Video Game Review: Cris Tales

Cris Tales

Developer: Dreams Uncorporated/SYCK

Publisher: Modus Games

Turn-Based RPG

Cris Tales is a game of highs and lows. There are aspects of it that work very well and make it lots of fun to play, but there are also just as many aspects that elicit frequent eye-rolling and make you wish it could’ve been better for the sake of the good bits. To be perfectly candid, as I’m sitting down to start writing this review I’m still not sure whether I would give it a recommendation or not, and I’m half hoping that putting all my thoughts to the page and having them be organized in front of me will help me figure it out.

So, first things first; Cris Tales is a turn-based RPG about time magic and a girl with a powerful-yet-unrefined command of it named Crisbell. She starts off living in a not-catholic orphanage before a frog in a top hat helps her awaken to her powers as a time mage, sending her on a quest to save the world. It’s pretty standard JRPG plot fare, but unfortunately, the execution of it is clumsy at the best of times. The pacing is far too fast to really grow invested in any of the characters or the events occurring, with the dialogue especially feeling rushed and awkward. I can’t even guess at the number of times a character would voice resistance to trusting or accepting help from the protagonists only to buckle not five seconds later after some very unconvincing persuasion.

It doesn’t help that the rules of the world and setting are either inconsistent or just poorly defined – possibly both. I was never really sure whether Time Mages were something established and well known throughout the world, because it felt like people were frequently skeptical that such a thing even existed but, once again, they were far too easily convinced for that to believably be the case.  Even speaking more generally, characters both within and outside of the party act and react to things in ways that feel totally unnatural and not at all like things real people would do, and everyone feels very two-dimensional. These issues are not helped by frequently sub-par voice acting, especially earlier on in the game. I admittedly felt that the voice acting improved further in, which made story scenes somewhat more bearable, but I was never particularly impressed. Additionally, the sound mixing is a mess all throughout, with some effects being, either way, louder or way quieter than they have any right to be and others being entirely desynced from their accompanying actions.

Despite all this, I actually had a good bit of fun during my playthrough because the actual gameplay is better than the story. Combat is turn-based and does that thing where pressing a button during an attack (whether it be yours or an enemy’s) with the right timing can either mitigate or maximize its effect (we really should come up with a term for that given how common it is becoming) which I’m always a fan of. In addition to this more active approach to RPG battles, Crisbell’s time powers come into play with her ability to either send enemies into the past or future, which has a slew of interactions with other party members’ skills. One combo the game points out early on is that if you poison an enemy and then shift them forward through time – whether by sending them to the future or yanking them back out of the past and into the present – they will take all the poison damage at once rather than over the course of several turns. It adds a nice little layer of strategy to things, even if after a while you’ll fall into a pattern of doing more or less the same comfortable thing over and over again as with most other RPGs.

Cris Tales’ combat system does still have its own drawbacks though. Enemy attacks are much harder to get the proper reactive timing right on for a number of reasons, ranging from enemies not moving from where they are when they attack to poor or even non-existent sound design for many of them. I may not have been able to figure out certain timings at all if it hadn’t been for the press release I received from the developers informing me that the screen very briefly dims during the “sweet spot”, a fact which is never explicitly stated in-game. Even then, the dimming effect is so small that it’s sometimes hard to notice and properly react to. The game is easy enough overall that I didn’t die too many times on account of these issues, but they nevertheless take some of the wind out of its sails.

Exploration also has its ups and downs. Aside from the honestly very lifeless world map, players explore town areas and dungeons over the course of the adventure. Town areas are presented rather uniquely, with an interesting split effect on the screen representing Crisbell’s ability to see into the past and future. The behatted frog I mentioned earlier is able to hop into either of these time frames and have limited interactions with things and people in them, which while somewhat simplistic is still a surprisingly fun mechanic to use. Every time I entered a new town I would make a point of running around and checking out all the characters’ past and future selves. Dungeons are much more straightforward, typically consisting of a fairly linear path with a few simple puzzles and occasional small offshoots containing a treasure chest at a dead end. The simplicity of the dungeons, however, is made up for by the fact that they never drag on too long and that the game is absolutely gorgeous. For whatever else one might criticize about Cris Tales, it’s impossible to deny that it’s a beautiful game with lots of care and attention put into its environments. On the other hand, the transition from dungeon to combat is off-putting; a simple fade to a white screen while the battle loads without any sort of accompanying sound effect, such that the first time a random encounter happened to me I thought I was just entering a new area.

As a final note – and this isn’t normally the sort of thing I bring up in reviews because I am fully aware that many people could not care less about achievements – there is one achievement/trophy that highlighted a frustrating design choice for me. Late in the game, the final party member who joins is based around capturing the “souls” of enemies and using their abilities in combat. The trophy in question is for capturing every enemy soul in the game, or in other words filling out the character’s repertoire of skills. However, there is one enemy which cannot be encountered again by that point in the game unless you have not been doing side content, as there is an optional quest about ten hours earlier in the game that disables random encounters in the only area where the enemy in question appears. You can’t simply delay completing that quest, either, because the game has fairly regular progress gates which cause sets of side-quests to expire. If the only impact this had was that it made an achievement more difficult to unlock, I wouldn’t mention it, but the design choice to make players either capable of doing the full ending or unlocking all of a characters’ skills is a poor one, at least when there is no real indication that this is a choice the player is actually making.

I would like to reiterate that despite its many, many flaws I did have some fun playing Cris Tales. I wouldn’t recommend it for a more casual gamer whose game time is more limited than someone who plays a lot of different titles, nor would I recommend purchasing it at its full forty dollar asking price, but there is still a simple sort of pleasure to be had here if you turn off your brain and just enjoy the pretty colors.