Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles

I went through the motions with this game. At first I loved it, then I hated it, then by the end of the game I started to enjoy it again. I just hate needless backtracking, and this game is full of it. This isn't a very big game in the first place, but the end got really really hard, so you're forced to backtrack through dungeons multiple times to get strong enough.

I loved the graphics and the music, but the gameplay did get repetitive to me. The boss fights was enough to get me through the game though, and the ending (while it felt tacted on) was worth playing through this game just to watch it unfold. The overall lack of storyline is what makes me disappointed in this game.


----------Battle System----------
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is an overhead dungeon crawler RPG. The game is very action oriented, so there will be alot of slashing and hacking, but there is a very original magic system that I kind of enjoyed. You can't save up any spells with you before a dungeon, but what you have to do is kill an enemy and hope one of them drops a magic orb. If you collect a Fire Orb then you can use unlimited Fire magic until you exit the dungeon, so there's NO MP in this game, which is awesome.

You only have so many spaces to put things though. I think you start out with 3 or 4 spaces. These spaces will include "Fight", "Defend", and so on. Each magic and item you want to carry with you takes it's own space. If you have enough spaces to carry two magic orbs, then you can Fuse them. If you have 2 Fire Orbs next to each other, then they can for Fira. If you have a Fire and Thunder next to each other then you can create Gravity. The list gets bigger the more magic you can find, but there's only a few original orbs you can find and hold.

One thing that kind of bugged me about the game was your inventory. You can only hold about 40-50 items (I'm guessing). If you want to make good items or want to carry alot of health items, then you'll be tossing out alot of stuff you want. There's no deposit or bank that will store unwanted items. To make weapons and armor you have to start with a scroll. This scroll tells the blacksmith how to make the item. Then you need the required items to make that item, and then you finally have to pay the blacksmith. Making items is a long process, and to make what you want you'll have to carry a ton of items with you, and back to that, you'll be ditching alot of stuff you want because of that.

The dungeons revolve around similar puzzle structures, but the differ enough to give you a decent challenge, there was a few that I was stumped on for weeks. Other than those few puzzles, all the dungeons are the same, all you have to do is get to the exit and fight the boss. Getting to the exit is the hardest part. While all the bosses are different in their own ways, you still have to kill them the same way, hack and slash, with only a couple exceptions.

After you beat a dungeon you'll get rated on the way you did the dungeon with a random reason. For example, the reason at the end is to collect the most gold, then if you collected alot of gold then you'll be rewarded with a ton of points. The more points you get the better Artifacts you get to choose from. These Artifacts is the only other way (other than equiping items) to edit your stats. You can boost your HP, MP, Strength, Magic and so on over time by re-doing dungeons and getting more Artifacts. In multiplayer this is how the four players get to choose who picks the artifact first (whoever has the most points at the end of the dungeon).

----------Characters / Story----------
At the start of the game you get to create your own character through a series of questions and customizable things. There's four races you can pick through, each have their strengths and weaknesses. After you made a character you'll be whisked off into your adventure. The world is surrounded by a mist called Miasma. This Miasma is what monsters live in, but to humans it's deadly. Your job as a caravaner is to take a chalice and go to every Mryth Tree and collect a drop of Mryth to bring back to the village and feed to the giant crystal that protects them. If you play in single player, then a Moogle will come with you carrying the Chalice (which has a small crystal on top of it to protect you). In multiplayer you'll have to get one of your buddies to carry it.

After you've collected three drops of Mryth you'll be warped back to your original village of Tipa, have a party with the villages, sing and dance and restart your quest to gather more Mryth. This is the basic idea of the game and it can get pretty repetitive.

Your characy is a mute, so he can't talk. You'll meet various people in towns, but they don't progress your story at all. The only "story" in the game until the last 40 minutes is the caravaners you’ll meet and greet on the road. These scenes really don't help out the story, but the characters can be interesting. You'll eventually meet up with the same people over the course of the game and get more of a sense of their personalities, but by the end of the game none of that will ever matter.

----------Graphics----------
The graphics impressed me quite a bit. This is, for the most part, an overhead dungeon crawler like a Balder's Gate game, but Crystal Chronicles surpasses just about every dungeon crawler I've seen to date. The dungeons are all unique to each other, they look great, and they're really long. The boss battles are HUGE and was the main reason I ventured further and further into the game. I just wanted to see what I had to fight next. The enemies looked great and the character models look awesome. The cutscenes are extremely impressive to me, with the fluent movement of the characters, and all the detail put into them. I enjoyed these short cutscenes more than I did any Xenosaga game to date.

But for all the good, there is the bad. You can tell Square cut some corners in this game to possibly save up on disc space. This game could of easily been split into 2 discs. Whatever. There's just alot of repeating backgrounds, for example there's the Moogle Nests, which all look exactly the same, no matter what. Then there's the towns, which are big, but you can't go into any houses or anything and most towns only consist of one giant screen, no sections at all to make them bigger or more interesting. There's no camera control in the game, so you're stuck with what Square gives you in a fixed camera views. At the end of the year is the same cutscene everytime.

----------Sound----------
The music is classic Square, some of the best music I've heard in a game since Kingdom Hearts possibly. The sound effects are good, just about every monster have their own unique grunts. There is no voiced out dialog, but before you enter a dungeon a lady in a real somber voice will give you a cryptic overview of the dungeon, similar to Mister Mosquito.

----------World Map----------
The world map is a simple connect the dots map, where you get only a couple options of moving to your next destination, be it a dungeon, port, town or Miasma stream. The game is seperated in four sections, each section is guarded by a Miasma stream surrounded by mist. You need to match your chalice's element to let you through the Miasma. The Miasma's element changes every year. Within dungeons you'll find a bright circular object, these things are what changes your elements within the dungeon. When you find these you can quickly change your element on the world map after defeating the dungeon. There's an "Ultimate" element you'll need to find to finish the game, which is arguably the hardest part of the game.

When you walk across the map you'll often be stopped by a cutscene. These scene's seem unimportant and worthless, and rarely have anything to do with the "story" of the game, but they become very important in the end of the game. You'll often have to make a Yes or No question, or possibly have to give or buy items from the people you meet. The overall lack of storyline is what makes me disappointed in this game.

----------Time to Complete Game----------
17:59

You don't save after it's completed, so it allows you to continue before you take on the final dungeon doing whatever you missed. I missed plenty of stuff with this game, there was alot to do, but nothing truly important in my eyes I think. The ending was pretty good, much better than the rest of the game.