Cris Tales bills itself as an “indie love letter to classic jRPGs.” Instead, it so completely misunderstands what makes them great that it comes across like a creepy kidnapper letter composed out of letters cut from various magazines. This is a game that looks fantastic while doing everything at least a little wrong; entire mechanics are outright broken, bugs can strike and render certain battles unwinnable, and stats randomly see massive rises and drops that make it impossible to tell how powerful your characters actually are. Add in Cris Tales‘ slow movement speed and insistence on making you run around doing busy work and you have a recipe for a truly painful experience. Love letters to the jRPG genre are a dime a dozen these days, so if that’s what you’re on the prowl for, I’d recommend something that thoughtfully captures their essence like Cosmic Star Heroine over Cris Tales.

(But if you’re going to hurt yourself with Cris Tales anyway, at least buy it from an affiliate link: here’s a link to some of the various console versions)

Forced party banter and unnecessary dialog causes much of Cris Tales‘ story to drag

You play as Crisbell, a young girl from a nondescript village who stumbles across a gift for time magic while looking for Matias, a frog who wears a bowtie. If that sounds delightfully insane, I should probably clarify that this happens in Cris Tales‘ opening few minutes, contributing to some truly jarring pacing (and generally bizarre design decisions) in the opening hours. It’s crazy—characters are introduced in a few lines and you’re expected to remember these nobodies 15 hours later. This speaks to a deeper problem, though. Cris Tales spends so much time trying to hit a 20-hour playtime that it bombards you with dialog, little of which matters. Party members argue about nothing in particular, and this would be in keeping with classic jRPGs if not for the small detail that the arguments arise apropos of nothing to fill the silence and create the illusion of party bonds.

I genuinely felt more of a connection to a living statue (and method of moving around Cris Tales‘ islands between chapters) named Paulina than most of my party members. The I Am Setsuna-style filler in conversations is one contributing factor, but Cris Tales‘ story’s irritating proclivity for saving its reveals for the very end keeps the party hammering on one note for much of the game with no growth.

Crisbell oscillates between hesitant uncertainty and being a prodigious Pollyanna. Cristopher (yes, there are two characters named Cris, and yes, they’re the first two characters you get) is generically heroic. Willhelm is a fellow time mage who bickers with Cristopher about pointless things and plays no role for a large part of the plot. There’s an unfathomably old robot who’s sort of idly amused by humanity. A girl named Zas who’s delightfully airheaded but not integrated into the story nearly enough. And one more character who shows up toward the end and has so little to do with the story by the end that all of her lines could be replaced with a shrug emoji without anything being lost. This band of adventurers hops from town to town cleaning up messes caused by a villainous time mage known as the Empress, but the overarching story advances so slowly that none of the playable characters have an arc.

One character remarked toward the end that he thought that he had grown up a lot over the course of the journey. His actions and behavior never went through any type of noticeable change. There’s a lot of telling happening in Cris Tales but not a lot of showing. It’s not all bad, though. The relatively small cast of characters has plenty of forgettable faces, but a small handful of them (namely, Rysa and the Volcano Gals) have real problems and enough of a presence to constitute an actual story arc. Cris Tales succeeds when its writing zooms in on an area’s problems and treats its NPCs like legitimate figures in the world rather than mere quest dispensers. Sadly, the main story is too scattered and back-heavy to recommend.

I struggle to believe that anyone involved with this game has played a jRPG before

Everything about Cris Tales‘ gameplay feels off. Your walking speed is about 2/3 what would be comfortable, random battles either pester you every few seconds or take so long to occur that you’re fooled into believing that you’re in a safe area, and the game’s time travel mechanic is basically useless. Most fights begin with enemies surrounding the party from both sides, and Crisbell has the ability to send the left side of the screen to the past and the right side of the screen to the future. In theory, this can be used in interesting ways. If you poison an enemy and then send them into the future, for example, they take all of that poison damage at once. However, normal enemies are weak enough that you have no reason to do this, and bosses are rarely vulnerable to poison or other status effects. Worse, time effects cause party member abilities to become less useful.

That’s not an exaggeration. An attack that previously hit all enemies on one side might instead target all enemies and allies, resulting in much more of a penalty to your party. I’ve noticed other special attacks doing less damage, too, so it got to the point where I just stopped using time effects. They wasted a turn to make everything worse.

When you remove the central gimmick from the equation, what’s left is a bog-standard combat system with a Paper Mario/Bug Fables-esque QTE system for increasing damage inflicted and reducing damage incurred. Cris Tales has the single worst implementation of this system I’ve ever seen; you’re forced to press a button as the edges of the screen flash (or sometimes darken!), but the timing makes no sense.

A perfect QTE when attacking doubles your damage. A less-than-perfect QTE halves the bonus damage. The same pattern holds true for defense, too, which can be ridiculous considering that some attacks visibly move toward your character while others hit you instantly the second your opponent twitches. The specific attack is listed at the bottom-right of the screen, so where are you supposed to be looking? If you look at your character, you’ll miss the enemy animation. If you watch the enemy, you’ll miss spell effects enveloping your character. If you watch the bottom-right of the screen, you’ll miss everything. None of this was designed well.

Many of the problems that Cris Tales suffers from are things that most players familiar with the genre would know better than to include. For example, multiple characters leave the party (one doing so permanently, which can lock you out of the achievement for upgrading everyone’s equipment if you’re not psychic enough to see this coming). If that’s how you’re designing a game, then it makes sense to share experience among inactive party members, right? Cris Tales doesn’t do that; when these party members rejoin, their level remains the same, causing several characters to lag behind until they’re totally unusable. Another stupid decision is to give enemies the ability to spam status effects without giving your party members a good way of dispelling full-party status effects. And if you neglect a status effect that deals damage each turn instead of dispelling it from each character individually, a boss may use a spell that reduces everyone’s HP to 1, instantly wiping out your entire party. Where was the QA?

And sometimes Cris Tales is just full-on broken, which causes its balance to go haywire

Cris Tales has some serious balance issues, which becomes obvious when the beginning of the game tasks you with running across a field of random battles with insufficient healing items long before anyone’s unlocked a healing spell. There are a couple of other giant difficulty spikes, too, but the truth is that I don’t know if those are real difficulty spikes or just the game going bonkers on me. I managed to carve through some bosses like butter, only to do a third of the damage to the next boss after my attack stats randomly dropped by a hundred points. Equipment doesn’t do what it says, and it’s currently impossible to know which stats (if any) are telling the truth. Cris Tales isn’t just rough. It’s genuinely broken.

Do you want your attacks to softlock the battle, forcing you to quit out and restart from your last save? Cris Tales has you covered. Random performance problems in a game with no graphic options? You bet. Camera bugs? Check. At one point, I moved a party-member-copycatting enemy from one side of the screen to another, only to have them instantly transform without using their turn. Is that one of Cris Tales‘ intentionally weird mechanics? There’s no way of knowing.

At one point, I spent 20 minutes fighting the Empress, to the point where I had to set up a macro to complete a button-mashing QTE because it was making my finger hurt. Then I went to check her health and realized that she was healing every point of damage I was doing to her. When I came back the next day, she barely healed at all and the fight was a cakewalk. Cris Tales may be too broken to fix with patches.

The game looks good, but are the art and cutscenes worth so much unclear hit timing?

I can’t shake the feeling that a lot of the money that went into Cris Tales was funneled into the art, and that even that wasn’t enough to cover everything they needed. How else do you get a game with animated cutscenes, beautifully symmetrical art, and then find yourself unable to tell when attacks are going to hit because someone couldn’t be bothered to move the enemies toward your characters? Super Mario RPG found a way to accomplish this in 1996. A 2021 release should be able to figure it out. There are also a ton of enemy recolors. Like, an excessive number of enemies who are just recolored versions of previous enemies. Even many boss fights end up being recycled, and I just can’t give a 2/2 to that.

Cris Tales has a decent soundtrack that’s a step above generic jRPG music but a little too bombastic for its own good. It also never has a standout moment of any kind, with the entirety of the soundtrack being content to hang back and buoy the fantasy vibe. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the (original, non-Chopin) music in Eternal Sonata, which I described as “okay, if a bit unremarkable.” The music here is okay but unremarkable.

Story: 1.5/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 1.5/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ – 5/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*An Xbox Game Pass Ultimate key was provided, and I used that Game Pass subscription for this Cris Tales review. The game took me around 18 hours to beat because everything is slow and unskippable.

Cris Tales review – A swing and a miss first appeared on Killa Penguin