How are game systems like these still a thing nowadays?
They had beautiful visuals, an engaging story and interesting characters to fill their world with. It turned out incredibly bland, boring and actually the game actively pulls every fun out of the experience the further you're in.

It starts out great until you actually have to do something to progress the story. Movement is very slow and every city & dungeon has chests planted all over them with items you don't need 95% of the time. Every side quest in the first hours is a fetch quest combined with a tougher encounter. My passion to play this game skyrocketed when the trailers came out and decreased every hour of my playthrough.
The following points hold this game back tremendously:

〇 The story heavily revolves around the mechanic to change the time period to the past or the future. You can also do this in combat. The design of enemies and most bosses actually discourages the player to use this mechanic. How do you develop this mechanic and then make every bossfight harder when used is beyond me. And then an NPC who is always with you can jump to either times in most cities. First of all this is executed so slowly and secondly it has a max range of about 3m. So you probably sigh harder every time you have to use it.
〇 The enemies in this game are weak to either physical or magical attacks and that is all you need to know about how to approach every encounter. They get more boring the further you go and have no variability. The combat also lacks any momentum to motivate the player about the time travel skill, as it's just faster and more effective to perform standard moves.
〇 Also random encounters as a concept is bad.
〇 To trigger mandatory or optional events the player has to follow the very specific route to do that. Dialogue, collecting items, jumping to another time etc. So if you want to do any quests in this game it has to follow a -> b -> c and cannot be done any other way. There is no real freedom to anything and no playthrough is a meaningful experience. It could have been a visual novel with no combat, though.
〇 The max party size is three and there are more playable characters beyond that. Everyone not in combat doesn't receive EXP and at a certain time a character has to leave the party for a little while and when he comes back he is the same level as before.
〇 There is no way to see all of your items. If equipment cannot be held on to by any character then you don't know it exists. Also equipment is poorly balanced, because you get access to very powerful parts about 1/3 into the story and afterwards you just stomp over every encounter.
〇 It's way too long and dragged out with a carbon copy of quests and cities beyond the first hours. I was eight hours in and realized there was about 24 more to go. At this point I already lost all motivation to continue.
〇 Achievements block each other out so you cannot master this game in one playthough. This isn't that bad, but noteworthy because why should you play this game twice.

Cris Tales is an indie darling that seemed to pop up out of no where full of ambition and heart that it kinda just captures the minds of gamers that see it at a glance. Being an indie game however means that a lot of the ambitious stuff it can do, and the limitations of a budget tend to stop it from pulling off exactly what it wants to tell or do, but for what this game set out to do, Cris Tales at least gets it done.

While I personally still don't understand why the game was named Cris Tales aside from two of the characters having Cris in the name, the whole plot follows a young time mage girl trying to stop world ending events to the best of her abilities. Through her mishaps and ventures with friends she learns to grow and mature into someone that is capable of defending the world she tries to protect. While we do make stops to lively places and cities, overall the world itself feels far more barren than it probably out to and the choices made along the way feel very limiting and feel at times meaningless. While the whole idea of a time mage being able to see the past/present/future is a neat idea; Cristales simple doesn't utilize it to the best of it's abilities. Thankfully the actual structure and heart of the story are fleshed out well enough that it does carry a lot of foibles of it's story telling with hints of charm rather than a mix of rushed story telling and running out of money.

The characters in Cris Tales are all fairly fleshed out to the degree that you can feel the charm and history behind their companionship, and the voice acting is pretty stellar to boot. Sadly, I don't think the same can be said for a lot of the sound design and animations that are used throughout the battle system. While there is certainly hints of where to use certain action commands or press certain buttons, the actual process just doesn't feel as natural as the likes of Paper Mario's combat system, which is a shame because a lot of the combat really helps bring about more of the personality to these characters. And it's to this degree that we can kinda see hints of how the game wanted to play out, but some how they just couldn't work it out.

As mentioned before Cris Tales has a combat system similar to Paper Mario, where you use interact through the combat phase to deal more damage or mitigated the amount you take. Again because of how awkward the sound and animations are, learning to master your commands takes a while to get used to, and with the way Cris Tales kinda sets itself up, leaves little room for error in the beginning of the game, but then drastically lowers itself the more options you get. It's an oddity for sure, and one that I don't think was suppose to be the initial difficulty curve for the game, but adding that on top of the way certain characters play can really leave players wanting for more in the beginning, and may be a turn off before you really start getting into the meat of the game.

I probably sound really harsh when it comes to this game, but I assure you that any criticism I give is one filled with love. I see how the art style is, the way the backgrounds are given attention, and even the way they are able to show you times flow throughout the cities. Cris Tales is honestly such a fancy title to first look at that it really makes you hopeful for what's to come. My only suggest is to hold out an expectations in finding that game it first shows you. This is a solid first outing for the game's aspect, there is a lot of work that needs to be done with the combat system, time mechanics, and even the world building, but all of these issues feel to me more like time constraints, limits on budgets, and just figuring out how to flesh out the world itself. Cris Tales is an absolute gem of a game, and one that I think makes for a great foundation for a sequel and possible franchise.

Unique visual, good soundtrack and likable characters.
Story wasn't so bad but It could be better.
It seems the developers had run out of their time for the final polish.
Overall, it was a nice RPG experience for me.
Looking forward to next game from them.

ユニークなビジュアルと良サントラ。
登場人物も胸焼けするような変なキャラとかもいなくて、低ストレスです。
ストーリーには特に大きな不満はないですが、もう少し頑張ってほしかったかも。
開発の仕上げの時間が足りなかったのか、色々と調整不足や粗が目立つのが少し残念。(インディ開発なので仕方がないのですが)
あとは翻訳の質についてですが、まぁまぁ誤訳が目立ちます。特に終盤にかけて質が低下してる感じが見て取れました。
とはいえ、インディ開発でここまで野心的な作品を生み出したことは素直に称賛したいです。次回作にも期待しています。

I've played 3 to 4 hours, so like 15 to 20% of the game I believe. It feels unfair to give it a score, but it's enough to give my thoughts.


I was kinda excited for this one after playing the demo some time ago, and this continued during the beginning of the game proper. The 1st battle I thought I was hooked - you throw a "Soaked" status at the boss, send her into the future, and that becomes "Rusted", a pretty interesting idea!

Sadly, that's it. The game does nothing else with its core mechanic. In fact, the time manipulation thing soon proved to be just a gimmick.

I was hit by the realization I wasn't getting what I wanted from this game in one particular boss fight, this robot thing with two arms. Simply put, none of the mechanics of the game work in this fight. Sending the arms to the past or future does nothing at all., not even their HP changes. All you can do is, when the core comes out... soak it, then rust it in the future...

The two arms do this charging attack, and none of my ideas to disrupt it worked. Sending either arm to the past/future, so maybe that part of the mechanism is broken/not finished? Nope. The past version is even called "prototype", but that doesn't mean a damn thing,

You can "pass" your turn, and trade it with whoever is next. Okay, so maybe I put myself in between each arm's turn? Nothing.

One of them was paralyzed by my thunder attack. Will that do it? It didn't. All I could do was tank the damage, or try to kill one of the arms before they executed it. That's it.

I was flabbergasted. The whole fight was just a matter of having bigger numbers than your opponent, which is the case for most RPGs, plenty of which I enjoy - e.g. Suikoden 1 is of the most shallow games I can think of, but I've enjoyed it.

But Cris Tales pacing isn't compatible with its complexity, as this game takes too long for anything to happen. Battles are much longer than they should, when you're not really doing anything beyond "hit it with your best stuff". Again, the future and past stuff is completely meaningless.

It's painful to say all of this, because the game looks great, but I honest to God think they spent all their resources on the art department, neglecting the core mechanics almost entirely.

It's very much possible I'm being super unfair to the game, and it does use all of its mechanics later on, but I find that very hard to believe.

If you finished it and this does happen, let me know. I'd love to be wrong!

Just about everything aside from the core gameplay was enjoyable. The characters are all fun, voice acting is surprisingly good for an indie game, the art style is gorgeous, the soundtrack... could've used a few more themes, but overall it was good. And the story... was... fine? It didn't blow me out of the water, but it wasn't like awful. The characters absolutely carry the story, they're almost all likable.

However... the core gameplay is... not great. Firstly, it's RIDDLED with bugs. Every time you round a corner, there's a missing texture, or the game softlocks, or a character that's not supposed to be with you is now suddenly back. It's one of the least-polished modern games I've ever played. The game also has serious balancing issues, everything is either WAY too easy, or ludicrously hard, but in both scenarios the same strategy is almost always the best course of action. Just use the strongest attack you have and hope your numbers are bigger that theirs. Which is a darn shame, because the game gives you a wide variety of spells that all sound like they'd be really fun to use strategically, but in every fight where you'd want to use them, you can't because they're immune to it. It frustrates me so much, because I want to have fun, but it won't let me. (Also I think there's supposed to be a New Game +, but that is also bugged, and the option only appears for half a second, meaning it's inaccessible.)

The game packs some pretty decent sidequests, they aren't just your standard "go here and kill X monster" they're pretty well thought out and fun. The problem is, there are no sidequests past the halfway point in the game, and the ones in the beginning are all missable. Now, the game does tell you WHEN you won't be able to do any more in any given area, but that's also a big fat lie, because there are SOME that you just cannot complete unless you did them way earlier, or talked to specific people in a specific order before that point. I really want to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe this was oversight, but it almost feels deliberate. And if you don't complete every sidequest in the game, you cannot get the true ending, meaning I was locked out of it since the second area.

It all just... sucks. I've been patiently waiting for this game for so long, and it just... isn't what I wanted it to be. Despite taking so long to come out, it still needed another year or two before this was something they could truly be proud of. They put way too much of their focus into the art, and the voice acting, and the animation, and didn't stop to consider if that was what they should've been using their time with.

After being pretty excited for this game, I have to say I was massively let down. It's by no means a bad game, but the difficulty in this game is completely broken. The beginning is brutal, but then you unlock the ability to heal, and all difficulty goes out the window.

Gorgeous art, soundtrack had some boppers, but the gameplay and story were mediocre at best. The time mechanic can basically be ignored in combat, which is a real shame, because it's a neat idea. Overall, just a disappointing experience only saved by its art.

La storia è in parte riuscita a sorprendermi in positivo, a partire da un certo punto cruciale. Abbastanza interessanti anche le sottotrame delle varie città, per quanto non vengano mai approfondite in quasi alcun modo (non che sia un problema, ma è un peccato che non si sia riusciti a dare loro almeno maggiore personalità).
Il doppiaggio è, sorprendentemente, presente per qualsiasi linea di dialogo: la resa è tale da restituire almeno una certa piacevolezza nel seguire discorsi che, spesso e volentieri, sono una barca di stronzate. In effetti, i dialoghi sono molto superficiali e si presentano anche moltissime occasioni perse (anche in momenti delicati o importanti) che avrebbero meritato una migliore scrittura. I puzzle sono una passeggiata, non c'è alcuna complessità: tanto che i dungeon stessi sono di dimensioni quasi sempre minuscole oltre che lineari, limitando all'estremo la possibilità di esplorare le aree di gioco (per lo più grotte, fogne, aree verdi/montuose e città - si tratterà sempre di mappe di piccole dimensioni). Rimanendo in tema, gli scrigni distribuiti nelle varie mappe saranno posizionati in modi sempre evidenti: fungono più da ricompensa per essere arrivati fino a un certo punto obbligato e/o in previsione che il giocatore abbia effettivamente bisogno di determinate risorse arrivato a un certo punto del dungeon. A tal proposito, c'è una notevole sproporzione tra il valore della moneta di gioco (acquisibile unicamente vendendo oggettistica - che non viene quasi mai droppata dai nemici uccisi - o uccidendo creature nemiche) e le risorse essenziali: pozioni per la vita, per il mana, tende sono quasi impossibili da trovare in giro e il loro prezzo è esagerato rispetto alla disponibilità monetaria del giocatore, costringendolo a grindare se intende poterne acquistare a sufficienza (anche al netto del fatto che molta della moneta di gioco occorre per acquistare eventuale equipaggiamento e anche per migliorare le proprie armi). Ciò, comunque, per la prima metà del gioco può non risultare frustrante per il semplice motivo che, superato il primo boss, si diventa delle inarrestabili macchine di morte. Potendo usare tre personaggi in battaglia, si avranno tutti i vantaggi del caso: il vantaggio più grande è, indubbiamente, la possibilità di usare molto presto magie di cura che prevedono un costo in mana incredibilmente basso (per rendere l'idea, la prima spell di cura costa 5 punti mana, a fronte di oltre 200 punti mana a disposizione dell'utilizzatore). Vista l'organizzazione del campo di battaglia e dei turni, visto il costo estremamente basso di mana delle cure, visto che i nemici saranno in sovrannumero in rari casi (e quando lo saranno il giocatore avrà raggiunto un livello fin troppo alto), le battaglie per le prime 10 ore di gioco diventano letteralmente delle seccature e perdite di tempo che non richiedono alcun impegno. Questo è certamente un problema condiviso da numerosi jRPG, ma in questo caso la difficoltà degli scontri rimane bassa anche introducendosi in nuove aree. La cosa diviene ancora più problematica quando al proprio team si aggiungerà un altro personaggio, particolarmente portato per l'attacco: in questo caso lo si potrà usare in battaglia e tenere fuori quello addetto alle cure, il quale piuttosto potrà fornire tutte le cure necessarie a battaglia finita massimizzandone la disponibilità di mana e rendendolo un assoluto sostituto delle pozioni al di fuori delle battaglie.

Inoltre, fatta eccezione per le situazioni in cui ci si trova davvero in difficoltà (poche) e per certe boss-fight, viene meno l'utilità della meccanica-cuore del gioco stesso: la capacità di mandare avanti o indietro il tempo sul campo di battaglia. Questa meccanica permette di attivare una serie di strategie interessanti, che tuttavia diventano totalmente superflue nel momento in cui per sconfiggere buona parte degli avversari è più che sufficiente ricorrere ad attacchi-base. Rimanendo in tema, problema del potere stesso è il modo in cui si è deciso di utilizzarlo anche per la risoluzione di certe side-quest e per integrarlo nel normale proseguimento narrativo: non se ne fa alcun utilizzo interessante che sfrutti a dovere il concept, dato che si tratterà sempre e comunque di azioni estremamente semplici e immediate, completabili letteralmente nel giro di 10 secondi. Un peccato, poi, che questa stessa meccanica non sia quasi mai sfruttata a dovere per le boss-fight (ci sono alcune eccezioni).

Ci saranno poi alcune situazioni gestite in modo pessimo, talmente da rendere l'esperienza sul momento imbarazzante. Stesso discorso per l'uso della OST, che non cambierà praticamente mai fin quando non si cambierà setting: a prescindere dallo svolgimento degli eventi, finché ci si trova in città o in un dungeon si tratterà sempre della medesima traccia musicale senza nessuna variazione che possa accompagnare in maniera più coerente certi cambiamenti di tono.

Per quanto riguarda le animazioni e le illustrazioni, il lavoro è sempre superbo: quasi sempre meravigliosi i brevi filmati di intermezzo in certi momenti chiave.

I wanted to like this one so bad. In the end, I came away frustrated. The game's slow by every definition. Long loads, long animations, too many loads, too many encounters. Eventually I got an item that repelled encounters and I walked to the end. The game suffers from not having a difficulty slider; combat is too easy and the solution becomes spamming physical attack which isn't fun or engaging, but it's the quickest way through. The final third feels like filler, straightup. It's just catacombs. I love the characters, except at one point the game forcialy removed one of my party members for the story. When I got them back, they were several levels beneath the team. If the game did some good, it's that each major location feels unique and you can feel the effect you have on them at the end of each chapter.

Looks gorgeous, has a killer soundtrack, quality character writing, and an engaging story - but unfournately suffers from half-baked, unrefined gameplay, tedious grinding, and a messy final act that prevents it from becoming the classic it thinks it wants to be. This one especially hurts cause the concept and art are so great and I love indie RPGs but this was clearly too ambitious for it's own good in a lot of ways.

There is, though, a great animated series lying underneath here, one that has a fun mythos, really likable characters, and a focus on pacifism and diplomacy that keep the conflicts morally grey. It's a shame that the game it's attached to, while occasionally rising to great things, is mostly just ok.

Despite the average score, the game is truly a remarkable experience that I do recommend for anyone interested by the premise

The highlight of the game is definetly the presentation, I've seen nothing like it in recent years. The wonderfully vibrant environments and charming character design gave life to the world of Cris Tales in a way that very few RPG are able to replicate.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game isn't as consistent. The main gameplay loop feels somewhat archaic. The comination of Crisbell slow walk speed, and random battles with long loading screens results in me often prefering to not explore the gourgeous environments and just rush to wherever I need to go. Also, since party members don't earn exp when they don't participate in battle, meaning that I had very little incentive to actively switch my party members and ended up just sticking with my go to team. Lastly a lack of auto-saves made me lose quite a lot of progress a couple of times, including having to redo a very long boss fight during the end of the game due to a softlock.

The core mechanic of manipulating the past and present does feel underused. I very rarely had the correct party members with the right spells to abuse this mechanic and losing a turn to initiate time travel means that most of the time I prefered to just do damage. However, I do have to stress that in the moments where it did work it felt very satisfying.

Lastly, the narrative did have a lot of captivating moments and I can say I enjoyed the main cast quite a lot. Some plot point do feel a bit rushed and/or unexplained, but that is a staple of the genre. My biggest gripe with the story is that the latter end of the game has a lot of padding, making us revisit old areas in a very repetitive and unintuitive manner. The padding definetly soured the really cool concepts that the game was presenting to me.

Again, not a perfect experience by any standart, but it is a very charming game. When the gears click and you feel yourself in Crisbell's shoes there truly is nothing like it, even if that happens only few and far between.

I want to like Cris Tales more than I did. It has the foundation of something that could have been great but fails to deliver on almost every aspect.

The gameplay had the potential to be fun and creative with its time travel gimmicks but the tutorial battle is as complex as the game ever gets with the time travel mechanics. In the end it's relegated to a few creative spells and quick and easy puzzle solving.

The barebones of the story is fine. It's unimaginative in parts and overstayed its welcome in the end with all the backtracking but the biggest issue is that the writing is bland, cheesy and much too condensed. The characters never have room to grow aside from maybe K (and for that smidgen of character development alone he's my favourite character). The story never managed to make me really care about anything because it didn't manage to get me invested, a failure of storytelling and character development.

The soundtrack is fine with quite a few nice tracks and the art style is gorgeous, but it feels like they spent their entire budget on art and didn't focus enough on the rest of the game. Cris Tales has good ideas and it's frustrating to see the potential in it that is never realized. I went through the entire game hoping it would get better but it never did.

I had no expectations for Cris Tales. I saw it on Game Pass and decided to play it. At first, I was not expecting to like it. The beginning was slow and tedious, but then the gameplay, story, and characters begin taking shape, and I was engaged. The game is not difficult at all, but I still found it entertaining. I rarely got tired of battling.

The art style is gorgeous. I love all of it from spell animations to Crisbell's run cycle. The music was fun too, though not that memorable afterwards.

However, the same cannot be said for the story. It is intriguing enough, but goes on for a few hours too long. Gameplay wise that leads to backtracking quite a bit in the final hours.

Overall, it was a decent game. Not bad, but not great. Give it a shot if you want a light, breezy RPG.

I wish Cris Tales didn't have anything going for it--namely I wish it wasn't so pretty, and I wish it didn't establish the framework for an engaging battle system. I wish these things because I'm finding it difficult to tolerate playing it and it's making it more disappointing.

I think the first flag went off for me when I saw my first "battle transition." I don't think I've given it much thought before, but the RPG battle transition is actually an important emotional trigger for playing these games. At times, understandably, that emotion is frustration as you just want to get somewhere and don't want to be bothered, and as someone who generally doesn't mind them I absolutely understand the distaste for random encounters. But when it's "working" it puts a stamp of excitement onto conflict. The screen spins or tears or whatever effect the developer has created, and you know something's about to go down. For a very long game that's figuring out how to get you on par with the forces you're facing, I think you need that motivation to carry you.

I put "battle transition" in quotes for Cris Tales because it's just a loading screen. Of course all battle transitions are loading screens effectively, but it's identical to any loading screen the game has, such as moving to a new area or just a cutscene wrapping up. A huge white splash screen dissolves into view, Crisbell running in the corner to let you know it's thinking real hard. Until the battle starts, nothing about the sound shifts. I don't even want to get into how filling the screen with white every single time a battle starts is a hell of an eye strain--but let it be known, it is!--but I want to focus on how it robs one of the most subtly important parts of an RPG of any impact. The music tries to do work once battle commences, and it's a good score, don't get me wrong, but it's honestly too late. Battles in Cris Tales feel less like a hurdle to overcome and more like a limp inevitability, and I think the presentation has a lot to do with that. And yet, like many JRPGs of old, it has a lot of these encounters, sometimes spawning them as quickly as 5-10 steps after your last one. You'll be fighting [or running] a lot.

And if you choose to engage they're going to take longer than they should since the developer has put in place an overcomplex hybrid battle system. It mixes timing elements from something like Mario RPG with its own time mechanics, which at first sounded exciting. But it's crucial for button timing windows to feel intuitive in this sort of system, and I'll be damned if I ever truly figured anything out in my 5 hours with the game. It's hilariously compounded by the "transitions" feeling so inert, because you'll look at a loading screen for 4-5 seconds and then, as it turns out, the enemy has the first move in your encounter and oops did you have time to process what you were responding to? Probably not! But even if that problem didn't present itself, none of the timing feels correct or consistent.

And then there are the time mechanics, allowing you to throw enemies into the past or future and back, presumably for numerous strategic reasons--speeding up time to increase the damage rate of poison, throwing enemies into the past so they no longer have a buff, and so on. But, like every minor element of the battle system, it takes a precious amount of time to set up and execute, so for regular encounters it's pretty likely you won't want to bother, and for boss encounters they're going to be immune to like 80% of what you have access to, or they'll have their own obnoxious mechanic that will deflate your interest in time manipulation real fast.

Everything in this game takes forever. Even exploration takes forever. Crisbell has the power to see into the past and future, which is cute for narrative implications but isn't cute when you realize it means there are three places to open treasure chests or find key items. [But only for towns, conveniently? I guess her time powers don't matter in exploring dungeons, at least not to the point I played. Probably for the best.] And because it would be too easy to just let Crisbell warp herself to the past or future, she instead sends her unfathomably slow frog companion, so you quickly get into the habit of getting as close as possible to where you want the frog to appear in the other timeline before you send them because the frog hopping speed is unbearable.

It breaks my heart because it's gorgeous to look at and pleasing to listen to, and there's the slim possibility the combat really opens up. I just know that if it does "get better" it'll be because they added more complexities to the mechanics, and is that really better in this case?

A vontade de prosseguir nesse jogo é bem baixa. A experiência é praguejada por constante screen tearing rasgando a imagem tanto em cutscenes quanto no próprio jogo.

Talvez usando configurações externas seja possível resolver, mas o próprio dev não lembrou de por opções gráficas em um jogo para PC. Não há V-Sync, não há nada que resolva o problema.

Complicado, assim.