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Ys X Nordics I have also beaten an Ys game this week. I actually started it last Fall when it launched but I fell off of it after 20 hours or so. In part because Indiana Jones came out and I was super excited for that but I also wasn't really feeling Ys X at the time. That was weird since I usually devour these games. At the time I couldn't really point to any single thing about it that I didn't like (and I still can't) but now that I'm done with it, I kinda see what the problem was. Basically, this is pirates/vikings Ys. The entire game has a Norse theme and you sail around on a ship and spend your time exploring islands and fighting undead monsters. The problem is that, early on in the game, the ship is insanely slow. It gets better over time as you upgrade it but it's fairly tedious early on. I'm speedrunning through new game plus on Nightmare difficulty right now and even though I was skipping all the cutscenes and ignoring most of the optional stuff, the first few chapters were still excruciatingly slow because of it. That alone isn't a huge problem but the best part of Ys has always been running around and killing monsters while listening to that sweet soundtrack. So the ship exploration fucks with the pacing, and since you're exploring islands that tend to be fairly small, you only do the running around killing monsters part for short periods of time. The game also keeps introducing new gameplay elements up until about the halfway point. So when you take all of these things into account, the pacing gets absolutely obliterated in the first half of the game. It gets way better in the second half as you upgrade your ship to be faster, the dungeons become longer and the game is done throwing tutorials at you. Ironically enough, I had stopped basically right when the game was about to get better. Everything I've been playing over the past week has basically been what I want out of an Ys game. It really was just the first half that had pacing issues. So yeah, overall this is a solid Ys game. It's biggest strength is the new combat system. It drops the party-based combat of the last few games in favor of a dual-protagonist setup. The focus is on rapidly switching between them while chaining up skill attacks and precisely timing your blocks to build up a meter that allows you to perform big team-up attacks. I hope they'll keep this system for the next few games because I absolutely loved it and I want to see them iterate on it like they did with the party system. Other than that, it's Ys. If you love the series, you'll love this one.