Crystal Project is a game that could have been beautiful, but has been allowed to grow bloated, ugly, and inelegant.

Sending the player out to explore a vast world with little guidance and only a vague idea of what to look for is a tried and true concept that has persisted since the earliest days of computer RPGs for good reason -- it's fun to go on an adventure of your own devising. Crystal Project has clearly exerted stupendous effort in hopes of eliciting this classic sense of adventure, but while the game does have its moments of brilliance, so much of this effort simply feels misplaced. It is onerous to explore Crystal Project's world; the geography itself is purposelessly brobdingnagian, composed of towering landmasses that lack justification for their sheer scale, and a gaggle of frustrating design decisions produce friction every step of the way.

Lack of a robust fast travel feature is probably the game's most egregious issue, but the developer is taking steps to address this in recent patches, so I won't dwell on it. Suffice to say that the sparsity of fast travel in the game at release accomplished little but padding the play time. I frequently found that the most direct way of reaching any given location was to simply warp to a high point and glide down to it, which is really just fast travel with a commute.

The approach to mapping will seemingly remain an issue for the foreseeable future, however. Crystal Project is incredibly stingy with both the mapping feature and the maps you need to use it to begin with. By the time you've jumped through enough hoops to acquire a given map, you may not even need it anymore, and the actual process of mapping out terrain is incredibly tedious due to the fact that the mapping radius does not extend above the player. It's a lot of work to fill out your maps, and there simply aren't enough points of interest to make it worth your while. Recent Ys games automatically fill out the remainder of a map once you've explored a certain percentage; a system like that would help a great deal in developing an understanding of the terrain. (Personally, I would take Elden Ring's approach of simply feeding you map chunks that come filled out, as there is no actual reward or acknowledgement for filling out maps in this game.)

Ultimately, though, what I found the most abrasive was simply the act of traversing the game world on a basic mechanical level, in large part due to the mount system. Crystal Project gates large swaths of the world behind movement upgrades, which in and of itself isn't a bad idea -- it provides a loose progression to follow before exploration opens up completely. But in practice I can only describe the way this concept was implemented as asinine. Rather than simply upgrading the player character's own capabilities, Crystal Project forces you to swap between no less than four types of mount in order to effect various forms of mobility. Want to go fast? Switch to the Quintar. That jump is three blocks instead of two? Gotta go with the goat. And so forth. While it's cute at first, the mount system results in the player needing to constantly open a menu and swap mounts as the situation demands; forget assigning hotkeys, a quick menu (that you've likely populated with other items in addition to the instruments that summon the mounts) is all you get. As the mounts do not supersede one another, you are forced to perform this inane song and dance for the entire game. But you know what the funny part is? That isn't even my biggest complaint with this system. To be blunt, the goat feels extremely unpleasant to use. Every time you want to jump up three blocks, you need to swap to the goat and slowly charge up its full jump height, a process which completely breaks the flow of controlling the character. And believe me, you're going to need to jump up three blocks a whole lot. I am not exaggerating when I say that the goat is so utterly miserable to interact with that I would rate the game 2.5 stars instead of 2 if this single element were improved.

So it sucks to move around, sure. The world design itself could have still made up for it, but unfortunately Crystal Project's world is stagnant and barren. While the game certainly makes stabs at world building, in the broad sense, it is weirdly devoid of life, figurative or literal. The player is rarely rewarded for exploring, because there simply isn't very much of interest in the first place. You might come across some equipment that's soon to be vertically outclassed, or a pouch that lets you carry 56 potions instead of 55, but moments of genuine discovery are few and far between. There were times when I was excited to discover a connection between two parts of the map seemingly removed from one another, but for the most part it felt like I could get away with doing the bare minimum, since most of the meaningful rewards were located along the beaten path of the main story progression anyway. This problem is only compounded in the endgame, when any attempt at a story evaporates and there is nothing to do but wander a silent, unchanging world. I honestly found the experience quite eerie, stumbling across so many locales that lacked even the most oblique purpose from a narrative standpoint. Perhaps you could liken the experience to exploring a dying MMO; there is often a sense that there should be more, but there simply isn't.

I do respect the effort that went into crafting a world of this scale, but art that does not resonate with the audience can only be appreciated in the most prosaic sense.

And all of this is without even getting into the combat! The combat is, well, it's fine.

If I can opine for a bit (well, what else is a review for?) -- I consider job systems inherently flawed. They want to have their cake and eat it too, trying to encourage the player to commit to builds while simultaneously presenting a huge range of options and synergies. If you want to get the most out of a job system, you simply have to sit there grinding out levels for each job. It's an unnecessary attempt to stake out a middle ground between fixed character skillsets and full customization, carrying with it the frustrations of each. When a game actually asks you to fully engage with a job/class system, what it's really doing is forcing you to grind so you can spec into a narrow range of optimal builds, thereby ultimately stifling player expression. As someone who likes to commit to builds/strategies in RPGs, it always rubs me the wrong way when games suddenly pull the rug out from under me and force me to play in a strictly optimal way, often by designing bosses that are so powerful and/or RNG heavy that suboptimal playstyles simply aren't viable. I recognize that people find joy in the problem solving elements at play here, but I greatly prefer when I am allowed some agency in my party composition, when a boss I struggled with isn't completely trivialized by some munchkin build that you need a PHD to put together.

Anyway, rant aside, I did find the combat in Crystal Project satisfying for the most part. As objectionable as I find job systems, there is a certain joy in watching your party come together over time, in growing more powerful by virtue of your options expanding. As implied by the paragraph above, however, I have a lot of problems with the actual numerical balance in Crystal Project. Very frequently I would reach the boss of a given area and find myself unable to beat it with my preferred strategy, as my numbers simply weren't high enough. Almost every single boss I encountered required coming back to it later, once I had a few more levels under my belt, and this really detracted from an aspect I consider core to RPGs: the sense that you're growing steadily more powerful over time. The final boss and superbosses are particularly egregious on hard mode, essentially forcing you to use certain jobs -- and at that point why even have a job system? From a strictly mechanical standpoint, the only real issue with the combat is that the RNG for misses and crits meshes poorly with the otherwise mostly deterministic flow of battle, but this is a pretty big issue. I ended up lowering the difficulty to normal for the final boss, because my strategy simply would not work due to the enemies being able to randomly one shot my characters with crits, and I was unwilling to scour the entire game world in order to acquire the summons and blue magic necessary to put together something that could bypass the RNG... and really, the fight itself. (As an aside, blue magic is little more than busywork, as are adjacent systems like capturing monsters. All they accomplish is forcing the player to constantly run a blue mage or micromanage enemy HP -- there's no meaningful decision making or exploration involved.)

Honestly, there is more I could complain about with Crystal Project, like the woefully anemic story that left me wondering what the final boss was even trying to accomplish (and indeed, what I accomplished by defeating her), but I think I've made my point. The game does have sparks of brilliance here and there, but really what kept me going was my love of JRPGs as genre and not anything Crystal Project itself did. If you're wondering why I didn't give it an even lower score after spending so many words raking it over the coals -- well, I love JRPG gameplay, and Crystal Project has a lot of that, at the very least.