Spoilers for Crystar as well as Crymachina

This is one I feel very conflicted about. To explain myself, I need to write a little about how I got to this game.

So, a few months prior to this one releasing, I played the same team's prior game, Crystar. To put it quickly, it was a very bad game, but despite the writing being rough around the edges too, it had an absolutely lovely cast of characters and a pretty depressing, Yoko Taro-esque narrative structure which allowed the game to finish off with an emotional payoff that truly hit me like a truck. It's a game that, for all its flaws, had a very strong emotional core that I couldn't help being charmed by.

So when I learned that the same team had a new game just around the corner, I was very excited, and the demo that came out not long before its full release finished selling me on it: it looked a lot better visually, seemed like a step up gameplay-wise (though the bar set by Crystar in that regard was incredibly low)... in short, if it could reproduce the strong emotional effect of Crystar or something close, I felt like it could be a true gem.

And, in some ways, it is a step up from Crystar: the setting is more fleshed out, with less of those rough edges I mentioned before. Most notably for me, the fact that this game is canonically gay helps a lot: in a game that talks about ego and being true to your heart, that kind of message is so much stronger when not all the relationships and characters just so happen to fit a narrow social norm. The setting is also much more fleshed out in general, with all the antagonists having their own motivations and allegiances... another aspect I like is how clear the game is about what kind of ideology the enemy upholds: you're not just fighting a nondescript "system", but rather a group of eugenicists who want "investors" and others to lead them into a new world.

So then, why is it that I don't like this game over Crystar? To put it simply: Crymachina critically lacks the emotional power of its predecessor. Here, the fact that the setting is much more fleshed out actually comes back to haunt Crymachina: despite it having so much more going on than Crystar, which had an extremely simple setting, it actually took me a couple hours less to finish than Crystar. And because of this, this game is packed chock full of twists; too many of them, to be honest. Even major twists, like the one about humanity not being what we thought it was, get brushed aside: after a couple dialogues, the story is back to a steady march toward its grand finale. And this is another difference which made Crystar more impactful: here we have a linear story, versus Crystar's multi-ending structure. And this structure matters, because it helps a lot with telling an emotional story in those 25 hours Crystar has: until the final few hours, you're absolutely going through it, with moments of emotional respite being few and far between. I expected Crymachina to be like this. In fact, for a while after finishing it, this expectation colored my thoughts: I read the whole game as being Ending A, pretty much, and thought I was going to start a new route until I looked up how to get the True End, and got it in a matter of minutes. (This created so much confusion and conflict in my mind, but after a few days of trying to separate expectations from experience, I think I've managed to find a middle ground in my feelings about the game). This is important because, through these many hours of strife, you get attached to the characters. A major tool Crystar uses for this tool are flashbacks where the characters are allowed to narrate their past traumas, using simple but very evocative illustrations from Hajime Ueda. Every major character gets this chance, in Crystar. Now, Crymachina didn't need to reprise this technique, but it did... only for two characters, one of them being Lilly, who is relevant for about 2-3 hours of the story. It's incomprehensible, to me. Nothing justifies using these flashbacks only for Ami and Lilly, instead of say, Leben and Enoa. Crymachina doesn't have time to let everyone talk about themselves though, and so makes these two completely arbitrary choices, and then resumes its march forward.

And so, by the time the game ended, all I felt was that I wanted more. The ending sequence is so short, too; after beating the final boss, it takes maybe five minutes for everything to be wrapped up, if you don't count the credits. That's the disappointing part to me: the ending lacks emotional impact, it lacks gravity, and those things are what I wanted most from Crystar's successor. This is where, most of all, Crymachina falls well short of Crystar.

To be clear, the core aspects of the game are still incredibly strong: the writing is better in some aspects as I mentioned, and the themes of emotional growth and self-determination expressed throughout are truly sweet. Enoa's story, in particular, is beautiful. But, with her as with all the other cast members, I didn't have time to get attached anywhere near as much I'd wanted: this game doesn't allow itself to have a Sen or a Nanami, mostly due to the setting and plot being too dense for this kind of length to also allot time to more expressive character writing. (as a more personal wish, god did I wanna see more of the Trinity! Those fools! Give me more of them!!)

To be honest, saying "this game should've been longer" is frustrating, because I truly do believe Crymachina had everything it takes to elevate itself to the level of something like Tales of Berseria as one of the best, most emotional tales in a JRPG of the past 5 years. But it's simply... too short. It's good, though! It's... just... good. It falls short of excellence by so little, a mere matter of lines of text, and it's a little bit sad, but at least, unlike Berseria's successor, it's certainly far from garbage. But I really wanted this game to be "betterer Crystar", and it was almost that... except in the one defining aspect that made Crystar so charming. A shame, really. I still like it, though, I do want to emphasize this. It's a cool story, at its core, and Enoa deserves all the happiness.