Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Remastered Edition

A fun little hack-and-slash. The nostalgia of playing on a GBA might not be there anymore, but there's a lot of adventure packed into a small package. Its biggest flaws are that it doesn't feel particularly inimitable nowadays, and the multiplayer is almost a must. If you're looking for a relaxing way to beat down some baddies with your friends, Crystal Chronicles gives you everything you might be looking for — without having to shell out for four portable systems.

Even though I spent so little time actually playing it, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles remains one of my favorite childhood games. There's something to be said for the experience, that it creates memories that powerful. But memory is all-too-often unreliable, often building things up to be better than they ever were. In this second trip with the crystal caravan, I did still delight to discover the cheerful tales and chipper tunes of days gone by. Less welcome were the dated systems for item management. Not welcome at all was the modern update to multiplayer. Turns out cross-platform is not always the answer. I'll take my beat-up old GBA as a traveling companion any day.

An upgrade from the original, but sometimes for the wrong reason. The lack of local play is an odd decision, considering the original thrived on it, and especially when so much thought and execution was put into the online multiplayer aspect of the title this time around. The fighting system probably won’t win over most fans of the series or of the original 2004 title, but the charm of the original game is still intact through this edition’s exploration and treasure discovery. In the end, this game still contains some fun aspects of its original gaming intentions, but only if you can see through its faults.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered is a better take on the GameCube classic from 2003. The game does a few things better, like the multiplayer. Still, there are enough obstacles for the game to be really fun. The chalice restrains you from moving freely and the multiplayer still feels outdated. In terms of graphics there were steps taken but the game still looks like an old game, only in HD. For fans this is a must by because of the new things added, but newcomers better skip this caravan.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition retains plenty of its original charms, enhanced by updated visuals and audio, but with its defining local co-op diluted by clunky online play, it simply doesn’t stake a strong enough case for its return.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is still a serviceable action RPG as a single-player game, and playing the dungeon content in a party with the known limitations in mind can be enjoyable in spurts, but the whole feels stripped almost bare of what originally made it unique. My renewed excitement for a remastered version of Crystal Chronicles was centered around revisiting a classic with modern multiplayer infrastructure in mind, instead, I found a product that clearly feels unfit for its new interpretation and unfaithful to the original.

Dated design, clunky multiplayer systems, and unacceptable load times make playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition a terrific chore.

As a singleplayer game it's flawed but functional. Combat is very basic, the story isn't great, and the game wants you to play the same dozen dungeons over and over. However, the art direction and music are phenomenal, and it's an exceedingly comfy fantasy game. The broken multiplayer is a missed opportunity, but the core game is actually a decent remaster.

It's disappointing that they used a guest system for multiplayer instead of allowing you to join your friends' actual caravans. If you do actually want to play through with your friends, you need to do 3*n dungeons to complete a year instead of just 3. That aside, it's still a pretty solid game. If you happen to not actually have friends who want to play this game, the multiplayer works fine. You still don't get myrrh as a guest but you do get to pick an artifact still. Hopping in as a guest every now and then can speed up the process of grinding artifacts.

The game is great, the remaster is beautiful and offers tons of nostalgia to keep you going. Back in the day, I was never able to play this with other people, due to the peripherals/limitation. So the single player experience wasn't that great. Now, with the remaster, we can finally play this as was intended: with other people. But here is the catch (and the problem) in my opinion: Square-Enix decided to cut couch co-op, which would be perfect for so many people, who would love to sit down with their friends or SO to play this. But, in a move that I can only read as a cash-grab, they force people to buy many versions of the same game, since it'll only be online multiplayer. What will happen, in the future, when nobody is playing anymore? Or when they shut down the servers. The game will be single player only? LOTS of content are extremely unfriendly to a single player, and they know that. I think that was a pretty shady move and lots of people are unhappy - and rightfully so. Hope SE addresses this in future patches. On that note... THE HORRIBLE LOADING SCREENS, Jesus Christ. It makes no sense that a GC game takes this time to load on current generation consoles. Leave the town, load. Walk and activate a cutscene, load. Leave the cutscene, load. Load, load, load, load. 15 to 20 seconds per load makes it a CHORE to travel and play. This is unforgivable in my honest opinion. All that being said, the game is beautiful, heartwarming and should be played. Just hope SE treats their fans with a little more love.

The charm of the original has been stripped bare from this remaster. Do yourself a favour and download the new free version of FFXIV instead. Crystal Chronicles had its flaws when it launched on Nintendo's gamecube, but the co-op was unforgettably fun. Setting out together, making progress together, and returning to towns to see families and growth has been stripped away. You won't even get a letter after helping a friend in their world and if you plan to play in a group of four, you will be playing the same dungeons four times over to make progress. Even simple things like continuing to help your friend progress in their world is unavailable, and instead after each multiplayer session the lobby needs to be closed and remade. I was very excited for this remaster, but disappointed with the souless imitation we recieved. FFXIV truly is the last bastion of quality Final Fantasy.

I'm so disappointed by this remaster. If you played the original FFCC on GCN you'd know that it's almost great, but flawed in one major way, which is the clunkiness of its multiplayer. There was some negativity around the original when it came to expectations. The name "Final Fantasy" causes players to expect a certain type of turn based RPG, and this is not it. This is a spin off which uses more of a beat-em-up action rpg style combat. While it's technically playable solo, it's just not fun to play on your own. It feels lonely, the levels and puzzles are clearly designed to be tackled by a group of friends, and the combat system isn't deep enough to keep you entertained for a whole game when playing solo. But the one big flaw of the GCN version was the multiplayer requiring a lot of hardware and setup. This remaster was a chance to fix that one major flaw. And they really failed. There's no local/couch co-op like the GCN version. Instead it's online only. The online multiplayer in the remaster is limited to dungeons only. The ability to create 4 characters with your friends, all from the same hometown, and travel together in a caravan across the game map is completely gone. All you can do is travel to a dungeon on your own and then connect online with 3 friends via a cumbersome friend code system, or 3 random people. You can then run that one dungeon together, but then you separate once it's over. If you're playing with friends, you'll all have to disconnect, then travel to the new dungeon alone offline, then connect again with the 3 friends to run the next one. Not only is this multiplayer bad, and worse than the original, it's also poorly explained. You'll stumble through creating "lobbies" without ever being told you're doing so, and then get punished for "creating too many lobbies" if you try to reconnect after getting kicked by a bad connection. In the multiplayer mode, whether playing with friends or strangers, only one player can be the "host." Only the host receives myrrh, the story collectible explanation for why you're traveling, meaning only the host progresses toward completing a "year" in game. Guests do receive artifacts, which are basically what level up your character, which does give some incentive to replay old dungeons. But expecting every person to host every dungeon at least once is expecting too much out of replayability. Yeah, sure I'll go back to an old dungeon a second time, maybe a third. I am not running every dungeon in the game 4 times. Additionally, only the host player gets mail from their family at the end of a dungeon, while all the guests have to sit there and... watch. You can't leave the instance, you can't do anything, you're just stuck watching as the host player navigates menus that you can't even see. There's technical problems as well. I had a lot of noticeable slowdown when playing offline in certain dungeons when there were a lot of enemies or effects on screen. When playing online, the slowdown and lag are even worse. Loading times are long, and pop up very often. Every time you go in and out of a town, or hit one of the random story events that can happen on the road, you're hit with a loading screen before and another one after. This was my experience on the Switch version, which I know is not as powerful a console as the ps4, but still, it's a gamecube game from 20 years ago. It should not be huge chore to load. This game was delayed, which is something I'm generally in favor of if it helps the end result. But even now it still feels unfinished. It's possible it will be patched, but I don't have high hopes. Some of these decisions are too fundamentally built into this version to be easily corrected. The biggest problem with this game was just the decision making. They took a Gamecube game that was built entirely around couch co-op and then decided in the remaster to remove the couch co-op. The online multiplayer that was offered instead has less functionality than the original's couch co-op, leaving you with a game that will feel like a solo experience with occasional pop-in from some random strangers online who you can't speak to. That solo experience is lonely and not very engaging, and will just leave you wishing you had friends next to you who could actually join you on your journey.