Various Thoughts

Playing Memories of Celceta, the third Ys IV iteration, after Lacrimosa was a very bad idea. Not because of the plot/character connections (which are superficial), but because of the technical quality; it’s no better than Seven. Arguably worse:

While it’s true you eventually get the ability to warp at any time, for the first half of the game or so your fast travel is restricted by pointlessly color-coded monoliths. Worse is how ‘gamey’ it is, with bizarre obstacles constantly being placed in your path that can only be overcome by using a particular party member’s controlled ability. The new GUI is also a problem, both due to the ease of being able to accidentally click on the Inventory/Item buttons when you’re trying to simply attack (continuously attempting to move the camera via mouselook is a nasty habit) and because the ‘cancel’ keybind doesn’t work on all screens when bound to the right mouse button (you have to manually click the onscreen cancel/back button). On the positive side of things at least the combat itself hasn’t deteriorated and this does mark the first appearance of Flash Dodging… so it’s not all bad.

Finished it in ~20.5 hours with 100% map/quest/treasure/monster completion at level 57. The storyline this time around is notable for being something of an origin story despite taking place after Felghana, and in that respect it’s decent. The ‘modern day’ part however unfortunately focuses on the winged race and Darkling descendants (both of which are terrible) in a manner similar to Origin; the whole ‘blatantly false god that everyone worships like a god’ trope really needs to go (which, if Lacrimosa is any indication of future direction, may actually come to pass).

This particular Ys game makes a number of significant changes to the franchise. Changes which mostly serve to turn it into a conventional RPG.

The character visuals are now full-sized rather than being sprite-based, you can now save at any time, jumping has been replaced by dodging, there’s a party system with a large selection of eventual party members along with a crafting system, a number of quests that don’t involve combat, quite a few optional plot-related scenes, and even some (superficial) dialog choices. Combat mechanics are fundamentally pretty much the same with the magic system being replaced by a skill system (skills are learned from different weapons and can be leveled-up) and boost being slightly modified to trigger a single powerful attack, while the boss difficulty is about the same as Origin‘s (the ‘Furious Bird’ and Wind Dragon being the most annoying). Oh, and a block mechanic has been added as well.

I finished the game after ~21.5 hours at level 60 with all but one of the final weapons crafted and the only grinding that had to be done was at the very end; to get the materials for those weapons. Overall I’d say the experience was worth it once you’re able to open the menu to change the practically unusable default keyboard/mouse controls… though it must be mentioned that the storyline (note that one of Napishtim‘s characters plays a major role here), character behavior, and certain plot developments are just as terrible as you’d expect from previous entries.