I was excited when I saw that Ys: Memories of Celceta was getting a port from Vita to the PS4. I played Ys VIII last year and absolutely loved it, so I’ve been jonesing for another game in the series ever since then. I’ve been aware of Ys as long as it has existed but I never played any of them before VIII, mostly because the early games’ bump combat concept did not seem appealing. That bump combat stuff is long gone and modern Ys is much more of a traditional action RPG, though with a loose and arcadey style that sacrifices precise gameplay for speed and ease of play. I knew Ys IX was coming over eventually but I also wanted to go back and play some of the earlier games I’d missed in the long running series. The release of Memories of Celceta on PS4 in the US seemed like a perfect opportunity, but since I already owned but had not played the Vita version (them PSN sales) I decided to wait for a price drop to double dip.

Cut to nine months later and PSN finally decides to chop $10 off the admittedly already budget price of the port, and even though I would have preferred a larger discount I gave up and bought it for $20. Having played through the game to the credits, at a little less than $1 per hour I got my money’s worth. Memories of Celceta is not as good a game as Ys VIII in almost any way, but it’s still a fun and addictive experience that actually gets better as it goes. I was mildly disappointed by the first few hours of the game but ended up really liking it by the time it wrapped up.

Ys: Memories of Celceta is a remix of two games that were released a long time ago as Ys IV. The history of the Ys series is complex and one that I don’t fully understand, but basically Falcom released two versions of Ys IV on different platforms, both outsourced to different developers, and Celceta, which was originally a Vita game, represents them making an “official” version that draws on both games but also features new plot and characters and, of course, modernized gameplay and graphics. The Ys games aren’t quite as disconnected from one another as the Final Fantasy series, since they re-use characters, world building aspects, and other elements, but they’re pretty much standalone affairs so knowledge of prior games definitely isn’t necessary to understand them. This is especially true for Celceta, given the set up.

So what is the set up? Adol, the intrepid adventurer and protagonist of the series, has lost his memories and even identity while exploring a massive forest. He has returned to the town on the edge of that forest exhausted but alive and after meeting up with Duren, an information dealer who he was apparently friendly with prior to his memory loss, helps save the town mine from encroaching monsters and is subsequently tasked by the governor with mapping the very forest where he developed amnesia. Duren and he set out into the forest to make the map and to recover Adol’s memories, which are floating around in the environments as glowing blue orbs, as memories are wont to do.

The game’s first couple hours are mediocre, bordering on actually bad. It’s not a great looking game, even for the Vita, and the animation level of the opening cut scenes is terrible, below even the standards of the PS2. You’re stuck in town for way too long, learning some of the mechanics and dealing with story set up, and while the game gets better as you start to actually explore the forest, I could definitely see why Ys VIII was the breakout game for the series, rather than this one. Celceta is mechanically quite similar to Ys VIII, with you controlling a character and running around smallish environments while you do standard action RPG stuff like slashing enemies, picking up loot, opening chests, swapping equipment, completing basic quests, and all the rest of that jazz. Just like in Ys VIII you have an active party of up to three characters who you can swap between at the press of a button, a set of up to 4 active skills that you can use with skill points that you build up by using your standard attacks, and a super meter that lets you fire off a mega attack that will destroy most standard enemies immediately and do massive damage to most bosses. You can dodge and guard, including flash dodging and guarding if you hit the button right before an enemy attack lands, many enemies have specific vulnerability to one of the three types of attacks (smash, slash, and pierce) and resistance to the others, and there are tons of crafting components spraying out at all times, which your AI controlled companions helpfully pick up for you.

Despite these similarities, Celceta suffers in comparison to VIII in almost every aspect. For one, Ys VIII is a much better looking game, especially on PS4. While it was also originally released on Vita there were numerous enhancements for PS4 that simply weren’t done with the Celceta port. Beyond that, Celceta was clearly low budget even at the time, looking more like a PSP title than a Vita game in some ways. VIII has total camera control, allowing you to take in its much more detailed environments, while Celceta allows some very basic zooming in and out but is otherwise played from a static offset top down perspective. The better camera perspective also allowed Ys VIII to have a lot of verticality to its environments and a dedicated jump button, while Celceta’s environments are mostly flat, though there is the occasional ramp or overlapping walkway. Ys VIII was not a fantastic looking game even for the Vita, let alone the PS4, but it’s gorgeous in comparison to Celceta, and while its environments are still carved up into small areas that you load between those areas are multiple times the size of the relatively tiny areas that Celceta has.

Ys VIII also had a lot more to do than Celceta does. It was full of side content, ranging from fishing and town building to a town defense system and complex relationship system between Adol and the other castaways. Celceta is just an action RPG. It has some crafting you can engage with, and optional side quests, but no side activities outside basic combat or fetch quests, which isn’t always a bad thing but makes it feel much less immersive than VIII was. Especially missed is Ys VIII’s use of the character of Dana, which I won’t go into to avoid spoilers, but really added some variety to the game, especially in the ways it was fleshed out for the PS4 version.

Ys VIII’s strongest aspect was arguably its soundtrack, which is top tier even in a series known for good music, and while Celceta’s music is still above average it isn’t anywhere near as good. Other sound is just okay for Celceta. There’s a little bit of voice acting but most lines are text only, or feature a short voice clip of part of the line and then mostly text. It’s a common JRPG trope to save money on voice acting (even the modern Yakuza games do it) but here there’s so little voice acting that it’s very noticeable, though what’s there is…fine. In general Ys VIII seems to have had a much higher budget for presentation, while Celceta feels more like a mid-tier PS2 game than something released in 2012. Even the game’s anime intro feels a little cheap, and the in engine cut scenes all look straight out of the early 2000s.

The only area where Celceta really outshines its successor is in its plot. VIII has better characters and dialog, but Celceta is one of the few JRPGs I can remember that has a somewhat cohesive and logical plot where the twists and turns all mostly make sense and the character motivations are consistent and reasonable. This is a small element of the game, and VIII’s stronger cast and better dialog mean that it has the better story overall, but I found myself wrapped up in Celceta’s plot in a way that I wasn’t expecting.

Putting aside comparisons to Ys VIII, there are elements of Celceta that felt archaic even for a 2012 game. For example you collect artifacts during the course of the game, which give your characters additional abilities like swimming underwater or shrinking down to a tiny size to get through small holes. Only one of these items can be equipped at a time and you end up spending an annoying amount of time in menus equipping and unequipping them, especially since one is a special cloak that lets you heal your party just by standing still, which is very necessary in a game where healing items are expensive and none of the characters has healing magic you can rely on. The fast travel system is also annoying since for the first half of the game you can only warp between points of the same color, meaning that traveling back to the starting village (which you need to do to collect the rewards you get for discovering more of the forest) can only be accomplished by chaining together a bunch of fast travels in an annoying manner. The way “artifacts,” which are special items that enhance your party’s abilities, are used is especially annoying. You can only equip once at a time, and since they grant pretty basic abilities, like swimming underwater or recovering health by standing still in a dungeon, you find yourself swapping them frequently. There are even separate artifacts for running and for dashing, which…is a decision that someone apparently made. Since most of the artifacts are situational this doesn’t serve to force you to make strategic decisions, it just makes you spend a lot of time in menus swapping them in and out, and is the kind of design choice you expect from a game from the 90s, not the 2010s.

So far I’ve done nothing but complain about Celceta, and when I started playing it I did find it somewhat disappointing, but as I delved deeper into it I found a lot of the issues fading into the background as the strengths of the core gameplay and storyline drew me in. Even a worse version of Ys VIII’s gameplay is still pretty fun, and Celceta’s plot is clear and logical, which is very rare for JRPGs. Characters actually have motivations for the things they do and there’s no giant left field twist where someone you haven’t even heard of turns out to have been the real villain all along.

In addition, the dungeon design gets better further into the game. The first few dungeons are pretty boring, and sort of linear, though I did get stuck on one for an embarrassing amount of time because of a visually unclear puzzle (that was actually very simple once you understand the rules.) In the back half of the game the dungeons get much more involved, with more challenging battles, cleverer puzzles, and just more to do in them. None of them are spectacular, but they’re solid action RPG dungeons that are worth your time if you’re a Ys fan, or just a fan of action JRPGs.

And that’s what I came away from Celceta feeling. Despite the slow start, and despite the fact that it is surpassed by VIII in virtually every area, Celceta was still worth my time. It’s a good, solid, game with some significant deficits. At a little over 20 hours it’s a very manageable length for a JRPG and doesn’t overstay its welcome. So many JRPGs, including Ys VIII, just drag on forever before wrapping up, so I appreciated Celceta’s brisk pacing and willingness to wrap up after saying the things it has to say.

It is a measure of Celceta’s quality that after I finished it I didn’t immediately move on to Ys IX, because I wanted to draw out my time with the series a little more before moving on to the latest one. In fact, Celceta sent me down something of a series hole. One of the marks of a good game is that it leaves you wanting more, and Celceta definitely did that for me.