Crystareino Review — Bland as Flanders
Yet another nostalgic turn based RPG served up hot on the 3DS recently was Crystareino, curiously by the same developers of Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector, Hit-Point Co.,Ltd. While you don’t collect kitties in this game, you do collect a lot of strays in Crystareino, in the forms of friends and allies that fight with you, the Hero.
The Hero has been destined to protect his homeland from a great threat, and has yet to finish training under the guidance of the sacred beast Eppol when he is suddenly transported to another world at the behest of the King of Rodwaal in order to stop the Demon King. Left with no other choice, the Hero and his sacred beast set off to defeat the Demon King in the hopes that it will break the seal preventing them from returning to their home world.
Along the way, many characters will join and leave the Hero’s party, inspired by their aura to fight their hardest against the influence of the Demon King. I actually really enjoyed this aspect of the game, because frequently changing the party dynamics meant that your approach to combat encounters is also constantly changing. This was an interesting way to prevent combat from becoming repetitive, in what would otherwise be a pretty generic turn based combat system. Otherwise, the encounters tend to be a bit of a breeze for most of the game, until you hit the difficulty spike where it just begins to throw boss after boss at you, by which point I had lost too much interest in the combat to come prepared with a synergistic party.
The downside to having so many characters come and go is that many of them never really get a chance to shine in the storyline, and often you’ll only get a snippet of their backstory before they’re suddenly shelved again until later on in the story. This is only for the characters that actually get a backstory by the way, since there are also random mercenaries that you can hire in taverns to fill up your party when the other characters have better things to do than preventing the apocalypse. As a result, many of the side characters are forgettable, besides Eppol, who is the only character I’d want to forget. Besides looking like a Pomeranian that stuck its chops in a candy floss machine, they serve as the exposition for the silent protagonist, and a result means they get plenty of useless and annoying dialogue that make me wish I could just swap them for a nice sword or something and be done with them.
The dialogue in general tends to drag on a bit at times, a common problem for indie RPGs, but it’s an issue that tends to be a bit compounded when your party is built like a revolving door at a cosplay convention. If your attention span is as short as mine, you’ll be finding yourself speed reading dialogue so you can get to the next save point semi regularly. This only makes the instant dialogue speed setting even more blessed, since at least you’re not forced to read at the text scroll speed.
Besides sounding like it was named by Ned Flanders, Crystareino does stand up as a solid RPG experience, but a lot of it is just too generic to keep my interest for very long. For those wanting a simple throwback to the early days of turn based RPGs, you’ll probably find a lot of things to like about this game, and it has the potential for you to get deeply involved in the finer mechanics. However for me, it’s a hard Crystarei-No.
Originally published at The Insatiable Gamer.
