Ever notice the discrepancy between Final Fantasy's CG cutscenes and the in-game action? Like how one is all blinding explosions, rippling hair and slow-mo acrobatics, and the other is selecting 'attack' from a menu and watching numbers squirt out of a goblin's head? Crystal Bearers rights these wrongs: anything movies can do, gameplay can do better. Isn't crushing a Chocobo pursuit force more fun if you pull the building onto them? And why watch a plummeting aerial gun battle when you could be the plummetee?
Kicking off Crystal Bearers, this freefall is the first of many standout action beats. Unleashing lead with the remote pointer, the wind rips past as an army of pink eagles attack our hero, Layle. Cutscenes deal with the yapping (there's plenty), but when it comes to the punchy, fun bits, control reverts to you. After the aerial target gallery comes ship steering, train escaping, monster fleeing and party infiltrating - each its own fenced-off setpiece, casually tossing around mechanics as far-reaching as rhythm games and Solid Snake-like sneaking.
Sounds a bit, well, bitty? You'd be right to think that. Action scenes are clearly intended as flashy self-contained moments (each is scored individually), and are not indicative of the whole. No, the meat of Crystal Bearers is more Zelda-like in flavour: a sprawling overworld in which an intensely linear story plays out. And we mean linear. Although gifted with immense power (more in a second) and a huge playground, Layle can make it from the start to end in just under ten hours, engaging as few as ten enemies. Let us explain...
Layle is one of the eponymous Crystal Bearers, gifted with telekinesis. If it's not bolted down, you can target it with the remote pointer, lock-on with B (the closer you are, the faster you grab) and manipulate it with flicks. But nowhere, bar a handful of prescribed boss encounters, do Square Enix demand you fight. Enemies roam the plains, but Layle is more than capable of running past (using evasive dodges if things get really hairy) and towards his next cutscene and blockbuster moment. It's entirely possible to finish the game without having equipped a single accessory.
Interviewing the developers this month (page 84), they repeatedly referred to the game as being casual friendly. That's initially hard to see (is there anything geekier than a force push power?) but having now finished the game, we understand: you play as much as you want. All those 'real-time cutscenes'? They're for the people who want a decent yarn at a rollicking pace. For you and us? A whole different game awaits. Perfectly fine in its own right, the story is really just a guided tour of a wider playpen.
Throughout the action you unlock medals for achievements, 300 in total. Our first ten-hour run-through saw us net 65 of them. They're awarded for everything: story moments, minigame performance, uncovering items, killing monsters. The majority lie in hidden reactions - interactions you uncover between Layle and the world. This is Crystal Bearers proper: actually playing at being a Crystal Bearer. When, in some downtime before the finale, Layle says he's going outside to play, you really should take him up on the offer.
Telekinesis is brilliant - a weapon of crass destruction, knocking old biddies to the floor and plucking newspapers from their mitts. Your first hour in the capital city is played out to a sea of angry emoticons. Hey, it's not our fault pulling a train's emergency brakes or lamping a Moogle with a fire extinguisher is fun. Eking reactions from combat is harder.
Once locked-on, different directional flicks have different reactions. Goblins can be piledriven into the soil. Flick angry red bombs to the left or right and they'll spin like tops before exploding in a mushroom cloud.
What a witty combat system it is. Snatch a skeleton's head and wolf monsters pant lovingly at your feet. Beetles can be rammed together into bowling balls. Tougher enemies require all kinds of cleverness - peeling off armour to reveal ejector seat levers or tugging away weapons to fire back in their faces. A personal favourite are the iron giants - clunking mechanical death-tanks that you rev into action by spinning the cog on its back. Putting them back to sleep? Good luck with that.
Clean out monsters (or wait long enough) and the region briefly purifies, filling with a whole new set of (slightly less face-eating) toys. A barren desert becomes a quaint farm, complete with pig-cows to milk and crops to pluck. In the grassy highlands, a farmer needs help with alien abduction. Hide and seek, fishing, topiary, football and water chutes await the diligent explorer; bit by bit that slim ten-hour runtime gets closer to 30 - more if you want the full 100%. It'll take two run-throughs, too, some events only opening second time round.
Crystal Chronicles has always been the Final Fantasy laboratory, where producer Akitoshi Kawazu and his team tinker with mad co-op experiments or real-time combat. Confident strides in a new direction are to be welcomed, but there's still some learning to be done. D-pad-controlled cameras are never nice, especially in tight boss arenas or platforming tasks. Navigation can be tough on a grander scale, too - a horribly vague map screen sees to that. And do not jump off a Chocobo in the middle of nowhere - doing so leaves Layle in for some long treks.
We're not sure the conclusion does the game justice either. After delicately balancing 'doing' against 'watching', the final hour spams the cutscenes and palms you off with a couple of quick-time events. The yarn (about warring factions and what seems to be five potential apocalypses) wraps up nicely, but couldn't we have done the wrapping? That said, five minutes later we've hopped straight back on Crystal Bearers for a second ride, back in an aerial plummet with 235 medals in our sights.
Could Bearers' true playfulness be better integrated? Certainly. Does the story feel a little odd taken alone? Without a doubt. But knowing this going in should help. Ultimately, it's hard to begrudge any game that encourages you to throw poo at cats and use a cow as a pump-action milk gun. Final Fantasy has always done the best line in silly anime hair - how nice to see Crystal Bearers let it down.
Sounds an intresting new direction for a Final Fantasy game and one that I will be looking to pick up. As for the ending its not the first game to suffer that issue, I remember the pain of a ending that was Metal Gear Solid 2! I sat and watched 2 hours of cutscenes vs about 10 minutes of play!
i didn't enjoy it at all. the combat system was an insult and smacked of a dev who had absolutely no idea what to do with the wii mote.
picking enemies up and throwing them at things ad infinitum... got old in an hour.
sickening voice work,terrible sub ps2 graphics,sugar coated mini games,no magic/summons,no co-op play and the overall lack of love and attention to detail that square are known for compounded the misery.
still,it starts well. if you're going to buy it play the good bit at the beginning with the dragons and the chocobo chases a bit later on and then trade it back in.
verdict: allegedly square spent 4 years making this,i'd say 4 months myself. 2/10.
i didn't enjoy it at all. the combat system was an insult and smacked of a dev who had absolutely no idea what to do with the wii mote.
picking enemies up and throwing them at things ad infinitum... got old in an hour.
sickening voice work,terrible sub ps2 graphics,sugar coated mini games,no magic/summons,no co-op play and the overall lack of love and attention to detail that square are known for compounded the misery.
Just maybe, long-term Final Fantasy obsessives aren't the best judges of this game. - It's a complete departure. A spin-off.- No more alike to classic FF than Link's Crossbow Training is to a traditional Zelda.
If you bought and approached the game expecting number crunching, formation management and character customization, then you only have yourself to blame.
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