Review - Crystal Project
(originally posted January 7, 2023)
Wow, yeah, this is pretty good!
What I Liked
The exploration
Big honkin' ol' voxel world, and you can platform two (2) boxes high and three (3) boxes wide, which means that each time you get a new method of traversal it feels like a huge increase to your explorative capabilities. If you like exploring off in random corners and seeing what weird shit's there, this has a lot of that. The warp point limit (and I used the additional home points assist option) feels incredibly restrictive at first in a way that makes you appreciative of the world design later when it's no longer an issue.
Like, remember how in Dark Souls, you couldn't warp for the first half of the game, and that added a huge amount of texture to simply traversing to your next destination, and more importantly, back home after a major trip? Like, finding the bonfire in the bottom of Blighttown is a blessing because it's finally a bonfire and then a curse because now you're stuck in Blighttown? It's a little like that.
The class system, most of the time
FF-style job system, right? If it ain't broke don't fix it. You get a main class with an active ability and passive bonuses and a sub-class's active ability. Support abilities are lumped into one big pool and each has a point cost, so there's some decent configuring to be had. I stuck with a tanky physical boy, a dex/agility DPS, an offensive spellcaster, and a healing/support caster, and it worked out most of the time.
The battle system
Yum yum, give me that transparent turn order and damage numbers. I didn't get up to the kind of shenanigans I did in Bravely Default (Hasten World + Jump) but I had a few boss fights that came right down to the wire in a really satisfying way. I am always a fiend for Damage Over Time abilities and there are like three different kinds in this game fuck yeah.
Assist options
No missable items is a nice one; there's a Lost 'n' Found vendor in the main city who sells all of the boss steal items and anything that was in a chest that wouldn't fit in your inventory. You can talk to an NPC and respec your level growths at any time, which is great for the kinds of people who would step on that one trap space in Final Fantasy Tactics that lowered your level, but you would do it with a crappy job with bad stat growths, so that you could level up again later with a higher tier job with better stat growths, thus achieving a net gain in stats. But I'm sure nobody would do this.
I turned on the multiple home points thing immediately, but in retrospect I might not have needed to. There are ways to configure the battle difficulty and to win minigames instantly and such (I will never race another Quintar again as long as I live). I also fiddled with the ones that let me configure EXP/Gold/Job Points rewards, which sort of leads me into...
What I Didn't Like
The game is somewhat judgemental about you using the assist options
Once you turn them on, you can't turn them off, and each puts a permanent mark of shame on your save file. This is ridiculous. Just let me have the sliders set to 100% normally and let me move them up or down as I see fit, alright? Have a little trust.
Long term progression is unreasonably tedious on Normal mode without using assist options (IMO)
Okay, so like, with this kind of JRPG, non-boss encounters are all about resource attrition, right? You don't want to use up all your healing items before you get to a boss, because you want to be as close to full power as you can. But you also need to fight them to get strong enough to fight the boss, so you can't just skip them all. It's the push and pull.
Encounters in this game will fuck you up. I assume I was pretty much on level curve, and I would often end bog-standard encounters with one or more party members downed or at low health. This is not bad in itself, but the game also has restrictive limits on how many restorative items you can carry, gold is fairly scarce, and equipment is expensive. By the time I was halfway-ish through the game, I was starting to dread reaching big new areas because I knew it would be a huge uphill climb.
Then I turned gold earned up to like, 150%? of normal. Enough to actually afford potions and at least one piece of the next equipment tier for the whole party. Suddenly everything got way more manageable, while staying tough.
The map system
Specifically, the way it won't even show you where you are in the void if you don't have the map for that location. Look, fine, don't give me the minimap, but I deserve to know my relative location on the world map.
What I'm Ambivalent About
The lack of story
It's not that there isn't a story, or that what's there doesn't do a decent job, but I could go for a little more meat here. For what it is, it's perfectly adequate, I guess. Just like, in Breath of the Wild or Souls/Elden Ring, the big-name "explore off in weird corners and see what shit's there" games, you often find things that tie back into the main plot and backstory and such or add flavor. In Crystal Project you might also find a sick sword, but it won't have a cool, evocative description that deepens your understanding of the world and its inhabitants. And that's fine, but I sorta wish wish it did, you know?
The only real exceptions to this I think are the final boss area and the secret boss questline. Except, because of how most of the game is, I feel like there's little point in thinking about it because nothing else seems to really have much going on narrative wise. I dunno.
Long term class balance
There was never a moment where I felt like I learned a real game-changer of an ability. There's not really a Rapid Fire or Doublecast equivalent where you feel in your bones you need to beeline directly towards it (even though Doublecast is totally in the game, it has a bunch of caveats that make its usefulness limited to specific situations). The closest was probably the Red Mage Warlock passive that lets you regenerate 6 MP a turn for six turns every time you enter battle; never took that off my casters once I got it. Instead I got these moments more from finding or buying fancy equipment, which is neat but not something I felt like I had control over.
This isn't a bad thing per se, I think it's definitely by design to keep the classes balanced, but it does flatten the curve a bit. I didn't feel like my party had crystallized into true shitwreckers until, when I reached the level cap towards the end of the game, I decided I was done trying to fill out jobs, stripped my entire party naked, and respecced them all into what I felt were the best versions of themselves. Did pretty well after that.