JRPG Ys 10: Nordics comes to PC with a heap of PC-specific features

(Image credit: Nihon Falcom)

The Ys games (it rhymes with "peace", you're welcome) are a series of JRPGs that go back to 1987, and have recently begun receiving English localizations sooner than they used to. The latest example of that is Ys 10: Nordics, which just released in English following a Japanese/Korean/Chinese PC port in March of this year.

For this PC version, Ys 10 has local co-op and a bunch of features explained in a post by Peter 'Durante' Thoman—once a modder known for his Dark Souls fix and helping bring The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel to PC, now head of his own PC porting studio. In the post, Durante highlights Ys 10 on PC having improved draw distance, support for any resolution or aspect ratio you care to throw at it, high-quality keyboard/mouse input support, and more.

I'm a particular fan of the graphics settings coming with a live preview so you can see each change in action, something more games should support. Dropping shadows down to medium to save a few frames per second, then having to wait until the next appropriately lit scene to see how terrible it actually looks is always infuriating. Another specific of the PC version is "Higher Quality Wind Paths", which means the pale blue arcs pointing out where you can pick up speed in the sailing sections now follow gentle curves rather than sharp low-poly angles.

The PC port has also been impressively compressed, taking up less than seven GB. With Space Marine 2 taking up almost 10 times as much space as that on my SSD, that's a blessing. And there's support for dynamic cloud sync, a setting that means if you're playing on a Steam Deck your save will be uploaded to the cloud even if you don't quit out of the game and just put it into sleep mode.

After watching the launch trailer, which features some real anime voices, I wasn't feeling thrilled about Ys 10. But put a phrase like "Full rebinding for both controller and MKB, support for primary and secondary bindings, and mixed use" in your blog post and you'll have my attention. Ys 10: Nordics is available on Steam and GOG.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.