Six more reasons to hate Crystal Chronicles

Games
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There are good things about Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. In fact, it’s a clever twist on the hack-and-slash treasure-collecting action-RPGs that were established with Diablo. The combat in CC is much more gratifying than winning a battle simply because you have a billion hitpoints and your Sword of Skull-Cleaving does 1,842 points of damage with each hit. Instead, combat rewards skill and shrewd tactical decisions. I also like how CC circumvents the typical packrat shopping mentality of Diablo. So that?s what goes on the ‘Pro’ side of the scales.

However, the ‘Con’ side is filling up rapidly. So here’s my List of Reasons to Hate Crystal Chronicles That Has Nothing To Do With Each Player in a Multiplayer Game Needing His or Her Own GBA and $15 Cable Even Though It Could Have Been Designed to Work with the Default Controllers:

  1. In single player, you need a GBA for your radar and monster information screens, but you can only have one display at a time. Even worse, to change your screens, you have to find a moogle house where you can paint your moogle.

  2. Speaking of radar, it pretty much seems the connected GBA is mandatory in single player. Without a map, how on earth are you supposed to navigate some of these labyrinthine dungeons with their multiple interconnected stages? Even with a map, you can’t scroll the map around, so you’re forced to try to remember which passage goes where.

  3. I can’t figure out how the inventory is arranging itself, so it’s pretty annoying to navigate my super long list of items when I want to eat cherries or swap out a magic ball from my command list (I did figure out that foods seem to be arranged from most to least favorite, so that’s nifty). And why can’t my artifacts stack up neatly rather than leisurely sprawling across a dozen pages? It feels much more like I’m plugging in slots in a list rather than gathering artifacts.

  4. The overland travel screen is a pain in the ass because you have to scooch your little caravan around to find which dungeons can change your shard to which color and what color you need to cross the miasma stream. Since it’s not tracking time as my caravan rolls to the four corners of the earth, why can’t I just move a cursor around to examine locations?

  5. The difficulty level ramps up way too quickly. I?m in the fourth year and keep running into gameplay brick walls. I got two friends to join me last night and we couldn’t make any progress. See Supertanker’s post in the other thread about how that went.

  6. You can’t save in a dungeon! And I’m at the point where a dungeon is easily taking at least an hour to finish. For this reason alone, I suspect Crystal Chronicles will find a nice quiet spot on my shelf next to Top Spin, in which you have to play through an entire 144 game tournament without saving.

Okay, my bellyaching is done. For now.

 -Tom

EDIT: My cutting and pasting from Word did something weird with apostrophes.

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I think there’s a problem with your apostrophe key. Unless I’m missing something…

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They’re all question marks for me.

This getting its own separate thread is basically a troll, btw.

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Ah…

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That’s nothin! Out west, you have to find a Chicken Ranch if you want to have your chicken choked!

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I agree for the most part with many of the complaints, and the reality is ever since Champions of Norrath entered my life, well FFCC has gotten no love from me playing solo. This game will likely only ever get playtime amongst a group, where it really does shine.

-The moogle painting is a neat little gimmick that they try to work into the mix, but a pain in the butt to deal with in practice. Cutting hair and spraypainting just takes an unnecesarily long time for the ‘on the move’ player. The young ones likely may get a real pret a porte kick from it though.

-The miasma crossing is just really strange to me at this point. Then again I haven’t played nearly as far as you seem to have Tom. Still in Year 2 and it hasn’t been very demanding for us to figure out the solution to crossing. Some NPC somewhere gave us a heads up on the elements in the world regions which helped us plan ahead or something. Maybe it does get vicious later though.

-Inventory is a total headscratcher. If ever a game needed a sort command, this is it! Can’t argue there.

-The radar stuff hasn’t been much of a problem for us. Granted, in single player it IS a pain in the butt not having more freedom with your personal GBA options, but thus far the clear path seems easilly presentable, especially given there doesn’t seem to be enemy respawns, it’s not all that hard to keep track of where you’ve been, unless the layouts get really crazy in later years which I’m just ignorant about at this point…

-My guess for the overworld travel is built the way it for the randomized cutsequences that spawn while traveling. It’s nothing that still couldn’t work with a FFTA styled Point-2-point map/cursor system. But for the miasma crossing stuff, yea I can totally concur on this complaint if you need to find that element.

-So the game gets really tough later huh? That’s nice to hear because while the first year and a half was great for us(learning curve took a good chunk of our inital playtime) once we settled in, we were whipping through the game. As I recall most reviews mentioned that the game gets so brutal in the final area that it’s almost required for the gamer to spend extra years just leveling in preparation, but hey the game seemed earn those 8/10 average scores for a reason…many of which you probably listed.

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double post

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-The miasma crossing is just really strange to me at this point.

It seems pretty straightforward. The map is divided into four parts. To move from one part to another, you need a particular color for your shard. The availability of this color is what Nintendo uses to control the flow of the game, forcing/encouraging you to visit various dungeons.

Although it does feel pretty contrived, I definitely prefer it to the way the fucking dragon head on the boat in Wind Walker would explain to me that he didn’t really think it was a good idea to go in this direction.

-The radar stuff hasn’t been much of a problem for us.

One thing that baffles me is that the monster information screen is completely buried. You either have to have at least three players or your moogle has to be, I dunno, green or whatever. Otherwise, no monster info for you!

But there seems to be important info here. For instance, last night, we were fighting a ghost and the monster info screen helpfully pointed out to Supertanker that we should use the ‘Holy’ combo on him. All good and well, except that no one knew he was a ghost until Supertaner glanced at his display! The little monster looked like a pile of laundry with two scarves flapping out to attack us.

it’s not all that hard to keep track of where you’ve been, unless the layouts get really crazy in later years which I’m just ignorant about at this point…

Good point about the monsters not respawning, but it’s still a pain in the ass to find your way around. I’ve been through the Goblin Walls twice and I still get hung up trying to figure which switch opens which door and which tunnel takes me to which point on which map. I’m fumbling my way through an ice cavern now that seems to have a similar layout.

Then there’s the fact that I’m getting my ass kicked by some beetle thingies and electric zappy thingies, but since I need my map, I can’t get info on what these creatures are and how I’m supposed to beat them.

Would it have fucking killed the guys at Nintendo to let me change the radar mode in single player so I can find this stuff out?

-My guess for the overworld travel is built the way it for the randomized cutsequences that spawn while traveling.

Sure, that’s fine by me. I’m cool with the cutscenes interrupting travel. But can I at least move a cursor or something to get info before I travel someplace to check if what I’m looking for is at that location?

-So the game gets really tough later huh?

Yeah, it definitely ramps up. In a way, I was disappointed that I had advanced so far by year four that new players couldn’t join me without dying every five seconds. But the problem is that I’m not making much progress single player either and a lot of it has to do with Nintendo’s design decisions.

I’m pretty much fed up with the whole thing. Where’s that Champions of Norrath disk?

 -Tom
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Nitpick: Nintendo didn’t design the game; Square did.

-Scott-

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I think Tom was trying really hard to bag on Nintendo and used their name instead of Square’s for some reason. I can’t imagine he’s played as far as he has and didn’t even know who programmed and designed it.

–Dave