Cris Tales caught my attention from the moment I saw him. Its stunning graphics and the unusual design of the game offering, which focuses on the past, present and future, made for such a strange combination of features that I was excited to try it out. Now that the day of release has come, I’ve been able to spend the last few days in this beautiful world to see how the game, which calls itself an “indie love letter to the classic JRPGs”, really works.
Cris Tales, whose story revolves around the young chronomist Crisbell, follows a group of powerful young men on their journey through the dangerous world of Crystallis and their four kingdoms with the aim of stopping a ruthless being, the empress of time, from the future of the Do not rewrite the world. With the help of a talking frog named Matias, the companions, each with special magical abilities that make them different, have to travel through different places to learn more about their abilities and thus to be able to face the evil empress. Along the way, they will help the kingdoms and their people change their future.
Cris Tales was designed as a tribute to the JRPG genre and is mainly divided into two play styles: exploring and speaking to various NPCs, as well as fighting. Most of the story is told through conversation and in most cases is interesting and engaging. The main story, which focuses on Crisbell and her empowered powers, is quite deep and emotional as well as entertaining. Likewise, the involvement of the rest of the characters and the way they fit into the story, either as part of side missions or as a tool to continue the narrative, will make you want to learn more about this fascinating world (which, like I mentioned earlier , it is wonderful).
However, the exploration leaves a lot to be desired. There are plenty of boring walks between the different plot points in Cris Tales, which becomes apparent early on when you arrive in Santa Clarita, an amazing looking town that is reached after climbing two exaggeratedly long flights of stairs. Needless to say, these moments of inactivity put a huge end to the immersion, but this isn’t the only aspect that neglects exploration as the world typically doesn’t have many places to venture out into, especially since the game is in 2D and relies on different times is a framework to create depth while exploring.
The design of these frames is pretty intuitive. The screen is divided into three areas: the past, the present and the future. You can see the world in each of these states at the same time and use this design to find rewards or solve problems, but you also have to face some moral dilemmas. For example, at the beginning of the game, you will find that some of the houses in your town have been affected by the ash plague, a type of rot that makes buildings uninhabitable over time. With the help of your talent and your friend Matias the frog, you can travel in time and into the future to decide how to solve the problem before it gets worse, but you can’t solve all the problems as often as you will It is up to you to decide what is better for the kingdom.
This system even extends to battles that can also abuse different time frames. You can poison an enemy and then send them off into the future for the poison to have an immediate effect and inflict significant damage on them instead of waiting for the damage to take effect over time. The trick in using time is that you are sending an enemy into the past or future by turning them into the creature they would be during that time, which can often be a much more dangerous adversary, or quite the opposite.
You might think this all sounds great, right? Well it is. The weather system is pretty cool, but the combat mechanics aren’t that cool. The game works like a traditional JRPG, which means that you pick a move and Crisbell and Co. take it. The problem is that the games are very complicated and there is a strange “timing” mechanism that basically makes it impossible for you to win anything if you don’t use it properly. You have to press a button at the exact moment a character is attacking another or receiving an attack (this varies by platform) to drastically change the damage he is doing to you or your opponent. It can be a little frustrating to do it at just the right moment, but the biggest problem is that the fights are pretty brutal. If you enjoy making medium damage attacks on your enemies while taking much larger damage attacks, you will feel right at home in Cris Tales. Oh, and it doesn’t help that enemies don’t have health bars, which means you have no idea how you are doing during combat.
This wouldn’t be a huge issue either if your characters’ health and other stats weren’t maintained in subsequent battles … but that’s not the case. When you have a particularly tough confrontation, you basically get annoyed about the next fight, and that encourages you to avoid unnecessary fights, which is also very difficult since the confrontations in the ‘wild’ zones, to say the least, very, very often. It’s like a Pokémon game, except that you reach your limit on the toughest Pokémon, basically forcing you to return to a Pokémon Center after two or three fights unless you have lots of potions with you.
Of course, you can equip Crisbell and her companions with many items to help you in battle, but they don’t come cheap. In fact, early in the game, renting a room to fully restore your entire team’s stats is cheaper than buying a single healing potion that won’t even restore your entire health bar during battles. It is clearly unbalanced.
And it’s a shame because Cris Tales’ graphics are some of the most impressive I’ve seen in a video game. Seriously, it’s really beautiful. The cathedral floors where Crisbell learns more about her powers reflect the rooms perfectly, and when we add the extensive color palette so well done we check out some of the most beautiful scenes in video games. Additionally, the design of the characters is fantastic too, as no two are alike. Dreams Uncorporated did a brilliant job bringing this world to life. So it makes me sad that on many occasions it looks more like an obligation than anything else.
For me, Cris Tales is a game that, to be honest, has both successes and failures. There are parts that I love and others that I detest so the experience is contradicting itself. With a few minor tweaks to make the fights less tough and stressful, Cris Tales could be downright fantastic, but right now it’s hard to see it as more than just a series of engaging scenes that tell an unusual but original story who are ruined by a world of design with little content and often frustrating struggles.
