Review: Nine Sols
Every time I sit down and play a game in this general "soulslike" genre, I'm always like "This is the one. This is the one I'm finally gonna beat." It never is. Or...well, it sort of is? I mean, sure, I had the damage modifiers cranked up to 25% taken and 200% inflicted, but you still have to actually do the fights. Just because you can survive 4x as many hits doesn't mean you stop taking them, and you still have to actually get your own hits in - you just have a lot more leeway in the whole process. Frankly, if I didn't have access to the story mode modifiers, I probably would have dropped off around Sol 7, so the fact that I pushed through to the end is surely worth something. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
I published my initial thoughts on the game when I was a little under halfway through the game, and having now finished it, I stand by a lot of what I said in that. I still think the aesthetic is a mixed bag (although the cyberpunk half does grow in importance as the game goes on), and I definitely appreciated the story mode modifiers more as the game went on. It's not an easy game by any means, but if you're thorough exploring, you can get ahead of the difficulty curve by having extra health and flasks than it "expects" you to, especially early on. This "extra runway" can get you through most of the midgame, but by the time you're heading to Sols 6 and 7, it's very possible to have maxed out your health, total flasks, and healing upgrades, leaving you with no real other options than figuring it out. Having a fallback of "Okay, if I just cut his damage down to 80%, I think I can do this" was a huge relief when I was otherwise banging my head against the lategame bosses.
I do not extend this courtesy to the final Sol and the area preceding her. For reasons I do not really understand, the research center runs like ass on Switch. Maybe it's related to all the regenerating enemies? But regardless of why, there was a massive slowdown every time you loaded into the area (including dying), and it didn't go away until 15-30 seconds after you gained control. This combined with a setpiece later in the area that combined the world's slowest autoscroller with a "cinematic" escape sequence...that takes away the UI. Do you want to know how close you are to dying? How many Qi charges you have, which you need to actually kill the regenerating enemies? Fuck you. You're gonna go by that "bloody" indicator at the edge of the screen, and you're going to like it. Suffice to say, by the third or so time I had to redo that sequence, I made myself invincible.
Equally, the final boss is an absolute nightmare. I have no doubt that she can be learned, lord knows that there are enough no hit runs on youtube to demonstrate my inadequacies on this particular subject, but she is relentless. Your attack opportunities are few and far between, and by the time you hit phase 3, she actually does not stop attacking at all - you can either work some attacks in the middle of her combo, or you block one or two specific attacks with a charged parry to create an opening. This is all extremely impressive to watch when someone knows what they're doing, but I did not, and frankly was not willing to get to that point, especially after the research center had drained a lot of the goodwill the game had built up. The knowledge that I could move on to Ys X at any time (and would never come back if I did) did a lot to speed up my decision to just finish the game, in whatever form that took.
My gripes with the endgame difficulty aside, I enjoyed the majority of what Nine Sols had to offer. The metroidvania aspects aren't anything special, but they work well enough to give you a small break between the minibosses and larger fights. The story is a pretty standard revenge tale, but it was more compelling than it sounds on paper and the gang of misfits that show up at your house are all good fun - Shaunshaun, especially. The way the house fills up with stuff that he's made is delightful, and the way he and Yi go back and forth teaching other is very well done. And we can't go without mentioning the end credits theme, which goes way harder than it needed to.
I don't think I would play another game like this, at least not for a long time. I had kind of thought to try Sekiro again, but the end of this game beat that notion out of me very quickly, and honestly? That's probably for the best. I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me want to go play a kaizo hack or something, but that's a different set of skills that I have a lot more of a stomach for. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go bang my head against an Ys boss for the next hour.