Crystar

Verdict:
Not recommended

Content Warnings:
Death, afterlife, emotional abuse, mentions of child abuse and neglect, mentions of suicide, dog death, killing of family members.

Do you play as a woman?
Yes, all playable characters are women.

Do the women drive the story?
Yes, all active characters are women.

How many men are there?
There’s like, one guy with speaking lines and he’s a one note boss.

What are the Romance options?
None.

Is the game any good?

Crystar is a game brimming with interesting thematic elements and cool ideas. The action rpg gameplay takes place in purgatory, which lends itself to surreal and gorgeous landscapes and otherworldly opponents. Your weapons and equipment are formed from the raw emotion and trauma of the enemies you kill, which you cry out as tears. The characters are cool and interesting and distinctive, their dialogue is solid too.

With that as a backdrop, it’s a shame that the gameplay fails to match up to expectations. Crystar is split into worlds, worlds have a set or level, or “ordeals”, which you have to complete to progress. Each ordeal is made of 3 floors, each floor being a large, mazelike map with a clear goal. Some ordeals have a 4th floor for boss fights.

That already very formulaic approach starts to get tired very quickly, especially since all ordeals within a world look identical. Some even have the same, easily identifiable rooms and corridors copies into them. It makes it hard to be excited since new content is brought in so rarely. Enemy variety is much the same, and by the time you have a full party you will have seen every enemy type in the game, who just get recoloured to have more attack and hp. Very few of these enemies are particularly interesting to play around and most of them can be utterly immobilised by simply attacking them repeatedly.

In theory, the issue with enemy variety is lessened by the abundant minibosses. Known as revenants, they are powerful and dangerous, while also being your primary source of “torments” which you can then turn into equipment. Unfortunately, they are just regular enemies that glow red, meaning that instead of being dangerous that are tedious, since you can stun them just as easily as other enemies.

Individual enemies being easy to exploit by continuously attacking isn’t, by itself, a problem. Combat takes place in large rooms where there are often four or more enemies, so you have to maintain some awareness of your surroundings. The issue is that the combat, and movement in general is clunky and unresponsive. Animations are stiff and slow, with the hitboxes for attacks being unpredictable at times. Projectile attacks suffer most from this, with the stiff movement and difficult animations requiring use of the lock on system in order to reliably hit.

Every character you play has a light attack combo and a heavy attack combo. You can end a string of light attacks with a heavy attack, which can at time be useful, especially when it does something like launch the opponent. Unfortunately, the difference between light and heavy attacks is otherwise pretty minor, making light attacks, which are faster, feel much more useful. Each character also learns skills, which are assigned to 4 slots. Some of these skills are fun to use, the main character has homing feather projectile attacks and a defensive tornado that launches enemies. Unfortunately character learn barely enough skills to fill those slots, which feels like wasted potential.

The already troubled combat is busted wide open when you recruit your fourth character, who is a ranged attacker. The game is completely unpreapred to handle her, and she can easily attack across gaps while enemies stand dumbly getting hit. That’s not all, she is easily able to evade the slow and predictable enemy ai and destroy them effortlessly. The few rangdd enemies shoot projectiles so loud and slow that they dont seriously threaten her so long as you keep your eyes and ears sharp. No character should be able to break a combat system like this, it is a condemnation of the design that she can.

The graphics are serviceable. None of the 3d models looks particularly good, but few of them look bad either. The 2d character art is quite impressive and stylized, though it may not be to everyone’s taste.

The news starts to get better when it comes to the narrative, which is the game’s sole saving grace. You take the role of Rei Hatada, a young shut-in girl who gets dragged to purgatory along with her sister. The story of the game follows Rei’s effort to leave purgatory, and later to rescue her sister.

Along the way you will meet a cast of interesting and energetic characters. They all have fun quirks and seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company, which makes the times they interact a joy to watch. I wish there had been more focus on the characters, more times for them to talk and bounce off each other to break up the dull tedium of going through the levels. There is quite a lot there already, but its so good I want more.

Rei herself isnt much of a slouch in the characterisation department though. She is very clearly struggling with depression, an experience I can sympathize with, but find strength where she can to push forward.

About halfway through, Crystar did something very interesting. I stopped cheering for Rei. Normally that would be an indictment of the storytelling, but I was clearly supposed to no longer be cheering for her. I never stopped wanting to see the story progress, and it didnt last long enough that it would drive me away, so I think that it was very effectively done. It is challenging to keep a story engaging when the point of view character is unsympathetic, but they manage it. It’s tied in beautiful with the ui and gameplay as well, extremely effective storytelling that proves the studio is capable of greatness.

Crystar has some extremely cool aesthetics and some fun ideas but fails to execute on them enough to make the game fun to play. I enjoyed my time with it, mostly, but I can’t in good conscience recommend anyone else play it. If you want to catch the very good story, watch a lets play.