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.
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.