As we enter the podium and talk about 3 games which I could honestly rank among my top 10 favorite games ever played, I'm going to give you fair warning now. This is the last game on this list that isn't gonna get... real. The top 2 are still games I enjoyed and will absolutely be revisiting at some point, but my write-ups are going to tackle some very serious and very heavy shit because quite frankly, those 2 games demand it. If that does not interest you and you want to stop following this, I understand.
I said most of what I would have wanted to say here in that post. However, I want to come at this from a different angle.
In the write-up for Ys VIII a few days ago, I mentioned that the Ys franchise is one continuous story as opposed to the usual JRPG format of self contained stories. This one sees Adol and his one companion through the entire series, Dogi, enter the town of Balduq, where Adol... immediately gets arrested and thrown in prison. Through a series of events involving a prison escape and a fortunate meetup with a mysterious woman, Adol becomes a Monstrum and gains his alternate form for this game: The Crimson King. After breaking out properly, he's a wanted fugitive and needs a place to hide out, since all Monstrums are cursed and can't leave the city until it's lifted. He finds an abandoned building and Dogi finds a few recruits to help turn it into a bar/hangout spot for the Monstrums.
Now, as I mentioned before, Adol is an adventurer. He never stays in one place for too long, always leaving everything behind for whatever comes next as soon as he can. Being forced to stay inside the city due to his curse, and having to stay hidden since he's now a highly sought after fugitive, this is his first real opportunity (after NINE GAMES) to slow down. To process everything. To reflect. This is the first opportunity Adol has to forge genuine, meaningful relationships because he knows he can't just abandon them the first chance he gets like everyone else in his life (aside from Dogi.) And the characters in this game are some of my absolute favorites!
This is the one game out of my top 6 that did not make me cry, but certain events and revelations later in the game did leave me stunned off the face of the earth. Don't be scared off by that 9 in the title, as well as my comments about how Ys is one continuous story, because you don't *actually* need to have played any of the past games to get into this one. Shit, I played this before 8, and I grinded through the whole thing in a single 4 day weekend. If you want more thoughts on the game, check out my far lengthier write-up on Darcy's blog that I linked above lol.
