Ys Memoire: Revelations in Celceta Review (Switch)

The older games in the Ys series have been slowly working their way to Switch in the form of Ys Memoire ports like last year’s Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana. This year, we have Ys Memoire: Revelations in Celceta. While the plot isn’t as good as other entries, the combat and characters pick up the slack.

Revelations in Celceta once again follows the red-headed adventurer Adol Christin as he goes on another globetrotting journey and somehow ends up saving the world (again). Celceta is also a reimagining of the 1993’s Ys IV: Mask of the Sun for Super Famicom, as well as the fourth chronological game in the series, taking place after Ys X: Nordics. Thankfully, Celceta, much like the majority of games in the series, is a standalone game, so you won’t have to play the previous ones to understand what’s going on.

Unfortunately, this story is one of the weaker aspects. Adol washes on the shore of Celceta as an amnesiac, and has to recover his lost memories while preventing an ancient artifact from falling into the wrong hands.

The villains and their motivations are quite shallow, and the plot just simply isn’t very interesting. It doesn’t have the emotional pull of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana or the heart of Ys Seven, which are considered some of the best in the series.

Thankfully, Adol’s companions like the cool yet collected Frieda and the cheerful Karna help keep Celceta’s story from being a complete bore. Character interactions between the main cast were always enjoyable to watch.

But what carries Celceta is its exemplary gameplay. As a real-time action game, you can have up to three people in your party at once dishing out constant damage against enemies on the field. You can attack enemies with basic swings, as well as map up to four different special moves to the face buttons and unleash them. Sure, it’s a button-mash fest sometimes, but battles end up being chaotic and exciting messes with the effects flying all over the screen.

On higher difficulties, though, you’ll need to be a bit more methodical. Enemies and bosses hit hard, and you’ll have to master the Flash Dodge/Guard system. By dodging or guarding at the right time before an enemy attack connects, they’ll freeze in place (like Bayonetta’s Witch Time), letting you wail on them for extra damage. It’s hardly an original mechanic, but it fits perfectly with the frenetic hack-and-slash nature of combat.

Customisation is straightforward as well, which also matches the combat’s simplicity. When you find more powerful equipment out in the world or at a shop, you can just equip it to make your stats go up. There’s a bit more depth in the item crafting and equipment refining process, like finding enough materials to upgrade your things, but it’s overall still a simple process that’s easy to understand.

This Switch port contains a newly-recorded audio score, and Celceta’s music is excellent. I never got tired of hearing the blistering pianos combined with electrifying guitars that are littered all across the soundtrack.

The graphics have also been touched up, although the game can still look a bit dated but that’s not entirely surprising given it was originally a PlayStation Vita game. Fortunately, the frame rate runs at 60fps, which makes combat and exploration feel smooth.

However, I do wish there was a bit more effort to put in additional quality-of-life features. With so many modern games having auto-save nowadays, I sometimes forget to manually create saves. An auto-save function would’ve been appreciated, but alas isn’t present.

Features like turbo mode are conspicuously missing from Revelations in Celceta too, even though the Oath in Felghana remaster last year had it. So I’m not sure why there’s a regression here.