Rated CBAM!: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers (Review)

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers (Nintendo Wii)

Rated “T” For “Teen”

“The Crystal Chronicles” series spun off of Final Fantasy is a small list of Nintendo exclusive titles. The stories revolve around the four tribes of the Lilty (onion-people), Yuke (souls that live by being hosted in armor), Clavat (humans), and Selkie (humans). These stories also aren’t the traditional Final Fantasy RPGs either as they work on a free roaming, real-time battle system. The Crystal Bearers is the latest installment in the series and definitely stands out from those that came before it.

=====Story=====

Over time, the Lilty and the Yuke had raged war against each other. In the end, the Lilty were the ones that gained the upperhand and were able to eradicate all of the Yuke, but not before they cast a spell on their crystal. With the Lilty crystal poisoned by a Lilty genocidal spell, the Lilty prosper on, but not without knowing of the dangers that may come. The Lilty King has been stricken ill and a lone Yuke has arrived to revive its tribe.

Crystal Bearers are seen as different. They possess powers beyond normal beings and are often feared. Layle, a crystal bearing Clavat, is carrying on an escort mission with his Selkie friend for the Lilty when he suddenly crosses paths with the lone Yuke (whom he has crossed before). Layle chases after the Yuke in hopes to stop it, but finds himself uncovering more of what’s going on with the tribes, the royal Lilty family, and the Crystal Principle.

=====Gameplay=====

Crystal Chronicles never relied on turn-based battles and too many menu options to choose your attacks. Crystal Bearers is no different. As combat is done in real-time, you have to be on your toes as to what you have to do. As Layle, a Crystal Bearer with the power of telekinesis/gravity, you have the ability to move objects around. Layle will grab almost anything and can hurl them at the opposing monsters. That simply consists of pointing your cursor on the desired object, targeting and locking on, and then flinging it in whatever direction you choose. Sounds fairly easy and it is, but that’s all there really is to it. Find something that can be grabbed and then throw it at what you want. Grabbing monsters can be more beneficial as some may allow you to use some of their powers for a while before hurling them or losing control of them. You can also play the element game of what is better against what leading to small and effective item use (bucket of water thrown on bombs).

There are also a bountiful number of sidequests and in-game prompts that ask you to use the Wiimote in a certain fashion. It might be something like using your powers a certain way to steering an airship to surfing down a river to dancing. So you’ll be doing more than your fair share of flinging in this adventure.

=====Difficulty=====

Difficulty can be looked at a few ways. Since there really is only way to do combat, your strategies won’t be too detailed or deep. The amount of fighting you do does get more difficult as you fight multiple times in a single area. More monsters will spawn and be stronger or just stronger foes will appear that will take great effort to take down. Combat ends successfully when you close the portal that monsters come out of.

What adds to the combat difficulty is the fact that you are timed. One problem with that is that you don’t see the time. It’s possible you can spend minutes killing off monsters and start to hear the chimes of the timer as you’re running to close the portal just to miss it by a few seconds, which nullifies a clean win. This is very possible in larger combat areas or when fighting larger/stronger creatures.

You can also look at how difficult the game is by the fact that you DO NOT have to fight any of these battles and just have to deal with story-forwarding battles. It is entirely your choice to skip these encounters and the biggest loss is that you don’t get extra energy from completing a fight successfully the first time in that region. The thing is that you could be skilled enough to go through story battles since combat isn’t much different from any other. You might develop a run and fling strategy, but that’s all you really are doing anyways.

=====Content=====

As I’ve said before, there are a lot of sidequests that you can go through to add some hours to your total game time. These fall in line with the medals/achievements you can acquire throughout your adventure. Some of these medals require some work (throwing garbage away with moogles), using your powers to save people from rolling down a hill, or using your powers to stop crazy scarecrows. And some are achieved by things just happening like finding your first of a new item or leaving an area by train. There are over 300 of these medals to acquire, but not all required to fulfill.

Although you may want to take on a few of these as Layle’s adventure is terrifyingly shorter than what you would expect from any Final Fantasy. A simple run-through can go by in 10 hours. Doing that alone can easily come along with finding 30% of all the medals while still skipping a few fights here and there. While the story is intriguing, the balance of story and gameplay certainly does leave more to be desired.

If you really wanted to waste time and have your own type of fun, you could throw everything at everyone you see or just throw everyone you see around. The speechless NPCs more often get in your way and don’t do much else. While helping them will have NPCs follow you in adoration, flinging them around will cause some to get violent as they begin to knock you around causing you to drop gil. It’s not too big a penalty as you can easily regain that gil back in many ways. But who wants any further annoyances from these mindless citizens. At least this will spare you from hearing unimportant dialogue that NPCs are often cursed with.

=====Final Thoughts=====

Crystal Bearers had a shaky start from when development started. The scars of that development can be seen throughout the game. The occasional character running through walls is definitely not acceptable during this age of gaming. Voice acting is decent, but not everyone was blessed with a good voice, which may make some of the cut scenes more blah than interesting. While some action sequences are fun, a few may come out of nowhere and are then so short that you may wonder why you had to waggle the control for those few seconds. You may also find yourself feeling lost at times due to a missing map and sometimes not being told exactly where to go. Friendly moogles can often help point you to where you need to go.

There are still a few shining points that comes from Crystal Bearers. Square-Enix always knows how to make a game look pretty and this is a very good looking game. Not only that, the scale of environments is amazing and tempts you to explore just to see where you can go. Speaking of scale, larger monsters are definitely intimidating as they are the size of buildings and are definitely tough to take down.

The combat will definitely be a deal breaker. It is a new way to fight, but it is also a simple system to master. It boils down to throwing things at the enemy. While better objects may be around to use as projectiles, you may have to resort to throwing something simple like a snowball or a sign while waiting for objects to regenerate.

The one thing that may strike hard is the fact you might not feel as strong as Layle is portrayed in cut scenes. Layle can be seen hurling multiple objects at great speed in cut scenes, but you never get that same impact when you actually fight. Not only that, but there are times where you can leap great distances. With Layle’s type of powers, you might wonder why you can’t do that all the time. You can only leap great distances when prompted, but then you sometimes can’t climb over a wall a couple feet taller than you. Layle is powerful, but you never feel as powerful as he is.

There are a lot of things that make this game not perfect. Not everything is balanced (content, gameplay, etc) and the things that do shine aren’t the biggest factors to that should make or break a game. It might not be the strongest entry in the Crystal Chronicles series, but it was definitely a brave try. Just a lesson learned or hopefully improved if this series’ entry will get a sequel.