Part of the reason I so giddily dropped Bloodroots is that Cris Tales, a game that I’ve had my eye on for a long time, unexpectedly dropped on Game Pass. That saves me the trouble of waiting for Modus Games to do anything with my key request, which I didn’t expect them to acknowledge since it’s been radio silence from them since I covered Override: Mech City Brawl. Side note: remember when I could, like, get my hands on games at least a week in advance and have reviews ready by the time they launched? And sometimes even discover problems that the developers could then fix before release? Yeah. I don’t know what happened to that, but Cris Tales certainly would have benefited from an extra pair of eyes.
First, though, it needs to be said that Cris Tales is a gorgeous game. Its constant awareness of color contrasts reminds me of the lovely Iris and the Giant while the actual art style combines that with the vivid busyness of something like Indivisible. It’s an immediately arresting look, and that’s part of the reason why it stood out to me in the first place. There’s also this emphasis on symmetry that appeals to me on a deep level. I mean, have you ever noticed that I rewrite paragraphs until they’re all neat blocks? I’m OCD as hell. Symmetry is my jam, and Cris Tales brings the symmetry. Details like this give it a unique artistic voice.
As for the game itself? It starts out super weird. The first thing that happens is that you’re thrown into a boss fight, but then the game rewinds to a standard “mysterious child of destiny in a nondescript village” jRPG opening. Then main character Crisbell stumbles across her destiny as a time mage, magical sword included, in a matter of minutes before being kicked out of the village for… reasons. That also happens in Secret of Mana, though. It’s hard to criticize things like that since Cris Tales is a love letter to such games.
But as tends to be the case with love letters to jRPGs, the developers didn’t fully understand what made those seminal RPGs so great. Cris Tales struggles with pacing and its difficulty curve big time. This becomes immediately apparent once you’re out of the village and in the very first part of the game with random battles. How does it make sense to throw the player into an oversized area of random battles before they’ve encountered their first shop or unlocked their first healing spell? Attrition isn’t endearing.
The previous video ends with my party, worn down as it was, struggling against several powerful wolves. Fortunately, I suspected shenanigans and didn’t use up my one and only “tent” item that allows you to restore all HP/MP at save points. It’s a good thing that I didn’t—you’re meant to lose this fight, so using a valuable item (tents cost ~10,000 gold while equipment only costs around 1,500 gold) would be entirely pointless. Fights that are impossible to win are a jRPG cardinal sin. Especially when there’s no indication that you’re not supposed to fight with everything you have, burning through all of the healing items you’re unable to replenish yet. I understand the intention here, but this whole section could use some work.
Even an hour and a half in, Cris Tales had yet to hand over the reins. Every fight up to that point is a glorified tutorial that leaves you whacking at enemies over and over again until someone finally chimes in to reveal the mechanic you’re supposed to be learning about. It’s not like there aren’t better ways of teaching the player how to play. Cris Tales even uses some of them. Just not early on when it counts.
A much preferable way of communicating information is to leave an NPC in the world who explains mechanics. Take the NPC in the video above, for example, who reveals the elemental weaknesses of some opponents. That’s much less of a hassle than setting up a boss fight as a pretense. However, Cris Tales undercuts the quickness of this NPC method by ending dialog after each question. Does it make sense for you to have to hear the same couple of lines 3-4 times to ask each of the questions? No, it does not.
Cris Tales does eventually get out of its own way and cede control to the player. It takes entirely too long to happen, but the game’s interesting mechanics paper over some of that frustration; Crisbell is able to send the left side of the screen to the past and the right side of the screen to the future on her turn in lieu of attacking, and this can be used in some interesting ways. In the robot boss fight above, I send the hand on the left side to the past, causing it to be less armored since it hasn’t been fully constructed yet. Damaging it eventually causes the core to come out, which is how you beat the robot boss.
That’s not to say that I don’t have complaints, of course. This robot can stun your characters, and while you can perform timed inputs to deliver critical hits and lessen incoming damage, some of these status effect attacks seemingly can’t be blocked. That’s not a big problem in this fight, but it becomes one later.
The boss in the above video? Yeah, he can inflict my characters with a mind control status effect. This is separate from the “charm” status effect that you can buy items to remove, and it doesn’t appear to be blockable. This fight occurs long after you’ve unlocked some godly healing abilities, so he kept continually taking over Crisbell and using her to heal all of the damage I spent several turns doing to him. That’s not cool, Cris Tales. And when I’d use her ability to send him into the past, he’d mind control her and undo the effect. I’ve played a lot of jRPGs, and while many of them feature bosses who play dirty, this is a next-level dick move. I haven’t played too far beyond this, but I hope Cris Tales cools it with the status effects.
Even normal enemies can be unbalanced assholes at times. Some enemies have the ability to perform a kamikaze suicide attack that does decent damage to your entire party, and for some reason that I can’t even begin to grasp, they’re programmed so that they can perform this kamikaze attack at the start of battle before your first turn. Normally, jRPGs give enemies the ability to perform this attack when defeated or near defeat so that you can run from the fight. Doing it this way makes no sense.
It’s not all bad news, though. While Cris Tales does fall victim to needless banter (basically, characters are always needling each other about incredibly random things like touching valves, which is usually a sign that someone on the dev team was unsure that the story would establish believable friendships), the time travel mechanic is used to great effect. Crisbell’s ability sometimes causes the screen to split into thirds corresponding to the past/present/future, and by sending her frog companion to the past to eavesdrop or grab items, all sorts of horrible futures can be averted. Futures that you can see changing as you intervene.
This is also used for character development. The above video establishes that a character unsuccessfully tried to court a party member’s mother in the past, leading to a slightly humorous moment. Even background characters are fleshed out by your ability to see the past and future. A gem-seller who has been little more than a background NPC thus far is a young girl examining a gem with a magnifying glass in the past. An NPC origin story! Sickly NPCs may be missing in the future, implying a problem that you may have the opportunity to solve. All of this is very reminiscent of Chrono Trigger‘s second half.
So that’s been my experience with Cris Tales thus far: lots of promise undercut by some aggravating design decisions. Even time travel is annoying. Your frog struggles to keep up with you and only goes into the past or future if they’re nearby. That’s dumb. Just allow Crisbell to do it, or warp the frog to her position if he’s too far away. Seriously. Games have had solutions to problems like this for decades.
Cris Tales is a beautiful, unbalanced game first appeared on Killa Penguin
