Ys X First Playthrough: Chapter 2 (via demo)
2As it turns out, the Ys X demo is honest to a fault, giving us more than 2 entire chapters of the game to see what it has to offer.
Unfortunately, Chapter 2 reveals that some of what it offers is... not what I would call compelling, as we receive the worst news possible in this chapter: the tower defense bits that no one particularly enjoyed even once are back for a 3rd consecutive game. Well, it's no longer tower defense, technically, but it's still kill-consecutive-waves-of-enemies filler, and it's even more unimaginative than ever. We need to talk about this.
Ys X introduces a whole new exploration mechanic in the way of seafaring. Unfortunately, this can get pretty boring as you wait to haul your slow butt interminably from point A to point B. I was hoping these would at least be replacing the tower defense segments from Ys VIII and IX, in which case I'd be willing to make that sacrifice. But nope, wave-based arenas are back IN ADDITION to all this new padding, and now they take place on ships that are too strong to sink from the outside.
Here's the thing: at least in Ys VIII in particular, enemies in these waves tended to somewhat believably originate from reasonable points on the map, and resulted in "attacks" that felt at least slightly organic. In Ys X, Falcom made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to bother making it look convincing - enemies just warp in right in front of your face every single time. Like... you know ships have these inventions called doors and staircases and decks and stuff that enemies could realistically approach from, right? Nah, let's phone it in harder than anything the entire franchise has ever seen.
They phoned this in so hard, you can't even knock enemies overboard - they just hit invisible walls. Your characters are literally pirates for crying out loud, throwing jerks overboard is part of the job description! This is excruciatingly disappointing. If you're going to insist on making players suffer through a feature for the third damn time when they made it crystal clear it wasn't terribly fun in each of the previous two games, you better damn well at least put some effort into it. Falcom has done the opposite, as if they too are sick of this shit.
Anyway, looking past all of this annoying nonsense that has been padded into this game, Chapter 2 does eventually clue us in as to how the plot progression is going to work this time around. And it's somewhat amusing, in that it feels kind of like they're taking Ys VIII and standing it on its head.
That being said, with all of this excessive padding that isn't terribly fun, they're making Ys X a tougher sell, and I absolutely do not expect it to measure up to Ys VIII. (I wouldn't expect it to even without the padding; Ys VIII set an impossibly high bar for future titles.)