They tried, bless their hearts.

It's really hard to take a giant dump on a game that you can tell people put their hearts and souls into, but this was a hot doo doo mess. The visuals are incredible and the voice cast is surprisingly stacked but the story is a nothingburger, the combat is disastrously unbalanced, the music is forgettable, the writing is basic and the game is filled with bugs. I had to repeat the colosseum six times because the game kept freezing.

I don't know why I kept playing but I did. Maybe in hopes of the game getting better? I don't know. It just sucks because I'm all for more western turn-based RPGs but this isn't it.

This game is clearly ambitious and has some interesting ideas, but every inch of it is infested with the feeling of an amateur.

Firstly, the game is technically quite nice. The storybook aesthetic is complimented well with the physically flat characters, and the backgrounds are simply gorgeous. However, the characters are also a bit over-designed in a way that renders them a bit bothersome to look at. Something about the art style also makes these characters extremely hard to relate to. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I found it very distracting and not at all immersive. Not to mention the load times reaching 20-30 seconds just to enter or exit a battle. This is admittedly probably the fault of switch optimization, but there’s really no excuse when hardly any RPG has load times into battle PERIOD.

The story was fine, if underwhelming. I played for a couple hours and found it serviceable but uninteresting. I had zero interest in where it was going. The voice actors I found grating but they aren’t really doing a bad job.

The battle system is clunky, annoying, and feels like missed potential. Being able to send enemies to the past and present is a pretty cool idea, but for some reason the past is locked to enemies to your left, and same for the future on the right. The time gimmick isn’t even that fun anyway, some enemies become young and weak when you send them to the past and if you plant poison on an enemy in the present they’ll get poisoned in the future. It feels like it lacks depth that should’ve been thought out more as the main mechanic of the game. The menus in combat are controlled with four arrow directions, seemingly trying to replicate intuitive UI like Persona 5 or Yakuza, but this just missed the mark and felt like I couldn’t see my options, and I very often went to click on an enemy only to accidentally hit one of my party members. The opposite of intuitive.

All in all, this game feels like nothing more than good practice for a starting indie dev, and they are clearly quite talented. It just seems like they lacked the experience to make the ambitious game they wanted to.

Most beautifully crafted opening animation I've ever seen, rivaling Katrielle and the Millionaires Conspiracy in how good it is. Starting the game now, i hope I'll disagree with everyone. This looks absolutely stunning. Turned the lights off, ambilights linked to my hue lights are lighting up the room with the most amazing colours. If this game is even half good I'm sure I'll love it. Full review below


Quite some loading screens, and they're white and bright as fuck. Lovely music, and all lines are voiced. Many triple A titles don't even do that. The game looks super polished, there's many ~2 bucks sale games that are astronomically less clean. The time mechanic is an original idea and fun in battles. At level 7 i have yet to encounter the supposed difficulty everyone complains about, maybe people don't know you can heal between fights using your skills? The most annoying part so far is the left joycon vibrating like an earthquake during attacks sometimes and nothing in the menu to turn it off or tone it down.

First boss fight took me 3 tries, below I'll add some hints. The pacing is a bit odd. I did not get to go to a city or heal up naturally (without using a tent) between the first and second boss. Just straight from dungeon to dungeon. Rounding corners in these dungeons is a bit clunky. Also, the weaknesses and strengths of enemies don't always make sense. The huge fish is immune to electricity? But takes normal water damage? Ok i guess. And why do some dungeons have an exit you can't enter back in through? I missed a sidequest and had to run through a dungeon 2 more times haha. Not a hassle though.

I did encounter a crash, didn't lose any progress luckily as i had just saved but these are rare to encounter on switch. I must say the gameplay is quite linear, do this, go there. I do really enjoy the movement though, the walking, the transport through the overworld. Enemy variations could be better, i wish a new area would mean all new enemies. Or at least enemies that make more sense. I guess slimes can be anywhere, but why is there a guard from two cities ago battling me at the lake? Why is he there? Why is he hostile at all? The 4th character comes pretty much out of nowhere, and by that point I had already made my magic boosted character immensely strong (139 magic attack). There was no reason to add him to the party. Let's see if I'll regret that.

Having to do the same dungeon again for a side mission seems unnecessary, especially if you have to grab the exact same objects as in the main missjon. Just leave it out then. A lot of people seem to complain about the random encounters. They're really not that plentiful, and not so bad. Also, before even meeting the 4th character you can buy an item (for 10k) that completely eliminates them when worn. I truly wonder whether the game has been updated for the Switch or something.

Lots of issues people have, e.g. the extreme difficulty, i do not encounter at all on Switch. The game is fun, I do think I've head enough though. I'm level 20, and i notice you still unlock things at level 38. That's too much for me, I maybe would've continued if it wasn't for one GLARING issue. My entire build hinges on a single character, who is temporarily replaced by another character who literally dropped from the sky and is dogshit. Therefor i can't blast through enemies anymore, it's been fun but i think I'm done, 10 days seems plenty.

Spoilers:

Audible Wow counter: 7
- Opening animation
- Entering the cathedral
- Reveal of the time mechanic
- Entering the walled city
- Seeing the "broken" mural
- First look at the mineral lakes
- Walking through the mineral lakes

Tip: do NOT use your first tent before the wolf fight
Tip first boss: Focus on a single arm only, plant a heal, use passes if the arm is down but the healer isn't there yet, get lucky and only have wilhelm grabbed (3/3 in my fight haha)

I'm all for supporting local industry, as it is very small in my country, and that's why I bought it, but sadly, this game ain't it. The story and dialogue are obnoxiously childish, and the novelty of the gameplay (the time travel mechanic) is very shallow in its execution. It would be the perfect game for the go on Switch, but those loading times are inexcusable, even more so considering there are random encounters, each with its own loading time. Hope they learned a lot from this and hope their next game will improve.

Ultimately: a huge letdown. First and foremost: the game is gorgeous, with beautiful vibrant colors and dynamic style. That is about where the good ends, as it was largely the reason I chose to pick it up. The issues lie in how unintuitive the game was; with a gimmick like time travel, battle were often cumbersome to complete, especially due to how long they could be, as well, it never felt like you did anything impactful.
The game just kinda meanders with characters you are not given reason to care about, a world you cannot care about, and gameplay that does not hook you. I eventually game it up soon after getting the fourth party member and noticing how much work would be used to make him competent and realized I did not have the care or patience to play it any longer.
As well, numerous tech issues, the game frequently crashed for me, as well, going in and out of battles took a century, which made me lament each time a random battle took place.
Perhaps there is a good game hidden past the very specific time which I quit, but I somehow doubt it; if I play as many hours as I did and remain annoyed throughout, it perhaps is not worth it.

Olha, eu vou ser sincero: se você quer jogar esse jogo pra ter a experiência típica de um JRPG, talvez você se decepcione.

Agora, se você for como eu, que não é tão fã do gênero mas vira e mexe joga alguns, talvez você tenha uma boa experiência.

O jogo é lindo, a soundtrack é muito boa e a dublagem foi uma adição crucial pra que eu gostasse tanto do jogo. Apesar de ter seus momentos de falha, acho q a dublagem é uma das melhores coisas de Cris Tales. A mecânica da protagonista é algo que eu nunca vi em nenhum outro jogo do gênero e devo dizer que é genial. Num geral, o jogo é uma delícia de se jogar, você sempre quer esticar mais 30 minutos de gameplay pra cumprir o próximo objetivo (por isso eu fiz 27 horas de jogo em 4 dias). Me divertiu bastante.

Mas eu preciso reclamar do final. Como alguém já mencionou em alguma review aqui, o final bom deveria ter sido muito mais impactante do que foi. As coisas aconteceram tão rápido e com tanta negligência dos personagens envolvidos que o jogador não consegue se emocionar com aquilo. Outra coisa que eu percebi também é que o painel mostrado quando você completa a DLC no final do jogo parece MUITO que não foi pensado pra casar com o resto da história. Contribuiu muito pra minha confusão com o final.

Não me entenda mal, eu GOSTO de finais misteriosos que me deixam pensando em teorias. Acontece que aquilo parece que foi costurado fora de ordem, e algumas coisas (sim, AQUELA coisa) simplesmente não fazem sentido com o que acabou de ser mostrado.

Pra finalizar, eu recomendo sim que você jogue Cris Tales. Ele pode não ser o que se propôs (uma homenagem a antigos JRPGs), mas apresenta ideias inovadoras, uma história responsiva as ações do jogador (em boa parte) e personagens profundos o suficiente pra serem memoráveis.

I really love this game. The visuals, the music, the concept and ideas, but I cannot deny its flaws.

First off, it was clearly designed as a next gen game. The PS4 version had load times of about 15 seconds. I can't even imagine how the Switch ran, but when I eventually got a PS5 and downloaded the PS5 version of the game, loadtimes were maybe 3 seconds. Same for my friend's gaming PC. I don't know what happened during development but that definitely left a stain on the game's reputation.

Regardless, I persisted. I fell in love with the game from a single trailer. I bought it digitally because I couldn't wait to play it. Then I bought a PS4 copy for my collection. Then bought the PS5 special edition used on Mercari. I love the visuals, I think splitting the screen between past, present, and future was an awesome idea that can only really be done in the medium of a video game. The combat was serviceable, but I wasn't a fan of the random encounters. They would have been tolerable if the loadtimes weren't awful. Also, I noticed the encounter rate wasn't consistent, which didn't help when there were 2 difficulty spikes during the relatively easy playthrough and suddenly I needed to grind.

The ending was weird to say the least. It should have been so much more emotional than it actually was, but only one character really had an appropriate reaction. In fact, the BAD ending was actually so much more interesting and could be its own game.

This is my favorite indie game. It will always hold a special place in my heart, but I cannot recommend it to anyone who isn't playing on a next gen platform. I might replay it on PS5 someday to see if my love still holds up.