new and old. Some for the better and some for the worst. This is all to say while the game is well-reviewed and worth recommending, it could also be better with a few improvements.
10 Give Adol A Voice
It is becoming increasingly weird to see video games with voiceless protagonists. Eventually Adol, from this game, along with Link from The Legend of Zelda and so many others have to get a voice eventually. Now is the the time to do that with Ys. Retroactively giving Adol a voice via a patch now would be a lot of work since it means actually adding in dialogue so it would be a big fix in other words.
9 Delete Subtitles
If Adol can’t be given a voice then players should at least have this audio option. Any game that doesn’t allow players to turn off subtitles, like this and a majority of the Kingdom Hearts games, is crazy. Why leave those in when most of the dialogue is voiced? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in other words. Subtitles on Japanese voices does make sense of course so maybe that’s why they couldn’t get rid of it at launch.
8 Add Co-Op
The first few hours of this game are with Adol and Adol alone. About three hours in players will get their first teammate, White Cat. She and the rest of the eventual party follow Adol closely. This means they are always around. It doesn’t have be something as ambitious as like a Diablo style four player co-op experience, but having a two player co-op option would be nice.
7 Skip Options
Another voice oddity in the game is in relation to skipping segments. Entire story scenes can be skipped along with mini game like events. Both are big pluses, but the downside here is that there is another more flawed way of skipping.
Players can fast-forward through dialogue, but it doesn’t change the pace of animations. In other words character movement won’t be sped through in a conversation. This should be fixed.
6 Money Collection
When enemies are defeated they explode into bits. Sometimes these bits contain money and sometimes they contain items. In both cases players have to physically run over them for a majority of the game in order to pick them up. Isn’t there a way for the developers to have money automatically zoom to Adol and his band of merry misfits? Kingdom Hearts figured this out in 2002, so let’s get on it Ys.
5 Guiding Arrow
The map system is flawed. On one hand it is nice that the mini map shows traces of where players just came from thus negating doubling back on accident. However, when it comes to guiding players toward a goal, this game stinks. Players can select a waypoint on the map and a general direction will be shown to guide them, but elevation along with a direct path is missing leading to a lot of guesswork.
4 Better Fast Travel Options
Another problem with the map is fast traveling. The idea itself is very easy in that players can select certain destination and zoom to it in an instance at no cost. However, in certain districts of the city there are no, or at least very few, places that can be zoomed too. This makes exploring a real pain sometimes especially while trying to complete a quest.
3 The Quest Board
On the subject of quests, that system is also flawed. Players can’t take on requests from a board, but they can look at them. Why have them on the board in the first place then if they are already on the map to begin with?
Also, unlike a lot of recent games, Ys IX does not ask players if they want to quickly travel back to the quest giver after said quest is done thus piling on to the problematic backtracking.
2 Party Commands
Another reason why co-op would be so great is because the partner AI is bad. There is no good way to issue commands satisfyingly. They might even be worse than Goofy and Donald in the first Kingdom Hearts game. For those that remember that game, that is saying something about Ys IX. Fix the AI and or add in better commands in other words.
1 Photo Mode
Even though the game looks like a PS3 game meaning that the world is not that pretty, Ys IX should still have a photo mode. It’s the standard for gaming now. If this game can have a tower defense segment then it can surely adopt a photo mode. That might the most reasonable request on this whole list.
