The Unfulfilled Potential of The Crystal Chronicles: A Thirteen Year-Old’s Vision

The following post does not contain spoilers.

All of the images in this post are photos taken by me of the Nintendo Power Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles strategy guide and two preview books showing off upcoming Nintendo titles.

            Video games were mysterious things for me when I was a kid. For the longest time, the only ones I had access to where PC titles—a mix of children’s adventure games (like Gregory and the Hot Air Balloon), “edutainment” titles (think the Math Blaster series), and the occasional actual video game ported to the PC (Sonic 3 & Knuckles, for example). I wasn’t raised steeped in video game culture like a lot of nerds my age, and my first actual console was a long time coming. I often owned strategy guides for games I didn’t actually have any means to play, I assume because they were technically “books” and I was a big reader, though I’m not sure my parents could really tell me now why they let me get the guide for Pokémon Red and Blue when at the time I don’t think I even owned a Game Boy. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a mix of the “me being a reader and the guides being books” thing paired with ignorance about the nature of strategy guides. So I wasn’t super aware of the broader culture around video games, but I got these glimpses by way of seeing a Sega Genesis at a relative’s house or seeing some tiny, dark screenshots in a guide book. There’s a lot to be said about just the guides and my relationship with them, but that’s a discussion for another time.

            By the time Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles was being advertised, we had many more video game consoles in our house, but my memories of the lead-up to the release of that game are still dominated by “glimpses.” Maybe this is the truth, and maybe it’s just the nature of memory—After all, at this point all I have left of most earlier periods in my life are glimpses or fragments. And it’s funny that the question of memory plays a role here in writing about a game that chooses memories (and the loss of memories) for a mechanic and thematic focus. At any rate, the point I’m taking a long time to elucidate here is that I was not actually completely sure what kind of game Crystal Chronicles was when I started thinking about buying it, and that led to me filling in some gaps with my imagination.

            I didn’t know what a dungeon crawler was, and I had never played a Final Fantasy game before either, though that second point ultimately means very little since Crystal Chronicles is only loosely related to the larger Final Fantasy brand. I owned some game preview books that we had gotten for free at GameStop that featured more of the aforementioned small, dark screenshots of the game, alongside a lot of other mysterious (to me) titles. I might also have read some things on the internet about having to drag the “bucket” (the chalice item players have to transport to keep them safe from an ever-present poisonous mist) around with them while playing. And at one point I actually picked up the game’s strategy guide in a Books-A-Million and flipped through it briefly, seeing some intriguing images of a gross-looking (to a sheltered young teen) “dragon zombie” boss among other sights. The dragon zombie is the only concrete thing I remember from that moment; it’s the only glimpse that remains. And all of these little moments have been thrown together here because I really am not sure of the timeline prior to getting the game. Reading the articles almost certainly came after seeing the preview books, of course.

            At what point did I get the strategy guide (before or after buying the game)? And at what point did I decide to buy Crystal Chronicles itself? When did my sense of what the game would be like coalesce? I feel like I had to have gotten the strategy guide first or at least seen the piece of concept art for the game prominently featured on the back of it somewhere before buying Crystal Chronicles since it played a large role in my conception of the game and my eventual disappointment.

            The art in question looks like this:

            The image shows some of the possible character options in the game relaxing inside their covered wagon-inspired caravan—a two-wheeled wagon pulled by a fictional ox-like creature. The premise of the game is that the world is polluted with that poisonous mist I mentioned before, and towns protect themselves from it with gigantic crystals that must be recharged every year. To that end, each settlement sends out a caravan of chosen adventurers who go out into the world in search of “myrrh” from special trees that can be used to recharge the crystals for another year. While the actual process of finding myrrh in the game is very straightforward and not fraught at all, the vibe that the game creates, with its in-game narrative and out of game promotional material, is that this is an arduous and uncertain journey to distant lands. At one point in the game itself, you play through a dungeon that was once a town that failed to recharge their crystal when their caravan never returned. You dungeoneer amongst the abandoned, foliage-infested houses where only monsters now live, and tonally it helps drive home the (theoretical) stakes of the game.

            That image from the back of the strategy guide suggests that while the quest is dangerous and the road is long, there’s warmth in the camaraderie of companions, which, in retrospect alludes specifically to the ostensible companionship of playing local multiplayer with your own friends or relatives (people with whom you presumably already have a friendly relationship). Outside of that pre-existing warmth, the game doesn’t do much to cultivate that feeling while actually playing it. The one small touch that does manage to capture the vibe of another piece of concept art (pictured below) of the characters all opening mail together and having these individual but overlapping warm experiences comes from how each dungeon that you complete for a drop of myrrh ends with everyone in the party receiving mail from back home. You generally get letters from your character’s family and can then choose a short reply and possibly send money or an item back home to impact your gamified standing with that particular family member. Like I said before, this is one of the only things in the game itself that actually evokes the feelings of its artwork. The experience of receiving mail from back home while on a journey actually kind of simulates those feelings of warmth I keep referring to vaguely.

            For an even better sense of what the game “promises,” I’m going to link to a video of Crystal Chronicles’ opening cinematic below. The footage comes from the recently released remaster, which includes a redone version of the opening theme, but it’s essentially the same as the original, with the advantage of being crisp-looking as opposed to somewhat blurry like the original release from the early 2000s. Here is that trailer.

            This could very well be nostalgia speaking, but I still think this opening is one of the best I’ve seen in video games. It sets a mood (somber but beautiful) with sound and visuals alone. It tells a whole narrative about the game—and promises a specific experience—through the progression of images with no spoken dialogue. We see the individual members of the caravan alone as dawn breaks. They seem to be engaged in solitary preparation or meditation before their journey begins and have perhaps been up all night with their feelings. As the cinematic progresses and the sun rises, they come together as a group for a pep talk by the village elder while their relatives and neighbors gather to see them off. They then set off with the caravan, with some carrying packs, some walking alongside the wagon, and some riding on it. From there, it’s all images of adventure (like fighting monsters or rolling dramatically along a nondescript wilderness road) alternating with images of warmth (the characters taking a break by a river or relaxing by a fire at night) while the music plays on, beautiful but still somber.

            It makes a powerful impression on first booting up the game that Crystal Chronicles itself never actually manages to match. The tone is about right overall, as the whole game mixes levity, warmth, and melancholy through its environments, music, and story throughout; however, the emotional intimacy of the concept art and the intro cinematic is something the game doesn’t really simulate. You can’t actually go inside the caravan, for example, and nights simply do not exist. Since we’re finally getting at the heart of the issue here, I can go ahead and reveal that the crux of my vision for the game was something like The Oregon Trail, which is, for its age, an extremely intimate, if only mostly in the mechanical sense, game about a similar wilderness experience. You set out full of hope but wary of the dangers ahead, and then you guide the wagon across miles and miles of wilderness, the destination known but still unknown. You have to hunt, ford rivers, and deal with the logistical nightmares of broken axles and spoiled meat, sickness and death. While I didn’t necessarily expect Crystal Chronicles to emulate that style of game exactly, at least some of those elements, or at least the emotions they evoke, are suggested by the premise, artwork, and opening.

            Instead of that intimate, dangerous-feeling journey, however, what you get instead is a world map with an adorable little caravan figurine on it that you move along roads between clearly telegraphed stops like towns, ports, and dungeons. The epic, dangerous journey full of hope is reduced to miniature. There’s never any tension about where to go or what to do, and the sweeping views from the opening cutscene of the long road stretching away in front and behind never materialize. The actual game is cramped and small, and while I had fun with it, there was an initial period of disappointment when I saw that world map and realized that the journey I had envisioned the game taking me on wasn’t going to happen.

            The recently released Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles Remastered hasn’t been reviewing terribly well, but mostly, from what I’ve seen, due to issues with its online connectivity and multiplayer as opposed to the sort of failures of scope I’ve been describing here. And I suppose those reviews are right to heavily criticize the game for these problems, as Crystal Chronicles basically depends upon the multiplayer experience to give it some of the energy it otherwise fails to cultivate. Of course, the move away from local co-op to online exclusively sucks even more of the camaraderie out of the game. You used to have to play this game in close proximity to other people since it only had local co-op by way of wired controllers in the form of Game Boy Advances tethered to the Nintendo GameCube. Now, you might play with friends over voice chat, but if you wanted to be in the same room with those people (assuming we weren’t currently in the middle of a global pandemic), you would each need to have your own system regardless of proximity. You can also now get plagued by internet randos, if you try to create a party from strangers, who can grab your chalice and sprint ahead through the level, leaving you (and maybe a friend or two) to stifle in the poisonous miasma. If anything, an uncharitable reading of the game now could probably say something like “It’s less successful at capturing the mood of its art and initial story beats than it’s ever been.”

            This essay/post is not a review, so I don’t want to get bogged down in those sorts of details; however, as I’ve recently played a bit of the remaster’s demo “lite” version and a good chunk of the original release on my GameCube, I will offer some thoughts:

            First, the remaster clearly had work put into it. Issues with connectivity aside, there was obviously effort here beyond just a simple HD paint job. Menus have been overhauled to make them sleeker and less intrusive; additional tutorials have been introduced to make the game feel like it fits better in this age of more frequent hand-holding; new rewards have been added to the game’s main collection side quest to replace a multiplayer-only caravan racing minigame that could only be played on a Game Boy Advance. There are a large number of small touches that may go unnoticed by anyone who hasn’t played the original lately. In a more substantial change, the game now has voice acting for some cutscenes as well as during gameplay so that player characters now feel more lively as they call out spell names and grunt their way across the battlefield. Remixed, harder versions of the existing dungeons have apparently been added as post-game content, and there are also now items purchasable with real world currency which further “modernizes” the game for better or worse (read: for worse). However, the biggest positive for me at least is the fact that the game looks the way that I remember it looking back in the early 2000s, which, with a “remaster,” is one of the highest compliments that can be paid—having the game still look like itself, though what it actually looked like is now clearly inferior. An adjacent benefit of the remaster is that the game’s performance is smooth throughout, and while I’m not a framerate purist, the charm of the visual style is even easier to appreciate now without the original release’s generally consistent but still muddy, “humid” look arising from the standard definition presentation coupled with the occasional framerate dip.

Second, building off of the new content I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I just don’t know that the mechanical depth (or lack thereof) of Crystal Chronicles is capable of sustaining a much longer game. When I first tried returning to the GameCube original as an adult years ago, I was surprised to find it even simpler and more cramped than I remembered as a kid. There are few stats and few mechanical differences between playing as one character type over another. The levels are also fairly short and simple, which can better facilitate the dungeon crawler necessity of grinding for materials and better loot but also results in the game feeling even shorter and less epic than I originally thought. The prospect of post-game content sounds great in a value-per-dollar sense given the base game’s short (by modern standards) length and especially for returning players looking to justify the purchase, but I remain unconvinced that people would want to play the game for that long when the depth of something similar like Diablo just isn’t there. A simple game like this one should probably be shorter rather than longer.

            Third, even years later, I still do love certain elements of Crystal Chronicles. As a creative person who wanted to make games, there were things about this game that absolutely grabbed and held my imagination. I love the way that the story is told, for example—The main plot almost feels incidental to the ”true” narrative of the game, which is the story of a person doing a job. Crystal Chronicles doesn’t begin with fate or a quest to kill God. It sort of gets there eventually, but while plot points do start to accrue, they do so in that incidental way that I mentioned. You collect bits and pieces of information from NPC conversations in safe areas, random and fixed encounters with NPCs on the world map, and from the wonderful narration at the start of each level when an unknown woman speaks about the specific place, the world, and/or her memories. In recent years, games like Dark Souls have developed a positive reputation for telling stories in minimalist and esoteric ways, but Crystal Chronicles deserves credit for its own take. You collect journal entries on the road, and whether they’re important to the main plot or simply incidental conversations with other caravans, they all go into the journal in the same way. The remaster actually allows you to filter for entries related to specific groups, events, or plot threads, which is a convenience but doesn’t necessarily undermine the feeling I’m trying to describe here of the main plot not really being the focus. Despite the presence of the miasma and monsters in the game’s world, most places seem to have adapted just fine. There’s simply not an urgent need to change the status quo like there is in many games.

            I read one review of the remaster, for instance, that mentioned accidentally finishing Crystal Chronicles without realizing how close they were to the end. That could be read as a criticism of the game’s length and/or plotting, but I see it as a plus in the sense that the game is still successfully telling the story of an ordinary person doing their best for their hometown rather than a fantasy hero setting out to prevent The End of the World. Saving the world was never the goal—It’s just a possibility that emerges as you press further and further into the unknown rather than something you set out to do or were born to accomplish. Crystal Chronicles has always had a different feel to it than a lot of similar games (RPGs and action RPGs), and it has yet to truly receive a mechanical sequel. There are other games in the Crystal Chronicles universe, but from what I’ve seen and read, they don’t really try to expand on the mood and mechanics that make this game what it is.

            And here’s that feeling of hope again: A remaster can sometimes be a prelude to the revival of a franchise (see the recent Crash Bandicoot trilogy remaster now being followed with the announcement of a Crash 4). When the remaster of Crystal Chronicles was announced, I knew that, as much as it might fix other issues or address outdated elements of the original, that my particular bone to pick would not be resolved. When I think of the game, I tend to think first of that image from the back of the strategy guide and of my disappointment with the game not living up to its promise. However, there’s still a chance for Crystal Chronicles to get the treatment that it deserves and to maybe make good on the feeling its artwork and opening cinematic create through a proper follow up that finally fulfills the potential I saw in it all those years ago.