The game kinda is remembering me to Haven, which as well got a Coop Mode with 2 Heroes who seem to have a close connection and with great music involved (the Haven music was designed by Danger, not a no name at their genre). Of course YS is a "level up" in gameplay and overall possibilities including gametime and gameplay, but somewhat it got a comparable shape. Not that i know a lot about Nordic at all, i still need to play it... i need to take me the time today.

Yet, the Coop mode as far as i can say was not a "Initial design", as it was intended as a single player gamer. Albeit Durante was able to "hack" this mode into the game it seems, so it could even be fun together with friends&family.
I can get me the OST, no need to worry regarding this matter. I rather would recommend it to NIS because it will increase the value of their released content by a clear margin and they can finally be proud of their DLCs, a full artbook and a full OST.

Regarding the "money problems"; i dunno... but one thing i can still say: NIS biggest franchise, apart from YS which has been "handed over" to them, is Disgaea and so far NIS did not bother releasing this game on GOG or any other PC platform, so it is still Steam only. It will surely generate a lot of coins bringing it over... but for some reason they rather try to "overcharge" the YS games, instead of looking toward new possibilities. Apparently, they are still not desperate enough.

The YS-fans would call it a "AAA"-game. The entire rating matter is pretty subjective but usually it is involving judging the amount of money which has been spent on the development (in many cases not even known to us, lot of speculations here). Which can be miss leading because there are a lot of very expensive games i would not even touch with a pole and some very expensive games even failed hard (Sony knows the deal and many more companies). So, this rating always have to be taken with a grain of salt, even a big grain of salt. Talent is not something money can just "buy" out of the blue (sky) but it surely helps having sufficient resources, everywhere.

And as with most Falcom games, the music files are in the game installation's /bgm/ folder (in .opus format), albeit with lossy compression.

Lossy compression? I already did wonder how it is possible to pull so many music files into a game with 6.76 GB size... not really possible unless compression is used. This is not necessary on PC but might be useful for Switch.

Because it is GOG exclusive i guess.
This is indeed non necessary, especially because it is in most cases not even GOG exclusive.

Indeed, YS was treated like "what, does it even exist"?

Speaking of existence, is anyone else finding that Ys X isn't showing up anywhere in the profile pages on the website (as opposed to Galaxy)? If I go to /u/VanishedOne/games, order it alphabetically and scroll to where the other Ys games are, it's just... not there.

Of course there is. +10% for EU, including us here in the east, +16% for GB, +25% for CH as it was already pointed out in the thread, they don't forget about price hikes.
But they won't bother with discounts. Not even the former CIS states or China get them for this title, so don't feel left out. BUT, AU and CA get some small ones, less than 1% and 2%, respectively. They must be pretty poor over there to get that! (Of course, it's likely just a result of rounding down a little when converting to local currency.)

Yeah it seems you are right. According to gog you are playing an unreleased game. Maybe you should contact them and let them know about it. Probably the developer forgot to activate something?

The perception usually is "if there are no huge discounts for our apparently (i do not see China as a economically weak country) economically weak country then there is no regional pricing." Regional pricing for many of us simply means "they get cheaper prices"... to say it blunt. However, for some other gamers, at the other end of the pricing "strategy"... it is exactly opposite: Regional pricing means "higher price" to them.

If we want to be "fair"... and nope the world is not fair, fairness is just a ethical idea of some pretty humanistic minded people, then we may have to take the individual situation into account, which simply is not possible (way to complicated). So, in the end, the prices are simply the result of "what is working or does it work", or "trying to reach the average pain threshold of a given location"... nothing else. The most fair thing we may be able to hand out is "using a purchasing power parity of any given country" but even that one can become distorted a lot by the high inequality of any given country, ultimately never being able to become "fair."

Anyway, regarding NIS, a publisher in general not in favor for "low prices" (i guess i hit the nail here) it is special if they are now handing out a big price cut on a sale, so those interested into those games may now start to buy... as it may not become that much lower anymore and surely not frequently.

Regarding game settings: A certain user was showing me a YT video trying to show me how they are "apparently without a sweat" able to run YS Nordics "all maxed" in 1440P and 100 FPS. Now this is all nice and stuff but it does not show me the actual GPU load. All i was able to see is settings and FPS, thats it.

However, using a 3090, according to my experience (which is about 15% weaker than a 3090 TI in very demanding scenarios) if we go full settings, it will reach the maximum load at those settings (100 FPS) and in some scenarios the FPS will even drop a lot (still above 50, sure). There is yet a "small trick" with big effects: This trick is called "4x MSAA instead of 8x MSAA", it may look like a small change but the effect on the peformance is huge. 4x vs. 8x MSAA will result into 1/3 lesser load! So, in this scenario given to me, a 3090 might actually be able to keep nearly 100 FPS in almost any scenario, yet... it will need its full "load potential", so this GPU is not doing "a walk in the park" using those settings, still.

For my GPU it simply would mean, using 4x MSAA instead of 8x MSAA, 60 FPS instead of 100 FPS, and going 1080P internal resolution instead of 1440P (the resolution is always internal, mind it... because if the internal resolution is to high or to low... in the end it will still produce the resolution demanded by the screen using scaling technology)... anyway, it would mean i get about 1/3 load in average with some "demanding spikes" at around 40% load. In the words of power usage it would mean between 120 and 170 W TDP, which is actually the value important to measure "actual load condition". Because, every GPU got a certain TDP-range it is able to "make use of it". A 3090 TI can use a pretty large range of 30 to 460 W, in my experience, with a 50% load of about 230 W. The currently only GPU with comparable value is a 4090, simply with about 50% more performance, at the same load. What is important is the actual GPU load and how much load it is able to handle, other values are less important. Because this "load tolerance" will decide if the performance will remain stable or rather not.

Anyway, regarding settings of YS Nordics: I do recommend using 1080P+ internal resolution (any value higher than that will stress the GPU a lot, with rather low graphic quality gains) and not more than 4x MSAA. Higher MSAA might not even be useful as, as long as the screen is 1080P or lower (ideally 4k+) the game is not able to completely eradicate any aliasing, simply to less pixels. Using those settings the game may run smooth in a "modern GPU" but it remains the most demanding YS game ever "at max or near max settings".

Optimizing a setting simply means, getting the load conditions sufficient for any scenario. Nearly perfect if it does not exceed 50% load in average, so there is enough of headroom left for demanding spikes. If no headroom left... a modern engine may instantly reduce certain specs such as "internal resolution", resulting into sudden drops of graphic quality... a blurry image, but it may not even become noticed because many of us may use "motion blur"-technology which i hate... so they think the drop in quality is just "natural", which is not true. Using AI, even a internal resolution of 720P (YS Nordics can almost go down to a SD resolution = 520P, 50% of 1080P = 4x lesser pixels, a lot of magic here, it even works on a Switch pretty well) may still produce a sharp image but with missing stuff... artifacts or what else, or at least input lag if "artificial frames are used" instead of reducing internal resolution. The matter is pretty complicated nowadays because the modern GPUs along with modern engines are true magicians at sufficiently trying to produce "fakes" at every little corner of a picture and making it appear "correct and real". Anyway, in my mind, native may still produce the best quality but native will remain demanding, even on the very best GPUs out there. We are that much used into "AI" that we actually may not even notice it anymore and the game designers are already using AI as much as possible for calculating performance requirements. A old GPU, such as 1080 TI, is soon extremely outdated, as it can not deal with AI on the hardware side, no matter "how well" it still is being received by some retro-enthusiasts.

You really wanna know?

There is simply a high demand, way higher than many people enjoy to admit. In many countries there are more pets than childrens and i am not even taking the animals for food into account, because they could even outnumber the whole humankind. Obviously, it is more likely seeing someone going along with a pet, instead of a child or partner; thats the questionable side of society but we try to make it look wonderful. All the other stuff is somewhat "compensation", becoming a hidden demand.

Ys X and its DLC have a "soon" tag in library but are already available for download. This is likely because of NISA's crappy DLC policies: The versions of the product that most people will be able to purchase *haven't* released yet. After November 7th, the launch edition products now in the store will be replaced with versions stripped of the "exclusives".

In other words, each launch edition bundle contains one unreleased product - the stripped version. Or so it seems. I'd guess that it's done this way - instead of being fully separate entries - so that the stripped version (once released) properly shows as purchased in the store for those who bought the launch edition (since they've purchased all of its content plus the exclusives).

So in terms of the store, I doubt there's anything to worry about. Just NISA being crappy as usual.

Yeah it seems you are exactly right. It happened with the cold steel games If I remember correctly. The launch edition gets replaced by another edition and then all reviews etc. get lost from the store page. F Nisa...

They also get removed from wishlists, not being replaced with the new editions...

Played on Switch.

Another shity translation from NISA. For fuck's sake, stop changing what the characters talk.

It probably has something to do with that, but I got Trails through Daybreak at launch as well and it behaved normally in the profile (except that it still has no achievement percentage marker). Anyway, I'll inform Support and see whether they fix it.