Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers

In the end, The Crystal Bearers manages to be a somewhat simple but entertaining adventure, but one that is polished and put together with care, for the sole purpose of entertaining the player.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is not a bad game, but it’s not a great game either. In a lot of ways it suffers from the high expectations that come with a Final Fantasy game.

There are a lot of beautiful environments to enjoy in Crystal Bearers, and overall the entire world is nicely designed with even some interesting architecture. The repetitive battles and constant lasso-fiddling is a bit of a downer, though.

The absolute best part of the game is all of the stuff you can do besides the main plot. Not that the main plot isn’t fun – it’s just that the minigames are limited to chases, jumping puzzles and the occasional weirdness like ballroom dancing.

The Crystal Bearers is a strange mix of minigames and a big adventure in a colorful fantasy world. The formula has potential and at certain points that potential actually comes to fruition, but it doesn’t happen often enough to make The Crystal Bearers anything special.

The vibrant world and exciting story of this action game are at odds with its repetitive and frustrating gameplay.

This game is a mini-game collection masquerading as an epic adventure, and it doesn't even pull that off well.

this game is a WII Gem, the reason that its getting bad reviews is because people are looking at it like it should be a tratitional rpg game, there are interesting characters and an interesting story. the game is not meant to be fast paced, in my opinion the best way to play this game is by exploring the different zones and towns, finding secrets and Medal hunting (Acheivments) i think this game never got the attention it deserved, i certainly enjoyed it.

Competent execution, decent mechanics, but doesn’t quite hit the mark. Can be a bit dull occasionally, but, overall, worth a try.

FFCCTCB starts pretty solid, you get a fun combat sequence, interesting narrative, and stylistic choices but sooner or later you'll find that something is a little off. The Crystal Bearers is a weird game, I don't see how it came to existence but I'm thankful that it did. I love the original game and it's my favorite game, but I'm also aware that it is by no means a masterpiece (at least combat-wise) however it has an incredible amount of charm in its narrative, lore, music, mechanics, aspects that I believe The Crystal Bearers inherit, alas for the most part in a shallow way but also on its own way. The big draw here is that this is a new story told within the universe of the Crystal Chronicles with some drawbacks and references to its lore but that's all, the most notorious part would be the combat system, you now control Layle a Crystal Bearer, one of a handful of persons that can use magic, Layle is a gravity wielder and it makes all the sense since it surely was a technical choice to use the Wii motion to its main potential, well sort of it. The original game lacked a lot in the combat department, it was simple, serviceable and repetitive at its worst, in this game the combat, in theory, should be a lot of fun, since you use motion controls to control gravity, pull and throw enemies at the will of your movements like a fantasy Jedi, it sounds like it would be a match made in heaven but in reality, it feels unpolished, the battles are always as follows: pull an enemy to you, throw it to another enemy or wall to deal some damage, rinse and repeat, surely you can throw objects like rocks, or furniture too, and some enemies require that spin them first or activate a status but are basically the same thing over and over, you control the camera with the directional pad and it's way too awkward and unnatural when you're in combat that it almost became a chore, it would benefit greatly to have a lock-on reticle just to focus an especifc enemy even if you still need to aim it manually (a thing that I like mind you) to attack it. Although since it's an action game I never felt that the passing was off or the battles too regular to be a huge problem, what I find it pretty odd and it was a nice surprise, is that I have a lot of fun with the minigames within the story, one moment you're sliding through a waterfall, another you're in a beach butt-fight competition, semi-shooter segments, stealth segments and even rhythm games, similar to its combat they're not so polished but they're so brief and fresh that they were always enjoyable, they even forward the main story so they feel with purpose. The plot is nothing to write home about and it falls in some of the conventions of the franchise but it's good, the characters are charm enough just to look forward how the story will unfold, unfortunately, I have some issues with its localization, mainly the dubbing, it seemed that the original intention was to make something in the spirit of Cowboy Bebop at least character and narrative-wise, but the acting is way too cartoony and dull (a problem that most RPGs from Japan have when they're dubbed that prevails to this day), it's not the worst acting and maybe you can't pass behind it but to me, it was distracting, although, I really fall in love with this Yuke character and also her actress was genuinely good portraying her. The rhythm of the game as I stated before it's OK for the most part, my only issue is that at some points the story needs you to backtrack a lot from point A to point C just to make you go point A again, it can be bothersome since a good portion of the game you don't have a way to fast-travel and you move pretty slowly when navigating, there are some Chocobos here and there but they were always far away to me and they're not that fast also. Aside from the main story, you can make some "side-quests" that are hinted in notes or newspaper, things like: "there's a bunch of enemies floating around in the beach, we hope that someone could take care of them" they're not cryptic but it's hard to keep track of them since the game would not track anything but the main campaign and since the only reward is extra HP and some materials, the game is not that hard and the combat isn't that fun so honestly you can skip them easily. A thing that it's worth to note is that this game looks absolutely beautiful, it aged incredible well that at times it even looks better than a lower PS3 game, I believe is mostly for the art direction and artistic choices. Another great aspect is the music, the original game has a masterfully crafted soundtrack, and even when this one doesn't get to that height of finesse it has a lot of personality and variability than it needed to have, and for that I'm thankful. The Crystal Bearers is quite the unique if a mixed title, it has a lot of good ideas that fall short for the most part, but the sum of its parts make for at least an entertaining journey.

**** ****. Almost every character is an anime stereotype, and the combat is just the worst. It feels like you're not doing anything to the enemies and you need to throw things at them so if you don't have anything to throw, you're useless. It does take you to some cool places, and it is pretty for a Wii game. It does interesting things with the story. Not good, but interesting.

This game is awful. The controls are unresponsive and combat was bland and confusing. Every character's voice was grating and their personality even more so. Even the music contrasted horribly with the game. Really, the only high point in it was the graphics, but it's not enough to save this trainwreck.