Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. I must say I hated the Gamecube version. For me, it was the big return of Square on a Nintendo console after skipping a generation, but all I got was a really bad game, where even the best part of it sucked because of one gameplay element: the chalice you had to carry around. Multiplayer, which was the best way to play, also sucked because you needed a GBA AND a link cable for each person playing, and one of the people playing(usually me) was left doing nothing because he had to carry the fucking chalice. It was a big flop, but a big flop with potential that was never used. There were quite a few other flaws, but I wouldn’t have minded them all that much if the chalice and GBA thing weren’t such big problems.

Well when I saw the Crystal Chronicles name coming back on the DS, I wasn’t very curious and almost ignored it. But when I finally took the time to play it, I found that Rings of Fate was actually a really good game. Now I was quite excited for this one. The choice boiled down between the Wii and DS version, but the DS version  seemed like the better deal.

Wii seemingly has exactly the same graphics and switching between the 2 screens seemed unwieldy (yeah, the Wii version displays both screens from the DS game…). So DS version it is. READ ON for my impressions!!!

Looks and Sounds
Well, the first thing you see is that the game uses the same graphic engine as Rings of Fate. Well why am I not surprised?… Oh, maybe it’s because Square Enix has been doing that an awful lot in the last year, releasing sequels with the same engines as previous titles… Okay, well the game looks nice. For a DS title, this is pretty high quality stuff. The models and all look nice, the monster designs are not too bad. You only really see big flaws, mostly with textures, from close up. And  the hands are basically cubes, but that’s mostly because the DS isn’t really a graphic processing powerhouse. There’s a big variety of environments, but the level design is slightly repetitive. I did have one problem with slowdown. Well, if there’s a lot going on the screen, the game slows down a lot, sometimes dipping down to 5-10 Frames Per Second.

For sounds, well, the music is basic FF stuff, and you get the victory theme when you finish side-quests. There’s some voice acting, but it’s just average. Each level has its own theme, so there’s quite a few different tunes for each level.

Story
The story is pretty simplistic by FF standards. You control a silent protagonist who lives in the forest(it can be any race or gender you want). It’s his coming of age ceremony and he must go in the forest to fight a monster. After that, someone catches a weird illness called the Crystal Sickness. You go out of the village, ask some guy for the medicine, and then repay the favor by going to the top of 2 mountains and pushing a block on a structure on each. So it ends up that the guy is evil or something and a huge tower appears. The crystal in your village is destroyed too. So basically you have to reconstruct the crystal and prevent the bad guy from doing… whatever vaguely established goal he wants to do.

Overall it’s… okay. There’s very few characters. The villagers are pretty boring, Sherlotta (one of the villagers who “joins” you later on) is pretty cool but ultimately a bit meh, the antagonist is an old man so it’s a bit weird. And the main character never speaks or even does anything more than doing whatever other characters tell him to do.

Not a bad story, a bit too complex and random, but it’s enjoyable enough. Just don’t expect anything too epic and awesome.

Gameplay
Well, like the graphic engine, the game takes the pretty much the same gameplay engine as Rings of Fate. There’s slight modifications here and there, but overall it’s the same thing. That’s not to say that it’s not solid, but a bit different would’ve been nice.

Well the gameplay is simple. You start with all the spells, you get basic attacks with your first weapon, and in each stage you have to either kill everything or finish a puzzle to get to the next part, until you fight the boss and do the same thing in the next dungeon.

There are multiple ways of attacking. Normal attacks, which at the beginning you can only do 1 or 2 hit combos, but that changes as you level up. Along with normal attacks, when you level up you get “Charge Attacks” for certain weapons (the ones your race are good with), which you do by holding the attack button and letting go when you’ve charged enough. The last way of attacking is using magic. You select which spells you want on the touch screen, and then you can charge them with the magic button and aim them wherever you want. You can also lock the spell rings in place for later use, and stack spells to produce better spells. For example, 2 Cures make Cura, 3 make Curage and 4 make Curaja. There’s various combinations of all the different spells.

There are 4 races in the game. Each have different abilities that they learn at certain levels, each have different stats, each have different weapons they’re better with (because of the skills they learn for them) and overall each race plays a bit differently. Selkies are more agile and can double jump, Yukes are great magic users, Lilties are physical attackers and Clavats are average.

You can build parties in the game, using the guild. You can have up to 3 other party members, and you can switch between them on the fly. There’s one problem though: the party members suck. Their AI is pathetic. They can’t follow you if there’s a gap on the way, or platforms that are just a bit too high. And when you get in battle, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be useful at all. They sometimes just stand there doing nothing, they never use their abilities (can your Clavat ally use a 5-hit combo? well if the computer is controlling it, he won’t… charge attacks either). There’s various tactics you can set on them though. But they’re pretty useless on all of them. I tend to leave them at “Protect yourself”, because they’ll at least use healing spells on me in that state. And not using them isn’t an option, since some puzzles require you to use all your team on a switch to get to different areas.

Another fun element is actually replaying the game. At first you can only choose normal mode, but when you’re done with that you can finish it in both hard and very hard mode, and what’s really cool here is that each difficulty there’s some different content. new equipment, new characters that can join you, new quests, and the game gets harder. Since the main game is relatively short, the extra gameplay from extra difficulties is really nice.

As for equipment, well you can either buy from a shop, or use the customization shop. In the customization shop, you can buy scrolls, or use scrolls you found on the field, to make different equipment, and for that you need the ingredients, which are mostly dropped by enemies. You can equip anything on anyone (unless the item says differently), but equipping something else than what your race is good with is pretty useless since they won’t be able to use any skills. You can also upgrade your equipment. They level up along with you, but there’s more to it. You can put in gems to give extra stats, or enable the weapons to level up further (the original max level is 3). To make gems? Well, you can find some as monster drops and in chests, but you can also transform your old equipment into gems instead of selling them, making your new equip better.

Overall, the gameplay is solid. Varied depending on party, race and difficulty, and it’s interesting enough. If I had to complain about something, it’s the bosses. They’re a bit too simplistic. They all have some kind of protection, and when that protection is gone you can do massive damage on them, and they die a bit too easily. But otherwise, there’s not much to whine about the gameplay here.

Overall
This is a very good game. There’s enough modifications from Ring of Fates to make it worth buying despite it using the same engine. The gameplay is solid, the story is average, and the graphics are top-notch (for a DS game). If you’re a Crystal Chronicles fan this is an obvious buy. If not it might still be worth checking out, especially if you have someone to play with. There’s a few multiplayer options so if you know someone with the game, it’ll be pretty fun to play together. It’s a bit short, but there’s enough content to last quite a while.

jobocan Games, Handheld, Review