Ys IV is perhaps the most complicated game in the Ys series to talk about and one of the strangest releases in Nihon Falcom’s overall history. Released at the tail end of 1993, Ys IV was a return to the gameplay set up in Ys I and II, using a top-down perspective and simple “bump” combat. However, it got two completely different versions for the Super Famicom and PC Engine that were basically separate takes on similar plot elements. Stranger still is that neither version was even directly made by Falcom, with the PC Engine’s “Dawn of Ys” being handled by Hudson Soft, and the Super Famicom’s “Mask of the Sun” being handled by Tonkin House. While Mask of the Sun was the “canon” version, Ys IV lived a somewhat dubious existence until nearly 20 years later where Nihon Falcom finally elected to do their own definitive take of its story in Memories of Celceta. Released back in 2012 for the PlayStation Vita, the story of Celceta returns to handheld (and console) form, this time as Ys Memoire: Revelations in Celceta.
Celceta Conundrums
As the Ys series often tells its stories out of order, Celceta follows shortly after the events of Ys X. Red-headed adventurer and series protagonist Adol Christin is found lying in the streets of the frontier town of Casnan, situated just outside of the massive forest of Celceta. This is not unusual for someone like him, but what is unusual is that Adol has no memory of himself besides his name and skills with a sword. Dogi and Dr. Flair, who accompanied Adol to the Celceta region, are also nowhere to be found for some strange reason. In their place is a man named Duren, an information broker who claims to be acquainted with Adol. After a small incident at the local mine, the two are contracted by the region’s government to explore the highly dangerous Forest of Celceta to make a map and bring back info on its secrets. A familiar enough task for an adventure hungry fellow like Adol, but what throws a massive wrinkle in this is that Adol had already explored Celceta before he lost his memory, and wherever he went would be struck with calamity after his departure. With this established, it’s up to Adol to right those wrongs as well as find his missing memories just to piece together what in the world is going on.
This is an excellent setup for an Ys story, made all the better by the oodles of lore and details that makes it an important title for longtime fans. It importantly ties into just about every game preceding it, most notably Ys Origin, Ys I & II, and Ys VI. The story dives into the nature of the Eldeen, a race of godlike winged people who help humanity, as well as the Darklings, a group of occasionally recurring antagonists who use the dark arts for their own nefarious ends. One of the party members is even a major tie-in and lead-up to the events of Ys VI (which takes place well after this game). You even get a ton of glimpses into Adol’s past, who before this game had a mostly mysterious background and motivation, and I would say seeing his memories in this game elevates his silent protagonist status by a fair bit. There’s a lot here that I should theoretically enjoy as a longtime fan of the series… Which is why it’s baffling that the story is just not that interesting.
I like a good mystery, but Revelations in Celceta is so dead-focused on making questions and answering them that it leaves little room for much else. This is most evident in its characters, who lack any sort of interesting motivations or emotional pull that would help them become memorable. The most you really get are some occasionally funny interactions between them, otherwise they’re mostly concerned with fulfilling their duties and don’t have many real stakes in what’s going on. Sure, your party member Karna is cute and I think her strange affections towards Adol because of her peoples’ culture is fun to watch, but it doesn’t really have much to do with what’s going on.
While I previously criticized Oath in Felghana for being an uninteresting story told in an uninteresting way, I have an even bigger bone to pick with Revelations in Celceta. It’s an uninteresting version of a story that should be a lot more than this. Adol has amnesia and we get glimpses of his past, yet for goodness’s sake, it just doesn’t have much pull beyond that novelty. The characters are broadly pretty bland outside of the occasionally funny interactions, with motivations and chemistry being as dry as it gets. Being sandwiched between Ys Seven and Ys VIII while also being canonically after Ys X is doing the game no favors either, as all of those games had far better character writing and more personal stakes than this. Making matters worse is the unforgivably abrupt and anticlimactic note it ends on, which Ys games since then have thankfully been careful to avoid.
Ys Seven and a Half
Although it is a reimagining of Ys IV, Revelations in Celceta, like Oath in Felghana before it, is instead a refresh and refinement of its previous numbered installment. In this case, on a mechanical level, this title is essentially a sequel to Ys Seven. It uses the same basic engine and carries over a broadly similar gamefeel, but with a bit more polish and quite a few new features. To go over the basics of what one will expect in an Ys game, this series is all about exploring a large variety of fields and dungeons while dodging hazards and hacking away at scores of enemies. While the series has gone through several iterations and is known for having potentially very high difficulty, it tends to leverage simplistic play mechanics and satisfying, crunchy combat to make for something that’s accessible even to genre newbies.
Battles are fought using basic combo strings and Skills, which were first introduced in Ys Seven. Skills are special attacks and abilities that each character has a large variety of, but can only equip up to four at a time. Skills can additionally only be used at the cost of Skill Points, which can be obtained by attacking enemies or breaking environmental objects. Later equipment and upgrades allows for the player to regenerate Skill Points quickly and expand how much they have at a given time, allowing players to pile on the damage even further. In addition to this, each character also gets an “EXTRA” attack, which is essentially this game’s equivalent to a Limit Break. By attacking, blocking, and dodging, players will fill up the EXTRA Gauge to allow them to unleash an especially powerful attack. This will essentially shred most regular enemies, but with good timing can prove vital for piling on damage against bosses as well. An item later in the game will also allow one party member to access a secondary EXTRA attack, which does more damage but functions differently.
In addition to that, enemies are also weak to different attacking types. Each of the six playable characters has one attack type, making two characters per each attack type. Adol slashes squishy enemies, Duren strikes hard enemies, and Karna pierces other sorts of enemies. The game does offer a small damage bonus if you use two characters of the same type in your active three, but you’ll be without one type for certain enemies weak to it. There’s not much tactical implication to be found here, but it is nice to have some kind of reason to use different kinds of characters, and it does a decent enough job giving enemies some more distinct characteristics.
Flash Guard, which previously appeared in Ys Seven, is essentially a parry system where players will guard at the precise time to negate damage and gain a small window of time where every attack is a critical hit. This time around, it’s also supplemented by Flash Move, where dodging precisely will slow down enemy movements and speed up your own, while also granting temporary invincibility. These are fun additions to play around with, and makes wrecking bosses in particular feel satisfying as I’m basically flying over them once I figure out their movesets and patterns. Although there is an argument to be made about these mechanics being overcentralizing, I think this game does a solid job of balancing a sense of chaos alongside them so that it feels earned once I am able to trounce enemies with them. Combat remains simple, but fun thanks to frantic pacing and generally great gamefeel.
Adventure-holic Adol
The main changes made to Ys Memoire: Revelation in Celceta in comparison to the previous Ys Seven mostly comes in the form of more involved exploration. As part of the game’s plot, you’re making a map of the Celceta region as you explore it, and this translates into the core gameplay through its cartography system. As players explore each area, their map will steadily be filled in by thoroughly checking every corner of wherever they next end up. Although this is not mandatory, players will be generously rewarded with money and upgrades for doing this. It’s a simple addition, but there’s something bizarrely addicting and satisfying about filling in a map over time and making sure it’s as detailed as possible. Not only is this just appropriate for a series themed around adventure and finding new locales, but I think it adds a nice wrinkle of incentive to pry open every treasure chest I can find.
Where I’m less jazzed about exploration mostly comes in the form of character-specific exploration skills called Unique Actions. Each character comes with a Unique Actions that might help with exploration in some form, giving players further incentive to use them outside of their combat abilities. Adol can interact with orbs containing his lost memories and later gains the ability to slay otherwise unkillable enemies, Duren can pick locks on chests, Karna can cut down distant objects to make progress. Later characters separately have the abilities to break cracked walls, get rid of poison fog, or activate the switches on machines. As each character is added in your party, more areas will naturally open up to you.
It’s less exciting than it sounds since these are prescriptive actions and aren’t really anything the player ever has to think about. If they see a locked chest, they bring in Duren to break it open; if they see ivy that needs cutting down, they bring in Karna; and if they see one of Adol’s memories, they bring in Adol. More than my problems with the simplicity of its implementation is that it doesn’t really do anything in terms of how the player interacts with the map. Progression through the game works at an almost totally linear clip, so you never have to do something like think to return to a new area with the right skill. The game also plainly tells you where you ought to be headed to progress the plot, so despite the supposed mystique that these skills might bring to exploration, the map is ultimately lacking a sense of real romance. As a result, Unique Actions come across more as unnecessary pacebreakers.
It’s The Same as Before
Despite what the “Memoire” title might suggest, Ys Memoire: Revelations in Celceta is just a dressed up port of the 2012 “Memories of Celceta” release for PlayStation Vita, which was later ported to PC and PS4 (as “Celceta Kai” in Japan). If you’re looking for a new version of the game with new gameplay features, quality of life improvements, certain gameplay overhauls, and so on, you won’t find it here. From front to back, it’s exactly the same as it was before. While normally I wouldn’t mind this, Memories of Celceta has some gameplay peculiarities that I think could have been smoothed over without losing its sense of spirit. At the very least, I’d have liked it if they gave some reconsiderations to its baffling fast travel system, wherein you spend half of the game only able to travel between monuments of a shared color and shape.
Most disappointingly is that the bland artwork of the original game went entirely untouched here, unlike the previous Memoire iteration of The Oath in Felghana. The Ys series has its ups and downs in terms of gameplay and story, but one thing it almost always gets right is the artwork. Be it the great coloring and linework from Katsumi Enami’s art for Ys Seven, or the superbly rendered art from Falcom’s own in-house artists for Ys VIII, the series nearly always has an inviting and bold sense of fantasy brought to form in its thoughtful aesthetics. Revelations in Celceta really sticks out for being far, far cheaper in that sense, using an aesthetic that wouldn’t be out of place in some forgettable, cheaply made anime that wouldn’t get another season. The artwork is far from offensive, and I wouldn’t even necessarily call it ugly, but there’s no sense of style or inspiration to it.
As for gameplay visuals, it’s also not great, though I appreciate the new font for the English text that makes it easier to read on the Switch’s handheld mode. Disappointingly, the game’s overall performance metrics in this version are poor. It’s a locked 60FPS when played on a Switch 2, and looks reasonably clean on its portable display with Handheld Boost Mode enabled, but it’s still running at a visibly lower graphics preset compared to any version that isn’t the original PlayStation Vita outing. To be frank, although the Switch 1 is not the most powerful console around, I don’t think these performance metrics are acceptable on either it or its successor. Revelations in Celceta is, even in the best of times, a crude-looking game that mostly coasts on having a lot of different environments and a sense of flashiness to help to give combat that signature Ys crunch. I understand that it was built on an old engine, but a frankly poor-looking game running at noticeably less ambitious specifications than the Switch 1’s most visually pleasing titles still gives a sense that this version was simply not given the love that it needed.
In terms of audio, I have… mixed feelings on the new soundtrack option. Although somewhat more controversial among other fans of the original Ys IV’s soundtrack, Memories of Celceta ranks as one of my very favorites, mostly for its brand new tracks rather than its arrangements. Tracks like The Foliage Ocean in Celceta, Ancient Land, The Morning After the Storm, Gust of Wind, and many more besides are ones I still jam to this day. The new Memoire soundtrack has some great arrangements and some that I would even say surpass the original, like Forest of Dawn or the theme for the town of Casnan. Many other tracks, however, fare far worse, with quite a few of them having swapped out live instrumentation for MIDI instruments that just don’t hit the same. It would have been nice if I could at least mix and match which tracks I liked best from each soundtrack rendition. After a while, I simply chose to play with the original Celceta soundtrack since it was just more consistent overall.
Verdict
As a port, Ys Memoire: Revelations in Celceta will get the job done. It’s very no frills, and if you’re a fan of this title, that’s fine. That being said, my thoughts on this game are incredibly mixed. It’s filled with growing pains in both design and narrative intent, ones that would pay off in the superb follow-up in Ys VIII, but here they leave a lot to be desired. While the basic hack-and-slash gameplay is fun, the exploration isn’t quite up to scratch because of the pacebreaking nature of the Unique Actions in conjunction with its generally linear progression structure, and the main story not being interesting enough to maintain my motivation. Bosses fare a lot better, however, being genuinely fun to master and leveraging combat mechanics in ways that are always interesting. Outside of that, the game is inoffensive at worst, but the Memoire iteration disappoints because all it adds is a mediocre iteration of a soundtrack that was originally great. I think this is worth playing for fans of Ys because it gives you a real appreciation for how far the series has come since then, and that alone still makes it an interesting game.
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If you are looking for another Action RPG, you might want to check out Tales of Graces f remastered. If you’re interested in more Ys, check out our review of Ys vs Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga.
Many thanks go to Marvelous Games for a Nintendo Switch review code for Ys Memoire: Revelations in Celceta.
A hobbyist who took up the pen to write about their favorite pastime: games. While a lover of many genres, Isaiah Parker specializes in Platformers, RPGs, and competitive multiplayer titles. The easiest way into his heart is to have great core gameplay mechanics. Self-proclaimed world’s biggest Sonic fan. Follow him @ZinogreVolt
