Comfort food games take a large variety of forms nowadays. A lot of people will naturally drift towards replaying the games they played growing up, and in more recent times, it feels like games such as Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing have dominated the “cozy” space. While I’m guilty of indulging in all of these as much as anyone, my comfort food preferences when it comes to video games tend to skew towards RPGs. And when it comes to comfy, cozy RPGs, Ys has had that market cornered for a couple decades for a reason. From their smaller-scale worlds and accompanying smaller runtimes to their easy-to-understand combat systems and cheesy rock soundtracks (complementary) blending electric guitars and dramatic violins, Ys is the grilled cheese and tomato soup of RPGs.
Developer Falcom knows that and at this point has pretty much perfected the formula. Perhaps nowhere is that better demonstrated than in Revelations in Celceta; despite being a port of a nearly 15-year-old Playstation Vita game, it lacks none of the appeal of the more modern games in the series and is even one of the best Ys entries that I’ve experienced so far.
If you’ve never played an Ys game, the basic premise is that they’re action RPGs with combat that skews more towards the arcade-y side of things; they usually take place in singular regions or locations (as opposed to being globetrotting adventures like most games in this space), and the mainline entries all star a crimson-haired adventurer named Adol Christin. Each game is framed as a story from Adol’s journal, and you can easily jump into the series at any point without any concern for continuity, as the bottle episode approach the series takes with its stories makes each entry an easily digestible standalone affair.
This is doubly so the case in Celceta, which begins with a nearly dead Adol limping into an unfamiliar town before passing out and waking up later with no memories of what he was doing or who he even is. With the help of a local information dealer named Duren who seems to know Adol, you’re tasked with exploring the local forest of Celceta to create a map for the local government, as well as restore Adol’s memories and figure out what he was even doing in the first place. From there, you’ll be meeting a colorful cast of characters while discovering ancient civilizations and their secrets, joining up with new party members and defeating screen-filling bosses hidden away in long-forgotten ruins.
It’s really great stuff, and I think where Ys as a series stands out most is that there’s a constant, nigh frictionless forward momentum to its story and exploration that almost never keeps the player bogged down in dialogue, cutscenes, or puzzles for very long. No, Revelations in Celceta wants you to run around with your cast of six party members, using its fast and fluid combat system to quickly dispatch enemies and gather materials with a bunch of over-the-top skills while listening to buttrock (again, complimentary), and it wants you to enjoy doing it. Consider that mission accomplished, then, as I couldn’t put the game down for the better part of a week, despite its relatively simple nature. Between obtaining party members, learning new skills, and uncovering previously hidden areas of the map, you’re never more than a couple minutes away from making something satisfying and cool happen on screen. And isn’t that why we all play video games?
Despite how streamlined Celceta in general is, make no mistake that this is still a fully featured RPG at the end of the day, just one that’ll take you somewhere in the 20-hour range to finish as opposed to the 40-80 hour length many games in the genre seem to come in at these days. There’s a ton of equipment to craft and upgrade as you see fit (seriously, it’s a shockingly in-depth system if you want it to be), and I had a ton of fun specializing each character into a different type of ailment effect dealer, completing optional side quests, and skill leveling to be done if you want to engage with it. But it’s also very easy to just engage on a more surface level with the game if that’s all you want; its twist-laden story full of gods, destined knowledge, and forgotten kingdoms is genuinely interesting and will be plenty of incentive for most people to keep playing as is.
The combat, while plenty of fun, never requires much engagement or thorough understanding of its systems unless you want to put the time in; powering through a boss on the normal difficulty never requires much beyond paying attention to which damage type it’s weak to (slash, strike, or pierce) and making sure you’re well stocked on healing items. And to be clear, I think this variable level of engagement and streamlining is a huge strength of Celceta and Ys as a whole, as it helps make the game appealing to a wide variety of RPG fans, but it is worth noting due to the fact that it’s not as deep as others in the genre.
I do want to dwell a bit on the map aspect of the game for a minute, though, as I think it’s maybe the most interesting part about Revelations in Celceta and also a feature that feels like it’s begging to be reexplored in a more modern game. As you uncover a bigger percentage of the map, you can check back in with the Governor-General to be rewarded with money for your efforts, on top of whatever you end up finding while exploring. This created a really addictive loop in which I found myself venturing into places I was absolutely underleveled for, solely to look for rare items in chests and raise my map completion percentage a negligible amount so that I could be paid for my efforts and invest in better equipment.
The game never actually requires this of you, far from it in fact, but as someone that really loves to feel like I’m getting up to something I shouldn’t be in a video game, it was a big contributor to how positive I felt coming out of Revelations in Celceta, even though that feeling was heavily diminished in the back half when the story started taking more precedence and I had a much larger roster of party members I could swap to if a situation started getting hairy.
