Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers abandons the multiplayer, role-playing game trappings of the previous Crystal Chronicles games for a single-player adventure. Interspersed within all the action you'll find lots of motion-sensing minigames and a wide-open world to explore. Those frequent bright spots keep the game from dragging too much, because the tedious combat and lack of direction can quickly sap your desire to keep playing.
Similar to the first Kingdom Hearts, another of Square's popular action titles, the camera in Crystal Bearers is horribly unresponsive. It's easy to center the camera behind the main protagonist, Layle, and see where you're going. But when the game throws a platforming section at you or pits you against an oversized enemy, you're at a distinct disadvantage. Unlike similar Wii titles, pointing your cursor at the edge of the screen doesn't move the camera at all, even in first-person view -- you have to use the Wii Remote's D-pad. And when you're simultaneously running around while dodging enemies or environmental obstacles, trying to focus on a boss's weak point, and grabbing items to throw, camera control becomes unintuitive and overly complicated.
You're rarely penalized for dying though, and you hit auto-save points frequently. During some boss battles, your foe even retains the damage you've already inflicted if you die before finishing him off. Overall, Crystal Bearers doesn't throw much challenge at you, but it does toss in varied minigames to keep everything moving forward. Right at the beginning, you have to shoot at enemies while falling through the sky, and soon after that, you have to avoid pursuers in a high-speed cart race. You can't fail these sequences, and you're given a score at the end. However, doing better doesn't earn you anything, except the chance to go back and try again for a better result later in the game.
But there wouldn't be much reason to collect prizes even if you could. Different pieces of equipable jewelry you find throughout the game increase some of you abilities' powers, but actual combat plays such a small part in the game that farming for materials to make better equipment is never necessary. You can run past almost every enemy you encounter in the field, and the bosses tend to have exploitable weak points that make fighting them a battle of skill (and tricky camera manipulation) rather than overpowering might. You don't even earn new weapons or abilities; Layle's only power is picking heavy things up and throwing them around. It doesn't make any sense that picking up a few guards and tossing them across a hallway barely elicits any kind of response from the thrown or nearby onlookers, but the mechanic itself works well -- as long as you stay out of harm's way, you probably won't even miss not having an over-sized sword or ultra-powerful fire spell.
Things start out with a lot of excitement, action-wise, even if the eye-rollingly terrible dialogue and delivery make it hard to listen to. But I had no idea what anything meant, or why my character was getting roped into this crazy, crystal-collecting situation. But once I got the different factions memorized, and learned who was who, the whole predictable "stop an evil tyrant from destroying the world" became a lot more understandable. Unfortunately, just when the game starts to make sense, it drags things out with unclear objectives and lots of overworld walking.
The game's map is completely useless: The overworld is a giant picture that doesn't give you any assistance in figuring out how to get from one zone to the next, and the minimap you have when exploring on foot only shows red dots where your enemies are. That's it. It's even more nonsensical when characters give you directions like, "Go south to reach the cave entrance," since there's no way to determine which way is "south" in the game. Infrequent road signs can help point you in the right direction -- though they're not always labeled with the destinations you need (it took me forever to find the entrance to the Subterranean Ruins), and you can't check those signs if you're riding the game's Chocobo mount. To add insult to injury, if you get off the Chocobo to check a sign, he runs away! So you have to choose between wasting time by possibly going the wrong way, or choosing to dismount, and making the rest of your journey slow and on foot. You open up warp points and train routes much later in the game, but even they put you far enough away from your destination to make the journey feel equally tedious.
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But all that walking lets you enjoy the beautiful scenery. Decked out with wide, sweeping areas, intricate details on every characters' costume, and huge, badass enemies (including one of the best looking 3D Bahamuts I've seen yet), Crystal Bearers is a good-looking Wii game. But those beautiful details make it all the more jarring when, every time you open a chest, flat, low-resolution money pops out. It looks like an item from an N64 game tossed in on accident. But pretty graphics don't matter much when the game is so frustrating to get through. And it's hard to take Layle's brash, Han Solo-like personality seriously when he looks more like a 14-year old than an experienced adventurer. In this game's world, if people aren't grizzled and old, they're eternally pre-pubescent.
If Square had kept the fast-paced, action-oriented feeling of the few opening hours throughout, this would have been at least a fun, quick romp through a weird story. But dragging the game out with endless fetch quests and terrible combat makes getting to the end more of a chore than anything. In-game achievements and plenty of sidequests give you something to work towards, even when you're wandering around lost. But without any worthwhile rewards, even they feel unnecessary. If you're looking for some pretty Final Fantasy fan service, replete with Cactaurs, Moogles, and flying Nus, then you'll be able to appreciate the game's great art and creature designs. But Square still has a lot to learn about making a Final Fantasy game that's not an RPG.
Trailer
Screen Shots
Release Date: 12/26/2009
ESRB Rating: Teen
Genre: Adventure
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Square Enix
Similar to the first Kingdom Hearts, another of Square's popular action titles, the camera in Crystal Bearers is horribly unresponsive. It's easy to center the camera behind the main protagonist, Layle, and see where you're going. But when the game throws a platforming section at you or pits you against an oversized enemy, you're at a distinct disadvantage. Unlike similar Wii titles, pointing your cursor at the edge of the screen doesn't move the camera at all, even in first-person view -- you have to use the Wii Remote's D-pad. And when you're simultaneously running around while dodging enemies or environmental obstacles, trying to focus on a boss's weak point, and grabbing items to throw, camera control becomes unintuitive and overly complicated.
You're rarely penalized for dying though, and you hit auto-save points frequently. During some boss battles, your foe even retains the damage you've already inflicted if you die before finishing him off. Overall, Crystal Bearers doesn't throw much challenge at you, but it does toss in varied minigames to keep everything moving forward. Right at the beginning, you have to shoot at enemies while falling through the sky, and soon after that, you have to avoid pursuers in a high-speed cart race. You can't fail these sequences, and you're given a score at the end. However, doing better doesn't earn you anything, except the chance to go back and try again for a better result later in the game.
But there wouldn't be much reason to collect prizes even if you could. Different pieces of equipable jewelry you find throughout the game increase some of you abilities' powers, but actual combat plays such a small part in the game that farming for materials to make better equipment is never necessary. You can run past almost every enemy you encounter in the field, and the bosses tend to have exploitable weak points that make fighting them a battle of skill (and tricky camera manipulation) rather than overpowering might. You don't even earn new weapons or abilities; Layle's only power is picking heavy things up and throwing them around. It doesn't make any sense that picking up a few guards and tossing them across a hallway barely elicits any kind of response from the thrown or nearby onlookers, but the mechanic itself works well -- as long as you stay out of harm's way, you probably won't even miss not having an over-sized sword or ultra-powerful fire spell.
Things start out with a lot of excitement, action-wise, even if the eye-rollingly terrible dialogue and delivery make it hard to listen to. But I had no idea what anything meant, or why my character was getting roped into this crazy, crystal-collecting situation. But once I got the different factions memorized, and learned who was who, the whole predictable "stop an evil tyrant from destroying the world" became a lot more understandable. Unfortunately, just when the game starts to make sense, it drags things out with unclear objectives and lots of overworld walking.
The game's map is completely useless: The overworld is a giant picture that doesn't give you any assistance in figuring out how to get from one zone to the next, and the minimap you have when exploring on foot only shows red dots where your enemies are. That's it. It's even more nonsensical when characters give you directions like, "Go south to reach the cave entrance," since there's no way to determine which way is "south" in the game. Infrequent road signs can help point you in the right direction -- though they're not always labeled with the destinations you need (it took me forever to find the entrance to the Subterranean Ruins), and you can't check those signs if you're riding the game's Chocobo mount. To add insult to injury, if you get off the Chocobo to check a sign, he runs away! So you have to choose between wasting time by possibly going the wrong way, or choosing to dismount, and making the rest of your journey slow and on foot. You open up warp points and train routes much later in the game, but even they put you far enough away from your destination to make the journey feel equally tedious.
But all that walking lets you enjoy the beautiful scenery. Decked out with wide, sweeping areas, intricate details on every characters' costume, and huge, badass enemies (including one of the best looking 3D Bahamuts I've seen yet), Crystal Bearers is a good-looking Wii game. But those beautiful details make it all the more jarring when, every time you open a chest, flat, low-resolution money pops out. It looks like an item from an N64 game tossed in on accident. But pretty graphics don't matter much when the game is so frustrating to get through. And it's hard to take Layle's brash, Han Solo-like personality seriously when he looks more like a 14-year old than an experienced adventurer. In this game's world, if people aren't grizzled and old, they're eternally pre-pubescent.
If Square had kept the fast-paced, action-oriented feeling of the few opening hours throughout, this would have been at least a fun, quick romp through a weird story. But dragging the game out with endless fetch quests and terrible combat makes getting to the end more of a chore than anything. In-game achievements and plenty of sidequests give you something to work towards, even when you're wandering around lost. But without any worthwhile rewards, even they feel unnecessary. If you're looking for some pretty Final Fantasy fan service, replete with Cactaurs, Moogles, and flying Nus, then you'll be able to appreciate the game's great art and creature designs. But Square still has a lot to learn about making a Final Fantasy game that's not an RPG.
Trailer
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Release Date: 12/26/2009
ESRB Rating: Teen
Genre: Adventure
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Square Enix
