impressions: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles

Crystal Chronicles is a game that most gamers were watching with great interest, whether they wanted to play it or not. Since jumping ship to create Final Fantasy games for the Playstation, Square has been reluctant to develop for Nintendo's home console. And Crystal Chronicles was to be a very large undertaking, with its departure from the traditional turn-based combat system, asking players to make a significant investment for the controls, and all the while promising an engaging multiplayer adventure. And with many reviewers crying foul after seeing their own hype backfiring in their face, is the game actually worth playing?

I'm going to delay delivering my assessment to recount a bit of an anecdote surrounding recent Valentimes [sic] Day. That's when we picked up our reserved copy of Crystal Chronicles, you see. Ever since The Wife gained access to my GBA after I moved in, she occasionally played Metroid Fusion or WarioWare. She became interested in the idea of actually owning her own, and with Crystal Chronicles on the way I happily obliged knowing the multiplayer requirements. What better way to celebrate Valentimes [sic] Day, than with a Fire Red GBA-SP and Crystal Chronicles?

After connecting our respective Gameboys and starting a multiplayer adventure, I figured it would all be fairly straightforward, because seriously, who reads the instruction manual any more? Console games are usually self-revealing. After a solid half-hour getting used to the GBA/GC interface controls, we were on our way. Crystal Chronicles features some of the most beautiful visuals I've ever seen in a game. Leave it to the Gamecube, though, because that's exactly what I said about Metroid Prime. The Game Designers Studio has managed to convince me once again why I own this console. The music, put simply, is moving. I was emotionally stirred after viewing the opening movie, which served as ample introduction to the adventure to come.

During the first half hour of actual play I was absolutely livid, because I was almost certain that I had a terrible game on my hands. The controls felt awkward, the action lists were too complicated to modify while under attack, and the Crystal Chalice did not make me feel like we were in control of the action. But after our first boss battle I realized the truth. Wielding devastating spell combo attacks, coordinating our healing efforts and eventually killing the first boss monster brought me back to the days of Diablo, where only a coordinated assault guarantees victory. The Multiplayer adventure is where this game's design really shines, and should be the only reason you purchase this game.

I know exactly why reviewers had such a hard time with Crystal Chronicles. It forces you to stick together, share inventory items and spells and explicitly binds you by teamwork. What these people failed to understand – and Tycho nailed on the head – is that the game isn't meant to be convenient. Teamwork is an essential – nay, mandatory - component of gameplay. If you're expecting to breeze through it on single player and enjoy the same experience, you're absolutely wrong. You need to play this with other people; to fully understand the concepts behind the game it is essential. The single player option was thrown in so that players wouldn't feel obligated to buy a GBA, and is completely devoid of excitement. So you get a moogle companion to carry the Chalice - big deal. The game becomes little more than a more polished version of something like Dark Alliance.

Inventory management is completely discrete – it's all contained on the many pages of information accessed on the GBA. There's no need to pause the whole game just so someone can put on their Ruby Earrings. Randomized map, treasure, and enemy radars forces communication between players, as does the mandatory carrying of the Crystal Chalice. The game took a lot of flak for the Chalice concept, but I didn't find it annoying at all. In fact I found that whoever had the map was the best person to carry it, and even if you're attacked you automatically drop it.

The game may not share the turn-based combat of previous Final Fantasy games, but the environment and characters are saturated with it. The real-time combat is one of the main things that turned players away from this game; it didn't "feel" like a Final Fantasy adventure. I would love for more Final Fantasy games to share this visual style, though. I am more at home with the soft looking, child-like characters of FFTA and FFCC than the androgynized brooding male leads of recent Final Fantasy games. It's getting ridiculous, and I think having these characters present in Crystal Chronicles helps evoke the atmosphere of innocence and wonder, instead of making you feel uncomfortable playing a male who spends as much time in front of the mirror as his female counterpart.

I found the GBA-GCN connector cable was a little flaky at times, as we had to restart our GBAs more than once during play because they would freeze up. Luckily this wouldn't affect the game, though – Crystal Chronicles just waits to reconnect with the GBA. Unfortunately if you're in the middle of a boss battle and all players are resetting their GBAs you'll probably die before the link is restored.

After every dungeon you return to the world map and have the option to save your progress. There aren't many spots where it autosaves, so rather than making dangerous assumptions that it might save after a pivotal cutscene you're better off saving right off the main map. As many of the critics have noted, you lose your spells and magical abilities every time you leave a dungeon, only having to re-collect spell spheres when you enter a new one. You also must go right through to the end – there's no clearing an area, exiting and saving like we tried. Once you beat the area's boss then it's safe to save your progress and move on. There are multiple slots that will store different characters, so theoretically you could jump into an existing multiplayer adventure with newly created characters. As an added bonus, you can bring your memory card and GBA over to a friend's place and load up your existing character for an adventure.

Crystal Chronicles is not a conventional console game. It marks Square's triumphant return to Nintendo's home console lineup, and reminds us that going online is not necessarily the solution for a truly captivating multiplayer experience. I wouldn't call the game's execution perfect; the story is a loosely bound explanation for leaving your home village, and the mysterious miasma enveloping the land is not beyond reproach as the sole reason for the party to stay together (why not because they like each other?). You may still be thinking to yourself that this is a clever marketing strategy to get people to spend more money on Nintendo products, and in some respects you might be right. But I honestly can't see this game working in any other fashion. The combination of beautiful visuals, a superb soundtrack, and completely practical control scheme make me think that it was worth the wait. Maybe it's not a spectacular RPG, but it will at least be remembered for its willingness to see past the perceived boundaries of multiplayer console gaming.