Winter Storm Jonas hit us here on the east coast pretty hard this past weekend, giving us almost 2 feet of snow to wade around in. Due to this, I was pseudo-trapped at my buddy's house, spending almost 48 hours on his couch doing nothing but playing videogames.
I believe I tasted heaven.
Anyways, the game of choice for the majority of this stint was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, a beloved childhood game of mine developed by The Game Designers Studio, a shell corporation of Square Enix.
I had a blast playing this game on the Gamecube when I was way younger, and it's not just my rose-tinted glasses in action when I say the game still holds up. The graphics, gameplay, and combat system are all still pretty good! However, there is one problem, especially when playing the game in a room full of people. You see, back in the day of the early 2000's, practically everyone I knew had Gameboy Advances, which unfortunately for the dark times of 2016, are required to play the game multiplayer.
When I used to play this game, a bunch of buddies and I would plug our Gameboys into the Gamecube via adapter, and the Gameboys would serve as game controllers, complete with maps and other information on your own personal screen. Today, I'm the only person I know who still has a Gameboy Advance, so upon booting up Crystal Chronicles, I had to play by myself.
Back to the game holding up though...
Like most major titles on the Gamecube, the controls are intuitive and fluid, with unique game flavor built in along the way. I still consider the Gamecube one of the most inventive and creative consoles we've ever seen.
The game is just so magical, like most Final Fantasy games, however this one takes it to a whole new level. It vibes on a very storybook aesthetic, with a narrator reading the descriptions for the dungeons to you as if you were a small child being read a fable. All the characters, all the monsters, all the places, they are so high fantasy and storybook-esque that I seriously laud the creative director of the game.
But, there was on thing I didn't remember about the game.
Maybe it's because when I was younger, I was always playing with other people, but goddamn this game is really hard. Throughout my playthrough, I honestly could not stop comparing it to another Japanese-made game, Dark Souls, which I talked about in a previous post. A lot of the art direction is actually fairly similar, despite a more cutesy aesthetic in Crystal Chronicles.
But the game is fucking hard, just like Dark Souls.
One of my friends, who was actually playing Dark Souls while I played Crystal Chronicles (Multiple TV's) laughed at me every time I mentioned it, but it was uncanny to me.
Crystal Chronicles is incredibly unforgiving, some bosses taking 10-15 minutes to even kill. There's nothing particularly complicated about them, their health bars are just giant and if you're not constantly healing yourself, you're going to die. Regular enemies gang up on you and chase you forever, some of which also take just ages to actually kill.
Also similarly to Dark Souls, there is a very big "where the heck do I go" theme in Crystal Chronicles, with some of the levels being so intricate and uniform in design that getting lost is extremely easy.
The art direction, the monsters, the level design, and the difficulty... the game is seriously not that different from Dark Souls. Really. No seriously, I'm not crazy. They're not that different. Seriously though, you can go play Crystal Chronicles if you want, in fact I would seriously recommend it, but it's a hard game. Just like Dark Souls. Really.
Also I named my town "Dong".
-SK
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