And beaten. 37 hours or something, with all the quests + map and resources complete. What can I say, it's an Ys game through and through, and as such it's something I love. I don't think it managed to beat Seven as a whole, but I wasn't expecting it to, since Seven is my favourite entry in the whole series right now.
Still, the exploration component they added worked ridiculously well. Exploring was tons of fun and just loading up the map and seeing it getting filled was incredibly rewarding. The combat is a definite step up from Seven and in typical Falcom fashion, they've taken what was already a pretty great system and made small changes here and there that improve on it even more. Amazingly fluid, even faster, the dedicated button for Flash Guarding helps a ton and Flash Dodge was a very interesting mechanic that, while at first glance I thought would be ignored, ended up being really, really useful near the end once I got the hang of it.
I played it on Nightmare and basically did a no healign items/absorb weapon run. The first half of the game, other than the occasional strong enemy in the forest, felt pretty easy. No boss ever had me retry more than 5 times til the Tower, which for a NM run without items is... well, easy. From Crell Emecia onwards, however, there were a bunch of bosses that definitely stepped up for the challenge. I happened to be underleveled all around, too, and I'm not sure why. Beaten the final boss with Frieda at lv. 49 and Adol and Karna at 55, when the boss itself was 55. Don't remember running from enemies, so it was just something that... happened.
Regarding the music, a lot of people commented that they felt the OST was a bit weak, but I don't necessarily agree. It's true that some stuff got used more often than it should have, but I appreciated having some live tracks here as opposed to Seven's entirely synth-ish soundtrack. I still prefer Seven's compositions, mind you, but tracks like Black Wings here with Hiramatsu's guitar definitely delivered the goods!
In the end, I have two small complaints, however. The first one is that, should they keep the party system for the next game, be it V remake or VIII, I hope they'll take a tip from Seven's different weapon-types. Not being able to have Adol equip Strike/Pierce weapons in Celceta made it a bit hard to use my favourite characters, although I still went with Adol/Frieda/Karna party anyway. Still, I'd appreciate having the choice, and maybe if every character had two different options for weapon-types it'd make things a bit more interesting.
As for the second one, it's... the ending. It felt very abrupt. I got what they were trying to do, and apprently Kondo himself commented on how this was done to show that it is "Adol's story", but it's a bit weird that all of a sudden they decided to ditch having a more detailed epilogue. The series always had these very feel good endings where they clearly showed what happened to some extent, so this "it's over, time to pack up" approach felt a bit disjointed from the rest. ESPECIALLY since the party members in Celceta were easily some of the most interesting characters in the whole series!
Anyhow, it's a great game, and one that every A-RPG fan with a Vita should own. I know some people don't really appreciate the story and more RPG-ish newer games, but I think Falcom's been doing an amazing job at crafting these. For someone who's been with the series for quite a while, the bigger emphasis on the stories are allowing them to build the mythology around the series even more, and I personally loved all the shout outs to other games/characters in Celceta.