Should Ys X: Nordics be your first Ys game?

Again, I want to stress that I really liked Ys X: Nordics. I’d rank it as a top five Ys game. As far as whether you should start with Ys X, I’d specifically recommend it for two groups of people.

1: If you’re an action game enthusiast, Ys X should be your starting point. The combat mechanics are so enthralling and expressive once you get a handle on the controls, and even on the Nightmare difficulty I never felt like Ys X demanded grinding to win. If you enjoyed the gameplay of Final Fantasy XVI, you should enjoy Ys X

2: If you already know you want to play the rest of the Ys games, Ys X is an excellent starting point. It’s one of the earliest games in the overall series timeline, and the ending literally segues right into 2012’s Ys: Memories of Celceta. From there, you can follow the Chronology of Ys as laid out by Digital Emelas, and you can take a detour to play Ys I&II and Ys Origin whenever you feel ready for them.

For everyone else, Ys X: Nordics is a good starting point for the series, but the “best” starting point is debatable. While Ys X moves the series forward in important ways, it stumbles a bit in areas that fans especially value in these games. The music and consistent high energy has always been the soul of Ys, so a lesser showing on these fronts does make Ys X land slightly weaker than other past games have. If you’d like to learn about other starting points I’d personally recommend, you can check my Ys starter guide here

Regardless, I do recommend you play Ys X: Nordics in one way or another, especially if you’ve bothered to read this far. A demo for the game is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch, which does allow you to transfer your save file to the full game. By the time you approach the end of the demo content, you should hopefully see what makes Ys X so special. Or maybe you won’t—I don’t know what life is like for someone who never owned a TurboGrafx growing up.