Final Fantasy
Crystal Chronicles

Reviewer Chi Phan	Story	4/10
	Characters	3/10
	Graphics	10/10
	Music	7/10
	Gameplay	7/10
	Extras	3/10
	Final Score	5.7/10

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is Square Enix first Final Fantasy game for the Gamecube. After many years of having Final Fantasy games only available for the Sony consoles, Square Enix decided to make an exclusive game for the Gamecube as part of their deal with Nintendo for rights to publish Square Enix games on the Gameboy Advance handheld system. Of course things aren't that simple as Square Enix also has a certain contract with Sony in publishing and maintaining the Final Fantasy series for the Playstation 2. To work around this contract with Sony, Square Enix decided to make a new Final Fantasy game that is new and separate from the regular games of the Final Fantasy series. What came about was a game called Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles that uses both the Gamecube and its connectivity feature with the Gameboy Advance. In return you have a broader fan base of both console and handheld system joining together in a gaming experience. In short a multi-player Final Fantasy game. So how does this new multi-player Final Fantasy game look and play? Keep on reading my fellow Rpg Dreamers.

Be careful on your journey. I am the Black Knight that all fear. Miasma, a poisonous fog, has engulfed the world for years. No one knows where the origin of miasma started but its poisonous touch has reached the world's forests, valleys, and rivers. Nothing is safe from the infection of miasma touch. Within the abyss of miasma follows the birth of monsters everywhere. Yet still in this dark age there is hope for those living in the world. The power of the crystals is the only thing that is able to repel the miasma poisonous fog. The people of the world have rooted the crystals in each of their villages giving life and hope to the inhabitants. However the power of the crystal is not limitless as each year draws to a close, the power of the crystal begins to fade. In order for the power of the crystal to be replenished before it dries out by the end of each year, villages around the world have set up Crystal Caravans to travel the world in search of myrrh trees. Each myrrh trees will provide a drop of myrrh, the water of life, to be used on the crystal to restore power back to the crystals. So the long tradition of Crystal Caravans setting out at the beginning of each year from each village on a year long journey to gather myrrh began. You, the player or players, are a part of a Crystal Caravan from the village of Tipa. Each year you must trek out onto the world to gather myrrh for your village and return home by the end of the year where you can replenish the crystal in your village. This is the story of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. As you can see base on that brief summary of the game's story, there's not much of a story. The concept of the gameplay itself is the story. You go out on a Caravan to various dungeons to gather myrrh and return home. That's all there is. There's no big bad guy that wants to destroy the world like with most traditional rpg game. There's no character that needs to be rescue from an evil boss. It's just you and your Caravan on a trek to each dungeon to gather myrrh and return home. There are no significant story sequences for you to see. The only so called story scenes are random events with other Caravans that you may meet on the road but these story scenes have no significant to anything since they are just random events. There is one fix story event involving a Black Knight character but this fix story event involving the Black Knight are only 5 story sequences in total with each one lasting only 1 minute or so. So in the end, even the fix story event is insignificant. To simply put, there's a plot in the game but there's no story to go with the plot. The plot is there to serve as a guideline for why we are playing this game which is to go out and collect myrrh for your village. You're going to have to look elsewhere for a major rpg story as it's not going to happen here. Still every single rpg game need to have at least an end game boss to fight to finish the game. This game does have that end game boss where you need to fight in order to free the world of miasma. The end game boss is a boss name Raem that you need to fight. The reason behind Raem is because he's been eating people's memories. Or some mumble jumble about eating people's memories. It doesn't really make any. Anyone over the age of 20 can tell that they just added Raem in the story for the pure sake of having an end game boss. There's no story in this game period.

Pick a character. Story characters and the development of these characters are one of the things that most online multi-player rpg games lack when compare to the non online rpg games. This is due to the fact that all of the main characters in these types of games are usually created from scratch at the beginning of the game by the players involved in the game. It's no different here in Crystal Chronicles. At the start of each game, you and your friends are able to create a character to your liking from scratch. You get to choose your character's name, gender, job, clothes, and even race. Once you create your character, your character will then be place in a family base on your character's job. At this point you are able to control your character in the game. However your character can't talk in the game at all. If your friends are playing with you then they will be a part of your party. Their characters can't talk as well. There are no secondary supporting characters in the game. Your family members are pretty much nameless sprites that sell stuff to you at a discount during your quest. Some guest characters may show up during certain random event scenes but that's about it as they don't really play any real role in the game simply cause there's no real story in the game. Basically you are looking at the characters that you have created as the only character in the game and that's it. No story equals no story characters.

The water is so clear. If you ever wonder what kind of graphics the Gamecube can put out then wonder no more. This is by far the best looking rpg game for the Gamecube. Okay so that doesn't hold a lot of weight since there aren't that many rpg games for the Gamecube. So I'll rephrase it by saying that this is one of the best looking games on the Gamecube and will beat out a lot of other rpg games on the Playstation 2 base on pure graphics. The game environment is base off on a smooth, sharp, detail 3-D texture rendering in polygons. What really shows off the graphics is the fact that everything, from the character models to the surrounding of the environment, is done to a fine detail look that would send you in awe. Everything looks so real. A prime example of this is a cut scene that shows your character looking at the crystal chalice. The chalice itself is made of crystal and from the chalice you can see the reflection of your character. The chalice showing the reflection of your character looking at the chalice isn't a big deal. What is a big deal is the pure fact that the reflection itself looks very realistic. Other examples of this are reflections from the river as the boat is sailing to the other side of the continent or the green leaves from the trees in the area. They look so real. That gives you the impression that these graphic designers are making a real effort to make things look as real as possible. The colors in this game are done exceptionally well too. Not too bright and not too dark but using a good blend of colors together. And to round it off, if you have your Gamecube hooked with S-Video and Progressive Scan, then the picture will be super sharp that makes viewing regular TV composite mode a barbaric thing. The only downside is there are no FMV movie scenes. But I suppose we can't have everything perfect.

Let's go on an escapade. The music is pretty good but not as great when compare to other Final Fantasy games. The problem is that the music is hampered by the pure fact that there isn't a good story in this game and no story characters. Two main theme categories from music presentation are character tunes and story driven event tunes such as a sad moment in the story or a happy moment. Since the game doesn't provide much of those two, the music is confined to battle tunes, traveling tunes, and dungeon tunes. The main theme however is base on a year end festival where people are celebrating and dancing. The second most noticeable theme is that of a traveling caravan tune base on a group of people gathering together on a long journey. The music is pretty good giving gamers a happy feeling moment when they are playing the game but it is very limited to just that. In short, the music fit the theme of the game but due to the fact that the themes are base only on battle, dungeon, and traveling, you will be hearing the same music over and over again. Keep that in mind. In terms of sound effects, they are pretty good. You probably won't notice the sound effects much until you move around in towns and near the docks of your boat. This is where you will start to hear the benefits of the sound effects from the surrounding environment which much like the graphics comes off very realistic. The music could be better but it does okay with what the game gave it to work with.

Dude, you got to brush your teeth. Err... I need to make more friends. Game Information    Genre: Action Rpg    Publisher: Nintendo    Disc: 1 DVD Disc    Memory: 22 Blocks    Players: Multi Player Mode    Progressive Scan: Yes    Gameboy Compatible: Yes    Rating: Teen    Release: February 2004 When you start the game off, you are require to choose either single mode or multi-player mode. Next you are then taken to a screen to name your character and create your character's look, race, gender, and job. Once this is done, you can begin playing your game right away. At this point if you have a Gameboy Advance, you might want to plug it in. A Gameboy Advance can give you some details on dungeon maps that you wouldn't have gotten without a Gameboy Advance. You pretty much can go anyway and explore which every dungeon first. Since there's no story, there's no starting point that you need to do first, second, or last. Just go to whichever dungeon you want to tackle first. The concept of the gameplay is base on the plot of this game. You need to find a myrrh tree and get a drop of myrrh from it to fill your crystal chalice. Each dungeon will have a myrrh tree. Objective of the game is pretty simple. Make it to the end of the dungeon and defeat the dungeon boss. Once that's done, you will receive your drop of myrrh. The gameplay is base on a calendar year. Once you received your third drop of myrrh, the year will end and you return to your village to celebrate. In short every three dungeon you will return to the village. The dungeons themselves aren't very hard. Most of them are fairly short mazes. Just hack and slash your way to the end of the maze to the boss waiting for you. The bosses themselves aren't very hard to defeat. Just hack and slash them until they die. A note about the dungeon, once you receive a myrrh drop from a dungeon, you can't get another myrrh drop until two years later. However you can still go inside the dungeon again to fight the boss again. It's just that you wont' be able to receive another drop of myrrh because it takes three years for myrrh to regenerate for each dungeon. The gameplay and controls are pretty simple. The followings are a list of basic features in the game. Diary: Each time you enter a town, dungeon or encounter another Caravan, an entry is added to your diary. These entries are a summary of your character's thought on a town, dungeon or event that had occur during his/her travels. Once each year is completed, the entire diary for that year is read to sum up the entire year event. I guess this is sort of a way to add a story into the game. Jobs: There are eight different types of jobs. When you create your character, you have to choose which types of job your family will be assign to. Once your family is assigned a job, they will then begin selling materials base on that job was in the village. The advantage for the players is that you can get a discount from buying stuff from your family. Example, if you want to have discount on weapons and armors then you would probably want your family to be blacksmiths. Other than that, jobs don't have too much of a significant in the game. Families: Every player will have a family. The occupation of the family is base on the job that the player chooses. It is these families that will set up shops for you to buy stuff from. In single player mode, it's best to create 8 characters in total to have 8 families in total so that you can have a full village with all the shops open to you even if you are only going to play one character. Of course you can only get a discount from your family though. Letters: After clearing each dungeon, a moogle will deliver a letter to you from one of your family member. You can then reply back and include a gift to that family member. Interaction with family members through letters is the best way to raise their affection level toward you. It is important to raise your family level because the level of your family will affect the materials they can sell to you or make for you. Keep that in mind. Spell Fusion: Magic can only be obtain by picking up magicite in dungeons. Magicites are obtained by defeating a monster or by opening up a chest. Once you have a magicite like say fire then you just need to equip it to your command list in order to cast fire magic. That's the basic of equipping low level magic. However in order to obtain the higher level magic, you will need to fusion the magicites together. For example in order to have Haste magic you will need to fusion a Life magicite and two Cure magicites to have the spell Haste. This of course is called spell fusion. Not too hard to learn or do. The one thing about magic that you need to be aware of is that you can only obtain and use magic in dungeons. Once you leave a dungeon then all the magicites that you acquired in the dungeon will be deleted. Food:The main building block of your healing items is your food. There are numerous different types of food that you can eat to heal your HP in the game. However how much HP is replenished to your character depends on how much he/she likes the food that they are eating. Each type of race in the game has a certain favorite food that they prefer to eat so keep that in mind when you are playing the game. Moogle: The game was created with the though of multi-players in mind. Still since not everyone will have friends to play with, the game will give you a virtual partner in the name of a moogle. Your moogle will carry your chalice for you at times or even help cast a spell against an enemy once in awhile. But the main duty of your moogle is to carry your chalice so you can hack and slash at the monsters. Other than that, your moogle is pretty useless. Chalice: Your chalice is the only thing that is protecting you from the miasma stream once you leave the confine of a village since there are no crystals outside of the village. Your chalice gives off a force field like barrier protecting you from the poisonous miasma so your movement within the game is confine to your chalice. This means that wherever you go, you must carry your chalice with you. Of course you can have your moogle do that for you. Your chalice is also the container that will hold the drop of myrrh once you reach a Myrrh Tree. The world is divided into different areas with different elements to them at each year. In order to cross over to different areas, you'll going to need to change the element of your chalice to match the element of the miasma stream that's separating the two areas. This can easily be done by dropping your chalice in a hotspot inside a dungeon. Each hotspot will have an element assigned to it so you can change the element of your chalice to the element of the hotspot. Artifacts:Artifacts are special items found within dungeons from monsters dropping them or from treasure cheats that enhances one of your character's attributes or abilities. After clearing the dungeon, the game will list all the artifacts you have collected and list the attributes that each artifacts boost or gives to a fighter. You can only pick one that you would like to have. Those are the basic features of the game. For 90% of the game, it's fairly easy. However the only time where things are consider extremely hard is the last dungeon and the fight with the last boss. That's your warning right there. For the overall gameplay, I didn't enjoy it much. Two reasons for that, the first reason is because there's no goal to the gameplay because there's no story to the game. The reason why we play rpg game is because the goal of the story is to find the bad guy and kill him before he destroy the world or to save someone. There's no such goal in this game. It's just get the myrrh and bring it back to the village and celebrate the end of the year and repeat. It gets boring after about three times of doing the same thing over and over, especially when the celebration scenes are the same over and over for each year. The last reason is that the gameplay isn't new. What I mean is that there's nothing new or anything that is outstanding that really grabs you to the point where you say this is fun to do and I can't put this down. You might have a better time with your friends over but without a friend, you get bored of your moogle pretty quick and you get tired of the hacking and slashing from dungeon to dungeon. Without a compelling story to drive players onward, the gameplay becomes lacking without a purpose. That's what this gameplay is, lacking without a purpose. Giving a score of 7 is being nice. Final note, the game last about 20 hours. Maybe even less than that.

Score: 7/10

Is this what they call a random event? This is another weak point in the game. Side quests are few to none. Make that there's one side quest that you can do to gain 100 000 Gil but that's about it. The other extra stuff that you can maybe called side quests are getting and viewing all the random story events. Throughout the game during your travel, you will sometime be able unlock a random story event. These random story events consist of scenes between your caravan and caravans from other tribes. Each caravan from other tribes has a certain number of random story events for you to unlock. It might take a few years for you to unlock them all. In the end however, these random story events are unimportant and don't really serve much use to the overall original story. Other than that, there's nothing else to do in terms of unlocking secrets in the game. As for mini games, you only get one mini game in this game. To top it off, you can only play that mini game in multi-player mode. There's no mini game for single player mode, another reason why it suck to be a single player in this game. In terms of replay, there's nothing. No added incentive to play the game again, no Game+ feature, or any new secrets that will pop up if you play the game again. Once you finish playing the game, it's The End. And in all honesty, there's no real reason to play this game again. At the end of it all, there's really nothing in terms of side quests, hidden secrets or replay value.

Let's make this short. This is a poor man's version of a massive multi-player online rpg game. Even though it's a poor man's version, you can still enjoy this game. But in order for you to enjoy this game, you have to have friends. At least up to three other friends. Make that you have to have three other friends where each will own a Gameboy Advance handheld system and live in your area. If you are able to meet those requirements than this game is one that you should definitely pick up. However not many people will be able to meet those requirements. They may have another friend but three other friends that all own a Gameboy Advance are hard to come by. If you are a single player then skip this game as there's nothing here for you to enjoy. You might be able to enjoy this game with just another friend but not by much. The requirement that one needs to meet in order to experience this game fully is its own worst enemy. The main problem with this game is that multi-player mode is Crystal Chronicles's strength and weakness. Final Score: 5.7/10 Time to complete: 20 hours Difficulty: Easy to Hard Favorite story character: none Best item: Phoenix Down Most useful spell: Holy Voice narration: Excellent Best music theme: Festival theme Best advice: Find friends Best Skill: Focus Attack Also try: Final Fantasy XI Online Up next: Drakengard