Ys: Memories of Celceta Review (Heroine Nisa)
Ys: Memories of Celceta may not have been the best one. I played it on hard since I heard it was not very challenging.
Its gameplay is excellent, but its extremely poor balancing (the later characters are like leagues above the starting party), poor difficulty pacing (enemies later on fall into two categories: huge hp pools or huge damage.) by the end of the game you will find enemies who have a big HP pool but can barely damage you or normal HP pools but somehow deal 400+ per hit out of your 1500-2000 hp.
Just Guard and Perfect Dodges come back, this time way easier to use the guard part. Nothing much to say.
The weapon upgrade system is kinda wack. Not in a bad way but feels like an after thought.
The bosses were all quite uninspired with not great movesets. I can't remember a single memorable boss... Just like in Seven. But this feels worse, because many attacks seem to come out of nowhere. The normal enemies early were fine but later on they started having attacks that also come out of nowhere without any kind of buildup or animation...
The characters: You play as 6 characters. They all appear on the store page so its not spoiler.
Adol: The protagonist with only 1 sword this time instead of the usual 3 types. He is overall fine and consistent.
Duren: The new martial artist instead of Dogi. He is fine but his normals despite being faster than Dogi in SEVEN, his skills are not great as they have either buildup or move him all over the place.
Karna: The first girl of this game, and another Aisha from SEVEN copy paste ranged character.... blegh. I don't like how range characters feel on Ys. She is too safe to play but her skills are very bad compared to Aisha's.
Ozma: The worst character in the game. Slow to attack, bad skills. I only used him for the dungeon he was in and forgot he existed because I couldn't stand how he played. The only thing I can say positive about him is that he can do 2 attacks while swimming.
Calilica: Upgraded Duren, cute girl with a giant magical mace. Has good aoe skills. And the Thunder Summon skill that summons 3 small drones that attack when you do is really good.
Frieda: The absole best character in the game, being slash like Adol she has long reaching fast normals, strong aoe skills and ranged.
This game also lets you play without Adol in the party unlike in SEVEN, which is welcome in case you wanna level other characters.
The OST was also kinda mid for an YS game, which isn't bad, as its good but not great or amazing.
The story only interesting point is how it connects to Napishtism and Adol's backstory and reason for exploring.
As for the voice acting, its whatever. Both japanese and english do good perfromances. however I don't know why they even bothered to have voice acting when barely anything is voice acted. Random dialogs are voice acted but not the important ones, the final boss revealing the plan? The final encounter? no voice. This feels extremely half assed, Felghana was the last game where they tried voice acting. I'm not asking for every single dialog to be fully voice acted but you don't just have voices for 2 full dialogs and then suddenly mute the character it just makes it feel cheap vs just having text.
Good game overall.
Just not great, which by Ys standards thats not bad at all considering the previous games were very good. It definitely feels a bit half-assed compared to the previous Ys games as if it was rushed.