#Ys vita Pc
#Ys vita series

It’s pretty well tied together, it’s just a bit pedestrian. What I really enjoyed was that everyone in your party has got a secret, and when you start to uncover them the plot gets far more interesting. Soon the plot ramps up to much more recognisable RPG fair villains are trying to awaken ancient evils, take control of the world, that sort of thing, and it’s up to you and your new gang to stop them. Obviously, Adol is a nice and somewhat naïve adventure boy, and he didn’t do any of it, and therein lies the beginnings of uncovering the villains of this piece.

You get locked up and misunderstood multiple times, and then get the chance to go about setting right the wrongs the people think you have caused. The amnesia means that in every new area you reach, everyone already knows you even though you don’t know them, and seeing as you’re the only outsider they’ve ever met, they blame you for all the ill that has befallen their village. There are hidden villages, temples, shrines and caves in the forest, and each is usually home to a new friend who’ll join the party, give you a bit of backstory, and then it’s back to the main dungeon.

However, once you hit about 25% of the forest, you start to encounter that plot, and good job too. There’s no real intrigue to draw you into your mapping the forest task – Celceta’s plot does not start strongly. We’ll cover the combat later, but seriously, mapping the forest is where it’s at. You set out with your brand new burly friend Duren to explore, and for a few hours that’s all there is to it. Yes, it’s the oldest trick in the book, from Star Wars to the Matrix, but it’s tried and tested, and in Ys, it’s helpful, because it means it doesn’t matter that there’s a dozen other titles and remakes.Īdol staggers into town from the notoriously dangerous forest of Celceta that no-one has ever returned from, and a purple-haired governor gives you the task of mapping the uncharted forest as you’re clearly the only one up to the job, sans a little amnesia. We learn everything for the first time just as he does, and we need everything explained to us, same as he does. Helpfully I suppose for such a long and daunting series, flame-haired hero Adol is suffering from (yawn) amnesia and this helps make him a foil for the player. As such, Ys is far easier to dive into than it first appears.

#Ys vita series

There is a loose continuity, in that he gets a little older, giving the series an order, but that’s about it. Ys is the same.Īll that confusing numbering and remakes doesn’t actually matter one jot, because Adol Cristin stars in every instalment and what happened in one adventure rarely has any effect on what happens in the next. There would be common threads, and the same basic world and political systems, but from one adventure to the next it didn’t matter where you were getting started. Ys functions a little like classic sword and sorcery novels of the 1960s and 70s, where plucky heroes (like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) or bodybuilding brutes (like Conan) would go on adventures in every installment, and an over-arcing story was a massive afterthought. But they’ve dropped the numbering system. Celceta takes story beats from all three (confusing, much?) and combines them into what is now the canonical Ys 4, and released exclusively on the PS Vita (remember that?) back in 2012.

#Ys vita Pc

In 1993 there was both Ys Mask of the Sun on the SNES, and Dawn of Ys on the soon to be defunct PC engine, and then a remake of the Mask of the Sun property on PS2 in 2005. So to clarify, Memories of Celceta (hereafter just Celceta) is a remake of Ys 4 but that installment was already three different games. Now, hot off the heels of the success of Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana in 2017, Falcom are firing on all cylinders, porting previous Ys titles to the PS4. Then there’s the remakes of the classic entries in the series, so that more people could jump in during the 2010s when Ys Seven was launched to some higher praise. There are ten main series entries, some of which are non-canonical (that’s tricky enough to start with). Ys is a long-running series (first one came out in 1987, the same year as Final Fantasy 1) and frankly a daunting prospect to dive into. But it really doesn’t help you work out where you are jumping in. I have a suspicion that Ys: Memories of Celceta is named the way it is, precisely because a marketing team at Falcom (of Ys and Legend of Heroes fame) decided that this made it more accessible in the West, rather than less. With a release date possibly overshadowed by a certain AAA games release, Ys Memories of Celceta is a good RPG with a bit of personality, but it’s far from original.