After playing YS VIII months ago and surprisingly enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would, I decided to give YS IX a shot. As a whole, the latter isn't as good as the former but I still enjoy it enough to get to the end and roll credits on it.
Just to be warned, only get the Switch version of YS IX if you have no other option. The frame rate can get very slow almost to the point of single digits during certain parts of the games especially when fighting the enemies in the Balduq overworld.
This now transitions to the next part of my review. Instead of an unexplored island like in YS VIII, you are now in a prison city knows as Balduq. This is where much of the game can be a drag since now, you don't have the approval rating to get the "real" ending like in YS VIII so you can by bypass much of the downtime spent in the city by just spawning enemies in the overworld of the prison city. You do this for many hours until you spawn the Grimwald Nox and you do a series of wave defenses and then finally after all that, you can progress the main story.
This really can get tedious due to the game being as long as it is. It also doesn't help that the wave defenses this time around are a lot more unfair and cheap and this in large part due to the fact that enemies during these sections can spawn behind from the crystal you are supposed to defend and no matter how much you invest in the defenses, you can't spawn any traps or defenses from that blindspot. So during a wave defense, enemies might spawn from behind and due to the said crystal being so fragile and enemies being tanky, a game over will inevitably happen so then it becomes a process of knowing when they will spawn from the blindspot and lowering the difficulty enough that they will die faster and minimizing the damage done to the crystal until the wave is over.
However on the flip side. The dungeons are quite memorable. One big reason is due to the music in them being fantastic and really immersing you into the adventure and being great tunes to listen to. The various powers you get also makes traversing them more enjoyable since now you have a grapple hook(abeit contextual), wall run, glide, being able to destroy cracked walls, have a vision mode that can highlight hidden switches among other various ways to traverse through the environment. If there is one thing YS IX is an improvment over VIII, it's definitely this.
There are some annoying quirks however like the wall run being finicky on what surfaces you are allowed to run on and if it's not a smooth vertical surface, don't bother. You also have to manually switch to Yufa in order to use her hammer to break cracked surfaces.
Combat is mostly the same as VIII so it's decent but only when the enemies and bosses aren't moving so fast that the lock on will move along with them. It does get very easy to start doing the same old tactics when fighting hordes and fodder enemies.
I did miss the way the blacksmith worked in VIII since it was more about gathering materials than having currency and it encouraged you to explore the island rather than constantly get money to pay for weapons and gear.
The story is a weird one, it's not terrible and there are parts that can be pretty good especially the late game twist. However much of the story is spent doing the Grimwald Nox wave defenses for Apprills, doing a bunch loosely connected side plots and most egregious of all, those dull and boring sections where you play as the *real* Adol and not Crimson King. The last one is so bizarrely presented that for much of the game, I'm wondering "what is the point of any this?" It's never made properly clear what these sections are for until late game where it's there to avoid any bizarre retconning. I'm also starting to get more annoyed how Adol has no real personality and is just a stand in for the player or the responses you get are there to avoid him from being a complete mute.
The late game twist is quite interesting and insane but it takes so long for it to happen and a good portion of the game has gone by at that point. Also it was very weird how inconsistent the game was on what lines were voice acted and what aren't. There will be voice acting one minute but then during seemingly important scenes there won't be any at all. It can be incredibly jarring.
With all this said, due to the amount of time I spent with the game and the characters by proxy apart of did get emotional by the time game eventually wrapped up so in spite of my complaints, I did enjoy it since spent about 55 hours playing it.
Overall, YS IX was in improvement in some ways but is lacking in other areas. The music, dungeons, traversal and parts of the story do carry it.
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