Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers (Wii)
While it’s easy to identify similarities between games in the Crystal Chronicles subseries of Final Fantasy games, the wide breadth of genres it explored always seemed like an odd direction to take it. However, after the multiplayer focused original, the city builder, the tower defense game, and now the action oriented entry Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, I finally realized it wasn’t the same four civilized races featured or focus on protective magical crystals that really serve as the main uniting ties between the disparate entries, but that willingness to experiment with new ways to play with the common fantasy elements the Final Fantasy series is known for. Strangely enough though, while The Crystal Bearers was probably exploring the safest genre of the bunch with its action-adventure slant, it might also be the one that ended up struggling in its genre the most.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers kicks off with an armored magical being known as a Yuke appearing on an airship the game’s hero Layle has been employed to protect. Layle is a Crystal Bearer, someone who has been gifted an incredible and unique magical ability they can call upon at will, and it appears this mysterious Yuke wields similar powers, thus leading to their paths becoming intertwined. The world of The Crystal Bearers is made up of four races of civilized peoples, the Yukes having all but disappeared, the rogueish Selkies being humans who live on the fringes and devote themselves to trickery and trade, and the onion-headed Lilties being the dominant force with their glorious capital city Alfitaria and their powerful military might. The Clavat race, which are basically just unaltered humans… are just kind of there. Layle is the only Clavat of real significance we encounter, with background characters of the race existing but not doing much besides living unexceptional lives. Layle does at some point state that Clavats are basically locked into a life of low means even though you find them living happy lives at a winery and interacting with high society, but the interplay between the three other races serve as the driving force of the plot. The Lilties struggle to get along with the lawless Selkies while also trying to keep the Yukes from returning and amassing their magical strength once more, and Layle ends up caught in the conflict between these tribes simply because he has the right powers to contribute.
The plot and world of The Crystal Bearers feels like the main draw of this adventure, and there is a colorful enough cast to make the cutscenes worth getting invested in. Layle is an odd hero, never really getting fully invested in the growing stakes of the racial conflict he’s at the center of, but his interests line up with helping those who deserve it and his playful detachment to certain serious matters keep him from becoming a cliche. His unusual personality perhaps best shines when he comes in contact with the incredibly emotional and greedy Belle, but he also serves as a good contrast to Keiss who has heroic ambitions and a desire to be the first Selkie in the Lilty army. People of import like the devoted Princess Althea, the off-putting General Jegran, and even the Yuke have to find a way to work with Layle’s unique personality, and the fact the adventure takes you to many unique locations gives the game a decent flow between settings and story beats despite some weaker concepts like the fire-flinging Crystal Bearer who suddenly has his history filled in when introduced and exits the story shortly after.
The music lends a lot to the experience though, having an interesting approach where some songs rely on traditional instruments for fairly rustic settings while others can feature intense electrical guitar for bombastic action with even unexpected genres like surf rock cropping up, but the areas you frequent often like Lett Highlands can have some rather lovely compositions that evoke the feeling of the location more than the poorly conceived ticker ever could. Since much of the citizenry in the game won’t speak with you, the game decides to have a ticker appear at the bottom of the screen to slowly give you details about the lore and the world of The Crystal Bearers, meaning if you want to take in this information you need to stop what you’re doing and watch it slowly scroll by. A more organic method would definitely do the game more favors, and the long-winded newspapers are definitely not it either, but the main components of the story all come together without any of this potential extra knowledge proving to be necessary.
The main way you’ll be playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is as a third-person action game, your character’s unique crystal ability being the power to move objects as if he had telekinesis. Using the Wii remote, you can point at objects, people, and monsters and seize them to hurl them about or seal them in a magical orb you can then carry about before chucking them away. Depending on the object and if you have certain accessories on, the time it takes to properly grab your target varies, and some can only be moved about rather than fully lifted into the air. However, the game is flush with all kinds of opportunities to use this both for important battles and for just messing around. As you explore the world, you are given plenty of things you can lock your gravity powers onto, the player able to cause chaos by chucking citizens about, hurl garbage at things to coat them in grime, pluck fields full of crops, calm down rampaging oxen, pluck grapes in a harvest contest, pull hidden treasure chests off ledges, and so much more. It’s pretty easy to get sidetracked seeing what new toys your powers can interact with even if your interaction with them often boils down to lifting or throwing the object of interest, but it’s clear a lot of attention went into constantly providing things to use your powers on so that exploring a snowy monastery or walking across a sun-drenched beach can provide amusements until you reach the next important task. The game world can sometimes feature some unfortunate backtracking without being too clear on where you’re meant to go next, so having new changes to these locations to occupy you during these return trips at least eases up this small issue with the progression.
However, when your powers are called upon to do things that are necessary, they turn from a nifty gimmick to toy around with to a fairly weak way to engage with traversal and combat. When you need to get around, you’ll swing around and do magic assisted jumps but it always feels like a dedicated jump button would be so much more useful and engaging than pointing the Wii remote at the platform you want to reach. Combat is definitely the side that suffers more though, as so many fights boil down to the very basic task of grabbing something and tossing it at a foe to easily wear them down. Some foes like living bombs can be spun around to incapacitate them for a bit, and robots might have parts you can yank to change their behavior or force them to activate abilities, but in most fights, the most interesting interaction you will get is hurling a skeleton at a wolf and then seeing that the nearby wolf wants to eat the broken skeleton. The game is actually packed with tons of optional content to earn achievement medals, and some things are learning unique combat interactions by hurling the right thing at the right foe, but this doesn’t change that most battles really are just about grabbing what’s on hand and tossing it about. Maybe there’s water nearby you don’t want to throw the Sahagin fishmen into, or maybe since all monster encounters are timed you want to throw more explosives at the massive Behemoth so you can beat it before the monsters just go away, but even the final fight boils down to pointing, pulling, and repeating in a way that rarely excites.
The game does seem to know its combat isn’t the hottest though, with many monster encounters being entirely optional with only a health expansion to reward you if you do stop and fight. The adventure still has plenty of action even if its required battles are few and far between though, thanks to Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers going with the odd choice of having plenty of motion control focused minigames crop up at key moments. Sometimes these do directly tie to the regular sort of play like yanking pursuers off their rides as you make an escape on the back of a big bird known as a Chocobo, but others involve departures like guiding an airship, sliding through a watery cave, sneaking your way through a train, and assisting Belle in a strange beach sport where girls try to bump each other off a raft with their rear ends. Even dramatic battles sometimes take the form of some sort of minigame, although those are often better for it since battles like the one with the fire-wielding Crystal Bearer are pretty tepid. The prevalence of minigames does mean the game feels uneven as some like the stealth game are more annoying than challenging, but others are fun enough deviations like the waltzing and there are even optional ones to be found along the adventure like designing your own garden. These, more than any element, make the experience turn out rather uneven, and while they break away from the poor combat, the story having to hang off these side games does make it feel like this game’s enjoyment is sometimes hampered by the latest idea to integrate motion control mechanics.
THE VERDICT: While a plot filled with intrigue, a strong setting, and likeable characters help Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers keep your interest, other parts of the experience seem to actively work against this. Using the Wii remote to move things around is fun for messing around with the plethora of toys left around the world but fights are incredibly basic and unexciting because it fails to bring that creativity to the combat. Minigames are more prevalent than normal fights though, and these can range from slow and boring to enjoyable and exciting deviations, but mostly they settle into serviceable deviations from the telekinetic action. Some strong efforts from the soundtrack work to endear you to the title more, but the action being all over the place means it ultimately all settles into something that is neither exceptional or irritating, the distribution of ideas averaging out to unfortunate mediocrity.
And so, I give Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers for Wii…
An OKAY rating. Paradoxically, the same power that can’t really find a way to make fighting monsters exciting is also fun to tinker with in many other situations. It’s a mechanic that functions fine when it’s not working towards a direct goal or something that is aiming to be challenging, because when you’re messing with the world around you, it’s fun to see the mischief Layle can get himself into. It finds some decent footing in minigames, although the best of those are often breaks away from the core mechanics as well. Outside the direction of the story though, it feels like much of the adventure was filled in with whatever idea they could concoct to inject interactivity, leading to some half-baked minigame concepts. Combat probably needs more of the unique interactions to thrive, the medals earned for strange occurrences perhaps better implemented as the necessary way certain enemy types are overcome. Too often it’s easier to toss them about or grab something like a nearby cactus or stone and smash a foe apart, but forcing some clever ability use could spice up the fights and make them less like an optional task you might partake in if you’re in the mood. Minigames could also do with more depth as even some of the better ones feel like foregone victories while the weaker ones could use smoother interactions mechanics, but regardless of what can be improved, we still have an engaging enough story, quality music, and some fun side activities to keep this from ranking any lower.
Toying around with motion control gimmickry was basically the name of the game for many Wii titles, but seeing the Final Fantasy series, even its Crystal Chronicles subseries, devoted to that to the point it is nearly minigames strung together by plot points and environments packed with toys is a strange sight. Experimenting with the franchise in new genres is an admirable task that produced some good games, but this part of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles doesn’t really have the level of focus it needs to truly help its action elements shine. The traditional strengths of the Final Fantasy series shine through like story, characters, and the world, but the temptation to indulge in motion control play at every turn leads to lows as often as it does highs. Even if you can get engrossed in its better elements, you’ll still inevitably walk away thinking about the many uneven moments that its lack of focus adds to this adventure.