Ys: Memories of Celceta is a Japanese RPG centred around young adventurer Adol who is tasked to map out the area. The story develops into something much more than this and the characters that Adol meets help him out on the quest. The gameplay is fast paced sword swinging action with plenty of skills and equipment to unlock. As my first Ys game I will definitely be looking at the other games in the series.

Story

The story begins with Adol turning up in a town having lost his memories, though luckily not his swordsman skills which gets him noticed by the governor who tasks Adol to explore the forest and beyond. Exploring the area is a lot of fun as it fills in your map and I spent a lot of time exploring the whole map. Throughout the journey Adol uncovers key memories from his past that help to connect the dots between the current events and the past. The story develops into mind crushing absurdity in true Japanese fashion, which is brilliant.

On his journey Adol gathers with him several companions who all have a reason of their own to accompany him, the main story links together all these different motives and story lines well. The party has great dynamics with several funny relationships and the dialogue across the board is very good. The villain/s are also well developed and provide a great underlying message of morality through the main quest.

In each town you visit there will be a message board with 3 side quests. Unfortunately outside of the material reward you receive for completing the quest there is not much incentive to do these, most are simple fetch quests and monster slaying quests. This is disappointing though they do not take much time and are easy to complete, I just wish that there was more interesting side-stories involved.

Gameplay

Ys uses a fast action based combat system with heavy reliance on dodging and effective skill use. Dodging at the last minute will cause time to come to a standstill (for the enemy) for a few seconds in which you can get quite a lot of damage down, this is definitely where most of the skill and enjoyment of the combat comes from. You have four active skills from a pool of about 10, each skill is quite distinct, though I felt very little incentive to use any other skills than the big damage dealers. In saying that the big damage dealers are great fun to use especially on groups of enemies to just see the carnage you can deal.

In combat you have a party of 3, out of the 6 members of the group. You can switch between these 3 characters at will and each have their own distinct skills and attacks. In combat I almost always just used Adol (who is not essential), I saw very little reason to switch within combat except occasionally to a ranged character. Outside of combat however switching characters is important in the puzzle solving aspects of the game as each character has a certain action they can do to overcome specific obstacles. Overall this system works well my only complaint being that if you do not have the character active in your party you will have to go to the party screen and swap them in and then you can clear the obstacle, this gets quite tedious if it has to be done regularly (thankfully it does not happen often).

On your first play through you are limited to normal difficulty and for general exploration/combat this feels about right, however unfortunately the bosses were quite easy. I don't even think I was that good at the game, but I didn't die on a boss except once or twice toward the start of the game. There is a NG+ option after you finish the game, though I have little desire to play through the game again on the more challenging modes.

Presentation

This is a Vita title so graphical quality is going to limited, in saying that I thought the graphics looked quite good. The characters, enemies and weapon designs are all incredible though the overall art style of the game was generic I thought. The game runs very smooth even when there is a lot of enemies and effects going on, the only exception being right near the end of the game. The music from the game is a really good mix of orchestral styles and synthesised styles. Overall given the limitations of the platform the game looks and plays really well.