Tuesday, May 25, 2010

The fallacy in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals: The Crystal Bearers.



So I know I was complaining about this game on my Facebook page a while back. I'm still trying to mull over my anger for this game. I have always had a strong affection for the Final Fantasy series, despite having not played that many of them.

There are a few good points to the game. It's short and the story is very direct. There are not too many side quests to get lost on. (Granted I didn't find that many, so who knows.) The game has a quick jump-in style of gameplay that is great for people that aren't huge RPG fans. The game looks great for a Wii title, but at times it has that PS2 smell to it. The music is pretty solid and not too kiddish at times.

Onto the bad stuff. The in-game battle is on a flipping timer. If you don't beat all the critters around the miasma stream in a certain amount of time, a dinger goes off and you have to wait till the stream opens again. The critters come back and you have to kill them all to close the stream and get the mythril shards to add to your health bar. There is no level grinding. The controls are for the birds. You have to aim with the Wii remote and target to pull, push, hit, flip or whatever you have to do. It is a pain in the ass for sure. The map blows. You can't tell where you are on the overworld map because it's so small and lacking any and all detail. I got lost for 45 minutes and walked in circles to find a location.

Onto the even worse. The game is short. Like shorter than my ex's...oh, the jokes are no fun now. Anyway, I went into the boss battle after having only fabricated one of each armor class and only getting two additional mythril shards. The whole game took a grand total of 13 hours and 18 minutes. Honestly, if you don't account the 4-5 hours of cinematics and the estimated 2 hours I spend walking from place to place until the rail system opens up to SLIGHTLY speed up travel, I didn't really play for 13 hours. More like 7 hours of game play.

Ugh. This game is SOOOO not worth $50. Rent it from Gamefly or wait till it hits the $9.99 clearance bin and pray it trades in for $7. Seriously.

I give it a 4.5/10. Not unplayable, but it is not a Final Fantasy epic. A good waste of a weekend, but not good enough to keep and replay.

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