3.5/5 ★ – Ishu's review of Ys: Memories of Celceta [duplicate].

For a quick summary of my thoughts, Memories of Celceta is a solid Action RPG with fun combat and great music. The game looks great and many areas are fun to go through. However, I think this game is the worst party engine game in the series due to it's mediocre boss design, uninteresting story, and boring gimmicks. This game is definitely worth your time, but it most likely won't be one of the best Action RPGs you've ever played. Now for the actual review. Ys: Memories of Celceta (or Foliage Ocean in Celceta) is the canon version of the fourth game in the series and the second party engine game. Seeing as I did not like both Mask of the Sun and Dawn of Ys, I was hoping I would at least enjoy this game especially since it was in the same engine as my favorite Ys game, Ys Seven. Did that end up happening? Yes! I had a lot of fun with this title. I played through the game twice (my first run and then another on new game plus) on nightmare difficulty, and 100%ed every category in the journal, making me get every achievement in the process. Because of how familiar I am with Ys Seven, I noticed the many improvements Celceta made to the party engine formula. Firstly, the skill system is way better as learning new skills is no longer tied to using a specific weapon and leveling up a skill to level 1. In this game, it's tied to your character's level, and if you kill enemies with every character, you'll eventually get all the skills by end game. Along with that, skills only have 3 levels now, which makes mastering them far less grindy. To put this in perspective, getting every skill to max level in Ys Seven took me 3 days with each character taking about 5 hours to max out all of their skills using the fastest set up. But in Celceta, maxing out every skill took half the time it would take to do 1 character in Seven. Also, Celceta adds skills that increase the stats of your entire party temporarily which was a really nice addition. Next, I appreciate that Celceta got rid of the three swords for Adol. I felt this was extremely unnecessary in Seven, and it only forced players to grind more money/materials to get the latest gear for Adol. Moreover, it encouraged ignoring other party members. Along with that, Celceta doesn't force you to have Adol in your active party, meaning you can freely use three of the other party members if you want. The quest system is better overall. There's of course a lot of standard fetch quests/escort missions, but the game has plenty of unique quests to do such as a mining mini game. The rewards are also really useful, unlike Seven where only about half of the quests were worth doing. Some of my favorite quests in this game are the weapon tests, which are quests where you kill a specific enemy with a weapon that has a constant negative effect on you. If you succeed, you get to keep that weapon, but it instead inflicts that debuff on to enemies, which is a really great reward. Also flash guard has been slightly improved as well. You no longer have to spam the guard button because Celceta gives you a couple seconds of invincibility after successfully guarding. You can still spam the guard button in this game if you want, but it usually is not necessary to do so. This game also gives you artifacts that are useful outside of their original purpose. For example, the Beast King's Claws are used for destroying debris throughout the field, but they are also a really good for dodging boss attacks and general movement. Seven didn't have anything like this except for the Dragon Orb, Ares Seal, and Aeolus Urn, which are all hard to obtain or part of a side quest. Celceta has these three artifacts as well, but one of them is found in a dungeon chest, and the other two are obtained via map completion. Lastly, I really loved the overworld in Celceta. It is really fun to explore the forest while gathering materials. There are many secrets and chests to find throughout, and so many areas are aesthetically pleasing. Along with that, Celceta places several high-level enemies throughout the map, which basically act as mini bosses, and they are really fun and rewarding to fight as they give out a lot of experience and have interesting attacks. However, I do have a lot of issues with this game that sadly overshadow a lot of the positives I listed above. Whenever I think about this game, I'm reminded of how I only really had tons of fun when I was exploring the overworld. While there are dungeons that I enjoyed such as Tower of Providence, Mt. Vesuvio, and the Underground Ruins, I did not enjoy the others. Ancient Burrow suffers from having to use the Dwarf Bracelet constantly, which is an artifact I despise because of how slow it makes you when using it. Sacred Beasts' Lair forces you to deal with Celceta's awful underwater combat and slow swimming. Lake Tolmes and Colonia Magic both just feel like boring enemy gauntlets with no engaging gimmicks. Finally, we have Iris, which is awful due to the boring puzzles it makes you solve and the cutscenes that play every time you interact with a switch, making the dungeon a slog to play through. What's even worse is that every dungeon forces the player to constantly use Celceta's new obnoxious gimmick, character action. Every character in this game has a specific ability that allows them to interact with certain objects throughout the map. Most of the time, interacting with these objects allows the player to progress. It sounds like an interesting mechanic, but that sadly isn't the case. All this really amounts to is pressing shift when you see a little grey circle around an object. This makes your character do an animation that leads into a 5 second cutscene of the area changing as a result. This is the main reason why I hate the dungeons in this game, especially the Sacred Beast's Lair. The game makes you break so many damn rocks with with Ozma and each rock has a cutscene tied to it. It's so boring because you cannot skip any of these cutscenes, and sometimes, you have to do this several times in a row. Duren's character action is awful as well since the game just replaces a few chests with this grey chest that only he can open. I don't understand why these chests couldn't have just been regular chests. It wastes so much time having to add Duren to my main party, switch to him, and then watch the cutscene just to get an item. It's even worse if your party members are dead because you have to revive them then. Also, the music variety is so disappointing. Seven had a unique music track for every single dungeon and town in the game, but Celceta reuses so many tracks, which made the game a lot less fun. I remember heading to Sacred Beast's Lair after finishing Ancient Burrow and being surprised that I was hearing the same song I had just heard in the previous dungeon. It's a shame too because Celceta has an amazing OST, but it's hard to appreciate that when you keep hearing the same tracks play in every dungeon/town. The boss design is also very lackluster. A lot of these fights make you wait for the boss to reveal their weak point, allowing you to do more damage to them. Some have way too much defense, making them take too long to kill and others just have boring attacks. I really despise bosses like Dark Eldeel, the three Golems, and Angoraboras because they either have one of these issues or have all of them. Also, Falcom needs to just stop with frog bosses. Lanaluna was horrible in Ys 6, and Ribbi-Roi sucks here too. The final boss, Akashka Glyph, is not fun either. It has way too many attacks to keep track of and the second phase is just a huge waiting game. You literally run around in circles waiting for him to suddenly decide to lower his head down so you can hit it. Horrible bosses just all around, which really upset me as I loved Seven's fights. They were all so intense and had really interesting attacks that were both hard and fun to avoid. That said, I did enjoy a few such as Mustrum, Sol-Galba, and Elvaron because they have some of those aforementioned qualities. My next problem with the game are the party members. I only enjoyed using 3 out of the 6 party members in this game unlike Seven where I only disliked one of them. My problem with Celceta's party is that so many of them are so fucking slow. Ozma and Duren take forever to just do a single attack, and I'd rather just shelve them since Karna and Calilica are just way more fun to use. The same can be said about Frieda since Adol shares her damage type and is significantly faster and more fun to use. Along with that, the skills in this game are really underwhelming. While I did say that the skill system was overall improved in this game, the skills themselves leave a lot to be desired. The only two characters that I actively used a ton of skills for were Adol and Ozma, and since I didn't enjoy Ozma's basic attacks, it was really only Adol. The only reason why I bring up Ozma is because his skills are actually pretty fun to use and cover a wide range of attacks unlike other characters. Again, Seven had so many great skills even if they were a chore to unlock, so I don't understand why Celceta didn't have this as well. Map completion is also really horrible in this game. You have to literally hug walls to fill up empty space outside of the actual route you're on which is just silly. It's made even worse by how large the map is and the fact that Griselda gives you rewards based on your completion, so if you want all of those, you have to tediously fill out every inch of the map. Also, god forbid if you miss a chest or a harvest point because if you do, then good luck finding them. Granted, finding all of these only builds a useless percentage in your journal, but would it have been really hard to just add a way to easily track which ones the player was missing during the end game? Having to scour several guides on the internet just to find the one harvest point I was missing is so annoying, and it's made even worse by the fact that getting 100% map doesn't automatically mean you have every harvest point. Lastly, the story is just bad. I don't want to go too deep into why I dislike it as that will take a while, but the motives for every villain is just awful. They're incredibly generic with their hatred of humanity and desire to destroy the world. Eldeel is one of the worst written characters in this franchise, and Gadis and Bami have nothing going for them either. We barely see them throughout the game, so they have no time to develop. This is true for Remnos as well, whose true intentions feel like their introduced out of nowhere late into the game. The ending is also way too abrupt, providing no closure to the side characters at all. The game even acknowledges this by questioning why Adol didn't share more of his story after the final scene, but that just comes off as a really lazy way of concluding the game. I did enjoy the personality of many of the side characters, but their individual stories didn't draw me in as much as other character's from other games. Karna's suffers from Remnos being part of her side story, which automatically makes it horrible, and Ozma's only gets any attention at the start and end of the game, never in-between. I did enjoy Duren's and Freida's backstory as it expanded upon the lore of the series, and Duren himself is a really fun character to have around. I was also disappointed by Adol's memories as they were really only there to dump a bunch of exposition on the player and barely even went into Adol's past. We get a few that share what his life was like when he was a kid, but I was expecting a lot more of that and the game just did not deliver. Finally, the crafting system in this game is just useless. Every boss resists any of the status debuffs reinforcement adds to your weapons, making healing the only useful stat to invest in. It's also not really worth reinforcing weapons anyway since it doesn't increase their attack and you'll probably be replacing that weapon right after the next dungeon. Overall, Memories of Celceta was a fun game, but I sadly enjoy most of the other games in the series more besides Ys 6. I just feel this game took a lot of steps back from Seven, which handles several aspects of this gameplay style better. However, while Celceta failed to be a great continuation of style, Falcom seems to have succeeded with 8 and 9. As for Celceta though, I may replay this game occasionally in the future, but after getting every achievement, I don't see myself coming back to it for while unless I play boss rush.