Crystal Project is an old-school indie RPG that candidly dropped on Steam and was recommended to me by a friend. Apparently it’s been in early access for a while, but I didn’t know about it until the game had officially launched. And man, this is one hell of an underrated gem.
I don’t even know where to start. I’m just gonna write until I’m out of things to write about.
The good
Crystal Project uses a job system. You control a party of four, and before starting the game you have a choice of six starting classes: Warrior, Rogue, Monk, Wizard, Cleric, and Warlock. If you’re familiar with Final Fantasy 1, these starting classes may sound familiar. There is no starting freelancer job, which I’d actually call a good thing. Lots of RPGs with job systems will start your party as freelancers, then leveling unlocked classes makes the freelancer stronger. So you start out as a freelancer, then at the end of the game you… switch back to freelancer. It’s inviting build variety only to make that variety useless by the end of it all.
Crystal Project doesn’t do this, and I’m all for it. There are some broken builds by the end of the game where you make everyone the same, but they’re only really viable for a select few boss fights, and none of the post-game. Plus finding those setups is half the fun of an RPG.
One thing that makes these setups useful is no hidden information. Everything is laid out for the player: Turn order, attack damage, percentage to hit or miss, what attacks the enemy is about to do, literally everything.
The job system is also more involved than most other games. Not only do party levels increase stats based on the job they have equipped, but each job also has a small skill tree that must be cleared before it can be considered mastered; and some jobs have multiple archetypes based on the weapons they have equipped. Coupled with being able to equip limited passive abilities, sub-jobs, and being able to redistribute your job levels with an NPC, there is a lot of build variety & customization available to you. The game even lets you change your party members’ genders if you want, which has its own affect on your character’s stats. (I guess you could call that a negative. Gender locking in any context isn’t great).
In combat, everything is visible to the player. You can see exact turn order, who the enemy is planning to target, what status effects they have, what attack they’re going to do, and even if attacks will inflict status effects. Enemy HP does get hidden for your first encounter, but every repeated encounter it’ll always be visible. This includes boss fights with adds, so if you kill a boss but an add makes you restart, the boss HP will be visible when you try again. That’s a nice touch.
Outside of combat, the game is extremely non-linear. There are no invisible barriers, so your only restrictions are environmental obstacles. You progress by opening shortcuts, unlocking mounts, and unlocking some admittedly restrictive fast travel locations. It’s the kind of non-linear where you may end up sequence breaking on accident, and the level of sequence breaking possible is unreal. A casual playthrough can take 40–60 hours, but speedrunners have been able to bring it down to less than two hours. There are shortcuts that you’d never find casually unless you were actively searching for them. It’s insane.
While the game is mostly mechanics-focused, it also has a lot of really good hidden lore. There’s a bunch of NPCs that give you tidbits about the origin of the world, how it’s created/changed, and finding your place in it. Some good stuff, even if it’s overshadowed by the gameplay.
On top of all that, the game features a moderately adjustable difficulty. There is of course the standard easy/normal/hard, which the game lets you raise or lower when desired, but it also lets you skip minigames, extend timers on puzzles, and increase the amount of EXP/gold you earn from battles (I turned that waaay the fuck up when I reached endgame). Plus there are no achievements for beating the game on higher difficulties, letting the player go at their own pace… mostly.
The weird, the interesting, and the baffling
Something I’ve noticed about a lot of ‘throwback’ RPGs is they make some really weird gameplay decisions, and Crystal Project is no exception. Here are a few that I noticed:
The first thing you’ll likely make note of is there’s no option by default to run from battles or use items mid-combat. Both are restricted to job skills, which is an interesting design choice. I can vaguely understand both though. Items aren’t super practical to use mid-battle, and the game wants to encourage dodging flames rather than just encountering & running from them. But it’s still kinda weird to see as both are considered RPG standard.
The game also gets really hard sometimes. That’s a common staple of throwback RPGs, and most of the really difficult fights are optional, but even some required bosses are true tests of your mechanical mastery. The game is getting a balance patch soon though, so maybe it’ll get easier.
Another thing that adds to the difficulty is the level cap. Your party level caps at 60, which is surprisingly low. Even more surprising is you can still encounter enemies that go all the way to level 99. Again, mostly optional content, and much of the equipment upgrades can help compensate for the level cap, but still an interesting design choice.
I think the only part of the game that I’d call a design flaw is the save points & inn system. There are no tent or cottage items, so the only way to refill your HP/MP is to rest at inns. But if you die at any point, you respawn at your last save point with your HP/MP refilled… so why have an inn mechanic at all? Why not just refill HP/MP every time you save? You do lose money when you die to regular enemies, but when you die to bosses you don’t lose anything. It’s a lot easier to just intentionally die than it is to use items or backtrack to an inn, so having this design is baffling.
But the game is still really great
All in all though I’d definitely recommend playing this. Is it the best old-school RPG out there? Eh, no, it’s really hard to beat out Dragon Quest XI for that title. But Crystal Project absolutely takes second place; especially if you want something long.
This is a game that I genuinely want to study. I’ve been wanting to write an editorial about RPG progression & build design, and this game is definitely something I’d reference a lot in it. So look forward to maybe seeing that.
