Thank you to Modus Games for a review copy of the game.
There are a lot of games releasing this year, and it’s so easy to get lost in the shuffle. Even titles that get spotlights in presentations like Nintendo Direct can struggle to remain in the minds of audiences. In order to really stand out, you often need to be part of a bigger franchise, have some kind of incredibly unique idea, or a very visually stunning art style. Cris Tales falls neatly into the latter.
The one thing I knew about Cris Tales before jumping into its time-shifting world was how pretty it looked. It had an art style all its own, where the premade artwork and in-game models practically matched. It’s the kind of impressive visual style that you might find in other games like Wario Land Shake It, or Cuphead. Just having a good art style doesn’t always mean a game is good, but Cris Tales isn’t bad at all.
The game is a traditional JRPG with a twist (like most JRPGs nowadays, to be honest) where the enemies surround your party in combat and Crisbell, our protagonist, has the ability to either advance or reverse time over them. This will of course, make them older or younger depending on where they stand and this changes things like the stats and attacks of enemies. Sometime aging an enemy up will make them feeble and weak, but sometimes it makes them even stronger. Figuring out whether to use time magic on a group of enemies or not adds an extra layer of tactics that make battles feel less standard.
There are other tricks to be played with time magic as well; it’s an interesting mechanic. Willhelm, the group mage, specialises in special plants that can be used to poison and scan enemies (amongst other effects). However, you can only attack one enemy at a time. That is, unless you plant the seed and then use time magic to accelerate its growth. Doing this will allow the attack to strike multiple enemies all at once!
Another mechanic, this time involving the team warrior Cristopher, can have him use water magic to soak a foe in armour, and then use time magic to cause said armour to immediately rust over and become weak. It’s little tricks like this that help the time shift balance the fine line between a dull and fun gimmick.
The rest of combat is pretty standard, wearing its inspiration on its sleeve. It takes the action-time battle system popularised by Final Fantasy and combines it with Paper Mario’s timing attacks. Add a sprinkle of Chrono Triggers Double Techs, and there you have it! It works, and these are certainly some of the better RPGs to be inspired from, but I have to say that the timing attacks suffer from not being clear enough.
In Paper Mario, the players and enemies will approach each other before making an attack, making the timing clear. Cris Tales doesn’t do this, instead having invisible attacks and basic animations to show action. This is more so for the enemies attacking, not the characters, but it still makes the timing not as clear and so slightly difficult.
Paper Mario is also how the world feels like out of combat – it and Final Fantasy. The 2D art style necessitates the look and feel, but you won’t find platforming here. The world map and random encounters also scream classic retro JRPG. Once again, what makes this portion of Cris Tales stand out is the time shift mechanic. When active, the screen splits into thirds, showing the past, present and future of almost any area – though often reserved for towns. It’s a cool effect and it allows the player to get a feel for the worlds lore and where it’s heading. One town, as an example, has a section that will be underwater in the future and knowing this affects Crisbell and her motivation to save people.
From a player perspective, this is best reflected in side quests. An early quest shows a rundown pharmacy in the future, but it can be restored by solving a quest in the present. What made this quest in particular stand out was that it offered the player choice. You could save the Pharmacy, but you could also save some family’s home. It’s up to the player, and moral choices like these are abundant (personally, a pharmacy offers more use to the town than some rich family’s house, so I feel no remorse in my actions)!
Players can also send Mathias, a talking frog, through time to interact with objects and bring them to the present day. It’s an obvious idea for a game messing with time, but it feels half-baked. Mathias can only interact with pre-determined items and people when time shifting, which takes away the want to explore. It also turns Mathias into a tadpole or fat frog which, while an amusing visual, causes him to be much slower than normal, making travelling through time more of a hassle than it really needed to be.
I do need to give this game some credit for designing visuals for three different time periods and different versions of several NPCs based on which time period you’re looking into. In fact, the visuals are the best part of the games hands down. It is a very pretty game, and you can tell that the devs put a lot of effort into making the title look as appealing as possible.
It’s a shame then that I can’t say the same about the music, or specifically the sound design. The music is fine; I don’t think there was a track that really stood out, but there weren’t any bad tracks either. However, the sound design seems to be lacking in most places, in particular with the enemy encounters. In most RPGs when an enemy encounter happens you expect some sound of sound to play, whether it be the ‘swoosh’ of Final Fantasy games as the screen transitions or the ‘doo doo doo doo doo doo’ of Pokémon titles. It’s good to have a strong audio-visual indicator that the fight has begun. Cris Tales does not have this; the screen simply fades into a loading screen and then the battle. It was a bit of a shock the first time it happened to me.
Encounters are random, and the loading screen for going into battles is the same as every other loading screen in the game, so when I had my first encounter I just thought I was transitioning between rooms. There was no tension or excitement from it, the fight just started, and that was a let down.
While on the topic of loading screens, the Switch version really suffers from slow loading times. I’m sure the devs did all they could to prevent it from happening, but when every encounter, screen transition and major cut scene is bookended by loading screens. It gets a little tiring.
Cris Tales is a very good looking RPG, and certainly one doing its best to take its favourite parts from bigger series and splice them together for something unique. The time travel idea is cool in concept and gets put to good use here and there, but it alone doesn’t do enough to make Cris Tales stand out. That relies on the game’s visuals, which are beautiful, but it’s a shame that the game falls short in the smaller details. I can hardly call this game timeless, but if you’re living in the present and want a good RPG to play, then you won’t go wrong with Cris Tales.
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I had my eye on CT for awhile but gonna have to get it on a sale. As you said there is a lot of games releasing this year. 🙂
Thanks for the review!