Virtual 100 – Game 46
Woah, woah, woah. Hold on just a second. A few posts down, we’re looking at Game 30. Where in the hell did the other fifteen games go?? Well, there is a fifteen game gap for two reasons. One, I was no longer going to update this site, as I have stated in previous posts. Two, while I was in-between websites, I wrote all of my Virtual 100 articles locally, and they reside on my laptop. When I moved over to Squarespace, I began posting my newer articles there (of which there were only like, 3, because writing to Squarespace was not fun, in the slightest.) So then I came back here, and the first game to get a Virtual 100 article is Ys: Memories of Celceta, which comes in at #46 in the grand scheme of things. So here we are.
Completing Ys: Memories of Celceta makes it the fifth Ys game I’ve played (and the second one I’ve actually finished). But that’s counting Ys Origins, which didn’t come out until way later. So it’s actually Ys IV. But not the Ys IV that came out for the Super Famicom. Or the other, other Ys IV that came out for the TurboGrafix-CD. Neither of those count. This is the Ys IV that was meant to be Ys IV. Even if it’s really the third game canonically.
As far as gaming canon goes, Ys is about as confusing and convoluted as it gets. Not only did the games release out of order, chronologically, but the games themselves have been re-written and re-released so many times, it’s hard to know just which version you’re playing. I played a PC version I got off of GOG.com, which was a port of the PS Vita version. There is a newer version on the PS4 and Switch which may or may not add some new stuff I’m not aware of.
The previous game I played, Oath in Felghana, was a PC port of a PSP game that was a remake of an SNES game, which was then re-released on PS4 and Switch with new artwork. If you want to think you have the latest and greatest version of any Ys game, forget it. Just get whichever one you have access to and live with it. Don’t let the FOMO win.
But I digress. This is about Memories of Celceta. The game starts with the fabled adventurer Adol Christin wandering weakly into a town and collapsing. On top of that, he has lost all his memories (so that’s why they call it that!)
Celceta is the name of a great, mysterious forest on the boundaries of town, and the Romun empire is dead set on mapping the whole thing out. Adol, being the adventurer that he is, and having more than a few questions of his own— like, ya know, where the hell has he been— agrees to take on the challenge, despite the fact that nobody ever comes out of the forest alive and that he barely escaped with his life once already.
Nobody ever accused Adol of being the smartest.
If there’s one thing I have liked about the Ys series so far, is that they’re relatively simple ARPG’s. Each character has a weapon and an armor piece, along with two accessory slots for stat buffs. They learn a handful of special moves that can be mapped to the face buttons, as well as special relics that will give the party the ability to traverse specific obstacles. Picture the Gauntlet in Legend of Zelda and you’re on the right track. Each level the character gains automatically bumps up all of their stats, so the only micromanaging you’ll have to do is making sure your party is updated with the latest gear, or that their current gear is sufficiently refined using crafting materials. The crafting itself it pretty basic, using materials dropped from monsters and mining nodes on the map.
Most of the materials dropped by monsters are pretty shit. Thankfully, there are merchants that will trade for better materials. For instance, you’ll pick up a hundred “weak bones” off of the standard monsters. But those hundred weak bones can be traded for fifty “sturdy bones,” and those fifty can be then swapped out for twenty-five “hardened bones” (or something). The better the materials are, the better buff you’ll get from them when you refine your gear. There are three types of materials: ore and minerals, animal products like bones and fur, and plant-based materials like fibers and wood. Which ones you use will depend on what kind of buffs you want.
That’s pretty much all there is to it. Every other part of this game is hack-hack-hack. Just the way I like it. The combat in the Ys games (so far) has been pretty fast and fluid, and real-time, so it’s a really nice contrast to other ARPG’s like the Tales series that pull you into a separate combat screen, only for that fight to last literally six seconds. It keeps everything moving right along.
That’s probably why these games tend to be on the shorter side. They rarely stop the action for anything. The only time the player is really pulled away from the gameplay is in a cut-scene, and those are usually reserved for the occasional town when the story progresses, or when you unlock a memory in the forest. Other than that, it’s go-go-go. Unless you have Gamer OCD, like I do, you could probably blow through one of these games in ten hours or so. I usually take at least twice that because I have to see and do all the things. I’m just kinda special like that.
What’s weird is that, so far, it’s hard to have an opinion on Memories of Celceta. After the absolutely mind-boiling aggravation of the first two games, and the mildly frustrating Oath in Felghana, I feel like my opinion on Memories of Celceta is… kinda meh. It’s certainly not a bad game, and I didn’t hate my time with it. But at no point was I blown away either. It was, fine. All of the characters, while having their own special abilities, play pretty similar, and aside from them having their own attack attribute (slash, strike, pierce) one party member never really offers anything different. You’re supposed to utilize each characters attack methods, i.e. Adol’s slash against enemies that are weak to slash, but in the thick of battle, the characters all do enough damage to dispatch the standard weak enemies quick enough. The only time it would really matter is in a boss battle, but most bosses don’t have a weakness anyway, so it’s kinda moot. I do realize this is utilized in future Ys games, and hopefully it’s to a better effect, but here it just doesn’t seem to matter, at least on Normal difficulty. You can brute-force your way through most encounters.
The Ys series has been pretty good so far about not annoying the hell out of me with awful characters. While each character has their own motivations and personalities, none of them are really all that over-bearing. If anything, they all kinda feel a bit samey, and ultimately forgettable. But I’ll be completely honest, I’m a hundred-percent okay with forgettable characters. As long as they’re serviceable. I’d take that over cringe-inducing, awful characters I have to suffer through for an entire game. To be fair, though, these are old games without a bunch of spoken dialog. It’s still mostly text at this point. We’ll see if the tradition holds once we get into the more recent titles.
Despite Memories of Celceta being the fourth release in the series, chronologically I think it’s set almost immediately after Adol leaves the floating island of Ys in Ys II. Though Duren acts as if he’s known Adol for a while, so knows. Everyone else, as I said, is fine.
What really cracked me up though, was the forest of Celceta itself. This was probably intentional, and there’s likely some allegory to western expansionism, as this “uncharted forest” is chock-full of villages and towns. There are entire cultures of people who not only live and thrive in the “mysterious forest” but have been there for generations. Leave it to the “Romuns” who are enlisting Adol’s help, to think they are the first ones setting foot in this wilderness. Which begs the age-old question: Does a lost civilization know that they’re “lost?”
These civilizations, though, have their own questions. They know who they are, but they are also aware that they are descendants of an older civilization, with mysteries of their own. They apparently don’t venture far from their own villages, and are all-too-willing to jump on the adventure bandwagon because “why the hell not.”
The story is kept under wraps for most of the game, told in snippets through Adol’s recovered memories, or whenever a town is reached and an NPC fills the party in on a little bit. Then it’s all just kinda thrown out there in one big exposition dump toward the end of the game. I won’t spoil it for anyone that might care, but suffice to say that everybody seems to have a secret, and once everyone spills the beans and the cat is out of the bag, and all the loose ends begin to tie together, you’ll be like “oooooh, ok.” And then you beat the game and move on and forget everything that just happened.
The downside of the story is that, as with most of the Ys games up to this point, it has a pretty limited scope. The games have always had relatively low-stakes stories, with more of a small-scale, local conflict at the forefront. The Ys stories are chronicles of Adol’s adventures, after all, and every adventure couldn’t very well have the fate of the world hanging in the balance. He’s more of an Indiana Jones figure, if you want to think of it that way, and the Ys series is a serial of sorts, where each story is a chapter from the annals of Adol’s history. As a result though, most of the Ys games to this point have only focused in a specific area. The forest of Celceta is the backdrop for the entire game, and it all does start to look the same after a while. The upside is that the story is relatively short (for most players) so it’s not like you’re slogging through the same location for 60 hours.
I don’t have strong feelings for Memories of Celceta either way. As I said previously, it’s fine. I’m glad I played it. It doesn’t really offer any meaningful information into Adol as a character, although some of the memory snippets do fill in some of the blanks as to his home life before he set out for Esteria.
If I did have one major gripe, it’s that the boss battles really don’t feel like much of a challenge. Which is a weird thing to say, because I’m getting to a point in my life where I don’t necessarily want a challenge. But there’s a boss battle that’s sufficiently bossy, and then there are the bosses in Memories of Celceta. I played on Normal difficulty, and the bosses were a pushover. Even the end-game bosses were pretty lame. Granted, I was quite overpowered by the late game due to my Gamer OCD, but there were a few bosses I destroyed in literally seconds. When it was all said and done, I didn’t really feel like I accomplished anything.
The next game in the numerical order (not the release order, or the chronological order, mind you) is Ys V: Lost Kefin Kingdom of Sand. It’s an SNES game that never released outside of Japan, so I’ll be trying to play it emulated with a fan-made translation. It remains to be seen if I will actually be able to get through it or not. As with a lot of games back in the day, it might be broken, or so fuckin’ difficult it’s practically unplayable. So we’ll see happens with that one. I don’t even know if I’ll consider it a Virtual 100 title, since it’s not a game I’ve purchased and therefore not really in my backlog.
For now though, with 25 hours under the belt, I can click on that un-install button and make Celceta just a memory. Number 46 is checked off.
