Ys: Memories of Celceta certainly has more history to it than likely any of the previous games in the series. The game, which is canonically set between the events of the second and third, is a remake of sorts to both Ys: IV Mask of the Sun, and Ys: IV: The Dawn of Ys, two seperate titles made by different developers but are based on much of the same story. This is to say nothing of Mask of the Sun having its own reboot sometime later on the PS2 with Ys: IV Mask of the Sun - A New Theory. Memories of Celceta is certainly its own game with several characters and story moments not found in the previous titles but does share in the fact that Adol finds some adventure in the lost lands of Celceta.
My first experience with the Ys series was with 2018’s Lacrimosa of Dana for the Nintendo Switch, yet another of the Ys games to see a port from a Sony handheld. The series, which has yet to have a true modern iteration on current-gen platforms, was rather enjoyable, despite its simplistic visuals and somewhat dated gameplay. Memories of Celceta is certainly along the same lines as the title started its life out years ago as a PlayStation Vita exclusive, before eventually being ported to PC by XSEED and now to the PS4 just this month. It certainly feels dated and limited by the hardware, sure, but the core gameplay built around the game is still fun, but there are several caveats to that that I will get into shortly.
When series protagonist and mostly silent hero Adol Christin awakens to find his memories have faded away, his natural instinct to assist others kicks in and this leads him to venture forth into a monster-filled area of the local mines to save some trapped workers. This heroic act finds him later officially tasked with mapping out a deadly forest, to which those who enter, never return. The hook? Well, Adol survived his prior events in the forest but returned unaware of who he was and what events transpired that resulted in the recent memory loss. You team up with your good friend Duren, who will aid you on your adventure, with many others that get caught up in the mystery surrounding the forest and its deep and mysterious history.
Much of the narrative hangs on Adol slowly regaining his memories, be it from having a camp-out in the middle of the woods, or through memory orbs that litter the very lands you’re exploring. While all will be revealed in time, you’ll experience a vast array of connected storylines across several companions that will join the cause alongside you, as well as a massive revelation that shocks the entire party, and one that is rather well-staged. This isn’t to say the entire story is riveting as there are some pretty predictable moments and character turns, but for the most part, it does remain at least enjoyable, especially with the first two towns that you’ll discover with Adol and Duren.
Across the 20+ hours the campaign will take you, Adol will recruit 5 additional party members to his cause. You’re joined immediately by Duren, and your next two villages will each offer up companions in Karna and Ozma, who survive largely in the wilds of the forest through two of its small remote villages. Eventually, you are joined by Calilica and Frieda, who are tied to events surrounding the back half of the game’s story. Each character has a wide range of weapons and skills that can assist in defeating enemies quicker as certain foes respond differently to various weapons, making swapping to certain party members an absolute necessity. Each character, apart from Adol, will have another use, such as shooting down platforms, opening locked chests, or activating certain types of switches. It can get a bit annoying having to go into the party menu and swap characters out each time you need to do this, should they not already be in your active party, but it usually doesn’t take too long to do so.
Combat is typical of the action-RPG genre as you’ll run around the battlefield in real-time, pulling off a basic attack and up to four skills that when used, fill up a power gauge to unlock a much stronger attack. While you can swap to up to three characters in battle, the AI given to your teammates is questionable, as while they can certainly assist in small-scale battles, I found them rarely effective in boss encounters when you’d need to target key zones, that, or after the battle would concede, that they would just be running around in lightning-fast circles as if they had just had fourteen shots of espresso. It didn’t happen all the time, but it did glitch this way at least a few dozen times in my 20+ hours with the game.
Unlike most games in the JRPG genre, Ys: Memories of Celceta is not a slow-paced game at all. Almost right from the start, you are flying through enemy encounters, and it’s not long before you are granted an artifact called the Gale Shoes that allows you to sprint at breakneck speeds. While the artifact’s purpose is to allow you to traverse mostly verticle walls, as a means to block progression at a point where you don’t have the shoes, you’ll largely use this artifact to fly through locations in seconds. Much like the shoes, you’ll find other artifacts that shrink you down to tunnel through small cracks in the wall, or the ability to swim underwater, which is sort of weird that you can’t do this by default. Speaking of water, there are several moments where you’ll partake in water battles that only allow you to use your basic attack and this method of combat is vastly uninspiring and is often clunky and just not fun.
The biggest issue I have with artifacts is tied to another issue of having certain buttons do too much heavy lifting and while you can remap certain buttons, the option to do so is far too limiting. Each of the face buttons does something; Square is action, Triangle is guard, X is Evade, and Circle is used to switch fighters, with the D-pad being used in the same way to move your characters around like the left analog stick performs. While this is fine, pressing R1 plus any of those face buttons is how you’ll select your skills, and if you are spamming R1+circle fairly frequently, I found that unless you are white-knuckling that R1 button that you can accidentally have it only register circle and change your fighter in the thick of battles far too easily.
This is furthered by circle being used for exiting out of menus to prep a potion, or another item that grant’s a certain buff during a battle. It’s beyond easy to press it one time too many as you frantically try to get back into battle, thus another instance where you’ll swap fighters with no intention to do so. Had the left and right d-pad’s had the option to swap my fighters instead, and possibly the up and down to swap Artifacts, then almost every control issue I have with the game would be solved in a blink of an eye. Having menu’s where you constantly need to pop in and out of them, or buttons that do far too much are problems most games face, so while these are annoyances, I can’t really fault the game too much for doing what so many others do. Still, it’s an issue I have with the game and is something that does affect my experience with it.
Combat is fast, like, really fast, and is all set in real-time. There are no cooldowns on skills or turns to take and as you attack and damage enemies with your normal attack, you’ll fill up an attack energy, indicated by the blue colored meter in the picture below, that fuels your skills. Each skill consumes the bar differently, and there are items you can equip that either refill it faster or one that I equipped the moment I found it, which reduces the costs of each skill by 35%. Combine that with others that compliment your skill energy gain and you’ll be largely unstoppable. You can also guard and dodge roll around enemies, and timing it just right will perform an ability where time will slow down and allow you to get in a few quick hits.
Each character can equip 4 different skills from a pool of around 6-7 as you level up and unlock more. You can also find shops that will allow you to use the various materials you find in your travels to enhance gear and add damage modifiers like poison, paralysis, or freezing to your attacks, which helps a lot when you encounter a foe much higher level than you and it constantly gets frozen in place as the poison starts to zap its health. I found a secret boss that was about 9 levels above me that fell to that very situation.
On the topic of bosses, many of them here are just not memorable or that engaging, to be honest. Even the final few encounters are lacking and while they are fast-paced and use the combat systems well, they are just largely generic and come across as larger health bar threats that fall the same way as every other enemy. Sure, some have a few mechanics, but every single boss is just something that you’ll hit again and again until it dies, with nothing to shake up the formula.
Apart from the main narrative, you can take on side quests as you unlock the job board in each town. For as distant and “unknown” as these new lands are, I found it humorous that every single town has the same job board, or that every shop has the same prices, especially considering its mentioned that no one knows each other and that towns and their people haven’t had any contact with one another. While this is largely because the game simply needs to keep moving you around from place to place, it’s something that stuck with me as mostly odd and not really as an annoyance or anything to deter from the fun I was having. Side Quests are largely built around killing a certain enemy, gathering an item, or participating in a scavenger hunt with a pair of children.
Quests largely have Adol talking through them with a few basic dialogue choices, but these rarely change the story and are usually just bookended with a change in response, and then just moving the story along. It’s unfortunate that Adol doesn’t have a bigger voice here, and while there is some voice acting across the remaining cast, it’s used very sparingly and sometimes in odd places. Considering every main companion has an actor devoted to them, it’s unfortunate that the whole game isn’t voiced, but this is probably due to the space restrictions on the Vita card and the fact they likely didn’t want to rehire the actors when porting the game to PC and PS4.
The fact this game still looks and plays like its Vita counterpart is something that does hold the game back and it’s unfortunate that some parts of the gameplay weren’t changed to break past those platform restrictions. The camera, for example, cannot be swung around and it’s a bit annoying for sure. While you can zoom in and out, I constantly kept trying to spin the camera around, as I’d just become so accustomed to it in every other game, especially since you can do that in Lacrimosa of Dana.
The game certainly has that “it came from the Vita” look, but even so, the game is still visually fun and while I would have loved updated visuals to complement the current hardware, I knew exactly what I was expecting from the game, given it’s just a basic port of the Vita experience. That said, the PC version is just better, and that’s likely due to a different team being responsible for that port. The game just looks better and has a few other small changes that make it the better version, especially being able to run it in 4k with HDR, which isn’t the case here with the PS4 version. It’s unclear why the PS4 version got shafted, but both games still do feature the exact same gameplay, so it’s not all bad.
I wanted to love Memories of Celceta as much as I did Lacrimosa of Dana, but it’s just not quite as good. There is still a solid game here but I wish the port modernized the game just enough to make it feel new again. Combat and exploration are fast and furious with no stamina meter to limit your dashing or use of the Gale Shoes, so this game certainly has a very different pacing than any other action RPG out there. If you are looking for a digestible action game with enjoyable combat and an easy to follow story, but are intimidated by 100+ long JRPG’s that take a dozen hours to even get into the combat, then Memories of Celeceta and Lacrimosa of Dana are two excellent adventures to get lost in.
Ys: Memories of Celceta was purchased by the reviewer and played on a PlayStation 4 Pro.
All screenshots were taken on a PlayStation 4 Pro.