Crystal Project

released on Mar 31, 2022

Crystal Project is a non-linear JRPG where you are the maker of your own adventure. Explore the world while you find Crystals, unlock classes, learn abilities, and create a strategy capable of taking down the world's toughest bosses. Or just stick to exploring; it's up to you.


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Great indie game. Fantastic sense of exploration and adventure. Jrpg mechanic heavy with a bunch of wonderful customization. Story isn't really there, but sense of adventure is. Really enjoyed this!

Crazy to me that this was made largely using royalty free assets, the character models, music, everything. And yet it still has this really nice singular charm to it! If you yearn to play an RPG but are concerned about delving deep into world matters and story, don't worry this has you covered. Story aspects are largely barren but if you are going in looking for something like that this is perfect and real cozy.

One big part of the game is gaining new platforming upgrades, letting you navigate the world more. I love this mechanic. Grind some enemies, upgrade and change classes, search the area for little hidden rooms with treasure.. yeah. Really dig this. I think its pretty cheap too.

I got a bit annoyed with the awkward jump puzzles leading to frustrating extra encounters. It's been a couple of years and there are quite a few updates along with mod support nowadays. I really wanted to like the game, so maybe I'll give it another whirl at some point and see if I can find a combination of mods that works for me.

Could be better, but as an early-access game, I have hope that this will become one of the best FF-likes on Steam.

As a big fan of FFV, I've long been aware of more modern job system games like this and recently felt a pull to give the demo a try. Unfortunately it just didn't really grab me? The job system didn't open up into interesting abilities and combinations fast enough and the barebones world and characters didn't do much to pull me in.

Some minor quibbles which are not nearly such sweeping statements and yet I feel still warrant comment: The platforming is really unnecessarily finicky, so many jumps take the absolute limit of your range. Yet I imagine if they were a full block shorter you'd probably frequently overshoot. I guess the voxel world design is something of a limitation here, if jumps could be maybe half a block narrower they'd feel a lot smoother. Also, managing aggro in the early game is a pain in the neck - your mages are slower than your tanks and liable to do more damage, so they'll just attract attention and get gibbed. It's a bit frustrating.