Es el primer Ys que me animé a jugar en nightmare y me pareció divertido sin más. No es que sea tan memorable como otras entregas aparte de dar info sobre Adol, se siente bastante meh la mayor parte del tiempo aunque me gusto cerca del final. Lo que me invita a darle el 2,5 es puramente el gameplay, me gustaron bastante las mejoras respecto a seven y lo siento más rápido. Me gustó el dungeon final por lo variado que es, no es que el fuerte de Falcom sea crear dungeons variados en primer lugar, así que le doy el visto bueno por lo menos en ese dungeon en específico. Los jefes se me hicieron muy básicos en su mayoría, bastante alejados de lo desafiantes que podían ser los de Felghana u Origin incluso en dificultad normal (principalmente los 2 últimos son una risa). Disfruté el juego porque le encontré el gusto al gameplay, pero no puedo decir que se me hizo algo destacable para lo que venía jugando en la franquicia.
really want to like this game more. the core gameplay is an improved and refined version of ys sevens, ost hits most the right notes but everything else? kinda disappointed with. especially the story and characters. dungeons weren't all that fun either, accompanied by some of the most uninspired bosses since ys 6.
Ended up liking this way more than I anticipated, given how much it inherits from Seven. The battle system feels weighty and snappy and I love it everytime I'm on a dungeon but dread arriving at a new town to 30 mins+ of cutscenes and boring dialog.
I should have known something wasn't right about Memories of Celceta by the one-hour mark. Looking back, I’ve now repeatedly picked up and shelved this game a grand total of five times over the past year, with my feelings upon the game becoming more mixed every time. In fact, it actually made me question whether or not I liked Ys Seven to begin with. Upon a quick replay though, I can confirm that the issue was not so much Ys Seven’s baseline mechanics but rather Celceta’s interpretation of said mechanics. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll refrain from poring over Celceta’s general background (since the core ideas have carried over from Ys Seven and have been thoroughly explained here) and treat this write-up more as a compare & contrast.
The first thing that comes to mind is that despite carrying over the baseline combat mechanics from Ys Seven, Celceta’s pacing feels far more sluggish than Ys Seven. This struck me as quite odd at first, because there’s no immediate culprit that would draw my ire as anything that was excessively grindy (as compared to Ys Seven, which really suffers from an end-game resource grind for the best weapons in the game). Upon further reflection, I came to realize that it was actually a mix of smaller factors that kept intrusively interrupting the flow of Ys’s traditionally frenetic bread-and-butter gameplay over the course of the entire run. For example:
- Celceta has tons of slow swimming thanks to all the different water bodies and water elevation puzzles scattered throughout the overworld and the dungeons. This gets even more obnoxious because there are tons of enemies present in the water that Adol and company have to fend off with a very committal thrust (since you can’t dodge or flash guard while swimming).
- The first half of the game doesn’t let you freely teleport between differently colored monuments, which becomes very tedious when backtracking for resources/side quests/healing. It’s not until the Primeval Lands are unlocked and you obtain the Gold Wing that backtracking becomes much more efficient.
- There’s some coding/binding oversight that doesn’t let you use your special attack bound to the Y button without expending your EXTRA attack/gauge if it’s completely filled up. The result is that I felt pretty reluctant to use the Y special attack most of the time, and accidentally threw away my EXTRA attack plenty of times, forcing me to engage in additional grinding to enter every boss fight with a full EXTRA gauge.
- There are some high-level enemies near the beginning of the game with tons of health that you’d think would be a good idea to avoid; however, it’s actually pretty easy to defeat them by flash guarding the telegraphed attacks and they're worth boat-loads of experience. The Golden Pikkard near the middle of the game functions similarly to this, in that it can grant multiple level-ups at a time and is otherwise a somewhat unengaging fight since it will just run away from you while tanking attacks. These opportunities feel too good to pass up since it’s often very little risk for significant reward, resulting in the player occasionally grinding to become over-leveled for a good chunk of the game.
- The game encourages you to go for “aerial combos” juggling enemies for extra damage, but most characters are incapable of using standard attacks to hit launched foes because there’s no jump and most standard attacks aren’t pointed upwards. This creates this gap in combat where after hitting enemies with launcher special attacks and running out of the SP gauge, you have to wait for enemies to return to earth before resuming your assault.
- Each of the six playable party characters has a “unique” action that requires you to switch to them to activate something in the overworld (ex: Adol is the only one who can access memories, Duren is required to unlock chests, etc). This wasn’t completely absent in Ys Seven, but it’s significantly more intrusive in Celceta because there are many more instances requiring character-specific context-sensitive prompts, so a lot more time is spent menuing to switch party characters on the fly if the ones you’re currently using for combat don’t correspond with those required for overworld actions.
- While there’s no late-game resource grind as previously mentioned, there’s something far more egregious that players may feel incentivized to do. Due to some developer oversight, Falcom misaligned the world map, which means that to achieve 100% map completion, you have to unintuitively “hug” walls of certain areas to register them as part of the percentage. This gets particularly grating because the game is very picky as to what has/has not been registered, to where unregistered parts of the map may not even appear to be visibly faded while looking at the map display. You don’t have to 100% the map to beat the game of course, but since the item you receive as a reward for doing so is extremely valuable (a sub-item that accelerates the accrual of your EXTRA gauge), most players will probably end up going through this laborious and unclear clean-up that was fortunately addressed in Ys VIII with far more generous guidelines.
Looking past these pacing issues, Celceta does at least expand and often improve upon the toolkit from Ys Seven. For instance, dodge-rolling right when enemies attack performs a “Flash Move” that grants you temporary invincibility and temporarily slows the enemy down (as opposed to the Flash Guard, which is more of a “parry” that builds up your SP/EXTRA gauge), which should theoretically open up more avenues of combat. In addition, new special attacks for characters are naturally unlocked as the player progresses through the game’s fights; while Ys Seven ran the risk of players potentially not gaining permanent access to new special attacks if not used enough with new weapons, Celceta’s unlocks operate independently of purchasing new weapons to avoid this issue. Lastly, Celceta provides a stronger incentive for utilizing special attacks by allowing players to regain half of the expended SP if the special attack is used as a finisher, rewarding players for wisely timing special attacks to improve the flow of combat.
The more pressing issue then, is that the enemies and bosses are not scaled appropriately to match the player’s buffed toolkit, resulting in what is probably the easiest Ys game to date. Ys Seven at least ran the risk of punishing the player for mistiming the Flash Guard: if the player is hit during the end-lag after the active parrying frames, they would receive critical damage, thus balancing the risk vs reward. Meanwhile, Celceta not only removes this risk altogether, but in fact allows the player to mash the Flash Guard with no delay between inputs to quickly build up the SP/EXTRA gauge in practical invincibility, trivializing fights. Similarly, the charged attack is streamlined from Ys Seven to Celceta: Ys Seven forced the player to commit by holding down the attack button, while Celceta instead links the charged attack to a built-in timer (wait long enough without attacking and the next attack you launch will be charged). While this doesn’t appear to be a drastic change, there’s a lot less decision-making that goes into the latter compared to the former; the player is consciously making the decision to charge up an attack in Ys Seven, but in Celceta, it’ll naturally charge while dodge-rolling around anyways. Finally, remembered when I mentioned that most characters are incapable of hitting launched enemies with standard attacks for aerial combos? There’s one exception to this, and she’s the most busted character in the game: Karna can often infinitely juggle enemies with her ranged standard attack, and can in fact out-space the vast majority of mobs in the game. Couple all of these things with the activated flash-moves from rolling through enemy attacks, and Celceta’s combat often devolves into mindless hit-and-run strategies where you can dodge-roll/flash-guard through every attack in the game with little risk to the player.
As a result, Memories of Celceta lacks an engaging difficulty/learning curve compared to other games in the series; the same broken strategies that work at the very beginning are just as effective at running through late-game bosses, and there’s not much incentive for the player to experiment outside of their comfort zone considering how easy it is to fall back upon hit-and-run. I imagine that Falcom caught wind of complaints regarding spongey bosses in Ys Seven and thus toned down their health bars accordingly, but it feels like they went in the complete opposite direction because even the final couple of bosses absolutely melted in a couple of minutes from abusing flash guard critical-boosted EXTRA attacks. The game also lacks a satisfying payoff to justify the tedium: Memories of Celceta tries to place more emphasis upon the individual party members as opposed to the overarching lore (which is why Ys Seven’s limited storytelling feels more acceptable), but so much more time is spent mindlessly backtracking for side-quests that fail to provide interesting lore/character development, and the game abruptly grinds to a halt after an anti-climatic final boss fight that fails to provide any resolution or catharsis to any of the game’s party members. It really feels like Falcom phoned in Celceta's ending in comparison to the simple yet impactful narrative that Ys Seven provided, thanks to Ys Seven’s well-developed tragic villain and emotional climax.
Many have described Ys Seven and Memories of Celceta as a sort of “transition period” between the Ark-era isometric 2D-3D games and the “modern-era” party-based fully-3D games with broader scopes and longer runtimes, but I will go a step further: Memories of Celceta is the stepping-stone of the Ys stepping-stones. The short and thick of it is that while there is no single abhorrent quality or moment that makes the game unbearable, it's also the first Ys game that's struggled to hold my attention and I can’t think of any reasons to recommend it as opposed to its peers. If you want a tougher game with less developed mechanics but a tighter execution to fit its rougher toolkit, then Ys Seven is the way to go. If you want a more expansive and polished toolkit with a more engaging difficulty and learning curve to justify said toolkit, then Ys VIII is your weapon of choice. Finally, if you just want the tale of Celceta told to you in a more succinct and colorful manner, then I’d suggest playing through the original Ys IV via Dawn of Ys. Memories of Celceta loves to emphasize the importance of treasuring the past… but I sure as hell wouldn’t be surprised if this was the first Ys game that I ended up forgetting.
The first thing that comes to mind is that despite carrying over the baseline combat mechanics from Ys Seven, Celceta’s pacing feels far more sluggish than Ys Seven. This struck me as quite odd at first, because there’s no immediate culprit that would draw my ire as anything that was excessively grindy (as compared to Ys Seven, which really suffers from an end-game resource grind for the best weapons in the game). Upon further reflection, I came to realize that it was actually a mix of smaller factors that kept intrusively interrupting the flow of Ys’s traditionally frenetic bread-and-butter gameplay over the course of the entire run. For example:
- Celceta has tons of slow swimming thanks to all the different water bodies and water elevation puzzles scattered throughout the overworld and the dungeons. This gets even more obnoxious because there are tons of enemies present in the water that Adol and company have to fend off with a very committal thrust (since you can’t dodge or flash guard while swimming).
- The first half of the game doesn’t let you freely teleport between differently colored monuments, which becomes very tedious when backtracking for resources/side quests/healing. It’s not until the Primeval Lands are unlocked and you obtain the Gold Wing that backtracking becomes much more efficient.
- There’s some coding/binding oversight that doesn’t let you use your special attack bound to the Y button without expending your EXTRA attack/gauge if it’s completely filled up. The result is that I felt pretty reluctant to use the Y special attack most of the time, and accidentally threw away my EXTRA attack plenty of times, forcing me to engage in additional grinding to enter every boss fight with a full EXTRA gauge.
- There are some high-level enemies near the beginning of the game with tons of health that you’d think would be a good idea to avoid; however, it’s actually pretty easy to defeat them by flash guarding the telegraphed attacks and they're worth boat-loads of experience. The Golden Pikkard near the middle of the game functions similarly to this, in that it can grant multiple level-ups at a time and is otherwise a somewhat unengaging fight since it will just run away from you while tanking attacks. These opportunities feel too good to pass up since it’s often very little risk for significant reward, resulting in the player occasionally grinding to become over-leveled for a good chunk of the game.
- The game encourages you to go for “aerial combos” juggling enemies for extra damage, but most characters are incapable of using standard attacks to hit launched foes because there’s no jump and most standard attacks aren’t pointed upwards. This creates this gap in combat where after hitting enemies with launcher special attacks and running out of the SP gauge, you have to wait for enemies to return to earth before resuming your assault.
- Each of the six playable party characters has a “unique” action that requires you to switch to them to activate something in the overworld (ex: Adol is the only one who can access memories, Duren is required to unlock chests, etc). This wasn’t completely absent in Ys Seven, but it’s significantly more intrusive in Celceta because there are many more instances requiring character-specific context-sensitive prompts, so a lot more time is spent menuing to switch party characters on the fly if the ones you’re currently using for combat don’t correspond with those required for overworld actions.
- While there’s no late-game resource grind as previously mentioned, there’s something far more egregious that players may feel incentivized to do. Due to some developer oversight, Falcom misaligned the world map, which means that to achieve 100% map completion, you have to unintuitively “hug” walls of certain areas to register them as part of the percentage. This gets particularly grating because the game is very picky as to what has/has not been registered, to where unregistered parts of the map may not even appear to be visibly faded while looking at the map display. You don’t have to 100% the map to beat the game of course, but since the item you receive as a reward for doing so is extremely valuable (a sub-item that accelerates the accrual of your EXTRA gauge), most players will probably end up going through this laborious and unclear clean-up that was fortunately addressed in Ys VIII with far more generous guidelines.
Looking past these pacing issues, Celceta does at least expand and often improve upon the toolkit from Ys Seven. For instance, dodge-rolling right when enemies attack performs a “Flash Move” that grants you temporary invincibility and temporarily slows the enemy down (as opposed to the Flash Guard, which is more of a “parry” that builds up your SP/EXTRA gauge), which should theoretically open up more avenues of combat. In addition, new special attacks for characters are naturally unlocked as the player progresses through the game’s fights; while Ys Seven ran the risk of players potentially not gaining permanent access to new special attacks if not used enough with new weapons, Celceta’s unlocks operate independently of purchasing new weapons to avoid this issue. Lastly, Celceta provides a stronger incentive for utilizing special attacks by allowing players to regain half of the expended SP if the special attack is used as a finisher, rewarding players for wisely timing special attacks to improve the flow of combat.
The more pressing issue then, is that the enemies and bosses are not scaled appropriately to match the player’s buffed toolkit, resulting in what is probably the easiest Ys game to date. Ys Seven at least ran the risk of punishing the player for mistiming the Flash Guard: if the player is hit during the end-lag after the active parrying frames, they would receive critical damage, thus balancing the risk vs reward. Meanwhile, Celceta not only removes this risk altogether, but in fact allows the player to mash the Flash Guard with no delay between inputs to quickly build up the SP/EXTRA gauge in practical invincibility, trivializing fights. Similarly, the charged attack is streamlined from Ys Seven to Celceta: Ys Seven forced the player to commit by holding down the attack button, while Celceta instead links the charged attack to a built-in timer (wait long enough without attacking and the next attack you launch will be charged). While this doesn’t appear to be a drastic change, there’s a lot less decision-making that goes into the latter compared to the former; the player is consciously making the decision to charge up an attack in Ys Seven, but in Celceta, it’ll naturally charge while dodge-rolling around anyways. Finally, remembered when I mentioned that most characters are incapable of hitting launched enemies with standard attacks for aerial combos? There’s one exception to this, and she’s the most busted character in the game: Karna can often infinitely juggle enemies with her ranged standard attack, and can in fact out-space the vast majority of mobs in the game. Couple all of these things with the activated flash-moves from rolling through enemy attacks, and Celceta’s combat often devolves into mindless hit-and-run strategies where you can dodge-roll/flash-guard through every attack in the game with little risk to the player.
As a result, Memories of Celceta lacks an engaging difficulty/learning curve compared to other games in the series; the same broken strategies that work at the very beginning are just as effective at running through late-game bosses, and there’s not much incentive for the player to experiment outside of their comfort zone considering how easy it is to fall back upon hit-and-run. I imagine that Falcom caught wind of complaints regarding spongey bosses in Ys Seven and thus toned down their health bars accordingly, but it feels like they went in the complete opposite direction because even the final couple of bosses absolutely melted in a couple of minutes from abusing flash guard critical-boosted EXTRA attacks. The game also lacks a satisfying payoff to justify the tedium: Memories of Celceta tries to place more emphasis upon the individual party members as opposed to the overarching lore (which is why Ys Seven’s limited storytelling feels more acceptable), but so much more time is spent mindlessly backtracking for side-quests that fail to provide interesting lore/character development, and the game abruptly grinds to a halt after an anti-climatic final boss fight that fails to provide any resolution or catharsis to any of the game’s party members. It really feels like Falcom phoned in Celceta's ending in comparison to the simple yet impactful narrative that Ys Seven provided, thanks to Ys Seven’s well-developed tragic villain and emotional climax.
Many have described Ys Seven and Memories of Celceta as a sort of “transition period” between the Ark-era isometric 2D-3D games and the “modern-era” party-based fully-3D games with broader scopes and longer runtimes, but I will go a step further: Memories of Celceta is the stepping-stone of the Ys stepping-stones. The short and thick of it is that while there is no single abhorrent quality or moment that makes the game unbearable, it's also the first Ys game that's struggled to hold my attention and I can’t think of any reasons to recommend it as opposed to its peers. If you want a tougher game with less developed mechanics but a tighter execution to fit its rougher toolkit, then Ys Seven is the way to go. If you want a more expansive and polished toolkit with a more engaging difficulty and learning curve to justify said toolkit, then Ys VIII is your weapon of choice. Finally, if you just want the tale of Celceta told to you in a more succinct and colorful manner, then I’d suggest playing through the original Ys IV via Dawn of Ys. Memories of Celceta loves to emphasize the importance of treasuring the past… but I sure as hell wouldn’t be surprised if this was the first Ys game that I ended up forgetting.
5.5/10
I feel kinda bad cuz on one hand when the game is good its really good, some of the tracks are almost top tier Falcom, I like all the party members and Adol had some great content here. On the other hand I just don't care anymore man, it felt cumbersome playing through the last stretch of the game, this game is not for me.
Pretty good game, especially considering it's a vita game. Exploration is rewarding and the story is solid. Still one of the weaker Ys games though but worth playing if you can find it on sale.
Really fun action RPG ! It’s an old game that it’s still good to play nowadays.
I was kind of in between 3 and 4 for this - I was more of a 4 early on but as the game went on the repetition really set in and I watched the last bits on YouTube. I think my biggest disappointment was that the game wasn't actually set in the forest of celceta..only like the first 25% was. And I feel that setting was wasted for various reasons.
+ Gorgeous art - actually great color choices at times
+ The 6 characters felt tied to the story well and I liked the reveals, especially Duren/Frieda's hometown
+ It was a fun set-up to explore the forest at first
+ Cool to learn a little about Adol's backstory
+ Really great fast pace, although the combat was pretty repetitive, there were occasionally some fun situations with enemies zipping around, although camera angles/excessive VFX made it hard to see what was going on and react properly
- The whole Celceta forest was set up as this huge mysterious setting - and then by the end like, everyone and their friend is just easily walking through it!
- Wasn't as about Adol as much as I thought it would be
- Status effects were a nuisance and not that interesting to work around
- Some of the stuff in this feels really overly tied to Trails lore? The records, causality, big mecha people.. people coming out of mechas
- Kind of disappointing the game wasn't actually entirely set in a large forest
- The ending was so sudden with like no conclusion for the characters?? What's up with that
- Perfunctory level design and puzzles
- Formulaic level and story progression
- Boss fights feel messy and camera angles move too much. Rather than fights they all feel kind of repetitive - memorizing sounds/animations to know when to bash Flash Guard
- VFX make the screen really hard to read at times
- Item progression and upgrading are repetitive
+ Gorgeous art - actually great color choices at times
+ The 6 characters felt tied to the story well and I liked the reveals, especially Duren/Frieda's hometown
+ It was a fun set-up to explore the forest at first
+ Cool to learn a little about Adol's backstory
+ Really great fast pace, although the combat was pretty repetitive, there were occasionally some fun situations with enemies zipping around, although camera angles/excessive VFX made it hard to see what was going on and react properly
- The whole Celceta forest was set up as this huge mysterious setting - and then by the end like, everyone and their friend is just easily walking through it!
- Wasn't as about Adol as much as I thought it would be
- Status effects were a nuisance and not that interesting to work around
- Some of the stuff in this feels really overly tied to Trails lore? The records, causality, big mecha people.. people coming out of mechas
- Kind of disappointing the game wasn't actually entirely set in a large forest
- The ending was so sudden with like no conclusion for the characters?? What's up with that
- Perfunctory level design and puzzles
- Formulaic level and story progression
- Boss fights feel messy and camera angles move too much. Rather than fights they all feel kind of repetitive - memorizing sounds/animations to know when to bash Flash Guard
- VFX make the screen really hard to read at times
- Item progression and upgrading are repetitive
To talk about Memories of Celceta it is important to speak of Celceta's journey into modernity. Due to Falcom's incredibly storied history, Adol's adventure in Celceta has always had a layer of uncertainty. To keep it brief, Falcom was approached by Hudson for plans to develop a sequel to Ys III, however, due to poor upper management and mass resignations following Ys I, Ys II and Ys III Falcom was unable to develop a new entry. Due to this, Falcom pursued partnerships with other developers to create a Ys IV sequel for various consoles. Falcom would ultimately provide the framework for Ys IV's scenario (including characters, setting, story, soundtrack, etc.) and allow Hudson and Tonkin Soft to create Ys IV: Dawn of Ys (PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16) and Ys IV: Mask of the Sun (SNES) respectively.
Then, in 2005 Taito ported Ys IV (along with other Ys titles) to PS2 under the title Ys IV: Mask of the Sun: A New Theory. These three titles all shared similarities in setting, characters, and other aspects of Falcom's original design doc but with a few notable changes such as the primary antagonist.
Among these, Ys IV: Dawn of Ys was always considered "canonical" due to being released first and Ys IV coming about as a result of Hudson's initial proposal. However, in 2003 Falcom published an official Ys timeline which marked Ys IV: Mask of the Sun as the proper interpretation of Adol's adventure as it closely matched the original design and vision Falcom sought.
Thankfully though, in 2012 Falcom released their interpretation of Adol's time in Celceta with Ys: Memories of Celceta for the PS Vita.
This game is the definitive interpretation of Adol's journey in Celceta and was well worth such a turbulent history. Ys: Memories of Celceta is such a treat to play. Memories of Celceta takes the foundation of Ys Seven and elevates it to an entirely new level by refining many of the systems introduced in Ys Seven creating a tighter, more robust experience. In every way, this game surpasses Ys Seven on a technical level. You can tell Falcom critically thought about Ys Seven and the players, and aimed to make a better experience from the map design, to the increasingly thorough map itself, to the material gathering, to the weapon crafting, to the skill design and so much more.
And as per Falcom standard, the story, characters, settings, and soundtracks all remain immensely memorable. There are moments throughout that are inspired by Falcom's love for Ys I + II with locations and camera views that call back so emotionally to Adol's most recent adventure in Esteria. Memories of Celceta also take things one step further by acting to consolidate the Eldeen lore and mythos that were so prominent early on in Adol Christin's journey. This game was crafted with consideration for every aspect of Adol's journey, going so far as to flesh out characters and events that have yet to happen chronologically that we as players have already experienced. Part of Ys' appeal is that Adol Christin's travelogues are told "out of order", as they are discovered, which makes Celceta such an important story to experience. This game is the origin of Adol giving meaning to his journey through the title of "Adventurer" and this incredibly pivotal moment is one that makes this game so beautiful. This, on top of setting the stage for Adol's future encounters.
In sum, Memories of Celceta is a great game that deserves its place among Adol's travelogue and one that is important to experience as the definitive interpretation of his time in Celceta. It is a game that I love, as I do with every other Ys entry and one that I think is important to play for any fan of Adol's journey.
Then, in 2005 Taito ported Ys IV (along with other Ys titles) to PS2 under the title Ys IV: Mask of the Sun: A New Theory. These three titles all shared similarities in setting, characters, and other aspects of Falcom's original design doc but with a few notable changes such as the primary antagonist.
Among these, Ys IV: Dawn of Ys was always considered "canonical" due to being released first and Ys IV coming about as a result of Hudson's initial proposal. However, in 2003 Falcom published an official Ys timeline which marked Ys IV: Mask of the Sun as the proper interpretation of Adol's adventure as it closely matched the original design and vision Falcom sought.
Thankfully though, in 2012 Falcom released their interpretation of Adol's time in Celceta with Ys: Memories of Celceta for the PS Vita.
This game is the definitive interpretation of Adol's journey in Celceta and was well worth such a turbulent history. Ys: Memories of Celceta is such a treat to play. Memories of Celceta takes the foundation of Ys Seven and elevates it to an entirely new level by refining many of the systems introduced in Ys Seven creating a tighter, more robust experience. In every way, this game surpasses Ys Seven on a technical level. You can tell Falcom critically thought about Ys Seven and the players, and aimed to make a better experience from the map design, to the increasingly thorough map itself, to the material gathering, to the weapon crafting, to the skill design and so much more.
And as per Falcom standard, the story, characters, settings, and soundtracks all remain immensely memorable. There are moments throughout that are inspired by Falcom's love for Ys I + II with locations and camera views that call back so emotionally to Adol's most recent adventure in Esteria. Memories of Celceta also take things one step further by acting to consolidate the Eldeen lore and mythos that were so prominent early on in Adol Christin's journey. This game was crafted with consideration for every aspect of Adol's journey, going so far as to flesh out characters and events that have yet to happen chronologically that we as players have already experienced. Part of Ys' appeal is that Adol Christin's travelogues are told "out of order", as they are discovered, which makes Celceta such an important story to experience. This game is the origin of Adol giving meaning to his journey through the title of "Adventurer" and this incredibly pivotal moment is one that makes this game so beautiful. This, on top of setting the stage for Adol's future encounters.
In sum, Memories of Celceta is a great game that deserves its place among Adol's travelogue and one that is important to experience as the definitive interpretation of his time in Celceta. It is a game that I love, as I do with every other Ys entry and one that I think is important to play for any fan of Adol's journey.
Divertido, pero chicloso hacia el final
I dont hate it as much as other people do, but I do wanna play dawn of ys out of curiosity. soundtrack is fire
Mesmo com a progressão de cenário pra cenário repetitiva (não é como se os anteriores não tivessem isso também), todos os outros elementos principais da saga me prenderam muito bem aqui mais do que os outros jogos da série.
Let's get the negative out of the way first. Terrible poorly paced first half that contributed almost nothing to the narrative and had large empty areas with repetitive enemies, one of the least interesting plots in the series I've experienced, and combat that's overly exploitable by flash guard.
Once the second half began with the Primeval lands the game instantly improved as around 70% of the total bosses and actual meaningful interesting content comes around. The dungeons start presenting interesting mechanics and the towns don't overstay their welcome or bring progress to a halt. You also start getting some actually useful artifacts. If this game were solely this half I'd probably give the game a 4/5 instead.
Worth playing if you're a fan of the other Ys games or want an action rpg on the vita. On PC it's a drop of sand in the desert.
Once the second half began with the Primeval lands the game instantly improved as around 70% of the total bosses and actual meaningful interesting content comes around. The dungeons start presenting interesting mechanics and the towns don't overstay their welcome or bring progress to a halt. You also start getting some actually useful artifacts. If this game were solely this half I'd probably give the game a 4/5 instead.
Worth playing if you're a fan of the other Ys games or want an action rpg on the vita. On PC it's a drop of sand in the desert.
This is the third Ys game i've played and while it is the best one, it's still just decent for me. I mean, i'll cut the series some slack, Atelier wasn't wowing me either for the first few entries i've played and now it's my second favorite JRPG series.
Anyways, this game plays similarly to Ys 7 but it's better because the bosses don't take three trillion years to get down to half-health, so the game is infinitely more enjoyable. However, the game has a worst economy than current day America. Like damn, Adol should go on strike for this, the quests pay jack shit compared to how much everything costs in this game.
Speaking of, Adol is a Link-tier silent protagonist so i'm cool with it. I didn't feel his silentness was a detriment to the plot like Byleth in Three Houses or Joker in Persona 5. The other characters are nice too and they all go through their own little arcs, except the last one, who's just here cause i guess.
What i'm not cool with is the villains. Just a whole trio of nothing-people. Now, as a rule of thumb, what makes a good Saturday morning cartoon villain is one who is either entertaining to watch (however this manifests) or fits with the game's themes. This game's villains do neither. The main villain Gruda is a discount Vaati, a lad from a hidden village who becomes obsessed with darkness but is not given any motivation until the end. His motivation is revealed at the end to be "humans suck so i will become a menace so that humanity can prove that it's worthy" which to me, sounds like Malos. Gruda is a discount Vaati and also a poor man's poor man's Malos (yes i intentionally repeated it twice to get the point across). I don't even have anything to say about the game's other villains, they hardly mattered.
The soundtrack is good, if samey. Me thinks this is a series-wide problem. Ys: Memories of Celceta as a whole is probably the most 7/10 game i've played, solidified by the game's ending of all time.
Anyways, this game plays similarly to Ys 7 but it's better because the bosses don't take three trillion years to get down to half-health, so the game is infinitely more enjoyable. However, the game has a worst economy than current day America. Like damn, Adol should go on strike for this, the quests pay jack shit compared to how much everything costs in this game.
Speaking of, Adol is a Link-tier silent protagonist so i'm cool with it. I didn't feel his silentness was a detriment to the plot like Byleth in Three Houses or Joker in Persona 5. The other characters are nice too and they all go through their own little arcs, except the last one, who's just here cause i guess.
What i'm not cool with is the villains. Just a whole trio of nothing-people. Now, as a rule of thumb, what makes a good Saturday morning cartoon villain is one who is either entertaining to watch (however this manifests) or fits with the game's themes. This game's villains do neither. The main villain Gruda is a discount Vaati, a lad from a hidden village who becomes obsessed with darkness but is not given any motivation until the end. His motivation is revealed at the end to be "humans suck so i will become a menace so that humanity can prove that it's worthy" which to me, sounds like Malos. Gruda is a discount Vaati and also a poor man's poor man's Malos (yes i intentionally repeated it twice to get the point across). I don't even have anything to say about the game's other villains, they hardly mattered.
The soundtrack is good, if samey. Me thinks this is a series-wide problem. Ys: Memories of Celceta as a whole is probably the most 7/10 game i've played, solidified by the game's ending of all time.
Dropeado, me parece muy aburrido
A bit longer than I expected and the story was kina weird for me, but the combat and boss fights was worth it.