Ys: Memories of Celceta

Ys: Memories of Celceta!

This was a game released in 2012 for the PS Vita, 2018 for Steam, and 2020 for the PlayStation 4.

I played the PlayStation 4 version.

Similar to how Ys: The Oath in Felghana 'replaces' Ys III's spot in the series canon, Memories of Celceta is intended to replace Ys IV's spot in the canon.

However, there's a big difference here. Oath in Felghana for the most part entirely follows the previously-established Ys III storyline, only expanding and building upon it to create a much bigger and more well-rounded adventure.

Memories of Celceta, on the other hand, couldn't really do this in the same way. The problem with Ys IV is that there already exists three entirely different games titled "Ys IV", each of which has its own version of the story that are all largely incompatible with one another.

...So what does Memories of Celceta do? ...Well, it introduces a fourth version, of course. 

Memories of Celceta is yet another version of the Ys IV story. Unlike the previous three versions of Ys IV, this time the development was done by Nihon Falcom themselves. No more outsourced development, it's coming straight from the source this time. Therefore, this is now THE canon version of Ys IV. ...even though it doesn't have "IV" in its title. 

Interestingly, this game doesn't really incorporate anything from the previous versions of Ys IV at all. The premise, story, character roles, plot progression, and basically everything else is all completely new. None of the scenes and events that previously occured in Ys IV happen in Memories of Celceta.

Rather, this game takes the general setting of the Celceta Forest, the ten or so main characters who appeared in all versions of Ys IV previously, a few important items, some of the locations... and remixes them all into something that's completely its own thing.

Even aspects that were consistent between all three prior versions of Ys IV aren't necessarily present in Memories of Celceta. For example, I mentioned previously a scene where Adol gets thrown into prison by the soldiers - but that scene just doesn't occur here. Instead Adol is actually recruited by the soldiers' governor general to help survey the forest.

And lots of other things from the previous versions are not included, even things that you'd think were important worldbuilding elements - for instance, the Five Disciples of Lefance were seen (or at least mentioned) in all prior versions of Ys IV, but in Memories of Celceta, they just don't seem to exist at all, even though Lefance himself is still here. I guess this aspect of the lore is just gone then?

Memories of Celceta takes any pre-existing notion of what "Ys IV" was, and pretty much burns it all to the ground in order to establish a brand new story in its place.

And you know what? ... 

When I was talking about Ys IV previously, I was rather upset at how the extremely mediocre Mask of the Sun was supposedly the canon story, while the superb Dawn of Ys was not. But it looks like, ever since Memories of Celceta came out, neither Dawn nor Mask is canon any more. And... that's actually fine with me. I really like Memories of Celceta, so I don't mind it replacing all prior versions of Ys IV.

I've made my peace with the fact that Dawn of Ys isn't canon any more. It can go ahead and join the club for "alternative canon"  Ys games, along with the Korean Ys II Special.

...

Anyway, let's talk about Memories of Celceta on its own merits for a bit, yeah?

The most notable new aspect of the story is that Adol is amnesiac. At the beginning of the game, he wakes up with no memory of who he is. As you explore the Celceta Forest, you can come across stray memory orbs that reawaken one of Adol's lost memories, which shows a small cutscene of his past.

Due to this, Adol is pretty clueless and bewildered by everything going on around him for the majority of the story. ...He's turning into a typical shonen protagonist, oh no. 😲

It's fine, but I'm generally not a fan of amnesia plots to begin with. ...though some of the memory cutscenes do show moments of Adol's childhood, which is cute.

The game contains a very small amount of voice acting. Every time a new character is introduced, there is a line of voiced dialogue from them, but it goes back to unvoiced pretty soon after. There isn't a single scene in the game that's fully voiced. To be honest, I would have probably preferred if there were no voiced lines at all. It feels very strange to suddenly get a voiced line out of nowhere in a mostly unvoiced game.

In terms of the gameplay mechanics, Memories of Celceta builds from the previous game Ys Seven. All of Ys Seven's basic mechanics were copied over - we have the same combat system with the SP and EXTRA gauges, the learnable skills, swappable party members, enemy weakness system, collectible materials, item crafting, quests... basically everything Ys Seven established was kept around for this game.

The CPU allies don't seem to be quite as ridiculously good at dodging everything as they were in Seven. Instead, we now have the ability to set CPU allies to either "attack mode" or "evasion mode" by flicking the right stick. So if you want them to dodge everything, they're not going to be attacking any more. Oh well.

There are all sorts of other tweaks to the systems here and there. Skills are now learned as you level up, rather than being tied to weapons. You can now swap Adol out of the team if you want to. Charging attacks is now done automatically, rather than requiring you to hold a button. And lots of other minor things.

Overall, I would call Memories of Celceta a great improvement of what was established in Seven. Everything's been tweaked and adjusted to make the game feel better. The skills feel more distinct, item crafting feels more important, team composition feels more meaningful, and overall, it plays better than Seven in almost every way. Great stuff!

Adol has been tasked with surveying the uncharted Forest of Celceta, and the majority of the gameplay involves exploring and uncovering the map. For every 10% of the map you uncover, the governor general will give Adol a reward. Filling out the map is an overarching goal of the game, secondary to the main storyline.

You actually get quite a lot of freedom to explore in this game. When you step out into the forest for the first time, you actually have access to around 40% of the map right from the beginning. You can run around quite a lot before finding the next plot progression point. The world is rather large, especially for Ys standards. I really enjoy that. It's fun to follow the paths and find treasures and beat monsters and uncover the map, little by little. 

The structure of the world is rather mazelike, with lots of squiggly paths, branching paths, and paths that loop into previous areas to create shortcuts. It's not a confusing maze though, as the areas all feel pretty distinct from one another, so it's easy to keep track of where you are.

When it comes to actually completing the map 100%, there is a rather annoying problem in the way the map screen works. What visually looks uncovered on the map screen may actually have a tiny tiny corner that the game considers unexplored, which can't really be discerned just by looking at it. And so at the very end of the game, you can find yourself stuck at 99.6% map completion, with no indication as to which bits are supposedly missing. The only way to fix it is to literally just run around hugging every single wall in the game, hoping to brush up against the last missing pixel of the map... It's pretty awful that the game behaves this way. When I'm completing a map in an RPG, I definitely prefer to unlock distinct defined chunks of map, rather than it being so fuzzy and imprecise like this.

If completing the map was just a small self-imposed side-objective, that would be one thing, but there's actually a pretty big emphasis on it, as this task was given to Adol by the governor general as part of the main story. There's also a tangible and very useful reward locked behind 100% map completion, making it all the more important to be able to achieve it. It really really shouldn't be so annoyingly fiddly. I'd actually say that this is the game's biggest misstep.

But aside from this and a few other minor gripes, I enjoyed the adventure very much. The dungeons are pretty good, but occasionally annoying. Nothing special, but not bad. The bosses in this game continue the trend of Ys games having really good bosses. And the overall story and characters are fun.

It's a solid evolution of the Ys Seven system, a solid revision of the Ys IV story, and overall a great entry in the Ys series. It's a good game!

Unlike Ys Seven, which didn't have any postgame content whatsoever, Memories of Celceta includes both a boss rush time trial mode, and also a New Game Plus mode.

New Game Plus is very generous in this game - basically everything is brought over, including EXP, map completion, bestiary completion, all weapons, armour, materials - basically every item except for key items. It's actually quite fun to play in Nightmare difficulty mode in a New Game Plus file, as there is still a lot of challenge to be had despite being at endgame levels. I think Nightmare difficulty mode might have some level-scaling shenanigans going on or something, because even the early bosses were pretty tricky when I tried them in New Game Plus on Nightmare mode at max level.

New Game Plus is actually required to reach 100% item completion in this game. There's a blacksmith who will create legendary weapons for three of your six characters late in the game, and the only way to get all six is to do New Game Plus and reach the endgame all over again. It's rather annoying that you can't get everything the first time through, especially as there's an achievement for item completion, but oh well. It's not a huge issue.

I did take issue with some of the other achievements though - specifically, there are six achievements for having played "extensively" as a particular character. You need  to accumulate five hours of play time as each of the six party members. And this game isn't too long by modern RPG standards - you'd finish it in 20 to 30 hours depending on how much side content you do. (and a lot of that includes menus and cutscenes that don't count as playtime for the achievements) 

...So yeah, the existence of these achievements kind of made me self-impose some restrictions on my choice of character throughout the journey. Once the "Play extensively as Adol" achievement popped up, I never really went back to directly controlling Adol for pretty much the rest of the game, for fear of wasting the opportunity to be accumulating playtime with the others. ...Which was a bit sad. 

And by the end of the game, I was literally just standing outside the final boss door for like an hour and a half, waiting for the final character's achievement to pop up so I could get them all over with before I started New Game Plus.

I know it's my choice to care about the achievements. But I still think that the existence of these particular achievements is nothing but a detriment to the game. It serves only to make you self-conscious about your choice of character, rather than just allowing you to play as whoever you want without a care. And it's not a particularly interesting thing to reward a player for doing, anyhow.

...

So yeah. Good game overall. I enjoy it.

I dunno what I'll play next. The next game in the series is Ys VIII, however that's a biiig one, and I don't particularly want to start a big RPG so close to the release of the new Zelda. So I may take a break from Ys for now. 🙂