I played both YS VIII and IX prior to this and while I do enjoy them and X. The quality did start to dwindle with each subsequent installment. I do enjoy YS X and definitely think it has the best combat system and in some ways the best traversal, there are aspects of the game that knaw at me and really get in the way of my overall enjoyment.
I'll begin with story and it's mostly just on the "fine" side. Nothing amazing but things that I didn't mind before like with Adol not having a defined personality starts to really grind my gears here. Karja is an interesting character in that she's balancing the life of being a viking while also reclutantly leading a crew of people who just got their home destroyed but that's the issue here. Many of the characters on the crew you have to go out of your way to learn about. Adol and Karja are mostly driving the story so the fact that Adol is just a silent protagonist where you choose the responses and Karja is the one going through the real growth makes the whole "player avatar" role hard to accept. Adol is with her at all times, there might as well be some geniune character interactions between the two.
There's also the whole twist at the game. I'm not complaining that it's "predictable". I'm more so criticizing that the twist doesn't get revealed until the very end of the game. I had this issue with YS IX that it took far too long for the twist to be revealed but here it's worse since here it gets revealed at the very end. The way everything is drip feed to the player that eventually even someone who isn't the well versed in media tropes could figure out. At least YS IX's twist was insane and crazy here, it's tame and eventually it's easy to put the blocks together.
It's still not a terrible story since Karja and the character interactions as a whole are decent enough to carry it but it's on "average" side. The villains are also kind of just there but that's just going to me going on for another couple of setenaces.
Gameplay is interesting since combat might be the best in the series. For one dodge and guard are no longer mapped to the same button. On top of that there are perfect parries and dodges with enemies and bosses having their own specific timings. There's also blue outlines for dodging and red for blocking. I often like to test my abilities with the latter and see if I can get "perfect parry". It makes combat more dynamic. The team up attacks also have a lot of visual specticle to them and do a lot of damage. It did make me want to use regular skills a lot less.
Traversal is pretty enjoyable here with you swinging off of automated grapple points and using the surfboard. The dungeons are also enjoyable with the occasional section of Adol and Karja needing to separate and you need to switch between them in order to progress through the level. Despite the game telling you were to go, there is some legwork in trying to get from point A to B in finding what switch pulls what or timing the grapple points to get across.
There are two aspects that do detract from the gameplay. One being the ship gameplay which if you beeline it to the main story felt like a rather pointless edition to the game. Main story ship battles are minimal and you'll always have enough upgrades needed to get by what little mandatory battles there are. They often just feel like dull downtime in between dungeons and plot progressing islands. It also makes the ending of the game feel less emotional since you were stranded or trapped and it leaves with you finally going but now you've on a ship the whole time.
Second major aspect are the bosses. I do think the bosses being challenging is fine on paper, it's just that no matter how many levels I gain with the gear and loot, they just take stupid amounts of health. I have to lower difficulty and retry a lot more than VIII and IX because of this. Don't be ashamed of using this because the game would be impossible to get to the end of without it. The bosses are challenging even using this feature 3-4 times. A big reason for this is because the bosses don't have health bars but armor you have to destroy BEFORE you damage their real health bar and taking this down will take minutes on end. The final boss also regenerates his armor after damaging his health bar at least 3-4 if not 5 times. Bosses can take a long while depending on how well aqquainted you are with the game's mechanics.
Overall, that's YS X, it's an action RPG that has the potential to be really enjoyable gameplay wise but is held back by damage sponge bosses and dull down time on the ship. Adol not being a properly defined protagonist also detracted from the game too. Still if you beeline it's not even that long of a game so by the time I got to to end, the annoying parts didn't feel like a "I can't believe I put with that" upon reflection.
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